Last time, sue eye fight go!

HELDA HAD COME to work in Randa’s nurseries around the same time Katsa began to dole out Randa’s punishments. It was hard to know why she’d been less frightened of Katsa than others were. Perhaps it was because she had borne a Graceling child of her own. Not a fighter, only a swimmer, a skill that was of no use to the king. So the boy had been sent home, and Helda had seen how the neighbors avoided and ridiculed him simply because he could move through the water like a fish. Or because he had one eye black, and the other blue.

Ah, where to begin.

First off, if he has dedicated nurseries for the graceling kids, where are the servants that raised Katsa? Why doesn’t she have any parental figures among them?

Second, wouldn’t the fact she wanted to work with graceling kids already be a good reason she wouldn’t be scared of graceling kids in general?

Third, if her son was sent home and having trouble, why the hell did she abandon him to come take care of other people’s kids?

(Fourth, since when do people hate others for being good swimmers? Since when has anyone said “Wow, he swims like a fish LET US HATE AND FEAR HIM” instead of employing him to dive for pearls or lauding him for rescuing people from drowning?)

Katsa was ten by then, therefore past the nursery age and apparently in this universe children stop getting any form of adult supervision once they’re past crawling age, so Helda had to seek her out on purpose.

She’d sat and watched the child beat the stuffing out of a dummy, grain bursting from cracks and tears in the sack and slapping onto the floor like spurting blood.

STOP WASTING FOOD, KATSA.

The peasants worked hard for that. And I’m sure there’s starving orphans about from all the war and acts of king going on. Maybe if you didn’t ruin so much grain your evil uncle wouldn’t demand such high taxes and you wouldn’t have to go break heads when people didn’t pay, did you ever think of that?

“The first man you killed, My Lady,” Helda said. “That cousin. Did you mean to kill him?”
It was a question no one had ever actually asked her.

That’s stupid, because it’s a pretty damn obvious question. It doesn’t matter how cartoonishly evil they are, you’d want to know if she did it by accident for your own safety! If she did it by accident then no amount of threats or bribes will keep her under control and you should only interact with her via proxies you don’t mind dying.

“No,” Katsa said. “I only meant to keep him from touching me.”
“Then you are dangerous, My Lady, to people you don’t like. But perhaps you’d be safe as a friend.”

Uh.

No.

Look, book. I am completely in favor of people who deal with all their problems by excessive violence and murder. But, the thing is, a lot of why that’s fun to read about is because it’s not a reasonable way to behave. If your first response to someone touching you is not to tell them to stop, or move away, or push their hand off, but smashing their nose into their brain, your first response is flawed. That is not the best way to accomplish your goal. Now the book has set things up so that he appears to have been Cousin Badtouch so we assume a little eight year old trying to get him to stop by any less violent method wouldn’t succeed. But that’s not the point. The point is part of human interaction is that you give people a chance to back off before going for lethal force. It’s like a growling dog verses one that has no tells at all, it just lunges once it decides to. It doesn’t matter that the dog only attacks people it doesn’t like and is totally harmless otherwise, because the dog isn’t giving you any cues it doesn’t like you until it’s removing your face.

Also, note that Katsa did not, actually, say that she did it because he was someone she didn’t like. There’s plenty of situations where you might just not want to be touched right then. That’s another reason why smashing someone’s face in for doing so is not a sign of safe behavior.

Now, if Katsa said he was Cousin Badtouch? Only then does this sequence make sense, because only then is what set her off something you can assume won’t happen to any halfway decent person. But she doesn’t. Helga appears to just know that Cousin Badtouch had it coming and that Katsa is otherwise a cuddly baby who wouldn’t hurt a fly.

Helga then wants to know if Katsa has any servants, and apparently she doesn’t because it’s not like you kind of need servants in a world where nothing’s mechanized and there isn’t even plumbing. Katsa says she thinks that the way Helga is talking to her is way inappropriate for a servant, but we’ve barely seen any servants talking and there’s no sign of what is appropriate so that doesn’t tell us much of anything. And there’s the standard oh no poor girl no one’s told you about girl thing! Because there’s absolutely no way to learn about menstruation than by Mommy or Substitute Mommy taking you aside to tell you.

Are there any books that avert this? I only ever see it this way.

But the point is, Helga volunteers to be her servant, and Katsa’s like, Jesus, if you hate working in the nurseries so much I’ll find you another job, but no, Helga loves working in the nurseries she just also wants to work for Katsa!

Katsa had never needed a mother or sisters or anyone else, either. She didn’t know what one did with a contradictory servant; she guessed that Randa would go into a rage, but she was afraid of her own rages. She held her breath, clenched her fists, and stood as still as the wooden post in the center of the room. The woman could say what she wanted. They were only words.

So that’s the second time Katsa has flipped out over nothing. Again, it seems like this is meant to be a flaw, but again, the book doesn’t explain why she’s like this.

Also, she was raised in the nursery, wasn’t she? Because that’s where castle babies go, and she was both a graceling baby and the king’s relative. So where are the servants who actually raised her? Or the other kids she was brought up with?

This kind of disconnectedness is a common flaw in stories – the author doesn’t care about those people, so they just skip it. And it’s particularly bad in stories like this, where as part of the character being not feminine she’s cut off from the whole female sphere and has to make do with one embassy from the strange land of women to deal with whatever bits of her femaleness can’t be removed, since obviously her male friends can’t be involved with that.

Huh, you know, I’d really like to see more cross gender raising. It’s not like it’s impossible for men to explain periods, and it’d be a welcome change from women being in charge of the women things and men the men things.

Your eyes are so very pretty, my dear. Good-bye.”
Helda left before Katsa was able to find her voice. Katsa stared at the door that closed behind her.
“Thank you,” she said, though there was no one to hear, and though she wasn’t sure why her voice seemed to think she was grateful.

Katsa takes brokenness to ridiculous extremes.

Now back to the present, where she takes dressup hating to ridiculous extremes.

She heard Helda in the other room, rustling through the chests and drawers, unearthing the earrings and necklaces Katsa had thrown among her silk undergarments and her horrid bone chest supports the last time she’d been required to wear them.

Aside from the usual bit about not all old timey settings had corsets, what’s so horrible about silk underwear and also do you not realize how valuable silk is?

A moment later Helda came to the door carrying a dress bright as the tomatoes Randa imported from Lienid, the tomatoes that clustered on the vine and tasted as rich and sweet as his chef’s chocolate cake.

That’s basically modern levels of dye. Bright anything is hard. And why would Pandaman need to import tomatoes? They’re not that hard to grow. And since when do any tomatoes taste like chocolate cake? And where did they get the chocolate or piles of sugar necessary to make it taste good?

Katsa just goes on about how she hates red and won’t wear it. It’s hard, being rich and having pretty dresses. It’s hard and Helga doesn’t understand. Helga gets her a green silk dress instead, because apparently silk is everywhere. And Katsa whines that she wants something brown and why would she want anyone to look at her and she wants to cut her hair off.

Helga brushes her hair and says it wouldn’t tangle so badly if she’d brush it on her own.

Katsa snorted. “Giddon would get a good laugh out of that. My attempts to beautify myself

So she’s so repelled by girl things she won’t even brush her hair because hairbrushing is something you do to look pretty and she’s not pretty and no one will ever love her :(((((((((((

Dear Helda. She saw what Katsa was and what she did, and Helda didn’t deny that Katsa was that person. But she couldn’t fathom a lady who didn’t want to be beautiful, who didn’t want a legion of admirers. And so she believed Katsa was both people, though Katsa couldn’t imagine how she reconciled them in her mind.

Honestly, Katsa, it doesn’t sound like you actually don’t want to be beautiful. What it sounds like is you’ve convinced yourself you’re not and you can’t bear to try to do something and fail. While I’m sympathetic to this broad issue, I’d prefer a character who actually didn’t give a shit about appearance over yet another one who is insisting she doesn’t because she’s too emotionally broken to handle trying to attract someone.

For example, that bit about brushing her hair? If she didn’t care about her appearance, she should have said she didn’t want to bother. Instead, she’s saying she won’t brush her hair because she doesn’t want to try to look pretty and fail at it.

Anyway, we then move on to the dining hall, where we find out yet again that Pandaman is an asshole who likes to throw his weight around. Also, apparently everyone’s blond and blue-eyed.

She makes smalltalk with the poor guy stuck sitting next to her.

At first he sat on the farthest edge of his chair and looked at her shoulder and her ear and her hair as they talked, but never her face. But he grew calmer as the dinner progressed and Katsa didn’t bite him; his body relaxed, he settled into his chair, and they spoke easily.

This is a cute little scene, but I’m brought up short by the fact that the one thing we keep hearing about Katsa is that her social skills suck and that’s why everyone’s afraid of her. Yet now she’s suddenly become personable and able to put this guy at ease, and she isn’t doing her usual bit about why bother if he’s scared of me he’ll be scared forever and nothing I can do will change anything.

Prince Metaleyes is also there and apparently spends almost the whole time staring at her. Katsa just thinks this is odd because usually people avoid looking at her, and not because wow creepy.

She decides to tell the guy she’s sitting with to not worry about marrying her.

Katsa kept her eyes on her venison and carrots. “My uncle is very disappointed in me, because I intend never to marry

So apparently he can’t just order it? We continue to have no clear understanding of how any of their social structure works at all.

Then the lord blurts out that he wants to chat with the council. She takes this in stride without even wondering about the fact apparently everyone seems to know about it.

She stirred her soup. “Sit back,” she said. “Act as if we were only talking. Don’t whisper, for it draws attention.”

Although this does answer for me why everyone knows. Katsa’s idea of subtlety is to have the conversation but just not make a big deal about how secret it is.

The guy says some stuff about how he’s got an elderly father who suffers in bad weather and it’s important to keep the elderly safe. Okay, so it’s obviously meaning Teaprince, but why the fuck are you bringing it up? Katsa says she’ll talk more to him later, and then we get a completely unnecessary paragraph explaining that they’ll meet up with him later and where. There aren’t any details that might make it interesting, it’s just lines like Giddon would spread the word. Well okay, does he go to everyone individually or do you have some code? Slips of paper he passes out? Because I think readers can assume that if you’re holding meetings someone’s in charge of telling people about them, and if that’s all you have to say there’s no point in bringing it up.

Then Katsa overhears the king mention her and assumes he’s telling some story of her beating someone up and she suddenly becomes super upset and has to leave right then or else she’ll snap. So she stands up and everyone wants to know what’s going on and she says she’s going to take a walk and Giddon wants to go with her and she snaps at him because she wants to be alone.

Then she rushes out to the courtyard, yanks off her hairpins then throws her jewelry in the fountain, then realizes people will gossip, so she wades into it and retrieves them, then she thinks people will gossip at that if they see her, and why does she care about people gossipping again? Anyway, so then she decides to go running around barefoot. Without even changing her dress first.