Last time, Katsa and Metaleyes hang out together. Also, apparently Leck is evil. You know, Metaleyes, if you were so suspicious why’d it take you so long to ever check things out?

The farther south one rode into Sunder, the heavier and thicker the wood of the trees, and the stronger and more imposing the houses and inns.

That’s not quite how it works. You build bigger and stronger structures based on what kind of problems you expect, from storms to bandits. The rainforest has some pretty big trees, but people don’t make log cabins out of those. And it certainly can’t have much to do with temperature issues, because they’re talking on a day by day basis here.

the wild forests and simple, sturdy little towns, too far from the borders to be involved in the nonsense of the kings, had always pleased Katsa. The walls of the inn felt like castle walls, but darker, and warmer.

This is even less how it works.

Wood must be valuable stuff, because elsewhere someone was desperate enough for it that he was willing to buy from Katsa’s uncle, known for ordering bits cut off. And people generally expand to fill available niches, so forests just don’t last long – how long has this place had people, exactly? People don’t do more work than they need to either, the reason castles have massive walls is because those are needed for attacks.

Yet Katsa seems to think this place is peaceful. And apparently being in the middle of a kingdom makes you less subject to its government. She’s not saying they’re away from the fighting over borders, she apparently thinks border wars are the only thing kings do, even though earlier we heard about kings ordering their soldiers to attack their own villages, and, although the book doesn’t seem to notice, the fact some of the heads she had to break for the king were lords lying about the harvest show it isn’t just kings that can mess with peasants.

They’re drinking cider. While that’s not anachronistic at first glance, the apple tree comes from Asia. This place seems to be one small landmass, yet they have tomatoes, grain, chocolate, sugar and now apples. Next they’ll be snacking on peanuts.

Men-particularly Sunderan men, if men are like their king-would do a great deal for money.

Well I guess that explains why Katsa thought it was fine to torture one of them to find out what his king did, apparently everyone’s just a mini-version of their king, except Katsa’s own kingdom that’s totally different and no one’s assumed to be a sadistic bully just because their king is.

See, when ASoIaF starts going on about how group X always Y, you’re not supposed to say, “Well, that proves it then! Let’s go kill the eunuch for the poisoning, the cripple for the child murder attempt, the bastard for whatever’s left, then get back to discussing how those nobles are much too pretty and highborn to be bad.”

Furthermore, ASoIaF doesn’t pull those beliefs out of a hat. Why is poison considered the weapon of eunuchs and women? Because knights don’t need to bother when they can just hack your head off, then hack the head off anyone else who complains.

Now, it’s quite possible to have a cultures vary in how much they value money verses things like loyalty. For example, if you live on shitty little rock islands, you might decide that farming’s for suckers and pillaging is the better option, and everyone else will view you as “those fuckers who think ‘we don’t produce anything and live a completely parasitic lifestyle’ is something to be proud of”. It’s entirely possible for there to be a stereotype about people of a particular area and have it be somewhat true, particularly if the areas are large and have geographic differences that encourage different mindsets.

But what is not true, what is in fact so painfully stupid it hurts to even think about it head on, is that a country’s king would, apparently untouched by any cultural forces, happen to behave in a particular way, and then all the adults of that country would adopt that mindset. Apparently kings appear by spontaneous generation and then form a hive mind throughout their country so everyone acts like a copy of them. Also, fuck this book.

Katsa sipped from her cup and looked out into the sea of men. The finery of the merchants stood out among the muted browns and oranges of the people of the town. Katsa was the only woman in the room, save a harried serving girl, the innkeeper’s daughter

Being female, she’s going to be victimized.

I wonder at the author here. She seems to be noticing her writing revolves around men, but she’s decided to use it as a setup for a very special lesson revolving around further marginalizing and othering the few women who show up.

That’s right, it’s time for FEMINISM.

The girl is unmarried (Metaleyes can tell from what she’s thinking about him, because it’s unpossible a sixteen year old would be interested in anyone once she was married) and Katsa is indignant.

If she’s unmarried, I don’t understand why her father sends her out to serve these men. I’m not certain she’s safe among them.”

Because if she was married, then…uh…that would…something?

As to why her dad has her serving them, maybe because he needs someone to serve people? It’s like asking why I sometimes interact with small children despite viewing them as a sort of stupid dog that happens to have speech and opposable thumbs: because parents view their offspring as a free labor pool.

Metaleyes says that her dad’s around, no one’s going to do anything.

“But he’s not there always-he’s not there now. And just because they don’t assault her doesn’t mean they respect her.” Or that they would not seek her out later.

Katsa, no one respects the server. It’s not a sexism thing, it’s a general dickery thing. As to tracking her down for rape later, what, are you saying women shouldn’t work around men or be anywhere they can be seen because men might track them down later? I don’t see how the problem is her pouring cider. If they want to rape a girl, they’ll rape a girl.

the man at the girl’s other side grabbed her wrist and held on, and there was a great whoop from the men. She tried to pull away, but the laughing man wouldn’t let go. Red with shame, she looked into none of their faces, only pulled at her arm. She was too much like a dumb, confused rabbit caught in a trap

The problem here is not her dad having her exist near men. The problem is she doesn’t have a spine and the men are assholes, and given that men being assholes looks like it’s going to be a constant in this world, she needs to learn how to deal with this shit.

But really – what sort of girl works at an inn for more than a decade of her life and yet is a “dumb, confused rabbit” when someone grabs her arm? Why is she so utterly helpless?

What’s particularly obvious here is how terrible the worldbuilding is. There have been dozens of chances to say that girls in this world are socialized to not defend themselves, leaving them open to abuse, and the book has failed to take even one of them. And this, in turn, makes it look like women are just inherently stupid and helpless.

So Katsa jumps to her feet for some murdering, and Metaleyes grabs her so she doesn’t hop across the table, and everyone looks up and sees she’s pissed off and stops what they’re doing.

But Katsa wasn’t sure that it was over. Perhaps it was over with this girl, and these merchants. But there would be a new group of merchants tomorrow. And these merchants would move on, and find themselves another girl.

You know, prostitution exists, as do girls having sex because they just want to (particularly with apparently-no-consequences-babybane around) yet sex and rape are being treated as the same thing here. The merchants can’t find someone willing to have sex or even someone willing to be paid for sex, just victims.

Later, the guy’s two younger daughters come to give Katsa a haircut.

“Does anyone teach the girls of the inn to protect themselves?” she asked. “Do you carry a knife?”
“Our father protects us, and our brother,” the girl said, simply.

For more FEMINISM we’re going to get Katsa knowing better than all other girls, because girls are stupid and need Katsa to explain things to them.

See, the fact the girls think this works, and the fact their older sister seemed surprised by what happened, kind of suggests that so far, nothing bad has happened and that was an anomaly. Consider that the inn’s population is also made up of a lot of locals who might normally step in the way Katsa did. Consider also that stabbing people in the face is not actually a good way of resolving conflict but more a way of causing it.

It’s possible to have a character in this position without it being this sort of fuckup. You just need some sort of reason why they’re seeing things differently, such as because they’ve had a completely different life (ie, a person from a different culture like ours might pick up on power imbalances instead of seeing them as normal) or because they’ve been in a very similar situation and seen that the existing checks aren’t enough to stop things from going bad. Neither apply to Katsa, who’s someone within this society and also insulated from the situations non-graced, non-aristocratic girls face.

There’s no explanation here for why Katsa is particularly attuned to this subject. She’s never had to be concerned about this herself, and we see that if anything, she’s prone to not realizing other people’s limitations, so she should just assume everyone can take care of themselves until proven otherwise if she notices at all. And she can’t just have differing opinions about what women should be allowed to do, because a) there’s no sign there’s any social pressure on women not to know how to fight, or indeed any clear sign of gendered anything besides the fact Pandaman doesn’t employ female fighters and b) Katsa’s endless wangsting about how she’s not a real girl because real women shouldn’t fight means she thinks women shouldn’t fight. (Indeed, Katsa is the only sign of anyone having opinions about what women as a group shouldn’t do.)

Also:

wondered if other girls in Sunder, and across the seven kingdoms, carried knives; or if they all looked to their fathers and brothers for every protection.

The girls didn’t even say they were defenseless, or how old their brother was. One of them’s eleven, kids look to parents and older siblings to handle things and that doesn’t mean all women throughout the country are completely dependent on the nearest male relative for everything. If you’re so interested in women, a better thing to ask is why their mother doesn’t seem to exist.

You can see what the book is trying to do here, it’s just that it’s doing a terrible and condescending job of it.

Furthermore! This is everyone-agrees feminism. You are not a progressive groundbreaker for such topics as “should women get to touch sharp things????” The issue of allowing women to pick up a weapon is not one our culture struggles with, so creating your fantasy culture in order to lecture everyone about how wrong it is to not let women learn self-defense is to meaningful statements as making a dummy out of straw and whacking it with a stick is to meaningful fights.

Granted, we’ve apparently approaching the point in society where saying raping thirteen year olds is wrong is a shocking message, but the fighting thing has never been a real hot-button issue in our society, so even assuming we keep sliding downhill I don’t think this will ever end up a progressive message. If anything, the conservative side is happy to let women learn self-defense and get guns if they want, since the more women have to do to protect themselves, the more you can say that if she really didn’t want to get raped, she’d have done even more than whatever she did.

Anyway.

Later, Metaleyes shows up because he says the merchants are going to come to tell him about Teaprince and lie to screw with him, in revenge for Katsa standing up suddenly while they were messing with the girl. Whatever.

Because convenience, everyone involved in it ends up showing up, all six of them, and because god forbid we think about this as a functioning world, there’s no mention about the fact the room was packed with other men who saw the whole thing and must have had some opinion and do sort of have the same obligation to stand up and try to stop whatever’s going on as Katsa.

There’s some pointless haggling about price to fill space. Then they start saying stuff that isn’t true. Then we get a detailed summary of how it isn’t true, and how Metaleyes asks lots of questions anyway like he can’t tell, and blah blah this is only excusable if you’re paid by the word. Finally it finishes.

“Well, Lady,” Po said, with a glance in her direction, “we’ll have to send word quickly, so that my brothers know to investigate the dungeons of Birn of Wester.”
“You won’t travel there yourselves?” The man was surprised. And disappointed, most likely, that he hadn’t managed to send Po and Katsa on a futile mission.
“We go south, and east,” Po said. “To Monsea, and King Leck.”
“Leck was not responsible for the kidnapping,” the man said.

Author. I get it, he’s guilty as sin because Love Interest Sue speculated on it and so it must be. But for fuck’s sake, could you at least keep it ambiguous for a while? This even worse than King Murgle zeroing in on Metaleyes back earlier insisting the guy who’s looking for his kidnapped family member must be involved in the breakout of an unmentioned guy imprisoned in Murgle’s dungeon.

The guy insists Leck didn’t do it, and Metaleyes says he’s just going there to visit his aunt.

One of the merchants in the background cleared his throat. “A lot of sickness there,” he said from his corner. “At the Monsean court.”

Huh. They really, really don’t want Metaleyes to go.

He asks about the sickness, and the guy explains that some girls who work at Leck’s shelter died.

Metaleyes asked about the shelter.

“Well, Lord Prince, he’s got hundreds of them, dogs, squirrels, rabbits, bleeding from slashes on their backs and bellies.”
Po narrowed his eyes. “Slashes on their backs and bellies,” he repeated carefully.
“You know. As if they’d run into something sharp,” the man said.
Po stared at him for a moment. “Of course. And any broken bones? Any sickness?”
The man considered. “I’ve never heard tell of any of that, Lord Prince. Just lots of cuts and slashes that take a wondrous long time to heal.

I’m not sure how much this is just that the book’s writing is so terrible on a mechanical level, and how much of this is that the plotting is terrible.

I mean, okay, so he’s torturing animals. But it’s not really a shock since we already knew he was super evil from Metaleyes’ speculation earlier. And there isn’t even dramatic irony type suspense here, where you’re uneasy because the characters don’t know, because obviously Metaleyes knows it means Leck’s torturing animals too.

I think if this were better written you could still get a sense of horror because this is worse than what we knew before, and you wonder what else is going on that people don’t know about. Even then I think it’s hobbled by the fact Metaleyes explained Leck was evil earlier. If we didn’t know, if it was just a matter of Metaleyes wanting to check the place out because he felt something was off, and if the book didn’t feel the need to point out to us every discrepancy in every story about Leck, this whole plot would be – well, it’d be a plot, for one. Right now it’s more of an exposition train. We can assume Leck was behind the kidnapping, and if he’s just senselessly evil then there’s no longer a question of why kidnap Teaprince, and probably his wife locking herself up out of grief is about as true as all those animals running into sharp things constantly. There’s no sense of actually figuring anything out, it’s all being handed to the reader by the book.

Then, because they’ve Stupid Evil:

I’m suddenly dying of a sickness called boredom,” his partner said.
“Oh,” said the first, “perhaps you have a more amusing diversion in mind?”
“With different company,” said the man in the corner.
They were laughing now, the six of them chuckling over a private joke Katsa had a feeling she understood. “Alas for protective fathers and locked bedroom doors,” the partner said

So Katsa is furious, and Metaleyes stops her, and then they compliment Metaleyes for keeping her on a short leash, and now he’s furious too, and violence? :D?

…no, then Katsa stops him for some reason instead of removing their testicles. God forbid anything productive come of this.

Metaleyes tells them they won’t get the money because they’ve pissed him off.

“I’d like to do something to discourage them from touching the innkeeper’s daughter.”
“We won’t,” one of them gasped. “We won’t touch anyone, I swear it.”

Yeah, I’m sure that’ll stop them from raping ever again. You sure solved that problem, Katsa!

“And now will you tell me what you learned from them?”
“Yes.” He closed his eyes. “What I learned. To start with, other than that fellow in the corner, they barely spoke a true word. It was a game. They wanted to trick us into paying them for false information. To get back at us, for the incident in the eating room.”

You see what I have to put up with from this book? First it says what will happen, then it explains what’s happening while it happens, then afterwards, it says what just happened. SHUT UP!

Metaleyes does eventually finish saying what everyone already knows and grudgingly adds a piece of new information.

Katsa, when the man said that Leck was not responsible for the kidnapping, he was lying. But when he said, a moment later, ‘Leck is blameless,’ he meant it. He believed himself to be telling the truth.”

Well, that is indeed weird.

But we have to get back to shipping, so suddenly we shift over to discussing how he can read Katsa’s mind and how he has a solution to that, she can just knock him unconscious! Katsa, who previously felt blows to the head were the best idea ever, is appalled by the suggestion and they go back and forth over who wants to be more accommodating to who.

Then back to Leck.

“I’ve wondered… it occurs to me recently… that he could be Graced. That he could have a Grace that changes the way people think of him.

The grace thing was obvious from the moment you said he lacked an eye.

Katsa thinks it sure is weird, but then says that he’s such a nice guy and kind to animals! And Metaleyes points out there’s lots of holes in that story, and Katsa says yes but he’s so kind to animals, and Metaleyes says see, you’re doing it.

Katsa saw it; and the truth in all its gruesomeness trickled into her mind. She began to have a conception of a power that spread like a bad feeling, like a sickness itself, seizing all minds that it touched.

This does make for an interesting opponent for Katsa. She can win anything head-on, but she’s proven really easy to manipulate by anyone halfway competent.

Katsa wonders how she can face a guy like that.

that’s easy,” he said. “My Grace will protect me from him. And I’ll protect you. You’ll be safe with me, Katsa.”

Katsa doesn’t flip out about this because apparently she’s no longer flipping out about being protected.

I don’t really object to the idea here, but god is it badly worded.

Actually, that’s a pretty good summary of the whole book so far, isn’t it? The book isn’t championing particularly objectionable morals, if only because this book as all the substance of wet tissue paper so even when there is something awful (still remember you trained with fucking torturers, Katsa) there’s no real setting for it to ground itself and matter. And we do have abortion plants and a female character punching people out and a love interest who isn’t bossy or rapey. It’s just not doing anything interesting. There’s lots of things that could be interesting, but the execution isn’t there.