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Showing results for tags 'spoilers ahoy'.
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Paalm's story seems to me to be a deconstruction of the trope of the Fridged Woman. In AoL, Lessie is presented as your Standardized Fridged Love Interest, in the same way that Steris is the Sitcom Unsuitable Fiancee and Marisi is obviously going to be the Real Love Interest. Lessie gets through all of one prologue before she dies tragically and her purpose in the story is pretty much to drive Wax in the direction of the plot and give him something to angst over. Then comes Shadows of Self, and we find out she was meta-fridged. Writers are often accused of giving female love interests little characterization beyond "she loves the Hero"; "Lessie" (as opposed to Paalm) literally only exists for Wax. When Lessie refuses to get Wax back to Elendel-- in a sense, when she refuses to further the plot-- God himself kills her off to motivate the hero. Except that while Lessie is dead, Paalm is still there to take back her agency. She still has a voice. And she is pissed. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying she's not really a villain or something-- when your business card says "serial killer", it's time to think hard on your life decisions. I'm not even saying Harmony was wrong in the scheme of things. But as awful as Paalm's actions end up being, her rage is very understandable. I don't know if Brandon did this on purpose, or it just came out that way. But every time I read Era Two, I can't help but see Lessie as standing in for fiction's silenced, disposable women.
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I was right about Calamity being an Epic, and wrong about where weaknesses come from. So, with that track record, it looks like I have a….75 percent chance of being wrong. Anyway. Ever since finishing Firefight, I've wondered why some Epics are more powerful than others. You have Steelheart, who is basically a god among Epics, and then you have Firefight, who is a High Epic by default but far less powerful by her own admission. Why is this? As of right now, I have no idea, and I'm preparing to have this theory blown to smithereens. But with Epic powers tied to their fears, with powers appearing to give symbolic empowerment over those fears while their greatest fear cancels their powers entirely, I'm wondering if an Epic's power level is related to their willingness/ability to act on their fear. Take Steelheart, for example. He wasn't about to overthrow the government (so far as we know) but he was more than willing to use force when making his peers fear him. Once Calamity gave him the power to do so, he became one of the first Epics to conquer a city, and was one of the main reasons the US passed the Capitulation Act. He was extremely willing to act on his fear, and did once given the power to do so. Then there's Firefight. She fears fire, yet throughout Steelheart, we don't see her going out of her way to avoid fire. This could be—and almost certainly is—because Newcago runs entirely on green energy (well, Epic-supplied energy, which doesn't seem to leave a carbon footprint) leaving the citizens with little to no reason to ever use fire, making her avoidance of it a moot point. But even before Calamity, the only thing she could really do to act on her fear was get her parents to buy better smoke alarms and install an indoors sprinkler system. Her fear of fire is strong, but her willingness and ability to act on it is lower, so this could be a connection between her fear and her power level. What do you guys think? Thoughts? Comments? Snarky memes?
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