I can’t believe I’m doing this here instead of twitter because it’s TWITTER that’s the firestorm now but like, i have a very soft spot for grisha and i think the ending of the trilogy is good and appropriate for That Story. And/ergo i think the root of the grisha trilogy ending discourse is not as simple as “people didn’t like the ending” but people didn’t like That Story and thought it was or wanted it to be a different one, and then the ending wouldn’t let them. And it’s very easy to be mad about how objectively wrong they are, or be smug about them willfully misinterpreting/ bending a story to be the power fantasy they wanted and thus victims of their own lack of reading comprehension, but given my ongoing life’s mission to figure out why SJM’s stuff is so popular/ What We Want Out Of Our YA Fantasy, Really, I think it’s a really interesting! And kind of depressing! Case study!
Why do we so wholly reject a heroine who wants nothing but some Peace and Quiet slash why do we demand GIRL HAV SWORD, GIRL IS KWEEN surface-level empowerment? Have we somehow failed a generation of young bookish women by boiling down the fight for female agency to this single option, or is there something about the powerlessness of our current culture that inherently pushes so many of us to crave those no-strings-attached, step-on-men’s-throats-but-never-question-the-systematic-misogyny-in-your-worldbuilding SJM-esque power fantasies? Is it morally irresponsible to prioritize catharsis for your (presumed white, presumed cisfemale) readers (or self) over telling a complex, sensitive story?
Maybe I’m galaxy-braining here, but as someone who grew up on the quintessential portal fantasy structure where the girl goes home to her normal life at the end, I love the very broad idea that we reject that, that the dominant opinion is to want stories where the girl demands a rich, complicated, sexy, powerful life in the fantasy world she has just saved and made friends in. But looking at the grand scope of GIRL HAV SWORD, GIRL IS KWEEN YA from 2010-now, it’s so often shitty and homogenous in execution (not 2 mention comes with that whole host of ‘NOBDOY EVER ADDRESSES THAT IMPERIALISM IS BAD AND RACIST AND MONARCHY IS A SKETCH AF INSTITUTION BUT SURE WATCH THE QUEEN CONQUER I GUESS’ issues’).
As with most complaints about this industry and its crutches, the only “solution” here is to have MORE stories, a broader range of well-written and well-publicized books that both do this and don’t, so that each of us stops feeling so viciously starved of the thing that speaks to us, less willing to fight over scraps of it or see it where it doesn’t exist. But in the meantime, I also don’t know what to make of this seeming truth of what so many people want.
