High-school me would be really pissed off over the Caraval series.
We are probably in the golden age of Young Adult Fantasy Fiction right now, as much as we can be in the golden age of anything with the world as it is. Man, the kid I was would be so excited to be alive and in a bookstore, what with all of the options available to readers these days. I think it’s mostly why I gravitate towards the genre so much as an adult.
16 year old Danielle probably would’ve gone gaga over the first Caraval book. She definitely would have seen a lot of herself in Scarlett – quiet, non-confrontational, afraid to attract too much attention, scared of her own impending womanhood. She would have loved that the shy, scared girl ended up with the cool guy at the end too.
Then she would have read the next two books and been super upset because they largely wound up ignoring Scarlett in favor of her sister Donatella. Her inner monologue would have told her it was the story of her life and that she would similarly be pushed aside in favor of her flashier counterpart.
So I’m obviously not that 16 year old anymore, and I am mostly over that kind of crap, but I remain salty on behalf of my younger self, and on behalf of all kids today that may be going through the same thing. Only kids today are exposed to media espousing values counter to their feelings on a level that I never was. I could more easily avoid a lot of the stuff that was telling me, as a kid, that I’d be much prettier and much more desirable to boys if only I was blonder and more typically feminine.
For me, it’s the focus on Tella in Legendary and Finale that detracts from the series overall, but it’s unfortunately a trend you see a lot in some really popular YA fiction. Not to be nasty, but Tella is exceedingly basic in terms of what a standard YA heroine is these days – she’s sassy, typically pretty, and catches the eye of not one but two powerful magical beings. Everyone, everywhere she goes, remarks about how pretty she is (we know this because Stephanie Garber somehow sees fit to mention it repeatedly).
It also does Tella no service, making her looks the first thing everyone mentions about her, but she’s aware of it herself and very much takes advantage of it. In any case, it’s a pointed distinction Garber makes between both Tella and Scarlett, that the former doesn’t mind showing herself off and the latter is scared to draw attention to herself, so Tella is rewarded with verbal compliments and loads of powerful guys fighting over her. Basically we’re being told with all the subtlety of a brick through a window that we absolutely should be comparing these two girls to each other.
That’s not to say that it’s necessarily what the reader should aspire to, but Tella seems to be fascinated with power in the same way that Feyre from ACOTAR is, so reinforcing ideas like this across multiple books can definitely lead girls to think that that’s the sort of thing they should value. This made me think, almost immediately, of a book I read a long time ago called “Marry Him”, which essentially says that women shouldn’t hold men to ridiculous standards and that just because a guy is going bald doesn’t mean he isn’t a great guy. Tella says a couple of times how flattered she’d be that an immortal being would give up his power just to be with her, practically in the same breath as she does that she wouldn’t want to be the cause of someone giving up their immortality.
Still, I wouldn’t exactly say Scarlett was settling for Julian; lord knows there’s as much a problem with unrealistic standards for male characters in fiction aimed at women as there is with women in media across the board. However, I’ve always looked at that disparity as a way of evening the scales, i.e. if women are told via things like men’s magazines that they must have a flat stomach and big boobs to be desirable, then why not publish their own stuff where the men have six packs and are actual feminists too (ahem, Rhysand)? Julian is decidedly more human than Legend, and doesn’t have the conundrum of immortality to worry about when it comes to being with Scarlett. Their relationship is much more mundane, and therefore, relatable.
Taking all of that into consideration, it’s kind of especially disturbing to see how Garber juxtaposes Scarlett and Tella. As I said earlier, we are obviously meant to compare the two. Scarlett is dark, Tella is light. Scarlett is modest and reserved, Tella is brash and bold. Scarlett is scared, Tella is brave. Tella receives repeated verbal compliments from others. Scarlett is told only that she looks like her mother, who was ostensibly quite beautiful. Tella has two immortal, powerful beings competing for her love; Scarlett also has two men fighting over her, neither of which are magical, one of which was actually an arranged marriage from an abusive father who winds up getting brutally murdered in the last book.
It’s the stuff that goes beyond aesthetics that I find especially unpalatable. Scarlett is barely allowed to save herself in the books, whereas Tella is allowed time and again to be independent, to be the hero (she actually congratulates herself in Finale after killing Gavriel, when it was Scarlett that got her that opportunity in the first place, but I digress). Scarlett is technically “rewarded” with becoming Empress, but Tella as princess essentially gets all the benefits of being royal without all the work that probably goes with it. Scarlett has actual power, but despite it she winds up having to be rescued (by a man, and Tella) because she doubts herself so much. Would it have been all that difficult to show some actual growth and development for Scarlett and let her do the saving for once? I don’t really count her saving Tella in the first book because none of that was real, which is kind of awful when you think of it. Scarlett’s only act of heroism is predicated on lies, from the person she loves most.
My point with all of this is that Garber, intentionally or unconsciously, shows in several ways that Tella is the more favorable of the sisters, and the one that is rewarded more for her behavior – She wins Caraval on her own, whereas Scarlett’s win is kind of reduced for having been in a game that’s not only all about Tella, but one where the whole premise is based on her being lied to. Scarlett has things done to her, repeatedly, whereas Tella gets to do the things herself. At one point in Finale, after visiting Legend’s home, Tella remarks that it’s much nicer than Nicholas’s dilapidated estate, ergo, the quality of men she attracts is better. Scarlett gets the scraggly mortal brother, Tella gets the powerful, impeccable one.
As the main focus of the series after Caraval, it’s suggested that we should care about Tella more, that her story is more important and more worth telling (no pun intended). That’s definitely going to be the takeaway from an impressionable kid reading a book for the first time, so it makes me wonder what we’re really showing kids with stories like these. I can speak from experience in saying that as a kid, reading this, I absolutely would have inferred that I should want to be like Tella.
It’s implied in YA fiction (because it’s rarely nuanced enough to portray anti-heroes as they should truly be, a la Lestat in Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, who does terrible things, isn’t sorry about doing them, and you like him anyway) that the reader is supposed to look up to the protagonist. Well, after Caraval, Tella is really the center of that story (and you could argue she’s the center of Caraval too since the game is literally built around her). Moral of the story is this: the brave, bold, outspoken girls get the better things, they get the compliments, they get the better guys, they get to be the literal center of the universe. It’s not worth it to be quiet, reserved, and cautious. If you’re like that, you’ll have what was your story taken over by your flashier counterpart.
It hurts to look at something like this from the perspective of a child that was never sure of herself and always thought she needed to be something other than what she already was to be a person of value. I might be reading too much into it, and I’m in no way saying Stephanie Garber intended this when writing the series, I just think it’s very telling that Western, specifically American, society can’t get away from ideas like this no matter how much we try to push the “love yourself as you are” agenda these days. Self Love is a great thing in theory, but it’s like one step forward two steps back when books espouse ideas contrary to it.
They’re fantasy books, I get it, but what I love most about fantasy is that it’s always anchored to reality in some way, usually through the characters. I enjoyed the series a lot, but as an adult, it’s really difficult to essentially be forced to focus on a character like Tella when as a kid I too felt like I was pushed to the side, or was too quiet and unassuming to really be of value in the world.
It’s important for the quieter, shyer, more reserved girls of the world know that they can be heroines without having to be the loudmouthed, brash ass-kicking sort of person that YA fiction is just overrun with. You can have a story worth telling even if you’re not the most obviously exciting person. One of my former teachers wrote me a college recommendation letter where he said still waters run deep, and it was one of the nicest things anyone has ever said about me. Worthiness goes well beyond the surface, it’s not always visible, and it’s time that more authors started making conscious efforts to show that.
Keep It To Your Shelf 