The Cracked Throne
Joshua Palmatier

I liked Cracked a lot better than Skewed. The style flows a bit more smoothly, you get some fascinating new insights into the way the Sight and the Throne work, and Varis seems much less of a wet rag.

I like the personalities of the original group who created the throne, how they’re saner than the other voices, and present as a guide to Varis — it’s a believable way to teach her certain things that she needs to know but would take far too much time to discover herself. That’s always a problem when you have the element of new magic — either you blunder around trying to figure out how to work it, which takes forever and is not particularly exciting to read about, usually — or someone teaches you it, which is hard because the point of new magic is that it’s new. The ideal solution is to have it be a very old magic gone extinct, and new to the present, which is what we find here. And who better to instruct than the people who created the Throne?

I also liked the idea of two thrones, but it confused me because in the original vision in Cracked, I thought it was two thrones becoming one (and thus ending up skewed). I was really fascinated by the possibilities and metaphors of that idea, but I guess it really was that there were two thrones created. Still, I’m definitely fond of the fact that they destroyed the throne, and now they’re trying to repair it or find another — that haunted feeling of loss really strikes a chord in me. Because it’s not so much like losing a material object than like losing something within yourself.

However, I’m not so fond of the opening scene — Varis is true-dreaming through a street kid who’s being attacked and eventually killed by our typical brutish thug (which reminds me of something else — we never really get a motivation for this thug — in the first book, rape is offered as a frequent motivation, but the thug doesn’t rape this kid). The narrative style is similar to most of the first book, and I finally figured out why it’s been giving me so much trouble.

The problem is, these books characterize street kids as victims.

It says a great deal about you the reader if you can immediately see why that’s problematic. But to elaborate, it’s best to start out with an example of an author who writes none of his characters as victims — August Wilson. The characters in August Wilson’s plays have the deck stacked against them in a multitude of ways — their economic status, their level of education, racial discrimination at both an institutional and personal scale, even physical disability. But not one of them just lies down and wails with despair — they’re continually scrounging and maneuvering and dreaming of a better life. Maybe dreaming is what makes them non-victims, but the important point is — they’re all fighting to survive. And if you’re fighting, you’re not a victim.

"Victim" is a category superimposed by social institutions. It’s a form of objectification, because the will and desire of the victims are totally disregarded. (One note — murder victims belong in a different category, because their will and desire was terminated in the instant of attaining victim-hood. I’m speaking here of living victims; victims of poverty, abuse, discrimination, and so on.) This is the gap between social justice and social services — social justice sees individuals; social services see victims. As objects, victims have no influence in their own fate.

Children are particularly subject to objectification; we have moved from the Victorian idea of children being miniature adults, with the capability for adult value judgment, to the idea that children are all overgrown infants, without the capability for any judgment at all. Neither is quite correct; one results in ultra-high expectations, the other in ultra-low — the latter perhaps spawning the sentimental nostalgia for childhood found in a certain segment of the population. (To jump mediums and quote Bill Watterson: "Those who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children.")

The street kids in the Skewed and Cracked Throne are victims — they are portrayed as helpless to forces outside their control, their dominant emotion fear, prone to sobbing fits at the utter hopelessness of it all. Varis only gains agency through the intervention of an adult (Erick) and when she attains near-adulthood by virtue of age in Cracked, her agency still is weakened by the mere thought of separation from him.

Whereas real street kids are their own agents, fighters for survival.

There are no victims here.