Blood Heir (Part 2)

STATS

Title: Blood Heir

Series: The Blood Heir Trilogy (Book 1)

Author(s): Amélie Wen Zhao

Genre: Young Adult Fantasy

First Printing: 2019 (first hardcover edition), 2020 (first paperback edition)

Publisher: Random House Children’s Books (hardcover by Delacorte Press, paperback by Ember)

Rating: 4/10 (general), 6/10 (Young Adult audience)

SPOILER WARNING

Mild spoilers will be necessary to properly break down this story.  I will include “Heavy Spoilers” in the heading for any section where further detail is required.  I will keep the first paragraph of these sections as spoiler-free as possible in case you want to read the book for yourself before coming back for the full analysis.

ACTION

Remember how I praised The Shadow of the Gods for fight choreography that leaves no detail unaccounted for? Remember how I said the combat in The Stardust Thief at least holds together for the intimate duels because of the focus on the emotions of the combatants?

Blood Heir is not like either of these.  It flat-out fails on fight scenes.  That is a big problem when fight scenes serve as the main form of action in the story.

Credit where it is due, Zhao at least tries to rein in the Affinities so that combat.  Her use of Deys'voshk and yaegers sets clear limitations that often supersede the bland choreography.  Also, going back to the Young Adult audience, I'm not sure how much the Young Adult demographic really notices or cares about choreography in a non-visual medium.  Modeling fighting styles off specific martial arts pays dividends in an animated show like The Last Airbender, but I remember glossing over the actual back-and-forth of fights in books, reducing it to exciting noise as I skimmed to the next plot beat or character moment.

Unfortunately, there are two fight scenes in this book that are such completely and utter nonsense that they cannot be rationalized by appealing to the audience’s expectations.

The Market (Heavy Spoilers)

This scene takes place early in the book, right after Ana and Ransom first team up.

In this scene, Ana uses her Affinity to lash out at a noble who strikes an Affinite in his employ (the pastry seller mentioned previously).  There is an immediate response from law enforcement.  Whitecloaks, the absolute elite of the Cyrilian Empire’s armed forced, all but materialize within seconds.  With them is a yaeger and an Affinite broker, along with a blackstone paddy wagon to secure Affinite prisoners.  The Whitecloaks are on horseback and have blackstone armor.

One might assume, given the supposed skill of the Whitecloaks and the fact they came with everything they need to detain an Affinite (and immediately sell off said Affinite), that they came here with the awareness that they would find a powerful Affinite and need to use overwhelming force to subdue that Affinite.  There is no other way this makes sense.  For them simply happen to be on patrol and happen upon this scene would be like having a fully armed SWAT team patrolling the streets for anyone using marijuana without a license.

Which is why the following is so utterly bizarre.

Ana and her friend May (a secondary character who is an earth Affinite), try to escape.  This, by itself, is fine - Zhao just set this patrol up as an overwhelming threat.  However, the Whitecloaks do not pursue.  They hang back as the yaeger and the broker pursue Ana and May … on foot.  They just watch as the yaeger is incapacitated.  A single Whitecloak fires an arrow to drop May.  (This doesn't kill her, and she goes limp instantly, so my assumption based on established information is that the arrow was poisoned with Deys'voshk.)  The broker then grabs May and flings her into the wagon.  Then the patrol just … runs away with May, leaving the yaeger and Ana behind.  It's framed as them retreating before Ana's terrifying power, but no reinforcements ever return to lock down the area and deal with her.

This is utterly insane.  The Whitecloaks have strength in numbers.  They have the advantage of speed and height that comes from riding horses.  They are explicitly stated to have both arrows and Deys'voshk.  They have blackstone armor, which one would assume they would assume would protect them from Affinities, as they would otherwise not be wearing it.  (The scene demonstrates the Ana’s Affinity ignores the armor, and the retreat is called after she demonstrates that, but prior to that point, the Whitecloaks had no reason to believe that the armor wouldn’t deflect her Affinity.)  Their involvement would have instantly ended the fight in their favor.  They could have, and should have, riddled both Ana and May with Deys'voshk-laced arrows before either the yaeger or the broker got close enough to touch either one.  (True, Ana would not have been stopped by Deys'voshk alone, but again, they don't know that.)  The fact that there is a crowd can't be what stymied them, as that crowd conveniently disappears and reappears throughout the scene - notably, if the crowd was too thick for horses, then May should have killed several people in a moment when she used her earth powers to explode the street in front of the yaeger, but no such casualties were mentioned.

None of this is deep analysis, mind.  The issues with this fight are evident on a first reading.  I kept wondering why the Whitecloaks weren't doing anything to contribute.  They were so uninvolved that I actually forgot that their archer had been the one to shoot May until writing this review (I remembered it as the broker doing it).  Zhao went out of her way to set up an imposing threat, only to delete the threat when she wrote herself into a corner.

The Carriage (Heavy Spoilers)

This one is both simpler and more baffling than the market fight.

At the end of Act Two, Ana is captured by Sadov and incapacitated with Deys'voshk.  He is taking her back to Morganya in carriage.  Thankfully, Ransom had prepared a contingency plan in case this happened.  Two Affinites who popped up earlier in the book arrive to rescue Ana: a boy who does something with shadows (it seems to be either a shadow form or shadow teleportation) and a girl who controls the wind.  (I will note that these two are among the only cases of setup and payoff in this book that work.   Random is implied to have hired the boy for a small task several chapters earlier, and he had previously asked an Affinite broker about hiring the girl.).  The girl smashes a window, and the boy slips inside, knocks out Sadov, and unties Ana's bonds.

Then things get wonky.  Sadov wakes up almost immediately.  He uses his emotional control Affinity to incapacitate Ana and the girl.  He then flees.  Ana and the girl debate pursing him, but ultimately decide to let him go, since Ana cannot use her Affinity to tip the scales back on their favor.

What do you mean, what happened to the boy? What boy? There's no boy.

Seriously, the boy just vanishes from the scene.  The last mention of him in the book is him turning to look at the girl as she speaks to Ana through the carriage window.  We don't get any reference to him being taken out by Sadov.  He doesn’t vanish into the shadows.  He just fades out of the story as suddenly and anticlimactically as the dragon from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, except in this case, we're supposed to take this scene seriously.

As with the market scene, I suspect this is because Zhao wanted the shadow Affinite boy but didn't want him to alter the outcome of the scene.  He and the girl could have chased down and overpowered Sadov together.  Zhao needed Sadov to escape, though, so the boy had to stop existing.

Analysis

Up to this point, I have rationalized the flaws in this work based upon audience expectation.  This somewhat protects the poor fight choreography in other fight scenes, but I draw a hard line with these two incoherent examples.

There is a fundamental difference between writing to your audience's expectations and treating said audience like idiots.  The market scene and the carriage scene are the latter.  Young Adult audiences may not have the breadth of experience that adult audiences do, but that does not make them morons.  Authors should respect their intelligence and put in the effort to write scenes that do not collapse in on themselves with the bare minimum of reflection.

CHARACTER (ANA)

Blood Heir does not have a small cast.  There are a great many named characters, both Affinites and not, on both sides of the conflict.  However, I think that Ana is the one that is most significant to the quality of this book.  She is also the worst-written.

The Blood Witch of Salskoff

Ana's personal arc is defined by her powers.  When they first manifested, she was a small child, she accidentally caused eight people to explode in showers of blood.  Her father buried her involvement and concealed her powers from the public (in a manner that makes Elsa's treatment in Frozen seem quite healthy by comparison), but Ana was never allowed to forget that she was a monster now.  Only Luka and Morganya offer any comfort, but they could not stop the torturous regime of Deys'voshk therapy that she was subjected to (at Sadov’s hands, incidentally).  The twin experiences of the murders and the therapy emotionally scarred Ana.  The urban legend of the Blood Witch of Salskoff, the blood Affinite who murdered eight people, did not help her impression of herself.

This is a great start to a character arc.  There are multiple ways to tell a story with this.  Blood Heir chose to prove that Ana is indeed the monster that the Blood Witch of Salskoff moniker implies.

I meant what I said when I compared Ana to Daylen Namaran.  Ana's misdeeds in this book do not come anywhere close to his atrocities, but the entire crux of Daylen's story is that he is the villain and that he is seeking to atone (however flawed his approach might have been).  Multiple characters, including himself, assert this.  The conclusion of the story is that none of the good deeds he accomplished after his rebirth negate his bad deeds.  He is spared from the punishment that he himself agrees that he deserves due to a mess of political and religious factors that make killing him problematic, which is not the same as the narrative validating him.

Ana threatens to murder a crowd of people for tending to a yaeger's injuries.  She then interrogates the yaeger by threatening to murder the crowd anyway if he doesn't talk.  She uses her Affinity to torture an innkeeper, rob him of a very heavy coin purse, and steal one of his horses.  (She does this to save Ransom, and with him May, but she only needed the horse and the information to do that, and she didn’t have to announce herself to the innkeeper by torturing him before she even greeted him.)  She exsanguinates multiple people throughout the book.  When Ransom tries to stop her from killing one of the least threatening of these victims, she uses her Affinity to throw him across a room and into a wall.

What does Ana have to say for herself when she reflects upon these acts?

She worried about whether or not she is perceived as a monster.  After the mass-murder threat she makes to the yaeger, the narrative sums up her thoughts with:

But perhaps all monsters were heroes in their own eyes.

Perhaps this is meant to reflect upon the complex moral situations one can get into whole fighting injustice, but as it is framed in this narrative, it comes across as a narcissistic, violent sociopath trying to rationalize how she is still the hero after doing horrific things for her own self-interest.

And let's be clear - all the horrible things Ana does are motivated by self-interest.  She is not aware of the conspiracy that drives Act Three of the story until after she does all these things.  Her life in not in danger prior to that point (outside of being an Affinite in general), as everyone assumes that she drowned in an icy river after murdering her father.  She learns about the plight of the Affinites midway along this trail of blood, but she does not bond herself to their cause, even when a friend she trusts asks for her to join them.  All the torture, murder, and robbery are done for her personal benefit: to clear her name, to reclaim her throne, to save the few people she cares about (which might be selfless in another context, but given her overall behavior, it comes across as her clinging to people who make her feel good about herself rather than self-sacrificing love).  The climax of her character arc is her showing Sadov mercy in the one moment where exsanguinating a character might actually make sense, and she shows that mercy because she is aware she is being manipulated into killing him.  In other words, she spares a man’s life to spite someone she hates more.

Daylen became a horrific tyrant as a result of a chain of small steps: logical calculations, selfish delusions, and people unwilling to say, “No,” to him until it was too late.  Ana is a monster right out of the box.  That is not inherently bad writing unless the narrative tries to ignore or gloss over the problem.  Blood Heir does just that.

Analysis

When it comes to how Ana's characterization impacts a Young Adult narrative versus how it would impact adult Fantasy, I am of two minds.

The idea that Ana is the hero of this story appeals heavily to emotion.  She is the main character, the protagonist, the one whose emotional fulfillment should bring the audience some measure of catharsis.  There's nothing inherently wrong with this.  If anything, it is incredibly realistic that this character thinks only in terms of self-interest and the perception of her deeds rather than using a moral framework.  Young Adult audiences, who are dealing with so much confusion and stress in their lives, certainly are no strangers to dealing with strong emotions that override reason.  I can therefore see how someone like Ana could speak strongly to the Young Adult demographic.

And yet … the morality of the story is broken.

I am not saying that the broken morality is an objective flaw from a writing perspective.  Morality is something that must be assessed separately from artistic merit.  It is essential distance to preserve them both.  That's why I am trying my best not to bring up morality as an artistic metric when doing these reviews.

The problem here is that the story hinges on moral arguments.  The thematic idea is that the world is filled with good and evil, so people need to fight for the good.  This is explicitly spelled out on the last page of the book.  The story leans on outrage bait to assert that the antagonists are evil on the basis of how they abuse Affinites.  The murders of Ana’s family members are framed as moral injustices.

And yet, despite hammering on this moral binary, the book wants us to ignore the morality of her actions.  We are supposed to be invested in her internal conflict about whether she is a monster, and to believe that she is a good person who was abused into thinking that she was bad, while she is simultaneously torturing and murdering people at every turn.  We are supposed to think she has triumphed over her inner darkness because she chose not to kill someone in a scenario where she is aware that refusing to kill that person is a way to spite her real enemy.  Much like how the themes of atonement and guilt fell flat in Shadow of the Conqueror because of Daylen's choices and behavior, Ana's arc falls apart because she proves time and again that she is indeed the very monster that she grows more and more insistent that she is not.

Beyond the Boundary

Ana's character arc is noteworthy because there is a recent and far superior example of it.  There is a Japanese story (originally a novel and then adapted into an anime) about a character with a blood-themed power set who is stigmatized for her powers and is defined by her fears that she is a monster.  The story in question is Beyond the Boundary, and the blood-wielding character is Mirai Kuriyama.

Mirai comes from a clan of Spirit Warriors, supernaturally powered people who hunt the spirits that manifest from negative human emotions.  Her clan is stigmatized and hunted to near extinction because their blood was imbued with a powerful curse.  Said curse allows them to telekinetically manipulate their own blood (Mirai typically manifests a sword via a cut on her palm), but if its full power is unleashed, her blood will kill any living or spiritual matter that it touches (to the point that a fine rain from a few drops of her blood turns several acres of forest into a blighted waste).  Mirai has killed people with this curse by accident.  She believes that she deserves her status as a pariah and spurns attempts at friendship from the show's other main character, an immortal named Akihito Kanbara.

While Beyond the Boundary is far from flawless, it succeeds where Blood Heir fails.  Mirai Kuriyama does not spend the story throwing her weight around while bemoaning how that makes her look.  The closest she comes to abusing her powers are her repeated attempts to kill Akihito at the story.  These are deliberately framed as farce: as an immortal, Akihito heals faster than she can harm him, and he himself treats her many attempts as an annoyance rather than a serious threat on his life.  What’s more, the story isn’t about a moral binary.  It explores themes of loneliness and acceptance.  Mirai and Akihito’s respective powers and personalities isolate them from other people, so whenever their powers are being explored, it sustains the themes rather than providing examples of how they clash with those themes.

CONCLUSION

Blood Heir is a good example of how catering to audience expectations can produce profoundly different reading experiences.  Being Young Adult does not excuse all its flaws.  However, the decisions that produced those flaws were not necessarily bad ones.  Understand the audience to whom your book will be marketed and published is key to optimizing their reading experience.  Zhao appears to have made an effort to do just that.

ONE MORE DETOUR

The next book review that we do will be The City of Brass.  However, there is an interlude that I would like to put out first.

The concept of New Adult literature is a subject that is somewhat controversial in modern literature.  Not every publisher I've encountered recognizes it, and I constantly see writers taking swipes over it on Twitter.  While I am not about to put a definitive end to the debate, I do think it is important to plainly state my own position, as it does influence how I review books.  I think I should plainly establish that perspective to provide context for my reviews.

The New Adult interlude is coming next week.  The week after that, we'll arrive at The City of Brass.  I hope to see you all then.