mvk
Written on Jan 1, 2025
Okay, you'd think the author wants to show us this strong, skilled FMC with a sharp sense of justice and an almost sacred duty to her sister. But I hope you caught all my sarcasm because by the end of chapter two, what do we actually have?
This "skilled" thief - whose abilities are supposed to be the catalyst for everything that follows, and her unique selling point - in the very first fucking scene... royally screws up and leaves traces of her blood by which she could be found, and she knew that. Super skilful. Her supposed altruism with promises to save everyone crashes against the fact that she can't even handle herself - she has to steal to pay off her own debts. The cherry on top is that while escaping from the vault, she runs into her friend, sees that she's bound by the same fairy contract, and gets ALL the stolen money. She needed the same money to save herself and that deeply beloved sister she wouldn't shut up about. Logic? Never heard of that.
The bottom line is we have an FMC who can't even support herself, let alone help her sister or save the world. And the problem (deep breath here) isn't that she's a thief. We have plenty of great FMCs in fantasy romance who are assassins/thieves/headhunters with less-than-righteous lifestyles. Still, they don't immediately start screaming about saving everyone because that's supposed to be their character arc - that hero journey - and we genuinely empathize with them. No, the problem is that it's not presented through any well-thought-out moral framework of the main character but simply against the backdrop of everyone else being so awful that she ends up being the lesser evil, and everyone's oppressing her and her sister so much, but she's good, you understand?
I wouldn't see anything super selfish about stealing to save your sister and yourself in her circumstances, even without all the over-the-top clichés being described: evil man she's stealing from, mean aunt and cousins who treat her and her sister like dirt, mother who abandoned them, evil fairies and of course! Even more evil humans. Showing her being more selfish would not be bad. You can develop that into a story about how she learns to protect others by realizing she's capable of it. But don't show her as empty; don't tell us what a fantastic thief she is if it all falls apart in the first scene. And especially when this skill won't come into play later, even though the plot supposedly needs it.
We end up with an FMC without a single genuinely unique trait. She's not a fantastic thief, though that's supposedly one of the reasons she gets pulled into everything (not the main one, but still). She's not beautiful - the author constantly emphasizes this through her messiness and endless descriptions of her rough hands (I swear to God, I've never read about rough hands so many times in any other book), with only her hair being beautiful. She's not exceptionally bright, though the author mentions she reads a lot - but this never shows up in her ideas when she needs to be sharp-witted, nor in her ability to be open-minded about the world - she's got so many stereotypes and such certainty that the world works exactly as she thinks it does and no other way that this narrow-mindedness alone made me want to close the book. She's so blinded by her grievances and self-pity, which I'm supposed to take as a reason for empathy.
And we get this supposedly strong "not like other girls" FMC. On top of everything else, she has an initial love interest, but she'll have such frequent horny feelings for another fairy, whom she doesn't know, and it doesn't matter that he's one of the fairies she supposedly hates, and oh, she'll help them too.
She's so chaotic that there are constant back-and-forths with who she trusts and who she doesn't, and this often happens within a couple of pages.
My main problem is that such FCMs are infuriating, and how authors try to mask stupidity as naivety and lack of life experience. No way - if you're showing us a strong FMC with a rough background (which she has, and it's not bad), she can't be this flat, spineless, and unable to put two and two together or at least use the help she's getting. And boy, does she get help from every possible direction.
Of course, all characters in the first five chapters would fall in love with our heroine, everyone realizes how amazing she is, and maybe only by the end of the book will you get some answers about why this happened, but seriously, do I need to wait until the end of the book to understand all this fuss around her? That's what pisses me off. Because as a female, I'm supposed to empathize with such an FMC and identify with her.
I wish this were just poorly written text or weak prose, but no. The author writes well, and overall, the story isn't bad, not super-wow, but decent. For example, several side characters feel alive despite brief descriptions -you understand their motivations and stories even if they're not entirely told, even through their emotions and reactions. And they work much better as characters than the FMC.
And of course, our heroine will be this "not like other girls" type and get the most incredible abilities, and of course, become the most powerful and the one who solves everything - because how could we do without her? Everything would be okay; there wouldn't be a story without such a character, but the problem is with the FMC herself, who is just simply … bad.
