book review: Steelhands
This one's more of a rant, actually.
This is the fourth (and last?) book in a series that I was enjoying up until this book. And this one was such a horrendous fail that it made me look back on the other books and realize what a horrendous failure those were as well. The most problematic issue with Steelhands overall was the way it presents/considers women. And I'm going to start off talking about that.
It might be because of all of the YA critiques and book blogs I’ve been reading lately, a lot of which very smartly and eloquently highlight the deep-seeded misogyny that shows up in those kinds of currently popular books; some of it blatant, some of it so subtle that the authors themselves might have no idea they’re doing it and it’s actually become so normal that they themselves can’t understand that they are aggressively hating on women in their books (even if they themselves are women, which most of them are!). So now I’m on high alert for it, and I just happened to be reading Steelhands at the time.
This is the first book in the series with a woman character in POV chapters. Okay, this is actually debatable, because I never understood and frankly the book never TOLD me if Malahide was a male crossdresser or a transwoman, or something else. It seems to insinuate he/she had male genitalia but also had some sort of (involuntary?) sex-related surgery that might have removed...some of it? (But not enough to where s/he couldn’t get an erection? Even that moment was unclear) Honestly, that book was not good enough to really be specific on it, and Malahide’s “real” sex/gender was also basically irrelevant because it was revealed so late and impacted nothing and they might as well have never have brought it up/done it because it was handled so badly (and I am not trans, so I can’t say for sure, but it was probably offensive as well).
Oh wait, and there was that one woman in the second book, Madoka. But she was also written like a man, and basically I didn’t remember her being female until I’d already written up this whole review, because she blends into the male POVs like she is one. I remember liking her as a character and liking her sections, now that I remember she existed, but she wasn’t presented problematically because she wasn’t around a lot of other characters at all and only interacted with a few. So I don’t think she had the problematic misogynistic views that bug me so badly with the female character in Steelhands.
So then; this book has the first clear cis female character in a large civilized area that interacts with a lot of people that gets a narrative POV in the series. Her name is Laurence because her father wished she had been born a boy. Okay, whatever, fair play to tropes, this happens often enough. What would have been very interesting to do with this would have been to make Laure (as she is called) more “traditionally” feminine, having her preferring to align with the sort of turn of the century/Victorian gender roles for women that the book series has in its world, as kind of a fuck you to her father. Or just because that’s how she is naturally. But no, instead, she embraces this and is basically a male character. Except for being beautiful and busty. So physically she is like an ideal woman, and mentally she’s a dude. She’s more dude-like than her fiancé, who is a sort of pathetic awful caricature of a gay man. There’s nothing wrong with fey characters (hell, half the other characters in this book are; Troius, Luvander (the only character really working it effectively, honestly), Balfour to an extent, Raphael even-they’re all kind of sassy and/or fussy) but when it’s their only defining trait, that’s a problem. Toverre is defined and caged by his stereotype. Actually the problem with most of the characters in this entire series is that they are severely one note, but that’s a different critique. I’m talking about women.
So, naturally, Laure-being a man in a woman’s body-is pretty harsh on other women. She has generic misogynistic views that are usually awarded to the most “masculine” of male characters. She sees women basically as gaudy scenery; useless, frivolous, annoying, brainless. She constantly distances herself from them, mentally and physically. She doesn’t seem to have female friends, ever in her life possibly, and never mentions relationships with other women, even ones in her family (like does she even have a mother). Her few interactions with another woman are very masculine-geared (“Antoinette smiled, clapping Laure on the shoulder the same way I would’ve done for one of my boys coming back from a successful raid” - REALLY? They have to interact specifically like men?) She’s just surrounded by silly frittering girls in her mind. But the authors are trying to present Laure herself as SUCH an awesome woman, not like THOSE other silly woman, and why? Because she’s like a MAN! She’s not an awesome woman because she’s being awesome as a woman, she’s being an awesome woman because she’s a man. She behaves in the same manner that all of the “badass” men of the series do. She’s crude and improper, doesn’t pay close attention to her clothes or her health or her hygiene apparently, hangs out with all the boys and none of the women as previous mentioned, is naturally more capable of taking care of herself because she grew up in the country and not the city where women are all silly and pampered and likes clothes more than anything, the list just goes on and on with her stereotypical male behavior. Which would just be kind of whatever, par for the course with this series, except for her problematic views of women/female behavior. If she acts like a man but respects other women, fine. But she acts like a man and actively hates women. At one point she literally is not proud of herself until she is behaving and being treated like a man, by other men.
Not only that, but there’s Adamo, who’s a dick to everyone in general but again-most women are fainting, hysterical, silly annoyances in his head. But not LAURE, oh no, she’s tough and can hang with the boys! She’s just LIKE one of the boys! She even TELLS him to THINK of her as one of the boys, near verbatim, at one point! I don’t even know why they bothered to make Laure female. It doesn’t matter that she is (except for the sorta whatever attraction between her and Adamo-but come on, this is the “fangirl friendly” series). She’s written just like any of the male points of view and in fact is actually WORSE than they are, because her uncomfortable attitudes towards women matched with her complete distance from any other actual women then come off as some sort of twisted self-hate, and I don’t think these books are well-written enough to actually be going for that level of depth in character. Her misogyny is too casual; it’s written in a way where it’s like “thinking these disparaging things about women is just clearly a regular male behavior” and where it’s supposed to make Laure look cooler because she isn’t like THOSE women. In a better book this could have been done very well; because of her father’s wish that she was born male Laure could have internalized that disappointment nearly from birth, and ended up manifesting her father’s/her own hatred of her own sex into an unhealthy hatred of other women. Then it would have been more tragic, more realistically consequential, more intriguing of character, rather than just careless misogyny tossed in there to bulk up the “cool” and “special” factor of the female POV. But this book is not NEARLY deep enough for that. It’s all too passing, too fleeting, and too casual. I should have made more notes on instances of it, but it basically all has to do with Laure rolling her eyes and looking down on stereotypical female behavior, basically putting down women who are following ‘traditional’ (Victorianesque) behavior, which in this world is THE NORMAL WAY OF BEHAVING. There was one instance in her POV where it wasn’t even Laure being the trouble point, but the authors themselves -when they went out of their way to mention that a lot of the women in the university classes had stopped coming. I mean, yes, all of these worrying things are technically coming back down to the authors, but why even make that point in the first place? Just some more women-hate for no real reason; except to prove that Laure is still in those classes, because she’s BETTER than those women!
And Laure’s misogyny is not a theme, it’s not there to be dwelled upon as a problematic issue, it’s not a social commentary reflecting on our own society. It’s just THERE. Subtly, occasionally, casually. And it’s there to “be cool”. Because if it was any of those other things I just listed, it would have had a bearing on the plot or a character conflict or something; it would have been a character ARC. Maybe Laure would have been faced with a woman she genuinely liked despite them being more “feminine”, or maybe she would have been in a situation where there was a woman she was forced to treat with respect, not just another woman who was basically another man, but a woman who is a well-rounded, developed, layered character and -oh who the fuck am I kidding, this book doesn’t have any of those. This series doesn’t have any of those! Laure has no character arc. She’s severely one note and doesn’t grow or learn or change. That, inherently, is the problem with these books. NOTHING. EVER. CHANGES. No characters change, and really never the world or society. After the first book things are FLAT, FLAT, FLAT.
And the book actually seems to be aware of that about its characters, so it spends half the time telling you about the characters; characters talking about their own behavior and how they usually don't behave in a certain way oh but today they are and isn't that different from usual, characters talking about other character's behavior, characters highlighting what the behavior of other characters means, etc. It's telling. Pure, sloppy, obvious and irritating telling. You have no sense of the actual characters themselves because they are not allowed to show themselves. You're hearing about how they're like from their own self-reflecting musings and the observations of other people. It is exhausting to read.
I don’t even want to talk about how the “gay friendly” series somehow culminates in a lot of negative representation of that too. Adamo, who insults Royston and Hal at every chance he gets, finds them odd and weird, not to mention that Hal and Royston as a couple never made sense to me and still continue to not make sense and they have all of 2 seconds of “onscreen” interaction with each other this book (why the hell do they like each other so much again? I have no idea why they even care, other than they’re both gay and that’s such a great point to form a relationship on), the other airmen who still use the insulting term “Mary Margrave” to refer to Roy, and then TOVERRE, who is just an unbearable caricature whose only personality traits are being fussy, being fussy, being alarmed at other people not being as fussy as he is, being fussy, and then being hopelessly smitten by every passing man on the street. His and Laure’s chapters are nearly unbearable, both of them, for all the above reasons PLUS the fact that each of their chapters spends at least half the time DESCRIBING THE PERSONALITY TRAITS OF THE OTHER. In fact, this entire series never trusts the reader; they constantly over explain everything and it’s always possible to skip half of every paragraph because it’s just constant, constant retreading of facts. Basically, all of the characters are constantly doing some version of Captain Exposition: “I’m going to explain what we’re going to do before we do it and then we’ll DO it! And then things will be DONE!” Constantly.
And if you’re trying to make a “fangirl friendly” series, why write every other damn character as such a fucking homophobe? This is not a LGBT friendly series. This is a series with a lot of Ho Yay and Fo Yay but it hates itself for every instance of it, and it constantly creates situations and characters that react to it negatively. And it’s not highlighting this as a problematic thing that the society does and addressing it in any sort of thematic issue or something similar, it just is. The authors created a world populated by characters insensibly intolerant of LGBT (and other letters) people, with a main culture that has a vague societal view on the topic, since many main characters are total phobic assholes but they are also the jerk characters, so it’s hard to tell if this just a generic trait the authors gave to everyone who’s supposed to be an asshole, or that it’s just a common attitude in Volstov (and it’s never explained why this society would be intolerant of this kind of thing; there’s no real religion established and this is an alternate version of Earth and all our prejudice comes from religion fused into culture, there is literally NO LOGICALLY PRESENTED REASON why homophobia should exist AT ALL in this world; IT SHOULDN’T. It just DOES.) and the two other mentioned countries/cultures are also extremely down on it to the point of hostility. How is this friendly? Royston is gay, has an affair with the prince of a homophobic nation, gets exiled for it. Comes back with a boyfriend, everybody thinks it’s all creepy and weird. Friendly? Nope. All characters gay or perceived to be gay or even “effeminate” are constantly harangued and called names that impugn their masculinity, either in honest truth or even in a “humorous” hazing sort of way under the illusion of camaraderie. The one canon gay couple is side-eyed by everyone, often because of their age difference but mainly because they’re gay. The one other established gay character is an uncomfortable farce. No gay women at all. Hardly any women at all. The few that are there have to be written like men, or are scoffed at and dismissed for “feminine” behavior.
Why did I ever think this series was any good? It was a fun read once upon a time, now all of it makes me uncomfortable. The base writing is readable and smooth enough, but it’s beleaguered with constant OVEREXPLAINING. Steelhands is the worst perpetrator, I’ve skimmed so much of characters over-explaining other characters and what they’re like (characters that have their own POV chapters) and situations and worldbuilding, and I haven’t missed any of the plot. In fact I guessed what was going on waaaay damn early because the book is so blatant about it and doesn’t trust a reader to pick up on subtle hints and in fact picked two narrator POVs that erased the mystery entirely. Most characters are also all very very similar in tone-their narrations hardly differ and it’s impossible to tell most of them apart. I think Caius and Rook are the most notably unique voices in the whole series, and Rook’s is so because he’s SO grating and harsh and intolerant of everything. Caius (another ridiculously one-note fey character; now that I’m thinking about it all of these characters are so problematic) actually only had a different feel to him because he was kind of kawaii insane desu, where his craziness was really just sort of a fun ‘quirk’ rather than any sort of actual problematic mental issue.
So this was half a book review, half a rant, half just....garbage. Kind of just word-vomiting. I’m really mad at this series, and it’s the only other mainstream gay fantasy series than Nightrunners and it’s only sort of better. Just slightly. I think that after book one (Havemercy) they were really fucking stretching it with having more books. There really aren’t plots in the second and third and fourth. They’re just books that are there. They’re all kind of off-shoot cul-de-sac events of what happened in the first one, they can’t really stand on their own, and the only interesting thing really going on (what do you do with a bunch of elite specialized soldiers after the war is over, what do THEY do with their lives from now on) is barely touched on. It’s there, as sort of a quiet back-burner theme, but you could write entire books on this kind of thing and instead the focus is still these fucking steampunk dragons which were cool when they existed in the first book, but we’re in the fourth book and they’re still the main thing the plots revolve around (even though they were all destroyed in the first book) and it’s just obnoxious by this point. This world the authors created is larger (OR SHOULD BE) than this one fucking city and these fucking dragons.
Also, the second through fourth books are focused on maintaining the status quo, fixing a problem and putting things back to where they were. Basically after everything happens in the entire book(s), the situation returns to normal. The first book was the only one where things were different by the end, where the WORLD had changed and entire countries were going to need to adapt to a new situation of peacetime and diplomacy with each other. I just recently read a piece of writing advice, and I can’t remember from where and I don’t know who said it, but the gist of it came down to-change everything. By the end of the story everything should be different. And that’s why I had such a problem with the end of Harry Potter-they went through all of that, wars and fighting and struggles and all of it, just to return things right back to the same old prejudices and segregation with the society and the split houses in Hogwarts. Maybe people were grudgingly like “yeah, maybe Slytherin’s not all evil” but guess what, you’re just setting up for another future scenario like the one you just stopped. Don’t these people LEARN? (I guess not; they also replicated their parents’ marriages and families so, whatever).
Also, Steelhands. Cool word for a title, refers to one single character in the book, who is certainly not the main character (actually it really refers to a fucking dragon, which is in the book for all of TWO SECONDS). I have no idea why Balfour has a narrative perspective at all, actually. He is actually a plot point, not a character; just there to add little bit of the ingredients/”clues” for the plot of the book. The main character is basically Adamo, since he is the one who interacts with every important character and creates the connection between all the other major players, the one that the actual main plot is explained/revealed to first, the one who does the most in a proactive sense. The other three are all kind of...pointless. The book actually might have been way more interesting (and mysterious) if it had been just from Adamo’s point of view. Including all of the exact same characters and events, but just minus Laure and Toverre and Balfour’s perspectives. But I also would have had a problem with it then because Adamo is so homophobic and misogynistic, it would have been a seriously uncomfortable read. Basically the ONLY character in this book who is not problematic in some way/reads uncomfortably is Balfour, who is just kind of meek and unexciting (maybe that’s why it’s named after him, he’s the only decent person). Maybe if Luvander had narrated. Or Luvander and Antoinette. Or hell, just about anybody but the people who actually did. But basically this book just shouldn’t exist.
In hindsight, this series is a lot worse than I thought it was while reading it. These are not nearly all of my problems with these books. I just went back and knocked all my ratings of every book in the series down a star on Goodreads. That means 3 stars for Havemercy, two stars each for Shadow Magic and Dragon Soul, and ONE star for Steelhands. I never wrote reviews for Shadow Magic and Dragon Soul because every time I thought about doing it I was just like...meh. There’s nothing to say about these books. They are pointless. But Steelhands has enraged me so much that I had to talk about it.
This is the fourth (and last?) book in a series that I was enjoying up until this book. And this one was such a horrendous fail that it made me look back on the other books and realize what a horrendous failure those were as well. The most problematic issue with Steelhands overall was the way it presents/considers women. And I'm going to start off talking about that.
It might be because of all of the YA critiques and book blogs I’ve been reading lately, a lot of which very smartly and eloquently highlight the deep-seeded misogyny that shows up in those kinds of currently popular books; some of it blatant, some of it so subtle that the authors themselves might have no idea they’re doing it and it’s actually become so normal that they themselves can’t understand that they are aggressively hating on women in their books (even if they themselves are women, which most of them are!). So now I’m on high alert for it, and I just happened to be reading Steelhands at the time.
This is the first book in the series with a woman character in POV chapters. Okay, this is actually debatable, because I never understood and frankly the book never TOLD me if Malahide was a male crossdresser or a transwoman, or something else. It seems to insinuate he/she had male genitalia but also had some sort of (involuntary?) sex-related surgery that might have removed...some of it? (But not enough to where s/he couldn’t get an erection? Even that moment was unclear) Honestly, that book was not good enough to really be specific on it, and Malahide’s “real” sex/gender was also basically irrelevant because it was revealed so late and impacted nothing and they might as well have never have brought it up/done it because it was handled so badly (and I am not trans, so I can’t say for sure, but it was probably offensive as well).
Oh wait, and there was that one woman in the second book, Madoka. But she was also written like a man, and basically I didn’t remember her being female until I’d already written up this whole review, because she blends into the male POVs like she is one. I remember liking her as a character and liking her sections, now that I remember she existed, but she wasn’t presented problematically because she wasn’t around a lot of other characters at all and only interacted with a few. So I don’t think she had the problematic misogynistic views that bug me so badly with the female character in Steelhands.
So then; this book has the first clear cis female character in a large civilized area that interacts with a lot of people that gets a narrative POV in the series. Her name is Laurence because her father wished she had been born a boy. Okay, whatever, fair play to tropes, this happens often enough. What would have been very interesting to do with this would have been to make Laure (as she is called) more “traditionally” feminine, having her preferring to align with the sort of turn of the century/Victorian gender roles for women that the book series has in its world, as kind of a fuck you to her father. Or just because that’s how she is naturally. But no, instead, she embraces this and is basically a male character. Except for being beautiful and busty. So physically she is like an ideal woman, and mentally she’s a dude. She’s more dude-like than her fiancé, who is a sort of pathetic awful caricature of a gay man. There’s nothing wrong with fey characters (hell, half the other characters in this book are; Troius, Luvander (the only character really working it effectively, honestly), Balfour to an extent, Raphael even-they’re all kind of sassy and/or fussy) but when it’s their only defining trait, that’s a problem. Toverre is defined and caged by his stereotype. Actually the problem with most of the characters in this entire series is that they are severely one note, but that’s a different critique. I’m talking about women.
So, naturally, Laure-being a man in a woman’s body-is pretty harsh on other women. She has generic misogynistic views that are usually awarded to the most “masculine” of male characters. She sees women basically as gaudy scenery; useless, frivolous, annoying, brainless. She constantly distances herself from them, mentally and physically. She doesn’t seem to have female friends, ever in her life possibly, and never mentions relationships with other women, even ones in her family (like does she even have a mother). Her few interactions with another woman are very masculine-geared (“Antoinette smiled, clapping Laure on the shoulder the same way I would’ve done for one of my boys coming back from a successful raid” - REALLY? They have to interact specifically like men?) She’s just surrounded by silly frittering girls in her mind. But the authors are trying to present Laure herself as SUCH an awesome woman, not like THOSE other silly woman, and why? Because she’s like a MAN! She’s not an awesome woman because she’s being awesome as a woman, she’s being an awesome woman because she’s a man. She behaves in the same manner that all of the “badass” men of the series do. She’s crude and improper, doesn’t pay close attention to her clothes or her health or her hygiene apparently, hangs out with all the boys and none of the women as previous mentioned, is naturally more capable of taking care of herself because she grew up in the country and not the city where women are all silly and pampered and likes clothes more than anything, the list just goes on and on with her stereotypical male behavior. Which would just be kind of whatever, par for the course with this series, except for her problematic views of women/female behavior. If she acts like a man but respects other women, fine. But she acts like a man and actively hates women. At one point she literally is not proud of herself until she is behaving and being treated like a man, by other men.
Not only that, but there’s Adamo, who’s a dick to everyone in general but again-most women are fainting, hysterical, silly annoyances in his head. But not LAURE, oh no, she’s tough and can hang with the boys! She’s just LIKE one of the boys! She even TELLS him to THINK of her as one of the boys, near verbatim, at one point! I don’t even know why they bothered to make Laure female. It doesn’t matter that she is (except for the sorta whatever attraction between her and Adamo-but come on, this is the “fangirl friendly” series). She’s written just like any of the male points of view and in fact is actually WORSE than they are, because her uncomfortable attitudes towards women matched with her complete distance from any other actual women then come off as some sort of twisted self-hate, and I don’t think these books are well-written enough to actually be going for that level of depth in character. Her misogyny is too casual; it’s written in a way where it’s like “thinking these disparaging things about women is just clearly a regular male behavior” and where it’s supposed to make Laure look cooler because she isn’t like THOSE women. In a better book this could have been done very well; because of her father’s wish that she was born male Laure could have internalized that disappointment nearly from birth, and ended up manifesting her father’s/her own hatred of her own sex into an unhealthy hatred of other women. Then it would have been more tragic, more realistically consequential, more intriguing of character, rather than just careless misogyny tossed in there to bulk up the “cool” and “special” factor of the female POV. But this book is not NEARLY deep enough for that. It’s all too passing, too fleeting, and too casual. I should have made more notes on instances of it, but it basically all has to do with Laure rolling her eyes and looking down on stereotypical female behavior, basically putting down women who are following ‘traditional’ (Victorianesque) behavior, which in this world is THE NORMAL WAY OF BEHAVING. There was one instance in her POV where it wasn’t even Laure being the trouble point, but the authors themselves -when they went out of their way to mention that a lot of the women in the university classes had stopped coming. I mean, yes, all of these worrying things are technically coming back down to the authors, but why even make that point in the first place? Just some more women-hate for no real reason; except to prove that Laure is still in those classes, because she’s BETTER than those women!
And Laure’s misogyny is not a theme, it’s not there to be dwelled upon as a problematic issue, it’s not a social commentary reflecting on our own society. It’s just THERE. Subtly, occasionally, casually. And it’s there to “be cool”. Because if it was any of those other things I just listed, it would have had a bearing on the plot or a character conflict or something; it would have been a character ARC. Maybe Laure would have been faced with a woman she genuinely liked despite them being more “feminine”, or maybe she would have been in a situation where there was a woman she was forced to treat with respect, not just another woman who was basically another man, but a woman who is a well-rounded, developed, layered character and -oh who the fuck am I kidding, this book doesn’t have any of those. This series doesn’t have any of those! Laure has no character arc. She’s severely one note and doesn’t grow or learn or change. That, inherently, is the problem with these books. NOTHING. EVER. CHANGES. No characters change, and really never the world or society. After the first book things are FLAT, FLAT, FLAT.
And the book actually seems to be aware of that about its characters, so it spends half the time telling you about the characters; characters talking about their own behavior and how they usually don't behave in a certain way oh but today they are and isn't that different from usual, characters talking about other character's behavior, characters highlighting what the behavior of other characters means, etc. It's telling. Pure, sloppy, obvious and irritating telling. You have no sense of the actual characters themselves because they are not allowed to show themselves. You're hearing about how they're like from their own self-reflecting musings and the observations of other people. It is exhausting to read.
I don’t even want to talk about how the “gay friendly” series somehow culminates in a lot of negative representation of that too. Adamo, who insults Royston and Hal at every chance he gets, finds them odd and weird, not to mention that Hal and Royston as a couple never made sense to me and still continue to not make sense and they have all of 2 seconds of “onscreen” interaction with each other this book (why the hell do they like each other so much again? I have no idea why they even care, other than they’re both gay and that’s such a great point to form a relationship on), the other airmen who still use the insulting term “Mary Margrave” to refer to Roy, and then TOVERRE, who is just an unbearable caricature whose only personality traits are being fussy, being fussy, being alarmed at other people not being as fussy as he is, being fussy, and then being hopelessly smitten by every passing man on the street. His and Laure’s chapters are nearly unbearable, both of them, for all the above reasons PLUS the fact that each of their chapters spends at least half the time DESCRIBING THE PERSONALITY TRAITS OF THE OTHER. In fact, this entire series never trusts the reader; they constantly over explain everything and it’s always possible to skip half of every paragraph because it’s just constant, constant retreading of facts. Basically, all of the characters are constantly doing some version of Captain Exposition: “I’m going to explain what we’re going to do before we do it and then we’ll DO it! And then things will be DONE!” Constantly.
And if you’re trying to make a “fangirl friendly” series, why write every other damn character as such a fucking homophobe? This is not a LGBT friendly series. This is a series with a lot of Ho Yay and Fo Yay but it hates itself for every instance of it, and it constantly creates situations and characters that react to it negatively. And it’s not highlighting this as a problematic thing that the society does and addressing it in any sort of thematic issue or something similar, it just is. The authors created a world populated by characters insensibly intolerant of LGBT (and other letters) people, with a main culture that has a vague societal view on the topic, since many main characters are total phobic assholes but they are also the jerk characters, so it’s hard to tell if this just a generic trait the authors gave to everyone who’s supposed to be an asshole, or that it’s just a common attitude in Volstov (and it’s never explained why this society would be intolerant of this kind of thing; there’s no real religion established and this is an alternate version of Earth and all our prejudice comes from religion fused into culture, there is literally NO LOGICALLY PRESENTED REASON why homophobia should exist AT ALL in this world; IT SHOULDN’T. It just DOES.) and the two other mentioned countries/cultures are also extremely down on it to the point of hostility. How is this friendly? Royston is gay, has an affair with the prince of a homophobic nation, gets exiled for it. Comes back with a boyfriend, everybody thinks it’s all creepy and weird. Friendly? Nope. All characters gay or perceived to be gay or even “effeminate” are constantly harangued and called names that impugn their masculinity, either in honest truth or even in a “humorous” hazing sort of way under the illusion of camaraderie. The one canon gay couple is side-eyed by everyone, often because of their age difference but mainly because they’re gay. The one other established gay character is an uncomfortable farce. No gay women at all. Hardly any women at all. The few that are there have to be written like men, or are scoffed at and dismissed for “feminine” behavior.
Why did I ever think this series was any good? It was a fun read once upon a time, now all of it makes me uncomfortable. The base writing is readable and smooth enough, but it’s beleaguered with constant OVEREXPLAINING. Steelhands is the worst perpetrator, I’ve skimmed so much of characters over-explaining other characters and what they’re like (characters that have their own POV chapters) and situations and worldbuilding, and I haven’t missed any of the plot. In fact I guessed what was going on waaaay damn early because the book is so blatant about it and doesn’t trust a reader to pick up on subtle hints and in fact picked two narrator POVs that erased the mystery entirely. Most characters are also all very very similar in tone-their narrations hardly differ and it’s impossible to tell most of them apart. I think Caius and Rook are the most notably unique voices in the whole series, and Rook’s is so because he’s SO grating and harsh and intolerant of everything. Caius (another ridiculously one-note fey character; now that I’m thinking about it all of these characters are so problematic) actually only had a different feel to him because he was kind of kawaii insane desu, where his craziness was really just sort of a fun ‘quirk’ rather than any sort of actual problematic mental issue.
So this was half a book review, half a rant, half just....garbage. Kind of just word-vomiting. I’m really mad at this series, and it’s the only other mainstream gay fantasy series than Nightrunners and it’s only sort of better. Just slightly. I think that after book one (Havemercy) they were really fucking stretching it with having more books. There really aren’t plots in the second and third and fourth. They’re just books that are there. They’re all kind of off-shoot cul-de-sac events of what happened in the first one, they can’t really stand on their own, and the only interesting thing really going on (what do you do with a bunch of elite specialized soldiers after the war is over, what do THEY do with their lives from now on) is barely touched on. It’s there, as sort of a quiet back-burner theme, but you could write entire books on this kind of thing and instead the focus is still these fucking steampunk dragons which were cool when they existed in the first book, but we’re in the fourth book and they’re still the main thing the plots revolve around (even though they were all destroyed in the first book) and it’s just obnoxious by this point. This world the authors created is larger (OR SHOULD BE) than this one fucking city and these fucking dragons.
Also, the second through fourth books are focused on maintaining the status quo, fixing a problem and putting things back to where they were. Basically after everything happens in the entire book(s), the situation returns to normal. The first book was the only one where things were different by the end, where the WORLD had changed and entire countries were going to need to adapt to a new situation of peacetime and diplomacy with each other. I just recently read a piece of writing advice, and I can’t remember from where and I don’t know who said it, but the gist of it came down to-change everything. By the end of the story everything should be different. And that’s why I had such a problem with the end of Harry Potter-they went through all of that, wars and fighting and struggles and all of it, just to return things right back to the same old prejudices and segregation with the society and the split houses in Hogwarts. Maybe people were grudgingly like “yeah, maybe Slytherin’s not all evil” but guess what, you’re just setting up for another future scenario like the one you just stopped. Don’t these people LEARN? (I guess not; they also replicated their parents’ marriages and families so, whatever).
Also, Steelhands. Cool word for a title, refers to one single character in the book, who is certainly not the main character (actually it really refers to a fucking dragon, which is in the book for all of TWO SECONDS). I have no idea why Balfour has a narrative perspective at all, actually. He is actually a plot point, not a character; just there to add little bit of the ingredients/”clues” for the plot of the book. The main character is basically Adamo, since he is the one who interacts with every important character and creates the connection between all the other major players, the one that the actual main plot is explained/revealed to first, the one who does the most in a proactive sense. The other three are all kind of...pointless. The book actually might have been way more interesting (and mysterious) if it had been just from Adamo’s point of view. Including all of the exact same characters and events, but just minus Laure and Toverre and Balfour’s perspectives. But I also would have had a problem with it then because Adamo is so homophobic and misogynistic, it would have been a seriously uncomfortable read. Basically the ONLY character in this book who is not problematic in some way/reads uncomfortably is Balfour, who is just kind of meek and unexciting (maybe that’s why it’s named after him, he’s the only decent person). Maybe if Luvander had narrated. Or Luvander and Antoinette. Or hell, just about anybody but the people who actually did. But basically this book just shouldn’t exist.
In hindsight, this series is a lot worse than I thought it was while reading it. These are not nearly all of my problems with these books. I just went back and knocked all my ratings of every book in the series down a star on Goodreads. That means 3 stars for Havemercy, two stars each for Shadow Magic and Dragon Soul, and ONE star for Steelhands. I never wrote reviews for Shadow Magic and Dragon Soul because every time I thought about doing it I was just like...meh. There’s nothing to say about these books. They are pointless. But Steelhands has enraged me so much that I had to talk about it.