Mystery--the platinum radiance of the moon reveals deviltry

I have a habit of relistening to audiobooks to sleep, since I can not pay attention to the words and just listen to the murmuring cadence of familiar words and voices and trail off.  Some of these are old favorites (like Neil Gaiman or Susanna Clarke), and some are familiar without being necessarily beloved.  The Name of the Wind is one of these.

Now I know, a lot of people adore these books.  I like Pat Rothfuss, but his seminal works are middling at best, for a variety of reasons.  I'm going to do a bit of a deep dive into one scene that struck me last night as I was trying to fight insomnia (by the way, if you do enjoy the books, I recommend the audio performance by Nick Podehl.  It's why I've ever re-read these books).


I'm not going to get into all of the reasons why these books are less than stellar, but there is something profoundly disappointing about a work with so much potential that just completely fails to click with the reader in question (namely:  ME).  But the overwhelming elephant in the room here is Denna.

Denna is the main love interest for our protagonist Kvothe.  He meets her on the road to the University, and says she's maybe a year or so older than himself (at the time, about 14, so she'd be 15, 16-ish, unless she's secretly some kind of immortal).  He spends grotesque amounts of time mooning over her, and you know what, as a teenaged boy character, that makes sense.  If it were just that, I would be bored, but not necessarily disturbed.  But our Denna is a sex worker (and aspiring musician).

The world that Rothfuss builds here is less than salutary for sex workers.  One of the characters in Kvothe's caravan is a former prostitute, and we get a pithy aphorism about calling a whore a lady because their lives are tough.  Very advanced thinking there, I guess that builds some degree of parent points for Arliden. 

Now, I'm not going to get into degrees of sex work.  There's not one that's more respectable than another, it's not a fucking contest.  Denna exchanges sexual favors for financial gain.  And she is a child. 

I know I know, the apologists will grump about how the book is fantasy and based on a fictional place and it's not real and blah blah blah, it's medieval-esque and the age of consent is fner fner fner.  Listen.  We the readers are here in the present.  We can acknowledge that it is fucked up that adults in this book are cool with child sexual exploitation.

Here, let's get textual.  Looking at chapter 69 of The Name of the Wind.  Kvothe is on one of his zillion trips to try and meet up with Denna in these books (side note:  another thing that bothers me in these books is the complete lack of pacing and skewed sense of time and priority.  May get into that in another post some time), and goes to the Eolian where Deoch sits him down for some heart-to-heart drinking.  Unlike Kvothe, whose attraction to a girl around his age is understandable, Deoch is an actual adult with a job and property and a partner (though their relationship appears to be open).  But he wants you to know he tried to fuck Denna a while back.

So he tried to fuck her when she was 13.

Cool character you've got there, bro!

He goes on.

Oh cool, it's okay because she seems older than she is.  Yup, that never goes wrong.  That's never a thing that's used against young women.  We're never accused of leading adults on when we're pubescent. 

Oh, she's so much more complex than Other Girls Her Age.  Here's a dirty little secret:  children are frequently told this bullshit by sexual predators.  It's their stock in trade.  And as the internet has pointed out recently, the "old soul" line is often used on those of us who were suffering from undiagnosed and untreated mental illnesses at a young age.  "You seem so mature!"  "Yeah, that's because I'm clinically depressed!"

And hey, she MIGHT seem more mature than her years because she's been forced to turn to sex work to fend for herself.  You, an adult, might consider that before checking in with your dick.  If you own a tavern that caters largely to musicians and you find yourself with a talented child with no other means of support, a responsible human might have thought about taking her under your wing and possibly setting her up with some music lessons or a patron so she could support herself with a less abusive profession.  Maybe offering her a safe haven?  JK, it's way easier to try and solicit her for sex.

Hoboy.  Yep, we women are just hateful shrews.  We just want the attention of men, that's our only value, and the girl with the most dicks wins!  Rothfuss has gotten a lot of flack for this nonsense, and rightly so, but he's got a tendency to turn it to the audience.  We just don't like Denna because we love Kvothe so much!  We must be jealous!

Oh honey.

Kvothe is an egomaniacal wish-fulfillment character.  I have no use for him, by and large.  And I don't dislike Denna because she gets to be with The Greatest Hero Ever To Ever, I dislike her because she's written poorly.  On the page, she has no function except to be desired.  She typifies Not Like Other Girls, and it's boring.  Many of us went through that IRL when we were younger, before we matured (or not.  Some women definitely still have this POV, and I wish them happiness with it). 

Here, I only have a couple more textual inserts, and then I can try and put together how this could be fixed.

Notice here the distinction:  begging and whoring verses "trading on her charm."  Hey Deoch, that's the same thing!  You forgive her (how magnanimous) because you want her.  What is pathetic in other, less attractive (to you) street urchins is her "charm."  She has no support system because people like you haven't provided her with one, because it never occurred to you.  You might have offered her a safe haven, but instead you were just one more creep who wanted what he could get out of her.  She's not a person to you, she's a glorified treat.  You romanticize her life as choices because that absolves you of any personal responsibility or self-reflection (after all, you can't be attracted to a child!  She must be older than her years!  You can't want a prostitute, she must be just charming!).

Denna could be a better character than a cipher.  She could be someone with agency instead of a child who makes the best decisions with what options she's given.  She could be something other than a vessel for other character's hang-ups and romantic aspirations.  We're thrown a bone with the, "She wants to be a musician," a goal that is completely achievable within the goddamn text. 

If I were given the manuscript to edit, the first thing I would have done is age her up so that the characters she interacts with aren't fucking creeps for trying to fuck her.  Unless there is a seriously important reason for her to be underage (there's not), there's nothing that would prevent Kvothe from being fascinated with her if she were 4 or 5 years older than him verses one.  This is one of the things that a lot of male authors don't think through when they write these kinds of characters (looking at you, Jim Butcher), that the readers remember being 15, and that many of them are women now.  Guess what, the older man who tried to sleep with us back then is a predator, not a guy just bein' a guy!  You know guys, they short circuit around a pretty girl!  No responsibility for their sex drives!

The second easy fix here is to give her time on the page some kind of goddamn meaning.  She goes away for huge chunks of time, and Kvothe's whole goal is to meet up with her and talk.  They could talk about other things than the dudes she's trying (or trying to avoid) sleeping with.  I know, you want to build romantic tension, but when the on-page conversations are all, "Men are like this, and I am not someone who wants roses!" it gives us a very shallow view into her actual life.  You say they hang out and talk for hours, but the conversations we "hear" are all the same.  I know, you want Kvothe to be charming and sympathetic, so he has to be able to set himself apart from these Other Men, how about having her talk to him about something she doesn't usually discuss?  Let her talk to him about some of the dangers she might be facing (yes, I know, the mysterious patron she has.  That's rarely ever touched on, and when it is, it's just as another thing that obsesses Kvothe that he needs to rescue her from), something about how she got to where she is in life, about her interactions with other women (and no, the one time we see her advising another "ruined" girl to take up prostitution doesn't count, although points for her actually taking an interest in another woman and trying to help her).

And yeah, when you have a character that's supposed to be the Best Musician to Ever Touch A String, it doesn't make any fucking sense that he wouldn't try to bond with her over that early on.  And that could be an interaction (or series of them) that we could see ON the page, instead of, "We talked bout everything:  music, art, blah blah blah blah."  The second book tries this, sort of.  Except that we only really hear the one interaction when he flips out at her and sucks at communicating.  He's supposed to be so brilliant, and he mentions that if you can't explain a thing, you don't really understand it...why is he not trying to do that with Denna?  And she could try to teach him some things (like how to goddamn talk to women, and how we're not that hard to understand because we're also still people).  It would make it more of a relationship of equals instead of an excitable puppy chasing his tail and trying not to piddle on the lady.