48 pages • 1 hour read
Victoria AveyardRealm Breaker
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Dynamics of Family and Legacy
For many of Victoria Aveyard’s characters, their family legacies often designate their life’s purpose, and they must then make a conscious choice to either accept or reject that burden. For Andry, his appointed purpose is noble, and he willingly becomes a squire in the hopes of gaining knighthood and following in his father’s footsteps. For a character like Erida, however, her appointed purpose as the monarch of her realm becomes tainted by her tendency toward self-aggrandizement, greed, and violence as she seeks to dominate all of Allward and rebuild the old Cor empire. In both cases, history dictates the paths that each character must follow, but Aveyard suggests that those who bear a heavy weight of family legacy are significantly impacted by the expectations that such a history carries; the more overbearing that legacy is, the more these characters’ own personal patterns and decisions become predictable and inescapable.
Aveyard demonstrates this dynamic within Corayne, for although she is allegedly abandoned by her father and raised by her mother and her guardian Kastio, her personality is heavily influenced by her father’s lineage. As Dom reflects:
Cortael was the same [as Corayne], in his youth […]. Such was the way of Old Cor: humans born of travel and crossing, conquest and voyage from one realm to the next. It was in their bones and blood, in their steel, in their souls (140).
Although Corayne often reveals her bitterness over her father and has never met the man, the effects of her family lineage—her innate desire to travel and remain without roots—easily claim her, taking her away from the life she has known with her mother and forcing her to focus on her singular purpose as a Spindleblade user. With these events, Aveyard suggests that Corayne is incapable of resisting this innate call to fulfill her family’s legacy, for although Corayne openly acknowledges that she is not “the only Corblood idiot walking the Ward” (393), she does not shy away from Dom’s invitation to join his cause. Although the choice to follow Dom aligned with her desire to leave Lemarta, Corayne could just as easily have found a different way to explore the world. Instead, however, she chooses the dangerous path left to her by her father and tries to save the world.
Comparatively, Andry’s family heritage is considerably less determined and storied, given that he is “the son of a foreign noblewoman and a low knight [and is] [h]eir to no castles, blood to no king” (12). Andry’s blood is not defined by ancestors who have shaped the Allward, and he therefore has more freedom to determine his own his path. Though he has chosen to become a knight so that he might take up his father’s mantle and uphold the family’s honor, this goal does not define him so completely as to compel him remain a squire when Erida plots to take over Allward. By joining Dom and Corayne’s cause, Andry disengages from his family’s legacy because the burden of its history is nowhere near as weighty as that of Corayne’s, so it cannot define his full identity or and dictate his behavior.
The Problematic Stereotype of Male Stoicism
In a world that prizes strength and physical prowess, Aveyard’s male characters rely upon their own personal power to garner respect and deference in society. The author demonstrates this in multiple ways, whether by describing Dom’s superhuman strength and well-honed physique as an Elder or by emphasizing the powerful monsters and armies that Taristan collects by tearing the Spindles. In each case, however, the male characters in Realm Breaker pride themselves on their ability to exude an air of inaccessibility and stoicism.
However, while these characters’ stoicism fits with the medieval and largely male-driven world of Allward, Aveyard makes it a point to emphasize that this dynamic fosters their greatest vulnerability: the inability to fully express and process complex emotions. In Taristan’s case, the constant need to portray himself as strong stems from the fact that he was abandoned as a child; this old wound has rendered him unable to adequately process his emotions of grief and abandonment, and he therefore becomes vulnerable to the exploitation and finds himself weaponized by the demon god, What Waits. Aveyard first exhibits Taristan’s unresolved trauma in his relationship with Ronin, for he describes the wizard as his savior, declaring, “It was Ronin who found me, told me what I was. The red wizard pulled a mercenary from the mud of a Treckish war camp and made him a conqueror” (372). Taristan’s use of the third person to speak of himself as a “mercenary” highlights his loathing of his former self and his longing to become something greater than his painful origins dictated. Thus, when Ronin “told [Taristan] who [he] was” (372), the wizard effectively capitalized on Taristan’s vulnerability and made him the perfect pawn for What Waits, using Taristan’s family lineage to embolden and manipulate him into following the demon god’s desires.
Forever preoccupied with seeming untouchable, Taristan also allows his unresolved feelings of abandonment to guide his interactions with Erida, and his unresolved trauma therefore influences the development of their romantic relationship—or lack thereof. While Taristan is not one to play court games to please nobles, his decision to abstain from marital relations with Erida is indicative of his need to be desired. He awkwardly showcases this need when Erida musters up the courage to ask him to visit her bedchamber after the conquest in Madrence, for he tells her, “I prefer to go where I am wanted” (470). Here, Taristan demonstrates that while he is attracted to Erida, he will not allow himself to be made vulnerable because of that desire. Instead, he seeks intimacy and belonging over sexual gratification, and even despite the transactional nature of their relationship, Taristan is averse to risk a situation that might cause him to seen as lacking, or as an expendable means to an end. However, even the act of protecting himself, he reveals the true nature of his unexpressed vulnerabilities. Thus, the author uses several male characters to critique the pitfalls of remaining stoic when fully expressing one’s emotions may result in a more advantageous outcome.
The Ethical Dilemmas of Leadership
Aveyard’s Allward encompasses a diverse collection of landscapes, and its numerous kingdoms, both hidden and seen, each have their own rivalries, histories of war and alliances, prejudices, and cultures. Most notably, Allward still carries lasting monuments created by its mightiest conquerors, the Corbloods. Given the full range of Allward’s diversity, differences in philosophy and political interests are all but inevitable among the various kingdoms and factions, and many of the more strategic interactions of the novel reveal the full complexities involved in ruling ethically and responsibly.
Notably, several key rulers fall short of this ideal, as Dom discovers when he goes to rally Isibel to action against Taristan and What Waits. Although he believes that the prospect of certain doom and destruction in Allward should make everyone cast aside their differences and come together to face a common enemy, he soon finds himself bitterly disappointed when Isibel puts partisan interests before the collective good of the realm. Her view of good leadership is to deny any empathy for the mortals of Allward and attend only to the protection, well-being, and future of the Vederan. When Dom accuses her of being afraid to face What Waits, Isibel argues that her duty is to her people first and foremost, declaring, “I will not send my people to die. You will find no monarch who will” (70). For Isibel, the most basic duty of a monarch is to safeguard her people against needless harm, but she does not believe that she is responsible for protecting the mortal people of Allward. However, Isibel is ostensibly refusing to sacrifice the lives of her people; her insistence on using Taristan’s war as an indirect means of returning to Glorian reveals her choice to be a selfish one. By refusing to fight against Taristan’s efforts, she effectively makes herself an accomplice to Allward’s destruction.
While Isibel’s decision, while selfish, is based on a misguided but essentially kindly desire to return her people to their realm, Erida proves herself to be a far more malicious monarch when she sacrifices all semblance of ethical leadership and feeds her own inner desire for wholesale conquest by marrying Taristan and rallying to his cause. Disregarding the deeper implications of his allegiance to What Waits, she sees only an opportunity to restore the Cor empire to its former glory, and in her selfish insistence upon using Taristan for her own ends, she reveals herself to be just as despotic as he is.
Ranged as a collective contrast to these antagonists are Corayne and her motley group of companions, and most notably, Dom stands out as a strong example of what an ethical leader should be. When faced with his aunt’s cowardly scheme to simply allow Taristan to tear open the Spindles, he acts decisively to rally support against this threat, bringing his cousin Ridha to his cause and gathering Corayne and her various Companions in a concerted effort to save Allward from utter destruction. He, Audry, and Corayne completely disregard their own safety and take up the responsibilities that the world’s leaders have refused to shoulder. As the novel concludes, it is clear that this group’s endeavors have only just begun, and the implications of their alliance will only be made clear in future installments of the series.
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By Victoria Aveyard
