Broken Dove: Chapter Six

[penwalla]

God, this chapter pissed me off.

For context, I'm trying something new with these recaps, where I read through the entire chapter once before I start writing up my recap, rather than doing it as I go. I do this mostly so I don't waste time complaining about things that are addressed a page or two ahead.

I regret doing this now, because that means I have to reread this fuckass chapter and I don't. Want to.

Okay, Travis Redden, the new General, is giving a live broadcast. I guess the Uprising intercepts these broadcasts? It is a little weird to me that they immediately show it in real time to the entire base, but okay.

My shoulders go rigid. I don’t even want to know what Cross’s brother, the newly minted General, has to say. Whatever it is, it’s bound to provoke rage, retaliation, or both.

Yeah. No shit.

Wren compares Travis to Cross, saying that Cross makes her heart race but Travis makes it "stutter with trepidation" which...okay.

Travis's speech is extremely clunky, and this stands out to me because it should not be. One, the Command has been in power long enough that they should have a method for producing decent propaganda speeches, and two, Travis is speaking after his father was mentally assaulted during a speech in a way that made him sound like he was going off his gourd. It should be a priority for him to sound good. And I think Francis was trying to make him sound good, she's just very bad at writing.

“—was tragically targeted last week by members of the Aberrant Uprising. During this attack, the enemy revealed a power previously unknown to us: the ability to corrupt minds. To destroy them, as if our minds are nothing more than a series of wires to be tugged and pulled at their will. That night revealed a danger unlike anything we’ve faced before. The Aberrant destroyed my father’s mind, and they now seek to destroy the rest of us. These people, these unnatural beings…they must be neutralized, swiftly and decisively.”

Now, take note of Travis's description of the mind as being a series of wires, because that is exactly how Adrienne will describe the process of mind corruption later in the chapter. I assume this is foreshadowing, and the Command have a corrupter of their own. Hell, maybe Travis is also a secret Mod.

And I have to assume its foreshadowing because otherwise it is not a snappy piece of description, especially in a broadcasted speech, and also I don't know why Travis would want to make this announcement and signal to the Uprising that he knows about the corruption power and how it works, unless he's sending a message to them that he can do it too? Weird.

I feel the heat of everyone’s fury rippling through the room in palpable waves. And I can’t help but put myself in the shoes of a Prime citizen watching this broadcast, being told about the threat of having my brain fried. Any terror they’re experiencing right now would be wholly justifiable. Cross’s brother is intentionally trying to create division, and I suspect it’s going to work. So many Primes already hate us, fear us. This broadcast will only stir up more hatred.

I mean, is it wholly justified? Wren, you yourself have said that the Uprising tries to avoid civilian casualties. At this point in the book, I'm not even sure we've seen any civilian casualties! The Uprising killed two Silver Elite soldiers during the plane theft and they corrupted General Redden without killing him. Now, the Primes can't know this, and are living in a sea of anti-Mod prejudice, and I think Wren is right to point out that the knowledge of this new power will incite fear among them. But Wren's framing is so fucking weird.

Like, I think she is trying to say that this will make it hard to get Primes on their side, which may be true, but it just comes off like she's more worried about Prime feelings than Mod lives.

Which is pretty typical for Wren, to be fair.

Wren then worries about Cross, because as you may recall, he has been lying to her about how much danger he is in. But she also thinks that Cross wouldn't be safer with her. I disagree and think that if Cross were willing to turn on the Command, he would be a massive Uprising asset, but whatever.

“And to all the Primes on the Continent, this is the time for neither hesitation nor inaction. War doesn’t allow for indecision. War requires a choice. So I want you to ask yourself this: What side will you choose to fight on? Do you want to be on the right side of history, or would you rather look back and wish you’d followed the moral path? Not only are the Aberrant dangerous, but they lack all traces of morality. They are the enemy.” His expression grows cold. “And make no mistake, any Prime citizen caught aiding that enemy will face the same consequence as the enemy himself: detainment at one of our camps, or execution by firing squad.”

"They lack all traces of morality?"

Who talks like this?

Wren mentally congratulates Travis for his masterful speech, which casts the Mods as villains, and then thinks about how her parents were villains, too, but she is not because she is a member of the Uprising now.

The broadcast ends, and Wren is shaken. She's also surprised that Cross didn't warn her about the broadcast, and that neither he nor Roe were present. We haven't heard from Cross in a couple chapters. I'm curious if he's going to be absent through most of the book.

We get this insanity. Grayson checks in on Wren because he notices she is upset.

“You sure, cowgirl?”

“Cowgirl?” Karra’s pinched expression belies her airy tone.

I don’t think I blame her. If Cross had a nickname for another woman, I’d rip his tongue out.

Just a wild overreaction on everyone's part. Karra is reinforced as jealous and crazy throughout this scene, by the way, but Wren gets to say shit like this without an ounce of self-awareness. Remember, when Wren does something it's good, but if another woman does it, she is bad.

Adrienne then links with Wren, and asks her to come to her quarters to talk.

Next scene.

We learn that Xavier has refused to cooperate with the Uprising, and is likely going to be executed, because the Command doesn't want him back, either. Adrienne tells Wren that Gray arranged for her to get a room in his block, and that apparently he kicked someone else out of their quarters to do it. This Cross Redden level behavior is how you know he's a love interest. Nothing is more romantic than when a guy in a position of authority over you abuses that authority to get close to you.

I mean, that could be hot. I've read books where it was hot. But for a power dynamic to be hot I think the author has to realize the dynamic exists and make use of it. You can't break a sexy taboo if your characters seem barely aware the taboo exists.

Anyways, Adrienne wants to talk to Wren about her goals. She is extremely honest with Wren about her powers, going so far as to give her sensitive and personal information. This is keeping with the book so far, where the Command are weirdly forthcoming of Wren in an attempt to recruit her, and she refuses to see this honesty for the act of trust it is.

Adrienne tells Wren that she's the only corrupter on the Continent. She shows Wren her bloodmark, which is the same size as Wren's.

I frown. “He gave you away?”

“Happens all the time. Prime parents of Mod children only have three options, Darlington. They report their child to the Company and let the Primes use them as pawns or slaves. They hide their child’s abilities and risk being executed for treason and concealment if it ever comes out. Or they ask the Uprising to protect them."

Wren, you were given away by your mother as well! That's how you ended up with Jim!
This is a point of similarity between Wren and Adrienne, and this is the first time this otherwise cold and pragmatic person has opened up to Wren. But Wren barely registers the similarity, and instead starts thinking about how she doesn't understand her own mother's motivations now that she knows what her parents did.

But none of her motivations make sense to me anymore. If she was working against her own people, why wouldn’t she just report me to the Company and let them use me? Maybe she feared the Company would deem me too big a risk and kill me instead? Incitement typically means a death sentence, but I was only a child. I don’t know if General Redden would’ve been barbaric enough to execute a child.

It is so insane to me that Wren will ponder whether the fascist dictator trying to genocide her people would kill a child but not consider that maybe the rebellion fighting to protect all Mod children might have good reasons for occasionally doing violence to their enemies. Oh my god.

Adrienne was trained here at the Dagger, after her father sent her away, and she explains that like Wren, she accidentally discovered her abilities during training as a child. When Adrienne performs telepathy, she can see all their thoughts and memories as individual threads, in addition to being able to hear them. Wren, like most Mods, only hears the thoughts as voices.

Adrienne accidentally rewrote the memory of an Authority member, taking away all his memories of his relationship with his wife. The damage was permanent.

I just want to show you another amazing line from Wren:

I’m fascinated by all this. I hadn’t realized there was a whole Modified political system operating right under the Company’s nose.

What? Again, an insane thing to be surprised by. Why wouldn't an organization the size of the Uprising have its own politics? Like, Wren is a Mod, so why does she always seem surprised to find her own people aren't stupid and evil?

Adrienne continues. She eventually decided she wanted to train to use her power, so she went to another Authority member, Kallister, and he agreed to help her. He brought her a Prime who had been scheduled for execution by the Authority, and let her use him as a test subject. She destroyed his mind, and then he was executed.

Okay, see, this is some dark shit. This is the moral ambiguity the book has been trying to sell us on all along. I like this a lot. Adrienne tries to justify herself, saying that corruption isn't painful and that she was a teenager who hated Primes after listening to them talk about her like she was an animal her entire childhood.

Wren asks Adrienne about the fragmented Mods from the hospital, and Adrienne tells her she had no involvement and that she has been very careful about her powers over the past fifteen years, and that she doesn't take them lightly or use them on innocent civilians.

“You literally just said you don’t agree with corrupting innocent civilians.”

She’s unmoved by my reproach. “The General’s wife was targeted because of exactly that: She was the General’s wife. Our objective is to destabilize the current regime. That requires hard decisions. Picking strategic targets.”

“It took many years before she was fully corrupted, though,” I say warily. “Captain Redden told me it started off like symptoms of schizophrenia and lasted years.”

“I was only eighteen. I hadn’t perfected the process yet.” Noting my face, Adrienne rolls her eyes. “You incited a woman to kill herself, Wren. How is that any better than what I did to the General’s wife?”

Okay, see, this is the first time in the book that it has been good!

Adrienne is set up as an obvious foil to Wren: raised by Primes and then by Wren's uncle's brother, also possessing a rare and dangerous ability. But where Wren was raised by Mods to protect herself, and tries to never use her powers, Adrienne instead has embraced her capacity for destruction and is actively using it to try to achieve her goals. And look! Some actual hypocrisy! Adrienne says that she doesn't use her power on civilians and then admits to taking out the General's wife, who was arguably a civilian!

Now, all of this would have been way better if it was set up in book one. Because it wasn't, to be clear. Wren did espouse this theory in the last book, but she had no evidence at all and in general her distrust of the Uprising was never justified by their actual actions. But we're finally getting an actual moral conflict in this book besides "is it okay to use violence against our oppressors, the fascist military who want to shoot us all in the head?"

Adrienne asks Wren how far she's willing to go, and the chapter ends.

God, that was so close to being a good chapter. It mostly sucked, but there was like..a whole page of actual good content.

But I do have another complaint.

Why is Wren so obsessed with Prime allies? All through this chapter, and even in Silver Elite when she was angsting about her own powers, she's constantly concerned with what Primes think. 

Why does she care? No, seriously, Wren wasn't raised by a Prime. She had a Mod best friend, a paranoid Mod uncle, and expresses distrust of Primes from the first chapter of Silver Elite. (She is also fucking that Prime soldier. Put a pin in that.)

When she was in Silver Block, training, the Primes were almost universally Mod-hating bigots, even her friend, Lyddie, who was quick to betray her. Out of Wren's friends from training, we have:

1. Cross Redden. Cross is a secret Mod, and he's her childhood best friend, and despite those two things he is still pretty lukewarm about defending Mods. 

2. Lyddie. Hates Mods, but Wren was still shocked when Lyddie betrayed her and described it as "we betrayed each other" earlier in the book.

3. Grayson Blake. Secretly an Uprising agent.

4. Xavier. Despite being willing to accept Cross and Wren, refuses to cooperate with the Uprising, so he's not motivated by any actual stance against oppression, he's just willing to make an exception for the Mods he likes.

Okay, out of these Primes that she befriended, two of them are secretly Mods, one of them openly hates Mods, and one of them probably hates Mods but not her personally. On the other hand, Wren's beloved uncle, her only family, was a Mod and he was killed for it. Her best friend and her father, an actual Prime ally, were nearly executed and are now in a labor camp. Wren has seen the hospital full of Mods who were experimented on, she saw another Mod get shot in the head. 

Like, why is she so concerned about Prime allies? When has Wren ever relied on Prime allies, when has she ever been a position where she would have developed this obsession with them? I thought it was weird when Wren was fantasizing about giving up her powers and living a normal life in Silver Elite and I think it's fucking weird now. Wren is invested enough in the project of Mod liberation to join the Uprising, so why does she feel no solidarity with her own people at all? 

If When had been raised, for example, by an ex-Silver Elite agent running off with a Mod child he was meant to execute, that would make sense. If Cross was not a secret Mod and instead was an actual Prime who became a rebel for the love of Wren, that would make sense. But, once again, Wren's characterization is whatever Francis needs it to be at the moment.

Okay, final thing. This is a suggestion I am going to make that I hope Broken Dove fanfic writers will take to heart.

Would Adrienne not be a way better love interest than Grayson?

For one thing, she and Wren have a much more interesting dynamic. Grayson's only personality traits are "abusing his power to get close to his hot subordinate" Cross-style and "flirting", which he does in place of Cross's broody shit. He's basically just Cross with a fresh coat of paint because the book isn't super interested in having Wren explore ideological conflict with either of them.

But Adrienne and Wren have an actual conflict, a difference in ideas with teeth to it, and they're mirrors of each other who have taken opposite approaches to the same personal struggle. Adrienne is meaningfully committed to the cause in a way Wren is not, and would push her to do the same, while Cross is much more interested in protecting himself and a few people he likes, and would encourage Wren to equal selfishness. Now that's a love triangle.