Graceling

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"Does it lighten the burden of your Grace, to know you have beautiful eyes?"

Graceling is a fantasy Young Adult novel by first-time author Kristin Cashore. The heroine, Katsa, is "Graced" with the power to kill with her bare hands and is forced to utilize her Grace for her uncle King Randa's dirty work. Scorned and feared because of her Grace, Katsa remains relatively friendless and accepts the fact that people won't ever be comfortable or brave enough to look into her blue-and-green eyes. When she encounters a Graceling prince on one of her missions, Katsa has no idea how her life will begin to change...

It also has a Spin-Off, Fire (examples listed on its own, further down the page), taking place in the Dells, east of the original setting. The only character who shows up from Graceling is Leck. In the Dells, there are no Gracelings; instead, there are 'monsters', animals with oddly-colored fur, all of which are mind-bogglingly beautiful and can fuzz people's minds. Furthermore, predator monsters are particularly fond of other monsters. Yes, human monsters exist - or one still does: the titular Fire. Aside from getting hit hard with A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Read and So Beautiful It's a Curse, and attracting predator monsters like nobody's business, she has an extra, nasty burden - her father Cansrel's legacy. Cansrel was a monster in more than the literal sense and ruled the kingdom through the old king. He also brought it to ruin. Fire is therefore hated and distrusted by All of the Other Reindeer, and her only friends are her horse, Small; her surrogate father Brocker; and her lover, Brocker's adoptive son, Archer. When Prince Brigan, brother of the current king, calls her to the capital to help the government (her monsterness gives her mind-control powers that she hates to use), Fire has a pretty good idea her life is going to change.

The trilogy has been rounded off now with the third book Bitterblue. Though a direct sequel to the first book, examples are also listed separately as they will contain spoilers to Graceling.

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Tropes used in Graceling include:

• Action Girl: Katsa. Bitterblue is slowly heading towards this direction.
• Aerith and Bob: Most of the characters, including royalty, have Medieval-sounding one or two syllable names: Katsa, Raffin, Faun, Leck, Oll, Skye, Helda, Randa, Ashen. But then there's Bitterblue and Greening Grandemalion (who goes by Po, but still)...
  • These last two are from the Kingdom of Leonid where most names are based on colours.
• Attempted Rape: Katsa might've been raped by her older cousin when she was younger if she didn't, y'know, accidently kill him out of self-protection. Also this might've happened to Bitterblue if her mother didn't protect her from her psycho dad.
• Always Save the Girl: Katsa hates this trope up to a point where she's uncomfortable being saved by anyone.
• Anticlimax: Katsa's final battle with King Leck involves her killing him with one dagger thrown through his mouth.
• Arranged Marriage: King Randa is trying to get Katsa into one of these to be rid of her. His son Prince Raffin is dreading this.
• Awesome Moment of Crowning: Bitterblue.
• Babies Make Everything Better: Averted. Katsa is so vehemently opposed to having babies (and marriage) that she refuses Po's affection for her at first.
• Battle Couple: Katsa and Po, eventually.
• Badass: Katsa and Po, considering how they use their Graces in combat.
• Beautiful Dreamer: Katsa admires Po this way at least once. Of course, after making sure he's really asleep of course.
• Berserk Button: Do NOT imply that Po is Katsa's "sensible keeper". Or anything of that sort.
• Blessed with Suck: Po's ability to read minds and sense people really does suck since no one would trust him. For good reason.
  • If you're lucky and your Grace is useful to the king of whatever country you live in, you'll be kept at court. If you're unlucky, then you get sent home, where you'll most likely be ridiculed for your useless Grace. If you're really lucky, you live in Lienid, where the Gracelings are free and treated with something like respect.
• Brainwashed: Anyone who meets King Leck, thanks to his Grace.
• Blind Seer: Po becomes this. Well, he already had the Seer part down (sensing everyone's presence, reading minds), but he does lose his eyesight later on.
• But You Screw One Goat!: Implied that King Leck does this to animals at his orphanage before brutally hacking them to bits.
  • YMMV on whether that was the implication, or if Leck simply liked hurting them.
• Bullet Time: Why Po is so good at fighting.
• Childhood Marriage Promise: Subverted. Katsa and Raffin were thinking of making one so Raffin could avoid an Arranged Marriage. They don't take it too seriously and laughed about it when they realized it would never work.
• Combat Clairvoyance: Prince Po's Grace equates to this in a fight.
• Crapsack World: Sort of subverted. As long as you don't offend any of the kings and live as isolated as possible, you should be all right. Usually.
• Cursed with Awesome: Katsa's real Grace: Survival. King Leck's Grace also qualifies, but he has no moral qualms about utilizing this.
• Deadpan Snarker: Katsa has traces of this earlier in the novel.
• Decoy Protagonist: King Randa of the Decoy Villan variety.
• Determinator: Katsa really wants to be the best at everything, whether it's from archery to just racing up the stairs.
  • There's also the bit where she crosses Grella's Pass with Bitterblue in the middle of a blizzard.
• Differently-Powered Individual: The Gracelings.
• Disability Superpower: What Po's Grace becomes.
• The Dog Bites Back: Katsa comments about how Randa knows how to make her feel like a brutal dog. She then tells him how she will kill all of the hundreds of guards he has with him, along with Randa himself.
• Embarrassing First Name: Po's real name is Greening Gandemallion.
• Everyone Can See It: Everyone except Katsa knew that Giddon had a crush on Katsa. Oh, and that Katsa and Po liked each other.
• Exclusive Powers: Graces are very unique and strange skills that Gracelings, people who get these powers in general. They are identified by mismatched eyes that appears during a few months after birth or around early childhood. These skills can range from singing, giving dreams, never sleeping, and so forth.
• Female Gaze: Katsa to Po a number of times.
• Fighting From the Inside: Po and Bitterblue are pretty good at this. Katsa, not so much.
• Freak-Out: Katsa has one when she realizes that she's in love with Po.
• Good People Have Good Sex: Katsa and Po.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: Katsa, though she improves as the novel progresses.
• Hannibal Lecture: Randa to Katsa.
  • Katsa eventually gets an epic Shut UP, Hannibal moment in the form of a World of Cardboard Speech.
• Heroic BSOD: Po after he goes blind.
• Hot Amazon: Katsa, once again.
• Ho Yay: Raffin and Bann. According to Word of God, their canocity is her most frequently asked question.

Katsa: I told him I'm not going to marry you and hang on to you like a barnacle, just to keep you to myself and stop you loving anyone else. Po: It's all right, you know. Other people don't have to understand. Katsa: I worry about it. Po: Don't worry about it. We'll muddle through. And there are those who do understand. Raffin does. And Bann. Katsa: Yes, I suppose they do.

• Important Haircut: Strangely enough Bitterblue's haircut and not Katsa's. Bitterblue's haircut symbolizes she's no longer a pampered, sheltered princess. Katsa just found long hair annoying.
• Kissing Cousins: See Childhood Marriage Promise up above.
• If You Know What I Mean: "The wild ones are most fun if you know how to control them."
• La Résistance: Katsa's Council is a mild version of this. Or at least, they're too chicken to openly rebel against King Randa.
  • Yes, they're "too chicken" to risk destabilizing an entire kingdom, rendering it easy prey for the surrounding kingdoms and their tyrannical kings to waltz in and conquer.
  • And it's probably best that Middluns' neighbours don't know that the ones thwarting their attempts to oppress/extort the populace are from Middluns itself. Otherwise that neutrality will go straight out the window.
• Lets Read: Here.
• Love At First Punch: For Po at least. Actually, a big part of Katsa's and Po's relationship is centered on trying to punch each others' guts out. Being that both of them are accomplished fighters who revel in sparring matches, this is much less dysfunctional than it sounds.
• Mass Hypnosis: Not only Leck's Kingdom, but everyone who personally meets King Leck. In fact, anyone who hears King Leck, and then talks to other people, who then talk to other people, taking this to Up to Eleven levels.
• A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Read: Mind readers are very unhappy people.
• Mismatched Eyes: This is the Graceling indicator.
• Oblivious to Love: Katsa, full stop. Not just to Po's love for her, but to her own love for Po.
• One Person, One Power
• Promotion to Love Interest: Happens to Po about halfway through the book.
• Romantic False Lead: Poor, poor Giddon.
• Running Gag: Katsa "abusing" her horses from overwork.
  • Probably also qualifies as Somewhere an Equestrian is Crying. Seriously, she rides her horses full tilt at night for hours because its 'only' five or six more leagues until they get home and she's too impatient to wait for morning. One of the other characters asks if she is still ruining the horses.
• Shut UP, Hannibal: Randa gives Katsa a Hannibal Lecture when she refuses to obey him. She responds by telling him exactly how she'll kill every guard in the throne room and himself, before leaving.
• Stay in the Kitchen: Society's opinion of women.
• Superpower Lottery: Graces can be anything from being good at climbing trees to dancing to mind reading.
• Telepathy: Po's real grace. Note that it works only when people's thoughts are specifically focused on him.
• The Smart Guy: Raffin
• Thou Shalt Not Kill: Katsa has this attitude in mind though she's forced to kill plenty of people under her uncle's bidding at first.
• Their First Time: Katsa and Po, once again.
• Unstoppable Rage: Katsa is afraid of hers. Po has traces of this, too.
• Walking the Earth: Katsa and Po end up doing this from Part II on.
• Wise Beyond Their Years: Bitterblue. She even realizes that "Po was in a position to see Katsa naked" at 10 years old.
• The Wise Prince: Raffin.
• With My Hands Tied: While Katsa doesn't actually get tied up, she trains in order to counter a situation like this.
• The Woman Wearing the Queenly Mask: Bitterblue becomes this. Guessing from what Word of God says about the Bitterblue-focused sequel, this will bite her in the ass later.
• World of Cardboard Speech: Katsa gives one to Randa during her Shut UP, Hannibal moment by detailing exactly how she could slaughter him and every one of the two hundred guards he has surrounding her.
• Writer on Board: Katsa's beliefs on marriage and having children. Word of God even admits that some of her beliefs got transferred into the novel.
• You Gotta Have Blue Hair: Raffin dyes his hair blue by accident.

The Spin-Off, Fire, provides examples of

• Absurdly Youthful Father: Brigan.
• Action Girl: Fire's guard contains a few; if Hanna doesn't become one of these when she ages past, say, six, I'll eat my hat. Fire isn't, not really.
  • Actually, the whole army contains over five hundred of these, due to Brigan completely averting the Stay in the Kitchen concept.
• All of the Other Reindeer: Ah, Fire.
• Amazing Technicolor Wildlife: Animal monsters.
• A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Read: Again.
• The Archer: Archer didn't get his nickname from swordfighting.
  • Fire.
• Bi the Way: Fire's first lover was a maid named Liddy, whom Cansrel sent away to end their relationship.
• Body Horror: Brocker's legs were shattered. Not broken, shattered. By eight men taking turns with mallets.
• Blessed with Suck: Defines Fire's life.
• The Casanova: Archer.
• Closed Door Rapport: Fire insists on this with Nash at first, since seeing her face reduces him to a babbling idiot. Eventually he gets better.
• Cool Horse: Subverted when Fire chooses a plain, but good-natured gelding instead of the showy mare Cansrel picked for her. Played straight with the river horse that "adopts" her after her escape from Leck's hideout.
• Creepy Child: Leck.
• Crapsack World: Very much so, though the royal family are trying to make it less of one.
• Death by Childbirth: Archer's mother and Hanna's mother.
• Dirty Mind Reading: Mind reading + So Beautiful It's a Curse = ...remember when we said Fire's life was built around Blessed with Suck?
• A Father to His Men: Brigan, very much so.
• Enfant Terrible: Leck. Isn't it nice to know that torturing animals and killing people has been going on his whole life?
• Friend to All Living Things: Fire loves animals and they love her, especially since she can sense their minds.
• Friend to All Children: Fire again, which is why her resolution to remain the last of her kind is so difficult to keep. She compensates by taking care of her friends' children.
• Friends with Benefits: Fire and Archer. He wants to marry her, but the more he asks, the more it irritates her.
• Genius Ditz: Clara may seem silly at first meeting, but she's actually one of the Dells' highest-ranking spymasters.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Ironically, Archer.
• Green Eyed Red Head: Fire, who inherited it from her mother
• Heroic Bastard: Clara, Garan, Archer, and Brigan.
• Heroic BSOD: Fire has one after she kills her father. And another, years later, when she finds Archer's body.
• Heroes Want Redheads: Fire.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: Fire's monster beauty tends to bring out the worst in people.
• I Did What I Had to Do: See Self-Made Orphan.
• I Love You Because I Can't Control You: Brigan's mind is so disciplined that he can block Fire's powers, which unsettles her, but is also a part of what makes her fall for him.
• If You Die, I Call Your Stuff: Just before a dangerous mission, Fire jokingly does this in order to get a sleepy Brigan to pay attention.
• Ill Girl: Garan is an Ill Man.
• Inverse Law of Fertility: A variation. Fire, as mentioned, wants children, and she's physically capable of having them at least until she utilizes a permanent form of Fantasy Birth Control but she doesn't dare, because she doesn't want to give birth to someone who could become another Cansrel.
  • Meanwhile, Mila and Clara become pregnant purely by accident.
• Ladykiller in Love: Archer is a slut, but he does love Fire.
• Lamarck Was Right: A large theme of the story is defying this. "If we are all to be judged by our parents and grandparents, we all may as well impale ourselves on pointy bits of rock."
• Last of Her Kind: And Fire is damn well going to keep it that way.
• Like Parent, Like Spouse: No wonder Fire falls in love with gray-eyed, stoic, military genius Brigan. He's Brocker's son.
• Luke, I Am Your Father: Hoooooo boy. Let's see, we have: Fire I Am Your Grandmother, Archer I Am Your Real Father (semi-subverted since Archer always knew he wasn't really Brocker's son), and Brigan I Am Your Father.
• Morality Pet: In a rare instance, the hero is the pet; Fire was this to Cansrel. Hanna to Brigan, too, although he's not mean, just cold.
• Morality Chain: Subverted. Fire wanted to become this, but she couldn't.
• No Periods, Period: Averted. And the blood draws even more predators to Fire.
• Not So Different: The core message of Leck's Hannibal Lecture to Fire.
• Offing the Offspring: Archer is shot by his biological father (see Rape as Backstory), though it's not known if either one knew about it.
• One Person, One Power: Each Graceling has one Grace, although it is possible to elaborate on it.
• One Steve Limit: Followed technically, but Nash and Nax are close enough together to be annoying.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Archer's real name is Arklin, but no one calls him that.
• Parental Substitute: Brocker to Fire, even while Cansrel was still alive.
• Pet the Dog: In Brigan's case, be nice to the monster's horse and replace her broken violin.
• Posthumous Character: Cansrel and King Nax. Cansrel is quite well developed like this, too.
• Rape as Backstory: Archer was conceived this way when mad King Nax sent a man to rape Brocker's wife as revenge against Brocker for sleeping with, and impregnating, Queen Roen.
• Retired Badass: Brocker was the king's best war leader.
• Royals Who Actually Do Something: The entire royal family.
• Sibling Love Triangle: Nash/Fire/Brigan.
• Second Love: For both protagonists.
• Sexy Shirt Switch: Archer finds this "impossibly sweet", oblivious to the fact that Fire's doing it to cover up some bruises.
• Shotacon and Lolicon: Nax and Cansrel are mentioned to have had children from the court 'to make a change from the women'.
• Skunk Stripe: Queen Roan.
• So Beautiful It's a Curse: Fire plays this straight, and quite well too. She gets an extra, even worse facet, though: The same beauty makes her a predator magnet. Of both the animal and human variety.
• Self-Made Orphan: Leck in the prologue, and a heroic version with Fire.
• Spin-Off
• Stay in the Kitchen: Subverted/Averted. Thanks to Brigan, women are now permitted to become full members of the army.
• Tall, Dark and Handsome: Brigan.
• They Call Him "Sword": Archer
• True Companions
• We Can Rule Together: Leck wants Fire as his "partner". Her answer is to send him falling into some sharp rocks, explaining why he has an eyepatch in the later book.
• We Have Ways of Making You Talk: Fire herself, albeit very reluctantly and after much persuasion, uses her monster powers to interrogate prisoners. Justified as she's working to prevent a three-way war.
• The Wise Prince: Brigan.
• Woman Scorned: Nax was the Spear Counterpart.
• Worthy Opponent: Fire has a certain respect for Murgda, one of the rebel leaders.
• Wrong-Context Magic: Leck is a Graceling in a country that's never heard of them.
• Unlucky Childhood Friend: Archer was lucky for a while, but Fire eventually dumps him.
• Yamato Nadeshiko: Fire fits pretty well if you place the Dells in the position of family: A sweet girl with inner iron that tries to a Morality Chain and lives east of the first book's setting
• You Did the Right Thing: Pretty much everyone tells Fire this in regard to her deliberately causing the death of her father and making it look like a suicide. Considering what would have happened had he lived, they're not wrong.
• You Gotta Have Blue Hair: Monsters. Cansrel had literal blue hair.
• Your Cheating Heart: Brocker and Roan. Averted with Fire and Archer, as Fire knows that Archer sleeps around and doesn't think much of it, beyond frustration for the broken hearts he leaves in his wake.

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The final book in the Seven Kingdoms Trilogy, Bitterblue, provides examples of

• Complete Monster: Leck. The story is about the Kingdom of Monsea recovering from his tyranical rule, normally this trope falls into YMMV but the following tropes detailing his acts leave no doubt.
  • Compelling Voice > Mass Hypnosis > Getting Smilies Painted on Your Soul allowing him to get away with...
    • Mind Rape: The short version of the above.
    • Double Standard Rape (Sci Fi): Averted. Sci-fi rape, yes. Double standard, no.
    • Rape as Backstory: The backstory of the entire Kingdom is how Leck raped it, not just the many women he raped specifically. towards the climax it is revealed that Leck used his powers to make others rape and torture for him.
    • Medical Rape and Impregnate: Leck would rape women in order to perform medical experiments on pregnant women.
    • Medical Horror: One of Lecks great passions was his "hospital" where he would perfom surgical experiments. His impulse control problems often caused his subjects to die too quickly as he would perform multiple simultanius experiments on a single person.
    • Child by Rape: Hava is the daughter of Leck and his sculptor Bellamew. Her mother kept her safe from Leck by pretending she had died.
    • Brainwashed and Crazy:
• Government Conspiracy: Bitterblue suspects there is one, her new friends are sure there is one.
• Heroic Bastard: Bitterblue's half sister Hava saves her life a few times but is the only person to know they are related
• Queen Incognito The plot is mostly kicked off by Bitterblue doing this.