Midnighters: Difference between revisions

''Midnighters'' is a young-adult book series written by Scott Westerfeld. It's set in the small town of Bixby, Oklahoma (which, incidentally, does exist in [[Real Life]]). The main premise is that there are 25 hours in a day. The 25th hour is nicknamed "the blue time" because everything has a slightly blue glow, and takes place right [[Time Stands Still|after]] the stroke of midnight.

 

 

They're the heroes, and are the only people who can walk around and be not frozen in the blue time. They are Jessica, Jonathan, [[Defrosting Ice Queen|Melissa]], [[Jerkass|Rex]] and [[Embarrassing First Name|Desdemona]] (who goes by Dess, for obvious reasons). They all have nonstandard [[Stock Super Powers|powers]] (and are very sensitive to light).

* [[Evil Is Deathly Cold]]: The darklings. Also slither bites.

* [[Fear Discover Power]]: Type 1 seems to be associated with the nastier sorts of darkling. {{spoiler|Rex can do it too, and at one point intimidates another character by doing... ''something'' to make himself resemble a snake.}}

** [[The Hero]]: Skill-wise, it's Jessica, the {{spoiler|Flame Bringer}}. Personality-wise, it's Rex.

** [[The Big Guy]]: Skill-wise, it's {{spoiler|Jessica}}

** [[The Smart Guy]]: Both ways, it's Dess, the Polymath.

* [[Good With Numbers]]: The Polymath power. Dess can do lengthy, difficult, and intricate calculations easily in her head, and she can come up with thirteen-letter names in an instant.

* [[Hates Being Touched]]: Melissa. {{spoiler|She gets better, though.}}

* [[Improvised Weapon]]: Since any piece of a metal alloy given a 13-letter name is a deadly weapon against the Darklings, most of the weapons tend to be fairly mundane (and sometimes bizarre or random) objects, like screws, bolts, hubcaps, silverware, trash can lids, and one particularly badass microphone stand.

* [[Jump Physics]]: The Acrobat power. During Midnight, gravity's pull on Jonathan and whoever he's holding hands with is sharply decreased. He puts the jumps in most [[Platform Game|Platform Games]] to shame.

* [[Manipulative Bastard]]: {{spoiler|Madeline, an old Mindcaster. Among many other things, she used her power to convince Melissa's and Dess's mothers to push either just a little earlier or later, so they'd be born exactly at midnight.}}

** {{spoiler|Melissa too. ...Actually, this is pretty much par for the course for Mindcasters, apparently. Both of them affectionately (or not) get the title "Queen Bitch" at some point. And dear lord do they both ever prove that they deserve it.}}

* [[Mind Rape]]: Mindcasters are good at this. {{spoiler|Melissa accidentally mind raped Rex and Johnathan on a small scale when they touched her, her mind raping was responsible for Rex's father turning into a vegetable.}}

** {{spoiler|Poor Dess gets mind raped pretty badly twice in the second book. First by Madeline, although that wasn't entirely mind rape as she planted useful information and then gave Dess a trick to freely block and unblock it. Second by Melissa, trying by brute mental force to tear down said barrier and get said information out of Dess.}} She certainly isn't happy about it, but she survives with her sanity intact. Mostly.

* [[School Saved My Life]]: Inverted. All of the Midnighters' powers correlate to a school subject, which they excel at because of the powers. Except Melissa. Dess: Trigonometry, and probably engineering, Jonathan: Physics, Rex: History, Jess: {{spoiler|Chemistry}}

* [[See Thru Specs]]: The Seer power. Rex is mostly blind without his glasses, but things touched by Midnight (including Midnighters) appear in sharp focus. When he wears his glasses, "normal" things are clear, but stuff involving Midnight gets blurry (or outright invisible in the case of runes and lore).

* [[Shown Their Work]]: While he may have gotten the time frames wrong (see [[Fridge Logic]] and the [[Just Bugs Me]] page), Westerfeld still had to do a decent amount of research, primarily on numbering systems, making this series overall a welcome subversion of [[Writers Cannot Do Math]].

* [[Supporting Protagonist]]: One of the characters in the running for overall series main character is {{spoiler|Dess, [[The Smart Guy]].}}