She Should Have Known Better
A clever woman is charmed by a man engineered to charm, and the audience lines up to call her stupid. The book usually handles it fine. The readers do not.
The setup
In Stone of Farewell, Miriamele is hauled out of a ship’s hold as a stowaway and made to kneel on the deck. The man who owns the ship comes down off the quarterdeck, and the book spends a full paragraph on how he looks:
He deals with the situation in four words, walks off, and then looks back and smiles at her. Two pages later, while the captain is saying something genuinely frightening, she is “thinking of Aspitis’ golden hair and bold eyes, and wondering how in the midst of such danger she could suddenly feel so unexpected…”
And I already know what a certain kind of reader says about that, because they say it every single time.
The reflex I am ranting about
Here is what is actually being asked. A woman is presented with a man who has been deliberately constructed, by the author and by the character himself, to be maximally appealing. And the complaint is that she responds to him.
That is not a failure of intelligence. That is the design working. The scene would not be about anything if she were immune.
Four reasons the reflex is wrong
1. Charm is a competence, and he has it
Aspitis is not lucky. He is good at this. He controls a situation with four words, dismisses armed men, and gives a frightened stranger exactly one gesture of attention at the exact moment she has decided she is going to be whipped.
Expecting a person to be unaffected by a skill someone has spent their life developing is like expecting them to out-argue a lawyer because they are clever. Being smart is not armor against expertise.
2. The reader has information she does not
This is the part that makes the reflex genuinely unfair, and it is a structural feature of the book rather than an accident.
A hundred pages earlier, at a supper table in Nabban that Miriamele is nowhere near, Duke Benigaris says of Aspitis: “King Elias made him an earl at my request. As a gesture of his friendship to Nabban.”
You know he is her father’s creature. She does not. You are not smarter than her. You are better briefed, because a novelist gave you a scene she was not in.
Dramatic irony is not evidence of a character’s stupidity. It is a device that only works if the character cannot see what you can.
3. The state she is in is the whole point
Look at the order of events. Before Aspitis appears at all, the narration gives her this: “An hour earlier, Miriamele had despaired. Now she found herself taking great breaths, her heart rising once more. Even a whipping from the captain would be bearable. She was alive and upon the open sea.”
She has been running for months. Dressed as a boy. Hungry. Lying constantly. Answering to names that are not hers. She has just come up out of a dark hold into daylight and remembered she is a living person.
And then somebody looks at her.
Nobody is at their most skeptical about kindness on the first morning after despair. That is precisely when the wrong person is most effective, and everybody who has ever been through a bad stretch knows it.
4. She notices, and that is the tell of a well-written character
The line is not “she was in love.” It is “wondering how in the midst of such danger she could suddenly feel so unexpected…”
She catches herself. She finds her own reaction strange and slightly inappropriate to the circumstances. A stupid character does not do that. A stupid character just feels the thing.
The double standard, because there always is one
Notice who gets forgiven for this.
When a male character is taken in by a beautiful woman with an agenda, the genre files it under tragic flaw, or he never stood a chance, or simply she was extraordinary. The seduction is treated as an external force acting on him.
When a female character is taken in by a beautiful man with an agenda, it is filed under she should have known. The seduction becomes evidence of a defect in her.
Same trope. Same mechanism. One reading blames the operator, the other blames the target, and you can predict which is which by the target’s gender with depressing accuracy.
What a badly written version looks like
To be fair, the complaint is sometimes correct. Here is how you tell.
| Done well | Done badly |
|---|---|
| She is given a plausible reason to be off balance | She is competent in every scene except this one |
| He demonstrates the skill on the page | He is simply asserted to be irresistible |
| The reader knows more than her, and knows why | The warning signs are visible to her and she ignores them |
| She notices her own reaction | The narration goes soft and swoony with her |
| Her judgment stays intact elsewhere | She becomes stupid generally, to serve the plot |
By that test Stone of Farewell passes on every row. Which is why this is a rant about readers rather than a rant about Tad Williams, and I want to be clear that I noticed the difference.
The update this page promised
Here is what actually happens. Aspitis tells her, to her face, in his own cabin:
The first night. Not deduced later. Not suspected. Known, from the beginning, by a man who had seen her twice at state occasions and who noticed that the hair closest to her scalp was “quite golden . . . like mine” and worked out that a girl bound for a convent might cut her hair but would not dye it.
And the marriage he proposes is not desire. It is a position paper: “when your father grows tired of Benigaris, who better to rule Nabban than the one who found his daughter, fell in love with her, and brought her back home?”
Then the leverage, delivered while patting something at his belt she cannot see: “Once it is known that you have been, dishonored, you said?, do you think your father would offend a legitimate and high-born husband? A husband who is already his ally, and who has done your father many, important services?”
The narration does not soften it:
She tries the door and it will not open. “Pull it,” he suggests. As she goes: “I will come to your cabin later, my beloved. Prepare for me.” She gets off the ladder onto the deck and sinks to her knees, wanting “to fall into blackness and disappear.”
What that does to the complaint
It ends it.
Every hour of that courtship was a performance aimed at a target he had already selected. The kindness on the quarterdeck, the invitation to his table, the smile over the shoulder. All of it was operational. Asking why she did not see through it is asking why she did not detect a months-long deception designed by someone with more information than her, running it deliberately, with the resources of an earldom.
And the book does not treat what follows as her comeuppance. It treats it as something done to her, in a scene written from inside her body, ending with her on her knees on a deck.
The version that would deserve the anger
For completeness, because it does exist. The trope earns the complaint when a narrative arranges a beautiful predator, lets the heroine respond like a person, and then frames the consequences as her just deserts for being susceptible. Watch for a book that becomes noticeably less interested in her interiority right after the trap closes.
This one does the opposite. Her interiority is the whole scene.
Verdict
The trope stays off probation. The reader reflex goes on it.
“She should have known better” is almost never a statement about the character. It is a statement about the speaker’s confidence that they would have spotted it, made from a chair, with a novel’s worth of information the character did not have, about a situation they are not in.
Being charmed by someone who is extremely good at charming people is not a character flaw. It is what the skill is for.
Written for CVM Sekai. · The book · Red flags, green flags · All RaeRae Rants