#unwanteds

"There was a hint of wind coming over the top of the stone walls and through the barbed-wire sky on the day Alexander Stowe was to be Purged."

Alex’s character introduction is fascinating.  Because he doesn't really have one.  The Alex of the first fifty pages of the book is practically a non-character.  He's our (the readers') eyes into the world but not much more.  At the Purge, he's resigned and numb but not much else, with nothing that gives us many insights into who he is. That’s not to say that Alex doesn’t have a personality at the start of the book.  He does, he’s just not particularly special.  He’s scared, sad, and leaving behind everything he’s known.  Underneath that, he’s a little curious and inquisitive.  But all of the Unwanteds are scared and sad and curious.  There doesn't seem to be anything about him at a first glance that makes him the protagonist.

"Alex shivered, though the day was still warm. He thought about his twin brother, Aaron, and felt a sharp pain run through him, as if half of his own body had been severed from the rest."

The thing that sets Alex apart from the rest of the Unwanteds in the first couple chapters is the fact that he has a twin brother who's Wanted, a twin brother he misses, a twin he wishes could be with him (which is interesting considering Aaron's arc of struggling to differentiate himself from Alex).  He has a family member in Quill who he still really cares about and thinks about constantly, which isn't something that any of the other characters have.

"It's true, he [Aaron] thought. Enough mourning. Alex has likely been eliminated by now. The twinge in his gut was soon dulled by thoughts of his now-secured future, and a tiny surge of power."

On the topic of Aaron, because apparently I can't not talk about him, even when I'm supposed to be talking about Alex, he actually gets some pretty decent introductory characterization before Alex does.  The main things that the first chapter of the book does are establish that Quill is horrible, set up the conflict of Alex being sent to this death/the twins being separated, and set up Aaron's characterization.  The second chapter is then fully dedicated to exploring more of Aaron's character and is pretty much only from Aaron's POV, which is kind of unique in this third-person omniscient book series. Aaron's not alone in getting more characterization than Alex in the first part of this book.  Before we get any solid characterization of Alex, we get really good insights into Lani, Meghan, Samheed, and Justine of all people.  That's pretty much the whole supporting cast, except Alex. Which begs the question: Why?  Lisa does fantastic character work and the other character introductions are amazing and get the broad strokes of their characters across in a couple paragraphs.  So why is Alex's characterization so delayed?

"Alex didn't move, though his heart fell like a cement block into his gut. He stared straight ahead as he'd seen the other Unwanteds do in past years. His lips quivered for a moment, but he fought to still it. When the governors came over to him, he put his arms out for them to shackle with rusty iron bands. He made his eyes icy cool before he glanced over his shoulder at his parents, who remained unemotional."

 I think it's on purpose.  It partially serves to help orient a younger reader to the world without getting bogged down in a complex character (and boy is Alex complex).  But Alex behaving this way actually makes perfect sense when you've already read the series and understand who he is.  And how he responds to trauma. Alex is a perfectionist.  He's been told his whole life that he has to behave a certain way and repress his emotions, but he's also always been bad at that.  As such, he's always been told in one way or another that he's a failure.  His parents told him that he was Unwanted when he was ten.  TEN.  Imagine telling a ten-year-old that they're going to die in three years because they failed to live up to expectations.  That is incredibly traumatizing.

"Alex took to brooding alone rather than share the pain of what he perceived as his failures."

And one of Alex's go-to trauma responses is to shut down.  To isolate himself.  To give up.  We see it multiple times throughout the series, but it's really interesting that the first time we meet him is when he is in one of these 'shut downs'.  Because he's been told he's a failure and that there's nothing he can do, nothing he can change about himself, to succeed.  So why should he even try if he can't be perfect? And that's the Alex we meet at the beginning of the book.  An Alex who, at thirteen, is dealing with a lot of trauma and is coping with it the only way he knows how: by giving up, by becoming numb, by not expressing himself.  We don't get to see who Alex is because Alex doesn't care to show it.  In this sense, Alex starts off the series already broken by life, broken by events that we don't actually get to see much of.  And I think that actually makes his character arc in this book a bit of a healing arc (which is interesting to contrast with the fact that Aaron practically has a corruption arc in this book.  Aah, narrative foils).

"In a brave moment, with nothing to lose, he whispered, 'I'm Alex. It'll go quickly.' He wasn't sure why he said that. It was the only comforting thing he could think of."

 The first real character trait we get out of Alex is his kindness, in that famous (to me, at least) scene on the bus with Lani.  It's his first line.  Two sentences, five words.  But it still manages to say a lot about him.  It's not the words themselves that do it but their presence within the context of the situation.  It's already been established that the Unwanteds aren't allowed to talk.  That it could be punished.  But Alex doesn't care about that. He cares about doing what's right.  And he knows that what's right in this instance is to comfort the scared kid chained up next to him.  He breaks the rules and puts himself at risk to help someone else, and then feels happy when he sees that he’s made her smile.  And if that doesn't describe Alex as a person then I don't know what does.

"'Don't be afraid of me, Alex,' the octogator had said when Alex first met her, face-to-face with her alligator mouth full of teeth, and half her octopus tentacles floating about, almost as if she were walking on air. 'O-okay,' Alex said, noting the location of the door in case he would need to escape."

From there we start getting to see more of Alex's character, bit by bit.  Something that really stood out to me that I sometimes forget about is Alex’s fear.  Throughout most of this book, he jumps at everything.  He shies away from Simber's claws, looks for exits from Ms. Octavia's classroom, and is always waiting for the other shoe to drop.  Alex at the start of this book is timid.  Which is kind of crazy for me, thinking of the Alex from later books who confronts Eagala with a smirk on his face and leads his people into battle.  I forget that there's ever a time when Alex could be described as timid.  Character development.  It's crazy.

"And though the noise was very fast and loud, it was exciting, and it sounded good to his [Alex's] ears. He looked at Meghan, concerned, knowing how wrong this sort of thing was."

Alex’s fear is emphasized a lot more than the others’ fear is.  All of the Unwanteds are scared at the start, but characters like Meghan and Lani and Samheed all lose that fear pretty quickly.  Alex doesn’t.  When he hears singing, he’s afraid that he and Meghan are going to get in trouble for enjoying it.  When Samheed has an outburst, Alex is worried about him.  He doesn’t trust that engaging with these things that he thought were bad isn’t going to backfire on him or the others.  I feel like this probably also stems from his childhood.  He was always under a lot of pressure to conform from his parents.  And that was pressure that he was never able to live up to.  That led to him being hesitant to believe that these things Mr. Today is talking about are ‘good’, even though he’s curious enough and young enough to want them to be.  This sets up one of Alex’s internal conflicts in this book pretty well-the conflict between wanting the familiarity of Quill and embracing the freedom of Artime.  That’s mostly explored through his and Aaron’s relationship, which I’ll get to later.

"'Whatever,' Alex said. 'I think Samheed is just mean. He was mean back in Quill, and he's still mean. I have no idea what his problem is, and I don't care.'"

 Anyways, after that we learn that Alex is defensive of those he cares about, even if he is kind of hesitant about jumping to their defense at the start.  But we also start to see some of his character flaws.  We see that he, much like Samheed, has some anger issues.  He has an angsty, angry edge to him.  He'll snap at his friends when they're just teasing him or are concerned about him.  He's not afraid to get in a fight, even when he doesn't have the skills to back it up.

"And with all this praise, every day Alex waited anxiously for his private lesson, hoping to hear the same news that Meghan had received already: that Ms. Octavia would be talking to Mr. Today about advancing him to Magical Warrior Training. But every day, in the awkward silence at the end of each session, she merely praised him for his stunning work and sent him on without another word."

We also start to see one of Alex's character traits that is most interesting to me: his ambition.  Because Alex is ambitious.  He's terrified of failure, so he wants to succeed.  He wants to do well in everything.  He throws himself into his painting.  He brims with pride when Ms. Octavia showers praise on him for doing these things that he was told he was wrong for wanting to do.  And he wants to learn magic.  Desperately.  It eats him up inside when Meghan gets to be the first into Magical Warrior Training.  I wouldn't be surprised if he had wanted to be the first one there.  But surely he'll get there soon, right?  He's really good at his art-everyone thinks so.  He's finally succeeding and he loves it.

"Alex stared openmouthed as the mage disappeared from the blackboard. And something deep inside of him, deeper than he thought anything could ever be, quivered and broke into tiny pins that stuck hard into his gut."

Except for reasons that don't make sense to him (how could they?) everyone in his class gets to advance to Magical Warrior Training except for him.  And that stings.  He failed at being a Quillen and now he's failing at being an Artimean.  And at least in Quill he knew why.  He knew exactly what he was doing wrong.  But in Artime?  The poor kid has no clue that it was nothing he had done at all.  And every time one of his friends does magic, or talks about their warrior training, or wears their vest, he is reminded of his failure.  How could he not be?  So he feels like his only option is to isolate himself from them.  To dive completely into his work and paint like a maniac.  Oh, and he totally has depression.  Like, it’s basically canon.

"From that point on, Alex withdrew from the others and took his meals in his room."

We also see that tendency to shut down in the face of failure once more.  Towards the middle of the book, Alex’s immediate response to failure is to shut out his friends and pretend like he doesn’t care.  He isolates himself, he doesn’t talk to anyone, and tries to pretend like he doesn’t care about anything.

"'I wasn't worried either,' offered Meghan. 'Well, not much, anyway.'"

Of course, he does care and he does want his friends in his life, so he eventually decides to reach out to them.  They, of course, have varying responses, with Lani expressing worry about him, Samheed also pretending like he doesn’t care and Meghan. . .acting like she’d expected this.  She doesn’t seem like she was all that worried about Alex when he was isolating himself, and she doesn’t seem all that surprised that he came back to them.  Sure, she was a little annoyed, but she wasn’t hurt or devastated.  She was just kind of resigned.  Like, this is how she’s accustomed to Alex behaving.

Meghan is in a bit of a unique position here, being the only one of the three who was close to Alex growing up.  And her reaction to this makes me wonder if this isn’t the first time that Alex has withdrawn from his friends.  Did he do something similar while they were growing up?  Did he get his first infraction and then disappear from her life for months?  Would he be fine one day and then ignore her the next, as he spiraled deeper and deeper into depression?  I feel like it’s entirely plausible.  Which then makes me wonder, did he do that to Aaron, too?  Because Meghan, Alex, and Aaron were implied to be close (as close as anyone can be in Quill, that is) growing up.  And Alex certainly feels like he and Aaron were close.  But were there times when Alex shut Aaron out?  Were there times when Aaron needed Alex, but Alex wasn’t there?  Did Alex shutting him out lead to Aaron shutting Alex out in return?  Was there a time when Aaron decided that he could live without his distant brother and went to report him for the first time? I don’t know.  But it’s interesting to think about.

"Alex began to miss Aaron terribly now that he felt so distanced from his friends."

 Anyways, back to the book.  Alex’s isolation and his sense of failure are what makes him long for Aaron.  In his head, he focuses on the best parts of Aaron.  He remembers the brother that he thought he had, the brother he was always close with.  The brother he trusted enough to draw in the rain with.  The brother he was willing to sacrifice his life and his social standing for.  The brother who was quiet and scared and cared for him, too, who was the only person who spoke to him in an amphitheater of people letting him be taken to his death in silence.  The brother who grieved him.

"And yet Alex couldn't help feeling like Aaron was somehow different because of their birth link. that maybe, just maybe, Aaron was mourning for him. Over time Alex grew convinced that Aaron belonged here in Artime too."

Alex is the type of person who instinctively thinks the best of people.  I think that's something that remains true throughout the series, although Alex becomes more jaded and less willing to trust that instinct.  Here, he has no reason to believe that he could be wrong about Aaron.  Even after Samheed tells him that Aaron was the one who reported him, Alex can't reconcile that with the view of Aaron that he still holds.  Alex is naive and sweet and trusting.  And then he's isolated and the idealized version of Aaron in his head is the only person he doesn't feel like a failure to.  So of course he starts obsessing over ways to reunite with Aaron and bring him to Artime.

"Mr. Today shook his head and sank back in his chair. 'Oh, oh, oh,' he said quietly, 'what to do?' I am afraid that if Alex starts training, he will use his magic to find his brother. The powerful connection between twins. . .It's a huge risk we don't need right now, especially now that Aaron is in Justine's good graces and under her watchful eye.'"

Something interesting about this phenomenon is that Alex wouldn't have felt as driven to bring Aaron to Artime if Mr. Today hadn't held him back from Magical Warrior Training.  Alex still would have missed Aaron and would have wanted to save him, sure, but he also would have been surrounded by his friends.  He wouldn't have needed Aaron as much as he did in the book.  He also probably wouldn't have felt the need to go about doing it on his own.  Because even after he starts Magical Warrior Training, Alex still doesn't tell anyone about his plans to save Aaron.  I'm not one hundred percent sure why, but I suspect it was because, if he had failed to find a way to bring Aaron to Artime, no one else knowing about his failure would have hurt less (which we kind of see later with Spike).  I also don't think he would have been as worried about failure if Mr. Today hadn't held him back.

Essentially, Mr. Today's own fear over what having a Wanted/Unwanted twin duo would bring was what brought about those problems in the first place.  Maybe if Mr. Today had just let Alex advance, Artime wouldn't have been revealed.  I still think Alex would have tried to save Aaron, but it would have gone very differently.  He would've had the support of his friends from the start and that might've been able to stave off a war. 

burning orb on the chest like the seek spell over his grave

burning orb is also burning heart, reference to the sacred heart of jesus christ (symbol of the boundless and passionate love and devotion despite suffering) (martyr, bore the suffering of the people. alex is Such a religious imagery kinda guy okay, and since marcus had the robes first he’s like the Father who sacrificed the Son, passed the power and the burden) (you get it)

the fire ties into how he died (dragon fire spear)

the flaps over the arms are influenced by clothing from the 13-1400s, and the layers are to reckon the poncho description with the word “robes”