Revenge and Retribution Theme Analysis

She’s unbelievable. She’s literally unbelievable.

So of course Athena gets every good thing, because that’s how this industry works. Publishing picks a winner—someone attractive enough, someone cool and young and, oh, we’re all thinking it, let’s just say it, “diverse” enough—and lavishes all its money and resources on them. It’s so fucking arbitrary. Or perhaps not arbitrary, but it hinges on factors that have nothing to do with the strength of one’s prose. Athena—a beautiful, Yale-educated, international, ambiguously queer woman of color—has been chosen by the Powers That Be. Meanwhile, I’m just brown-eyed, brown-haired June Hayward, from Philly—no matter how hard I work, or how well I write, I’ll never be Athena Liu.

Though I feel the vicious kind of jealousy, too, watching Athena talk about how much she adores her editor, a literary powerhouse named Marlena Ng who “plucked me from obscurity” and who “just really understands what I’m trying to do on a craft level, you know?” I stare at Athena’s brown eyes, framed by those ridiculously large lashes that make her resemble a Disney forest animal, and I wonder, What is it like to be you? What is it like to be so impossibly perfect, to have every good thing in the world? And maybe it’s the cocktails, or my overactive writer’s imagination, but I feel this hot coiling in my stomach, a bizarre urge to stick my fingers in her berry-red-painted mouth and rip her face apart, to neatly peel her skin off her body like an orange and zip it up over myself.

Fine. Here’s how I really felt, when things came down to it.

At Yale, I once dated a graduate student from the philosophy department who did population ethics. […] Some of his arguments were a little extreme—he didn’t think, for instance, that there is any moral obligation to follow wills of the deceased if there is an overriding interest in redistributing wealth elsewhere, or that there are strong moral objections to using cemetery grounds for, say, housing for the poor. The general theme of his research was under what circumstances someone counts as a moral agent that deserves consideration. I didn’t understand much of his work, but his central argument was quite compelling: we owe nothing to the dead.

Especially when the dead are thieves and liars, too.

And fuck it, I’ll just say it: taking Athena’s manuscript felt like reparations, payback for the things that Athena took from me.

I used to think mean teachers were a special kind of monster, but it turns out that cruelty comes naturally. Also, it’s fun. Teenagers, after all, are unformed identities with undeveloped brains. No matter how clever they are, they still don’t know much about anything, and it’s easy to embarrass them for their ill-prepared remarks.

Skylar gets the worst of it. Technically her story—a whodunnit set in San Francisco’s Chinatown, in which none of the witnesses will cooperate with the police because they have their own secrets and codes of honor—is not bad. […] Still, her inexperience shows. Skylar’s exposition is clumsy in parts, she makes use of quite a few contrived coincidences […] and she hasn’t figured out how to toe the line between tense and histrionic dialogue.

I could gently correct these tendencies while encouraging Skylar to think up the solutions herself.

The truth is fluid. There is always another way to spin the story, another wrench to throw into the narrative. I have learned this now, if nothing else. Candice may have won this round, but I won’t let her erase my voice. I will tell our audience what they ought to believe. I will undermine all of her assertions, ascribe new motivations, and alter the sequence of events. I will present a new account that is compelling precisely because it aligns with what our audience, deep down, really wants to believe: that I have done no wrong, and that this is, once again, an instance of nasty, selfish, overdemanding people fabricating a tale of racism where there isn’t one. This is cancel culture gone deadly. Look at my cast. Look at my hospital bills.