57 pages • 1 hour read
Divine Rivals
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Themes
The Emotional Impact of Written Words
Written words have a significant emotional impact on their recipients in Divine Rivals, and this dynamic ultimately influences the actions and behaviors that the protagonists exhibit throughout the novel, as words inspire both Roman and Iris to take control of their fates and rewrite their own destinies. As the story unfolds, journalism becomes the characters’ primary means of embracing their own agency, for they use the power of their words to inform, inspire, and influence a public who would otherwise remain largely ignorant of the realities of the war. Yet even before they both find their true calling as war correspondents, the characters’ earliest writings still work to inspire, for as early as Chapter 1, Iris mentions reading an article that Roman wrote about a retired baseball player. The narrative emphasizes that baseball was “a sport Iris had never cared about but suddenly found herself ensorcelled by, all due to the poignant and witty tone of Roman’s writing” (11). Iris is nearly hypnotized by Roman’s writing ability in this moment, and the scene foreshadows the power that his words will continue to have over her as their semi-anonymous correspondence develops. The effectiveness of his writing also implies the larger goal of the characters’ writing to use words to inspire others to emotion and to action on important topics: an incredibly useful skill in the struggle to convince readers that Enva, not Dacre, holds the moral high ground in the ongoing war.
Iris herself understands how to wield words effectively in order to create a profound emotional impact, and she even helps Roman to use this technique more effectively in his early article about missing soldiers, claiming that he should “want the readers to feel this wound in their chest, even though they’ve never experienced a missing loved one” (69). As a result of her coaching, his article inspires readers’ empathy, compassion, and desire to offer support in any way possible. Iris’s articles as a war correspondent for the Inkridden Tribune also have a similar impact; finally freed from the restrictions of Zeb Autry’s limited worldview, she embraces her true calling of finding poignant ways to speak the truth of the war to the public of Cambria, thus using her talents to educate people and change her world for the better, as well as preparing citizens for the inevitability of the conflict that is encroaching upon their territory. As Roman reveals when he joins Iris in Avalon Bluff, “the city of Oath is reading about a not-so-distant war and realizing it is only a matter of time before it reaches them” (189).
The correspondence between Iris and Roman via their enchanted typewriters provides another example of the emotional impact of written words. Though Roman is at first inclined to dislike Iris, he finds himself to be “deeply moved by her writing and the memories she shared” (39) in her letters to Forest. Iris’s ability to evoke strong emotions in her readers is both awe-inspiring and a source of envy for Roman. Her letters also help him to come to terms with his hidden grief over Del’s death and inspire him to refuse to allow “[his] father to write [his] story” (149). Her words of encouragement to “Carver” also allow Roman to abandon his life of regrets and chase after what he desires. Roman therefore begins to see her letters as “a light for [him] to follow” (250). Their letters to each other thus strip away their individual armor, allowing them to show vulnerabilities that they have long since hidden away.
When Iris’s mother dies, Iris herself is left alone in her apartment, isolated from the world around her despite the proximity of the city’s busy activities. Once Iris learns that the person she’s writing to isn’t Forest, she still continues writing to him because doing so has become a source of comfort for her; as she states, it “helps to know someone is hearing [her] […] that [she’s] not alone” (84). The ability for written words to connect people across great distances, even in one’s loneliest periods, is a powerful magic of its own. Accordingly, Iris provides a similar service for the soldiers near the front lines, offering to write letters to their friends and family—to “people she would never see but was all the same linked to in this moment” (137).
The Intensity of Wartime Relationships
An inevitable effect of war is the irreparable damage it causes to the families it tears apart, but another quality is its ability to bring together found families—among fellow soldiers, friends, and strangers. When Forest leaves his family to fight in the war, Aster is driven toward an addiction to alcohol that ultimately leads to her death. For months, Iris receives no letters from Forest despite his promise to write. Her anger continues to grow along with her feelings of abandonment, her thoughts spiraling through repeating questions: “What about [her]? What about Mum? How can [he] love this goddess more than [them]?” (49-50). Iris’s grief and anger cause her to don the metaphorical armor that hides her vulnerable heart and emotions from others. As a result, she becomes isolated, and her only emotional outlet becomes the letters that she writes to Forest, which mysteriously disappear from her wardrobe.
After Aster’s death, Iris realizes how much her career “pale[s] in comparison to other things” (94), such as her only remaining family member missing from the war front. Determined to find Forest and to report the truth on the war, Iris sets off toward Avalon Bluff as a war correspondent, and it is in this personal quest that she ultimately finds a family of her own when she meets Marisol and Attie and integrates more fully into the Avalon Bluff community. When Roman eventually joins her, Iris’s new family is complete, and the bonds that join her chosen family are stronger than those of her family of origin because they have been chosen and embraced consciously.
While Iris is aware of how profoundly the war has devastated her family from afar, she is not prepared for the ways in which the war can alter a person who has become embroiled in its moment-to-moment carnage. While experiencing the horrors in the trenches, Iris contemplates “how much [she and Roman] would change in this war” (219) and wonders what scars they might accumulate in the process. While gathering personal accounts from wounded soldiers, Iris “soak[s] in the stories of courage and loyalty and pain they shared” (225), learning from their experiences: their shared losses and victories, their moments of grief and joy, and the trauma of the battles that they help each other to survive. Just like the soldiers, Iris and her own found family forge new bonds that transcend traditional family ties. Iris comes to love her friends at Avalon Bluff and realizes that “this was her family now” and that “there were bonds that ran deeper than blood” (308). Iris begins to view Marisol’s bed-and-breakfast as her own home, for she accumulates shared moments of warmth and joy among her found family. When Dacre finally attacks Avalon Bluff and an eithral drops what Iris believes to be a bomb, her life flashes before her eyes, and it is telling that instead of seeing her brother and mother, she imagines Roman, along with Keegan and Marisol’s garden. This reflexive thought in a moment of high stress indicates the fundamental shift in her definition of family among the tragedies of war.
The golden locket containing portraits of Iris and Forest serves as a symbol of their original family bonds throughout the novel. Aster first wears it to keep the memory of Forest with her after he leaves for war. When Aster dies, Iris wears it in hopes that it will lead her to Forest. Iris eventually loses it in the communication trenches and imagines it being “trampled into the mud of the trench” (241). Slowly, as she’s faced with the horrors of the war, Iris loses hope that Forest is alive and becomes closer to her found family at Avalon Bluff. As she embraces her new life and falls in love with Roman, the locket is replaced by her wedding ring, and this shift illustrates how wartime loyalties alter familial relationships in unexpected ways.
At the end of the novel, Forest and Iris reunite, but it is a bittersweet encounter at best, for not only has Forest separated Iris from her found family and her beloved, but he is also no longer quite the brother she remembers. The ravages of war have changed them both irrevocably, and her brother has become a stranger to her. When she grieves the loss of Roman to the enemy, Forest is silent and does not offer her comfort—“[t]he things he would have done in the past” (340). Iris is therefore forced to acknowledge just how profoundly life with Dacre has changed him. Meanwhile, Forest wears the golden locket as a sign that he still clings to the idea of the family that he has lost. Throughout his traumatic war experiences, the thought of his family has kept him going, and although he saves his sister from the front lines and hopes to reacclimate to life in Oath, he now finds his sister just as much a stranger as he seems to her. As the narrative states, “she felt like an entirely different person” (349-50). The changes that brother and sister have both weathered because of the war strains their reunion and foreshadows a dramatic familial conflict to come in the sequel.
The Dangers of Censorship
Dacre steadily gains ground in the war due to the extreme media censorship that runs rampant throughout the east, whose officials wish to keep the truth of the war from their citizens. Censorship involves the deliberate suppression of speech, media, or other information. Usually, censorship applies to materials that officials deem to be harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient. Often, the distribution of knowledge is controlled by the governing bodies of a nation in such cases. When the war first unfolded several months ago, the west called for help, but Oath was slow to believe in the necessity of the war until Enva’s music began inspiring eastern citizens to enlist in the fight against Dacre. However, the chancellor of Oath remained adamant about avoiding the conflict and retaliated with a false narrative designed to vilify Enva as a siren luring eastern citizens to their deaths.
The propaganda is so successful in diminishing support in the east that many citizens come to believe that Dacre is on the right side of the conflict. Thus, “[w]hile Oath was sleeping, the west was burning” (44). In the novel’s present day, the chancellor still controls “what the newspaper could share, quietly spreading propaganda” (16). This unethical abuse of power causes the people of Oath to remain blissfully unprepared and secure in their decision to remain uninvolved in the war because they believe themselves to be safely beyond its reach. The propaganda that journalists like Zeb and politicians like the chancellor spread about the dangers of Enva’s music also vilify any source of enlightenment or education about the gods and the war as another manifestation of the enemy. This narrative distracts eastern citizens from the real danger—Dacre—or, worse, converts them into becoming his supporters.
While working on obituaries for the Gazette, Iris “imagine[s] people would be more inclined to read the eulogies” (12) if the newspaper stated the causes of death. This line of thought can be likened to the dangers of censorship, whereby the people of Oath are uninterested in the news of the war because Zeb and the chancellor work so hard to diminish the more realistic war narratives from the west. By eliminating direct coverage and firsthand testimonials of the tragedies, they further their agenda of obfuscation and succeed in convincing the east that the war “is never going to reach [them] here in Oath […] It’s a western problem and [they] should carry on as normal” (17). Iris and Attie therefore become determined to spread the truth as war correspondents; their decision to travel to the war front and spend a week in the trenches to learn the truth about the war is born of the frustrating ignorance they have long observed in the citizens of the east. Ethical and unregulated journalism can make these truths an easily accessible source of knowledge for the people of the east yet is made impossible by heavy media censorship. The “undercurrent of fear and half-hearted preparations” (176) in Oath are a result of this censorship and will leave Oath completely vulnerable once Dacre arrives at their doorstep. Positioning themselves as war correspondents is a clever way to edge around the censorship issue in the east and report firsthand facts and accounts on the war to help people in the east learn the truth before it’s too late.
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