60 pages • 2-hour read
Fearless
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Themes
Gaining Strength From the Power of Love
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.
Fearless conveys how the power of love can transcend time, space, and impossible obstacles through its depiction of Paedyn Gray and Kai Azer’s relationship. As an Ordinary and an Elite, Paedyn and Kai aren’t allowed to be together, and their situation becomes even more complicated once Kai’s brother, Kitt, claims Paedyn as his new wife and queen. Paedyn and Kai are living in the same castle and working together to save the kingdom while being kept apart. The novel uses the forbidden-romance and forced-proximity tropes to intensify the stakes of their relationship. These tropes also offer challenges to the characters’ connection, compelling them to ask if their love is strong enough to last amid their tumultuous reality. However, with their happy ending, the novel offers a message of hope, highlighting how the love and support of another can bolster the strength of the individual.
Paedyn and Kai’s distinct and fervent love helps them survive a network of emotional and physical challenges. As the prospective new queen of a united Ilya, Paedyn is forced to complete a series of Trials to test her bravery, benevolence, and brutality. Kai can’t complete the Trials for her, but he does stay by her side throughout. This is particularly true when he accompanies her across the Shallows Seas and keeps her out of danger. When Kai isn’t physically by Paedyn’s side, the memory of his love helps her combat her fear. The same is true for Kai, who carries Paedyn constantly in his heart. Together and apart, the lovers offer each other support and strength.
Paedyn and Kai’s love also grants them a sense of the future. Throughout the Powerless Trilogy, Paedyn and Kai have been convinced of their impending deaths, and their encounters with tragedy and loss have threatened their resolve. When they’re together, however, they’re able to believe in a new life. They often tell each other, “You are my inevitable” (169), a profession that conjures notions of eternity. Furthermore, both Paedyn and Kai declare that they “will not stop loving [each other]” despite the obstacles between them (187). Their refusal to let each other go captures their belief that their love can survive and will let them build a future together.
Paedyn and Kai’s wedding at the end of the novel reifies the enduring power of their love. They have battled monsters, combatted wicked Elites, delved into the past to discover the truth of their origins, and traversed tempestuous oceans, yet none of these ventures has pulled them apart. Rather, the obstacles they’ve overcome have strengthened their bond and facilitated their “happily ever after.” With their example, the novel suggests that the individual needs love to survive life’s trials and that surviving these trials can strengthen the individual’s spirit and heart.
Personal Growth Through Challenge
Paedyn’s return to Ilya launches her quest for self-discovery and autonomy. Throughout the Powerless Trilogy, Paedyn has proven herself to be a strong-willed, big-hearted character. In Fearless, however, Paedyn must learn how to grow beyond her past life in Loot Alley. In particular, Kitt and the Ilya Elites want her “to prove herself worthy of the throne—and [the court’s] loyalty” (95). Because Paedyn still sees herself as an Ordinary young girl fighting for her life, she is unsure if she can inhabit her new royal rule and rule the united kingdom she’s always dreamed of. Throughout the novel, she must confront her insecurities, face her fears, and fight for her life—personal challenges that ultimately help her evolve into the powerful queen she becomes at the end of the novel. Through Paedyn’s journey, the novel highlights the importance of facing challenges as essential to one’s personal growth and development.
The novel uses repeated images of Paedyn regarding herself in the mirror to convey her gradual internal growth. When she first settles into her new chambers, she sees herself in a negative, inferior light: “I am the very object of weakness. I am loathed by all of Ilya. And if I am to be put on a pedestal, even to save their kingdom, they will gladly push me off” (24). Regarding her physical form, she sees her ragged hair, dirty skin, tattered clothes, and crusted nails as evidence that she isn’t good enough.
In the days and weeks that follow, Paedyn’s self-regard begins to change. The more obstacles she overcomes and tests she survives, the stronger she feels. She empowers herself by standing up for herself, claiming her strength, and using her voice. As a result, when she sees herself in the mirror again, the woman she sees looking back at her is transformed. This phenomenon is most pronounced in the latter third of the novel:
A queen stares back at me in the mirror. Her gaze is sharp, bright like the Shallows she survived and lined with kohl as dark as the cave she crawled out of. A slight shimmer coats her eyelids, right above the dark lashes that fan atop powdered cheeks. […] She looks lethal. Formidable. And, oddly, she doesn’t look like a stranger (439).
This time, Paedyn sees herself as the woman she has grown into, noting her strength, confidence, and ferocity. She also sees herself through the lens of the trials she’s overcome. She likens the sharpness of her gaze and the darkness of her eyes to the Shallows and the caves; these metaphors imply that overcoming these trials has empowered her. Paedyn’s transformation over the course of Fearless underscores the novel’s message about the importance of accepting life’s challenges to grow spiritually and emotionally.
Confronting Grief and Trauma to Move Forward
Paedyn’s journey toward self-empowerment is entangled with her work to overcome her traumatic past. Throughout the novel, she is faced with constant reminders of her life in Loot Alley: her friendship with Adena; the day Adena died; her upbringing with her father, Adam Gray; the day Adam died; and all the mistakes that she believes she’s made since. She is haunted by memories of her traumas, which appear on the page in the form of dreams and flashbacks. These “hauntings,” as she calls them, originate from Paedyn’s unresolved grief and perpetual fear of herself. She is also plagued by guilt, blaming herself for failing to save Adena and Adam. She knows that she’s capable of violence, too, and fears that her anger over losing Adena and Adam might unleash itself in irreparable ways. For Paedyn to fully grow as a person and move into the future, Roberts asserts, she must first face her grief, fear, and past trauma.
Paedyn gradually begins to acknowledge and process her trauma as she anticipates her wedding and coronation and completes the Trials. Because she has been involved in the Trials before, they trigger her memories of the past:
If I return from these Trials, it will be as less of myself. I’m running out of loved ones to watch die in my arms, so perhaps it will be me this time around. And maybe it’s better that way—to die before this life steals the warmth Adena sewed into my soul (128-29).
At this juncture of the novel, Paedyn isn’t yet ready to confront her grief and fear; she regards death as a ready escape from her internal unrest. However, when she emerges from the Trials unscathed, she begins to realize that facing her fear is helping her combat and grow beyond it.
The same is true of Paedyn’s grief and trauma—once she starts to acknowledge their effects on her psyche, she can begin to heal from them. She takes active steps to do so when she returns to Loot Alley, for example. In one such scene, Paedyn acknowledges that “[e]verywhere [she] look[s], [her] past stare[s] back. It follows [her] still, here in the Loot” (323). This setting conjures reminders of Paedyn’s former life and raises memories of her late father and best friend. Once she faces these memories, she can make peace with them. A pivotal scene occurs when she meets Mak in her and Adena’s old fort. With him, she actively lets herself grieve Adena for the first time, releasing the trauma of the deaths of her loved ones. This scene marks a turning point, after which Paedyn can move forward into her new role as queen and, later, her relationship with Kai. Her journey to reclaim her life and move into the future first required that she confront the roots of her trauma; after she does so, she quickly claims her new power and future.
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