Throne of Glass

Good versus evil is a hallmark theme of the High Fantasy genre, and Maas explores this dynamic on the personal and epic scale through morally complex characters.

Through Celaena, Maas explores how moral good is defined by a person’s impact and intent. Celaena is unapologetic about her history as an assassin, yet she resists Chaol’s desire to reduce her entire moral being to her criminal past. She is ruthless in her pursuit of personal freedom, yet even from the earliest pages of the novel demonstrates concern for the wellbeing of others. Having just agreed to compete for Champion and eventual freedom, Celaena wants “to think of a celebratory tune, but [can] only recall a solitary line from the mournful bellowing of the Eyllwe work songs”(19), preoccupied by the suffering of enslaved Eyllwe rebels in Endovier. Celaena has made moral compromises for survival—all the while maintaining an inherent goodness. Most obviously, though as a child, Celaena wanted to be a healer, after being orphaned she was forced to become a professional murderer. Still, Celaena does not absolve herself of her own crimes, feeling “stained and tainted by her crimes” in Elena’s tomb (184). Celaena recognizes the evil of her actions, and sees the mitigating circumstances—tragedy, orphanhood, debt—that drove her to violence.

Chaol cannot reconcile his strict moral code with ethical nuance; he considers himself damned for killing Cain, even though Cain was suffused with evil and about to kill Celaena. Maas critiques Chaol’s moral viewpoint by contrasting it with Celaena’s. It takes Chaol’s moral crisis regarding Cain’s death to shift his moral compass. At the end of the novel, he finds “hope that he had not lost his soul in the act of killing, hope that humanity could still be found, and honor could be regained” (397). Through Chaol and Celaena, Maas posits that while good people are capable of evil, the desire to do good defines them.  

Maas resists aligning the supernatural exclusively with either good or evil. Magic is an amoral tool, its ethical nature dependent on the user’s purpose. The King, who demonstrates deep knowledge of Wyrdmarks, enacts violence on a mass scale, committing genocide from behind the aegis of political power. Duke Perrington’s smaller acts of evil are facilitated by the mysterious powers of his black ring. Similarly, Wyrdmarks increase Cain’s capacity for evil. Yet, Celaena is also aligned with magic through her lost powers and her supernatural encounters with Elena’s spirit. Nehemia sums up the novel’s approach to magic and morality, telling Celaena, “We keep [Wyrdmarks] a secret because of the terrible power that they wield. Terrible, in that it can be used for good or evil” (378).

The larger the ethical scale, the less nuanced the novel’s morality becomes. Elena, in her invocation to Celaena to destroy the evil, implores Celaena to “Forget your friendships, forget your deaths and oaths. Destroy it […] before a portal is ripped open so wide that there can be no undoing it” (186). Although the morality of the individual is a mutable and conditional, Elena’s dramatic call to arms reveals that the epic delineation between good and evil is perfectly clear.