*reads reviews of The Blue Sword with mounting puzzlement*

...why does everyone think tBS is a bildungsroman? It isn't. I'm finding a lot of criticism because people say it's a bad example of its genre, that Harry doesn't actually learn and grow. But... she's not supposed to. Isn't that obvious?

This book is a deconstruction, in the original rather than popular meaning of the word, of the fairy tale. Harry gets given everything, yes: sword skill, language, a place to belong. She doesn't have to struggle for any of it, no. Because that's not the point. The point is that being magically gifted with all these things is a royal pain in the ass and involves becoming the tool of magic, like it or not--and a bewildered, ignorant tool at that. The wonderful fairy tale where everything comes easy is turned over to show the consequences of not having to struggle for language and place and skill: it means she doesn't actually know what she's doing and hasn't had a chance to grow into these things or, significantly, to control them.

So will people stop blithering on about that and talk about things I can use for supplementary materials, like the absent colonized, the links between whiteness, demonicness, and divinity, the gender politics, or the construction of Damarian culture.