Last week, I read Marissa Meyer’s Renegades series, consisting of Renegades, Arch-Enemies, and Supernova (Young Adult Science Fiction, I guess? With a cumulative word count of 1572 pages).

“The Renegades are a syndicate of prodigies – humans with extraordinary abilities – who emerged from the ruins of a crumbled society and established peace and order where chaos reigned. As champions of justice, they remain a symbol of hope and courage to everyone … except the villains they once overthrew. Nova has a reason to hate the Renegades, and she is on a mission for vengeance. As she gets closer to her target, she meets Adrian, a Renegade boy who believes in justice – and Nova. But Nova’s allegiance is to a villain who has the power to end them both.”

This is a VERY SPOILER HEAVY REVIEW! So. You know. If you don’t want the spoilers, you might want to read someone else’s review. But if you want to join me in my deeper thoughts about these books, then please, read on 🙂

These books were clearly written by someone with a love of superheroes and Marissa Meyer talks at length in the Questions and Answers section at the back of the Renegades book that the X-Men were a strong influence into her younger years, as they were in mine. Those were my main comic books when I was growing up and I still have my entire comic book collection, which I do reread from time to time. The X-Men were the first stories I remember reading which dealt heavily with topics about discrimination and persecution, especially when dealing with extreme physical differences, so I definitely understood the premise of Renegades, with the prodigies being hated and feared throughout time for being different or special.

Renegades begins with trauma and violence – the brutal murder of a young girl’s family while she hid helplessly in a closet. She uses her prodigy power to put the assailant to sleep and then stands over him with a loaded gun, attempting to convince herself to kill him, as he killed her family. She is eventually saved by her uncle, who we later learn is “the villain” of the story, Ace Anarchy, and she spend the entire series torn in both loyalty and actions between morality and revenge. And while she *asks* the questions about equality and justice repeatedly, I feel as though this series falls a little short in demonstrating any true sense of justice.

What do I mean?

Let’s look at how “the heroes” and “the villains” both look at their world of Gatlon City. The Anarchists (“the villains”) see how prodigies are murdered, abused, or left as slaves to their world. Their solution is to destroy all the governments, banks, law enforcers, and people with power in order to give everyone equality. The Renegades (“the heroes”) decided a dog-eat-dog world absolutely sucked so they started banding together in costumes and telling normal people to stay inside and they would fight the monsters.

The Anarchists believed in a world where everyone had all the same obstacles and potential as everyone else, which made everyone equal in their eyes. When the Anarchists were overthrown by the Renegades, the ruling council of the five most powerful of the costumed vigilantes (Renegades) decided they would make all the rules and disallow any disagreement. This provided rules but not growth for their civilization. The “average citizen” wound up trading a world of no rules for a world of too many rules, and rules they had no say in and no ability to challenge. Oh, and then their ruling council decides it’s okay to neutralize people’s prodigy powers without their knowledge or consent, after their witch hunts to hold people accountable for crimes supposedly committed years ago when times were hard and families were starving? THEN they’re okay with public neutralization AND execution in the SAME entertainment show of force at the arena?

The Renegades certainly weren’t very heroic.

Nothing about either system did anything to help the “average citizen”. The Renegades didn’t do anything to finish providing true public infrastructure to Gatlon City. Their whole purpose enabled violence as the only acceptable way to be a hero, which was shown at the very beginning with the recruitment trials in the arena. The only thing being tested in the arena is combat skills and combat capabilities. I would think the Renegades would heavily appreciate and recruit prodigies with less combat skills. I also would have liked to see more “normal” prodigies, like maybe someone who can remove all mold spores who worked as a janitor in a school. Or someone who had the ability to magically clean any reflective surface they touched working as a window washer. Or even prodigies who have the ability to make delicious food, no matter what ingredients are available to them. I would have liked to see a lot more prodigies using skills effectively in their world and I would have liked the Renegades to understand that people are more valuable than just as cannon fodder for violence.

I guess that’s the whole point of this series, yes?

I think the books didn’t go far enough to show ways of taking care of everyone. The ruling hero council conducted their trials so they could have flashy shows for combat patrols. And I don’t think it occurred to them to have anything in place for those denied a place on a combat patrol unit. What about a power like those who sense the history of artifacts? Why not “hire” them for the artifacts department? And why not hire those with flame or food related gifts into the cafeteria. You can’t tell me there aren’t prodigies out there with food related abilities. Or even encouraging prodigies with data skills or pattern analysis skills to look into histories and archives because you could take a lot of that trauma so many of the pre-supernova prodigies have and actually solve their issues. You’ve got a landlord who finds an 11 month old screaming baby and turns her into the orphanage on the same night her sister goes missing and her parents are murdered and that also happens to be the same night and location a major superhero is murdered? And you don’t have anyone going through records to find those orphans and help them get back to their families? But the end of the book didn’t really make the case that there’s a place for everyone – it just showed that things will also devolve into violence and hierarchies. The Supernova at the end didn’t actually solve anything. It probably actually made everything much, much worse. And it strikes me repeatedly how every piece of media believes mass violence is the only way to make positive, lasting change.

Now everyone has powers and there aren’t anymore “heroes” or “villains”. I mean. It was a good story. But. It stopped short. And there were no negative repercussions for the ruling hero council for not actually taking care of *everyone* in the first place. And while Narcissa and the Rejects were a necessary plot device to show “average citizens” in the city, I don’t think it went far enough. I didn’t really feel the “average citizen” struggle in this series.

Now that I’ve gone on at length about ethical considerations in superhero societies, I’m going to rant just a little bit about teenage characters and romantic plots.

I am absolutely exhausted of teenage saviors and their hormone-driven angst. The main characters in this series are all teenagers and honestly, teenagers maybe shouldn’t be the ones out on combat patrols, making judgments about who should have powers and who shouldn’t. Frostbite’s team proved that. And I think I would have been forcing everyone I know to read this story if Adrian had been Adrienne, instead. Like, if this was the exact same story but Adrian’s character had been female instead, I think that would have been amazing and I’m hoping someone does a gender-bender fanfiction of this series so I can save it and read it for forever. Either that, or I’d have to write it myself and that’s just not something I’m good at

Overall, I’m glad I read this series and I’m pretty sure I would read it again, but I’m also happy I checked it out from the library, as it’s way too het for me. And, yes, I know Adrian has two dads, but I would have preferred the main pairing in the story to be women. So overall, probably a 3 on my rating scale.