Recently, I’ve been thinking about the use of subtlety in books. Or rather, in the case of many recent releases of TV, movies, and books which have become popular, the lack thereof.

Recently, I started reading Furies of Calderon by Jim Butcher. It’s a book I had heard a lot about over the years, including a somewhat infamous story in some writing circles that Jim Butcher actually wrote it on a dare given to him during a debate about what makes good books good. In this debate, so the story goes, Jim Butcher was insisting that a good author can make a good book out of any idea, no matter how bad. The other party to the debate (whose name I do not recall), was insisting that a good book has to be based on a good idea for the book, and that without a fundamentally good idea, the book will always be bad. At some point during the discussion, one of the two said “Well, what about Pokemon meets the Roman Legion? That’s a terrible idea. Could it become a good book?”

And thus was born Furies of Calderon.

I do not know the truth of this story beyond that I heard it from an author who claimed to have been present for the discussion, but authors, like all people, sometimes stretch the truth. However, in reading the opening of Furies of Calderon, I had a surprising experience with the use of subtlety.

In the early opening–I believe it’s the very first chapter–a character is entering a rebel camp disguised as a slave with her mentor figure acting as her owner. Her goal is to learn about the camp to report to her ruler, and very shortly into this investigation, she makes several obvious blunders.

To start, she is left outside a tent as her mentor is brought inside and almost immediately a slave woman is shoved out in front of her. She begins walking away with the other woman and no one questions her, which is suspicious in itself. Then, she asks a number of specific, direct questions of this woman about troop movements and future plans of the rebellion. At this moment, she knows nothing about this woman except that she appears to be a slave. My first thought was “huh…so this character is dumb. Got it.” After all, even if this other woman is a slave who won’t be loyal to this rebellion, there’s no reason to think she won’t trade on her knowledge of the main character’s curiosity to her masters for some extra safety or comfort. Then, the other woman drops a piece of paper and shrugs it off as unimportant, but the character grabs the paper and quickly reads it, discovering that a particular noble is involved in the plot. Again, my alarm bells are going off. Why would this random servant have this paper? Why would she be careless about it? Why is this character so dumb as to admit to being able to read to a woman who is asking her if she can read in surprise? Lo and behold, the other woman was not a slave, but was a magic user who had disguised herself as a slave and was trying to catch the character in obviously spying on them.

Shortly thereafter, the same character is being held captive with her mentor and she mentions to her mentor that it’s strange that the rebels are keeping the two of them alive. If they were to escape, the character says, it would be terrible for the rebels because they know so much. The rebel leader takes that exact moment to walk in, say “Yeah, good point, captive!” and have her mentor taken from the room. She hears some sound which she assumes is her mentor being killed, and then the leader returns with a sword covered in blood. And I’m thinking “So…the leader hates taking care of his weapons and just lets them rust with blood and guts on them?” The leader did nothing to clean the weapon outside and is doing nothing to clean the weapon inside. I’m wondering if Jim Butcher knows that blood is really, really bad for weapons. And then the character realizes that it is weird that he made sure she could see the blood. Now I know what’s going on. This entire thing was a set up. The rebels knew they were coming and they’re trying to convert her in, honestly, pretty clumsy ways. The character catches on at the same time, and while nothing relieves her of her earlier stupidity, I feel a bit better about her. Maybe she’s just young.

I bring this opening up to talk about the subtlety here. It feels like there isn’t any, but Jim Butcher expected us to realize the issues with this scene. He didn’t explain why the leader leaving blood on his sword was weird. He just had the character think “Wait…why was he so careful to make sure the sword had blood on it when he came back.” He trusted his audience to understand, from that thought, that it was weird for someone to kill a person and not immediately clean the blood (assuming no other danger, of course). This is the subtlety that I’ve started missing in a lot of more recent media.

No one trusts their audience anymore, and as a result, we get the Barbie movie, which didn’t trust people to believe that ALL sexism is bad without pounding it into your head for two hours. Or The Traitor Baru Cormorant, which was so afraid you wouldn’t understand its colonialism message that it spent a third of the book telling you about the slow destruction of the main character’s childhood home due to colonialism before it ever got started with the damn story. That story might have been good…if it had been given the time to breathe and build, but I never managed to finish the thing because I was so bored by the time I got into the actual story I just couldn’t care anymore… even after getting through 3/4ths of the book. We also get, from what I’ve heard from my fellow readers, Iron Widow and a dozen other similar stories so caught up in explaining how cultural traditions that don’t fit modern ideologies were always evil that they forget how to tell a story.

If you ask a writer why subtlety is dying, some number of them will claim it’s the fault of TV, streaming, and social media. Instant gratification means people don’t think critically about things any more. But how can they when you’re too afraid of being misunderstood to not tell them something? That’s what makes books great. The pieces left for the readers to debate.