57 pages • 1 hour read
The Ballad of Never After
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Manipulation
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussions of manipulative or abusive relationships and violence.
The characters of The Ballad of Never After manipulate one another and various situations for their own ends, whether through interpersonal interaction or the effects of curses. Most of the secondary characters in the book manipulate Evangeline, though Evangeline is not always aware that it’s happening. However, after the events of the prequel, Evangeline is predisposed to believe that Jacks is manipulating her. Garber explores the dynamics of manipulative relationships through Jacks and Evangeline such as when he isolates her from others or uses her to open the Valory Arch. In Chapter 10, when Evangeline struggles not to turn into a vampire, Chaos tells her that Jacks wants her to remain human, but Evangeline states that Jacks “just want[s] her to think that he worried as another way to manipulate her” (76). Her explicit awareness of this is unique in the book, which serves as a marker of Jacks’s and Evangeline’s interrelated character developments. Elements of victim blaming are implicit in Jacks and Evangeline’s romantic arc. The novel implies that, when Jacks doesn’t live up to Evangeline’s expectations, Evangeline blames him for not doing something that he never said he would do. This dynamic creates a problematic assertion that Evangeline is partly to blame for having incorrect expectations of Jacks.
LaLa also manipulates Evangeline, and LaLa’s character development hence revolves around this theme as information is revealed to the reader regarding the curses that she has placed on Apollo. Garber makes both Jacks and LaLa manipulate Evangeline in order to build a textured characterization for Evangeline for the reader to engage with since Evangeline reacts differently to both Jacks and LaLa. While Evangeline claims to hate Jacks for how he’s treated her, she never says the same about LaLa; she is more forgiving of LaLa’s manipulation. Evangeline feels that LaLa’s manipulation is justified because LaLa did it in the name of love—this generates some irony since Jacks also manipulates Evangeline for love.
In addition to interpersonal interactions, magic and curses also manipulate Evangeline and others throughout the novel. Curses in the novel hence externalize the theme of manipulation. The archer curse forces Evangeline to run from Apollo, for example. At the Hollow, Jacks also uses the mirth stone to infuse the inn with magic; when Evangeline removes the stone from the clock, the magic fades, and Jacks appears to go from loving her to hating her. Curses cause the characters to question their own thoughts and what they perceive from others. While magic and curses provide the foundation of the fantasy genre, Garber also uses them to generate scenarios in which characters react to various forms of manipulation.
The Power of Love
In Chapter 19, Evangeline puzzles over the definition of love, finally deciding that love is like a war and that “winning at love [is] less about succeeding in a battle and more about continuing to fight” (137). With this intense analogy, The Ballad of Never After explores the power that love can have.
The characters of the book have different expectations of love. Evangeline’s expectations allude to those inspired by fairy-tale endings: She wants love to be beautiful and powerful. Aligned with her metafictional interest in endings, she believes that true love will always triumph, no matter what it’s up against. Having been hurt by love before, Jacks sees love as something fragile and elusive. Like Jacks, LaLa desperately seeks her true love but sees love as something that she’s incomplete without and that she can only share with one specific person. These characters have different ideas of what makes love true: Jacks understands that love requires work to find, but his fear may make him cling too tightly; LaLa is committed to finding the one person whom she believes will make her whole, but in doing so, she limits herself and distances herself from other possibilities. This theme hence underpins the development of each of these characters, as Garber uses its power to provide motivation for the actions.
The novel’s allusions to fairy tales borrows from their happier and their darker aspects. This is shown through this theme; the relationship between Evangeline and Jacks also allows Garber to explore the darker connotations of the power of love. Because of love, Evangeline continuously puts her faith in Jacks, only to have it broken. By contrast, Jacks wants to love Evangeline, but he fears harming her like he did with the last girl he loved. Both Jacks and Evangeline hold tight to their own beliefs because of the power of love, and this dynamic results in harm—sometimes, this harm comes in the form of explicit physical pain and violence, which reinforces the analogy of love as a war.
Apollo and Evangeline’s relationship illustrates the role of cursed love in the story world; love’s power is shown to be analogous to the magic of the genre as well as to war. The archer curse pulls Evangeline and Apollo toward one another while also forcing Apollo to hunt Evangeline. Evangeline’s desire to break the curse creates an allusion to abusive relationships: It presents someone in an abusive relationship trying to “fix” or help their abuser. This similarly highlights the darker connotations of the power of love since Evangeline attempts to help someone trying to harm her. She has no proof that Apollo doesn’t want to hurt her, but she fights to free him, putting herself directly in harm’s way to do so. While Garber employs curses as part of the fantasy genre, she uses love to inject the novel with a non-fantastical force: The fact that love is often a greater danger than curses is designed to engage the reader. The various forms of love in the novel highlight the strengths and weaknesses of each character, through their expectations of love and their actions motivated by love, as well as the fact that the examples of love in the novel implicitly present harmful behavior patterns that make the explorations of this theme.
The Effects of Jealousy
Throughout The Ballad of Never After, jealousy acts both as an emotion and a catalyst. Garber uses the actions of Jacks and Evangeline, as well as Evangeline’s attitude toward Petra, to explore the effects of jealousy.
Jacks and Evangeline both evoke the jealousy of the other, something that Garber uses to drive the romantic arc of the plot. In Chapter 25, when Evangeline feels jealousy about Jacks kissing another woman, she tries to tell herself that she’s being unreasonable, but it doesn’t work because “jealousy [isn’t] a reasonable emotion” (198). This forms the template for most of Evangeline’s and Jacks’s actions and decisions regarding one another. For example, Evangeline knows that Jacks’s kiss is deadly, but that doesn’t stop her from wanting him to kiss her instead of other women. Her jealousy motivates her to flirt with other men, something that’s in stark opposition to how she usually acts. Jealousy is hence an emotional device that Garber uses to generate novel scenarios in which the reader can see Evangeline—it makes her do things that she wouldn’t normally do—which further adds texture to her characterization.
Similarly, Jacks is jealous of Evangeline being close to other men, presenting a significant example of Garber’s use of jealousy to move the romantic plot forward. This is reinforced by the fact that the men with whom Evangeline flirts are largely flat characters; they do not interrupt the romantic plot but drive it. At the Hollow, Jacks admits that his jealousy is strong enough to kill any man who gets too close to Evangeline. Here, this theme intersects with that of Manipulation since it forms a motivation for Jacks’s isolation of Evangeline. Jealousy is part of what makes Jacks’s character development nonlinear in the novel; he becomes selfish in these moments.
Jealousy isn’t only felt in regard to love. In the chapters of LaLa’s party, Evangeline becomes jealous of Petra on sight. Petra is bold and beautiful, things Evangeline wants to be; in this sense, like Marisol, Petra is another foil for Evangeline to emphasize her characterization—something that is reinforced when Evangeline kills Petra. Jacks takes an immediate notice of Petra, and while he doesn’t flirt with her or seem to want her attention, Evangeline gets jealous simply because he’s looking at her with interest. This causes Evangeline to dislike Petra from the start; it’s only later when she’s away from Jacks and talking to Petra that Evangeline realizes that her initial jealousy caused her to make a snap judgment. The gendered dynamics in this theme hence interrogate the trope of women as rivals. In the same way that The Power of Love motivates Jacks’s harmful behavior, jealousy causes Evangeline to act out of character. Typically, Evangeline is welcoming and kind to people, even those she doesn’t know, but jealousy makes her treat Petra differently. Garber hence suggests that jealousy has the power to make us act differently—like with manipulation and love, it presents another example of a non-fantastical force that exhibits the power of magic and curses to change behavior.
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By Stephanie Garber
