Val’s Decision-Making in Valiant

On Monday, many people in class expressed that they found Val’s choices to be unrealistic. I too found some of her choices and thought-processes to be shocking and implausible. Val runs away from home and spends the night in NYC, willingly follows two strangers onto subway tracks to get to their underground hideout, seeks out the lair of a troll, starts taking a mystery drug, and a lot more. Even though Valiant falls under the urban fantasy genre and we expect certain aspects of the setting and certain events of the story to be fantastical, to identify and respond to human characters at all we want motives to be understandable even if they’re not rational. Val’s decision-making process is haphazard and inconsistent with how we would expect humans to be motivated to act. For those of us that find Val’s choices to be unrealistic and off-putting, is there something we all have in common, besides that we are all older than the intended audience for this novel, that makes us find her choices so disconcerting?

Also, without really having a way to know for certain, is Val able to be a relatable character to teen readers in spite of her questionable reasoning? Her reasoning, for that matter, seems to be that any decision she makes is fine as long as she is the one making it. Do teens value autonomy so much that they will overlook the consequence of a decision as long as it was made independently? And if teens do find her more relatable than we might, what, besides age again, makes teens more likely to find her relatable?

6 responses to “Val’s Decision-Making in Valiant”

  1. zaffiroe Avatar
    zaffiroe

    One of the main reasons why I was uncomfortable with Val’s decisions was because it just seems so unrealistic. For novels and stories, even Urban Fantasies, I need to have to find at least pieces of the main character realistic to understand where they are coming from. Because I could not see Val as practical in the smallest sense, I was unable to enjoy the work at large. In the previous novels we read in class, even in Phantom Tollbooth, there were pieces of the main character that made sense. Maybe it’s just my age getting to me, but Val seemed reckless for no main reason. Just cause she wanted to.

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  2. foulonni Avatar
    foulonni

    I agree with OP, Val’s decision just didn’t seem to make sense to me, especially in the context of Holly Black’s world building in Valiant. This is an urban setting, there are plenty of dangers that are almost omnipresent, including drugs, gangs, thieves, ect. However, this natural dangers don’t seem to have a significant impact on Val, and are displayed positively in the novel. Both the light and dark group of Faerie that the Troll tells Val about resemble gangs in their clan-like turf war with one another, yet Val just sort of ignores this information and pretends like she’s a neutral party. In a technicality, she is, but in actuality her role as a deliverer for the troll makes her a target for both sides, but instead of doing something about her predicament she spends the entire day high with Lolli. Now, I think it’s a little early to make judgments about Val’s character, but it’s still weird to me that Black’s world has very little punishment for the dangerous behavior that Val is engaging in. There is no way that you can just walk around the streets of NY like Val and be ok. It just doesn’t seem very possible.

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  3. sarahweinberg24 Avatar
    sarahweinberg24

    I’m definitely of the opinion that Val’s decisions were unrealistic. Like you mentioned, the autonomy issue is played up a lot in this book, but it made me wonder if there was a limit to what Val was willing to do so long as she was the one who decided to do it. She has no problem acting self-destructive, which can certainly be relatable for teens, but she takes it to such extremes. Of course, part of this is because its a book and is meant to be entertaining and gripping, and I think Val felt a sharp lack of control over her life after she caught her mom and boyfriend. Teens generally really want to be independent, but even though Val makes these decisions, she also kind of just goes with the flow. She seems to have no (or at least, not a very strong) basis whatsoever for some of her decisions. Val makes a comment about how she feels unsafe in Central Park, yet she was totally cool with following some questionable teens she just met into the subway tunnels? I don’t know, I feel like the intended audience was middle teens, and I’m only a couple years off, but I don’t know if I would have related to her decision-making any more at 15 or 16 than I do at 18.

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  4. erinrosenfeld Avatar
    erinrosenfeld

    While Val’s decision-making is certainly somewhat unrealistic, I personally don’t think it detracts from the story. I read this book for the first time as a young teenager, and at the time, I wasn’t bothered by the unrealistic decisions that Val made. As a teen, I connected with Val’s feelings of being pushed around and letting other people take charge of her decisions. First, her mother “punished her every time she did anything to show that she was growing up,” and later her mom switched to encouraging makeup and dating (5). Val is “used to being the overshadowed one,” with her friend Ruth and others (4). Additionally, she’s just discovered that her boyfriend, Tom, has been cheating on her. Thus, Val is shown as someone who doesn’t make decisions for herself and doesn’t have that many defining personality traits – she simply goes along with what other people do or say. I identified with Val as a teen, and so when Val runs off to NYC and makes rash decisions, I got to live vicariously through Val. While I would’ve certainly never made the decisions that Val does in real life, Black’s book allowed me to vicariously rebel against all those who had constrained my decision-making as a teen and imagine what it would be like to just make random decisions without any regard for consequences. Additionally, in the end, Val experiences many consequences for her actions, and learns to change her behavior. Thus, Black’s book allows teens to vicariously make bad decisions and also learn the consequences of them—in this way, they can live out their rebellious fantasies through a book instead of in real life.

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    1. elgriott Avatar
      elgriott

      I agree with a lot of this. I didn’t see Val’s action as terribly unrealistic once I factored in the extreme shock she’s just experienced; also, that she’s at the terrible age where every stupid idea suddenly becomes the perfect way to get back at your parents, your society, and yourself (because what is teenage life without a dollop of self-hate, right?). Additionally, Val repeatedly berates herself internally for always being the “person who just followed others around” and was content to be passively led around. Initially, I think Val believes that following Lolly, taking Never, and doing dangerous and reckless things /is/ an assertion of self-control and autonomy; however, as older readers, we can recognize that Val remains susceptible to the same old patterns of passive behavior (possibly) up until her apprenticeship to Raves; and even then her real self really emerges far later in the novel, when she decides on her own to expose and fight Mabry, fetch Ravus’ heart, and trust in herself to do all the above. At the novel’s close I felt Val had developed rather realistically considering she was only gone for a month.

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  5. ethanmakulec Avatar
    ethanmakulec

    I very much agree that Val’s decisions often push the bounds of plausibility, though this didn’t necessarily bother me directly. She is clearly very impulsive and almost every interaction she has with the world, at least at the beginning of the book, leads to her lashing out at it and making rash decisions. Given this, poor decision making seems likely with her lifestyle and behavior, and what bothers me is not that her decisions are bad, but that her lifestyle and behavior remain so constant for so long that it feels for a while like she never will learn to maybe think for half a second and consider some consequences before taking an action.

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