52 pages • 1 hour read
Alex AsterSkyshade
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Tension Between Love and Duty
Isla, Grim, and Oro form a love triangle—a popular convention in romance and romantasy fiction because it highlights the tension between love and duty. In these novels, love is a powerful, unruly emotion—one that breaks down boundaries and challenges social expectations. Isla loves both Grim and Oro, placing her desires at odds with the duty of loyalty that she believes she owes to each lover. Because Isla, Grim, and Oro are all rulers, the concept of duty extends beyond their duties to each other and encompasses duty toward their people as well.
From a young age, Isla and her lovers are taught to put their realms’ greater good above their own desires: “Rulers were born simply to serve their people. Her life was not her own” (271). The sacrifices Isla makes out of a sense of duty, such as using skyres, prove how deeply this lesson is ingrained: “It came at a cost. She heard the warnings in her mind, but they didn’t matter … not when so many other lives were on the line” (226). Although duty strongly influences the characters, the story offers examples of individuals who choose love over loyalty to their realms. For example, Isla’s father was a general who left Nightshade and abandoned his ruler to marry a Wildling: “Isla knew what it was like to choose her heart over duty. If that was what her father had done, she couldn’t judge him” (125). Her parents’ love story parallels Isla’s because both Oro and Grim place their feelings for her above their obligations to their realms, often triggering feelings of concern and guilt within the protagonist.
As the story progresses, Isla gradually untangles her complicated emotions toward her two lovers. For much of the novel, she believes that she cannot be loyal to both men at the same time, particularly because the rivals are on opposing sides of a war: “Traitor. The word echoed through her mind. In this very moment, she wasn’t quite sure who she was betraying. Maybe everyone, including herself” (331). To simplify matters, she attempts to convince herself that she despises Grim and only loves Oro, but she eventually falls back in love with Grim. Through their second marriage, the love and loyalty between them grow deeper than ever. By Chapter 21, she realizes, “Half of her loved Oro—always would. The other half loved Grim. Unconditionally” (230). Combined with this realization, the truce between Grim and Oro begins to present a possible future in which Isla’s feelings for her two lovers can coexist. However, the tension in the love triangle remains unresolved because Oro and Grim still loathe one another and only begrudgingly accept each other’s presence in her life. By the end of Skyshade, the protagonist has made progress toward understanding her own complicated emotions but has yet to fully resolve the tension between love and duty.
The Uncertain Existence of Free Will
Isla Crown’s story is shaped by the struggle to believe that free will exists in a world dominated by fate and destiny. The tension between fate and free will is a prevalent theme in literature, but especially so in the fantasy genre, in which the concept of a known, immutable destiny often features prominently. In the Lightlark Saga, destiny is a source of fear and inner conflict.
According to Lightlark’s prophet, Isla “will plunge a blade into a powerful heart, and it will mark the start of a new age” (81). She longs to break this prophecy so that she won’t have to kill one of the men she loves, and she wishes that her choices weren’t fettered to the fate of the world. However, another prophecy offers her hope and a chance at redemption: “He said that at the end of the world, a girl will be born from life and death. The girl will either destroy the world … or save it. She would be either a curse … or remedy” (202). Due to the open-ended nature of these predictions, Isla struggles to trust herself and sees her worst actions as evidence that she is doomed to bring destruction. The prophecies also negatively impact her relationships with her lovers. She deliberately breaks Oro’s heart and spends most of the novel apart from him because she fears she’ll hurt him: “That is why I stayed away. Even though I wanted to, trust me, I wanted to come back” (355). Similarly, Isla’s fate makes her feel guilty for being close to Grim: “She had come here, knowing the prophecy, knowing there was a good chance she would kill him” (100). Isla’s prophesied destiny damages her relationship with herself and the people closest to her.
Throughout the story, Isla fights to assert her free will. Although she is a ruler and possesses godlike abilities, she feels that she has little say in her own life: “What was the point in having any power at all, when she couldn’t even control her own destiny?” (52). Much of the plot entails her search for characters like the prophet-followers and the augur who she hopes can tell her how “to change her fate” (19). Near the end of the novel, Isla is given a way to see the future, but she doesn’t seize this opportunity: “Part of her wanted to break it, take it, know immediately to stop the doubt and pain. Another part didn’t want to know. Just wanted to stick to her plan” (393). Isla’s decision not to immediately acquire her mother’s gift of foresight indicates the protagonist’s desire to believe in free will. Instead of consulting the future and seeing how the novel’s climax is “destined” to play out, Isla prefers to believe that her choices can create the future that she wants. In the end, she proves that she can shape the future through her choices: She defies fate by saving Oro’s life after she accidentally stabs him and by ensuring that both of her love interests survive the book. Alex Aster portrays fate as a formidable force yet encourages readers to believe in the power of free will.
The Journey Toward Self-Acceptance
While Isla must contend with Lark and many other dangers, the force that poses the biggest threat to her self-actualization is her fear of herself. Skyshade begins in the immediate aftermath of Nightbane’s climactic battle, and this event exerts a significant impact on the protagonist’s psyche, leaving her overwhelmed with guilt at the devastation she has caused: “She deserved to bleed. Still, her pain meant nothing—these people were dead because of her. Because of her power” (8). Isla’s self-condemnation leads her to blame, fear, and despise her powers. The narrator repeatedly describes her abilities as a “monster that had been growing within her” to emphasize how Isla tries to rationalize her magic as something separate from herself rather than accepting it as an integral part of herself (282). In the ultimate sign of her self-rejection, she uses the shademade bracelets to lock away her abilities and return to a powerless state similar to the one she is in at the start of the Lightlark Saga. Even Isla’s heroic deeds are tinged with self-loathing; she tries to redeem herself through self-sacrifice because she doesn’t believe she deserves to live after taking hundreds of lives.
Ultimately, the protagonist’s relationships and struggles empower her to progress toward self-acceptance. Grim’s love and support help Isla see her dark side in a new, positive light: He tells her that they are the “the same shade” (184), and he commends her vigilantism because he understands what it’s like to try to channel his “anger and skills into something that maybe looks sort of like good” (184). One of the main points that the author tries to communicate through this narrative is that people and power are neither purely good nor purely evil. Isla already grasps this because she sees Grim as more than the villain most of Lightlark believes him to be, and he helps her begin to show herself the same grace. The turning point in Isla’s journey toward self-acceptance occurs after Lark imprisons her. The familiar patterns of negative self-talk appear when she calls herself “a monster” who “fed on death” (381), but she embraces “every strength she had been afraid to use” to free herself from the shademade bracelets and the self-loathing that they represent (382). This transformative moment allows Isla to defend her world and the people she loves using whatever abilities she must. Through Isla’s story, Aster celebrates the liberating power of self-acceptance.
