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Renegades
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Themes
The Moral Complexity of Justice, Revenge, and Grief
While many characters within the novel have their own motivations for pursuing justice or exacting revenge, Adrian and Nova are driven to seek both because they have been overcome by their past trauma and grief. Notably, Adrian pursues his mother’s killer beyond the boundaries of the law, becoming a vigilante and changing his own identity and even his own body in order to get his revenge. Likewise, Nova adopts a false persona and takes drastic measures to infiltrate the Renegades to avenge the fall of her uncle and the Anarchists, who are her extended family. Thus, the novel deliberately blurs the boundaries between justice and revenge as both protagonists experience doubt and are forced to question their own motives.
Both Adrian and Nova are driven to pursue revenge because they lack support from their respective communities, who fail to adequately acknowledge their traumatic losses. Adrian’s adoptive fathers are so desperate to protect him from harm that they do not help him to process his mother’s death. Their silence on this topic leads him to find his own methods to investigate her death and to process his grief. Hugh and Simon’s misguided attempts to shelter him from the details of his mother’s death are deeply harmful to Adrian’s psyche, and this problematic behavior is also mirrored in their choice to isolate Max. Thus, it is clear that their efforts to hide the truth compel Adrian to go to unhealthy lengths to find his own answers. He therefore uses vigilante justice to handle things by himself, and many of his actions lead to damage and suffering.
Similarly, Nova’s grief over her family members’ deaths has no healthy outlet, since the Anarchists, particularly Ace, deliberately manipulate her emotions and encourage her hatred of the Renegades. Unlike Adrian, who desperately wants to learn the “truth” about his mother’s death, Nova believes that she already has the truth and simply needs to exact vengeance. Nova has no real support system, for her fellow Anarchists exploit her emotions to incite her to violence. Even Ace, who is secretly in hiding, never supports her, and he even forces her to attempt to win his favor through her work as an Anarchist. However, as Nova begins to question the status quo, it is clear that she is not fully convinced of the efficacy of violent revenge. Her secret love for justice counterbalances Adrian’s secret love for vengeance, making them foils to one another. Nova wants her world to feel balanced again, but she gradually realizes that overt violence is not the right solution. Conversely, Adrian wants to feel safe and powerful, and he slowly allows himself to use more and more violence to achieve his goals. At the novel’s end, he is even willing to kill Nightmare. His inner moral evolution (or perhaps devolution) demonstrates that grief is capable of working a profound alchemy on a person’s moral sensibilities. While neither Adrian or Nova is a “bad” person, they both lack proper support from their communities and warp their own life paths in pursuit of revenge.
The Consequences of Wielding Power
The characters’ various superpowers are subject to a system that bases an individual’s value upon the degree of power that they wield. Those with more “valuable” powers gain fame and social stability by joining the Renegades, and in this post-dystopian world, social influence can equate to survival. Thus, the sociopolitical system incentivizes people to expand their powers as far as possible, even at the cost of their own well-being or that of others, and even the laws of the Renegades cannot fully negate the damage that this mindset causes in the world around them.
Of all the secondary characters, Genissa Clark (Frostbite) plays a key role in demonstrating the corruptive influence of power. While the Renegades as a whole do abuse their power (as when they exploit Max to create the superpower-negating serum, Agent N), Frostbite is essentially a corrupt police officer who uses a mask of “justice” to exert her power over others. A prime example occurs when Frostbite attacks the Anarchists without legal cause and rejects potential recruits whom she deems unworthy. Her behavior exposes her fundamental belief that power is the only possible source of personal value. However, this belief is not unique to her; it is at the very heart of the society that the Renegades have created. Even the trials are designed to measure the extent of a recruit’s superpowers, not their moral stance. Thus, Frostbite’s actions and behavior are an extension of this power structure; she is deemed a hero because she is powerful, and her corruption runs rampant as she exploits her position to dominate and bully others.
Thus, the central issue that Renegade society must face is the reality of its own hypocrisy. Nova is painfully aware of the contradictions between the Renegades’ ideals and their actions, and this discrepancy is further explored through the characters’ use of various masks and personas. Renegades are encouraged to look the part of heroes so that the powerless public will have faith in them, but their more reprehensible actions are hidden from the public eye. This dynamic is best typified through the discussion about Agent N at the end of the novel. Even if the Council means well, their willingness to remove others’ superpowers indicates that their corruption has reached dangerous levels; they believe that they alone have the right to decide who deserves power and who does not. The weight of trying to keep the city safe has therefore warped their perception of the problem, and the narrative suggests that Agent N is an overly simplistic solution to a complex problem, since the Council’s abuse of power will simply worsen the divide between the powerful and the powerless. Those without powers know that their very lives depend on the superheroes’ dedication to “heroism,” and therefore the converse is also true; the corruption of the Council will put everyone at risk.
The Challenges of Navigating Different Personas
The very first pages of the novel list the characters’ various powers and their alternate identities, and the prominence of this information immediately introduces one of the most vital themes in the novel: the identity crises that the superhuman characters must face. Due to their powers and their social roles, the characters must adopt different names and personas, and like celebrities, they all vacillate between their public personas and the version of themselves that only their friends see. In addition to this standard dynamic, Nova and Adrian must also struggle with additional personas and conflicting beliefs; they shift between multiple public identities, and even within their various groups of friends and family members, they constantly shift between identities depending on their physical and emotional context.
Nova and Adrian’s quests to redefine their true selves and beliefs are never fully realized in this novel, for their current situations and the gaps in their support systems make this feat impossible. Neither has a role model with a stable, singular identity, and as teenagers, they naturally mimic the adults they admire, adopting personas of their own to try and understand the world around them rather than accepting themselves as they are. For example, Adrian’s dads are casual and comfortable at home but heroic and purposeful in public, and even these two personas hide their deeper identities as powerful superheroes who are willing to take desperate and potentially harmful measures to protect the city. Faced with these conflicting moral messages from his only real role models, Adrian quickly follows suit, acting as “Sketch” or “the Sentinel” as the situation requires.
Similar dynamics dominate the Anarchists as well. Most notably, Ingrid hides her true nature as a power-hungry, violent traitor and pretends to be a friend to Nova. She only reveals her true motives after harming Nova and others, and she and the other Anarchists all encourage Nova to embrace her Nightmare persona because this violent aspect of her personality helps their cause. These problematic internal struggles suggest that neither superheroes or supervillains have managed to establish a stable sense of identity. Instead, they constantly adapt to changing situations, shifting between different personas to survive or to manipulate the perceptions of others.
The blurred lines between good and evil further complicate the idea of the true self. Nova and Adrian desperately want to define themselves and others as singularly good or evil, but such simplistic labels cannot capture the complexity of each person’s thoughts and actions. The Librarian, for example, sells illicit guns to the Anarchists but also promotes education and tries to preserve literature and knowledge in the midst of a collapsing society. He also considers both parts of himself to be “true” to who he really is. It therefore follows that Nova and Adrian’s identities cannot be stabilized until they accept that they are capable of both good and evil, and they must also come to grips with the fact that the lines between the two are often difficult to discern.
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