Runebreaker (Part 6 - Characters: Aelie)
Hello, all. Welcome back to the review of Runebreaker, an indie Romantasy by Mila Finch.
Over the next few parts, we’re going to be talking about the characters of this book - or, rather, we’re going to be talking about the two leads and the main antagonist, as all the other characters are functional yet forgettable. Since Aelie is both the Main Character and the 1st Person POV, we’ll going to start with her.
Please see the previous parts if you’d like context on everything we’re going to cover here. You don’t need to read the whole review up until this point, though I’d at least recommend looking at the parts that discuss worldbuilding (Part 4 and Part 5), as the worldbuilding is an important factor in understanding why Aelie’s characterization is so damaging to the story.
Let’s break some bonds.
STATS
Title: Runebreaker
Series: [Untitled Trilogy] (Book 1)
Author(s): Mila Finch
Genre: Fantasy (Romantasy)
First Printing: January 2026
Publisher: Self-published to Amazon
Rating: 0.5/10
SPOILER WARNING
Throughout this review, there will be mild, unmarked spoilers for Runebreaker. I will do my best to keep the first paragraph of each section as spoiler-free as possible. Heavy spoilers will be confined to clearly marked sections.
CHARACTERS
Aelie
Aelie is the type of blank-slate protagonist that appears so commonly in Romance fiction.
In and of itself, I don’t see this as an issue. It’s not something I care for, and it would keep me from giving the book a 10/10 even if it were good, but this is one of those points where I was willing to meeting the book on its own terms. I feel like a book can have this sort of audience avatar and still easily be a 7/10.
To Finch’s credit, while Aelie is a blank slate, she does have motivations beyond, “Have sex with Bad Boy Love Interest.” Her introduction establishes principles that could have dictated her actions as the narrative progressed. Furthermore, her narrative voice never feels at odds with the setting.
Unfortunately, a combination of the Author’s Assumption and Finch’s habit of writing to force the emotions of a given scene cause issues to pile up as the narrative progresses. Aelie begins this story as a blank slate with relatable motivations, but by the end of the story, she is more delusional and morally twisted than even Violet Sorrengail.
Author’s Assumption - Those Are Her Traits?
The two aspects of Aelie’s character that come closest to actual character traits are not adequately set up. One of them seems to just be a case of Finch putting way too much faith in a single brief scene to sell a certain character trait. The other, though, comes completely out of left field, and it made me roll my eyes and think, “Oh, of course. Got to check that box.”
The first of these traits is that Aelie is selfless and giving. This is supposedly introduced within the first few chapters. Aelie and Rheya steal from fae nobles, but not all of this money is being saved up for their eventual escape from Skalgard. Some of it is being given to a local “foundlings hall”. There is a very brief scene where Aelie stops by the hall to help the owner change some bandages. We are also told that she leaves the hall money and steals herbs for them (though, with how the information is Told to us, I initially thought she had been stealing herbs from the hall and leaving money as payment). Neither the foundling’s hall or any of the characters in it have any further bearing on the narrative, but just a little later, we get this exchange between Aelie and Rheya.
“We can’t waste a second.” Rheya pulled out the canvas bag we’d packed. “Let’s go.”
“The Rite’s tomorrow.”
She froze. “Aelie.”
“The infirmary’s still empty. More people will volunteer.”
“They do that every year.”
“But we promised.”
“We promised to help.” Her voice cracked. “We can’t anymore. Henrik was seconds from finding out.”
That sat like lead in my stomach. All those mouths we’d fed with stolen bread. The fevers we’d broken with pilfered herbs. Tomorrow, some of them would kneel on the sacrifice rune, choosing death over another winter of starvation.
Rheya crouched in front of me. “We gave this city everything. Our childhood. Years of our lives.” Her fingers dug into my shoulders. “When is it enough?”
“You’re right … I keep trying to save everyone, but I’m drowning. We both are.”
I’m sorry, but one vaguely worded scene at the foundling’s hall is not enough to support this. Finch has not earned this. She is just turning to the audience and saying, “My blank slate Main Character is just so virtuous and good, you see!” And it’s not like we get any more examples as the story progresses. Aelie just continues to insist she’s selfless and to accept praise for being selfless. At most, the closest thing she does to helping people after this point is breaking some runes that have afflicted Kairos’s soldiers, and there, it feels less like a character trait and more like an excuse to trigger the power fantasy (Kairos getting mad on her behalf that other people let her be so selfless).
The more glaring example, though, is Aelie’s love of books - because, naturally, the protagonist of a Romantasy must be a bookworm, just like the author and the audience, right? Except Finch never actually establishes that Aelie is a bookworm. She just has Aelie visit Kairos’s library about 30% of the way into the book, gives us some throwaway lines about how she used to steal books from fae nobles, and then reduces most of Aelie’s remaining contributions to the plot down to her researching at the library. This aspect of here character then doesn’t drive the story forward. It’s just used to justify Aelie being the one who figures out where the second rune binding the dragons is located (which, as we’ve previously covered, doesn’t even make sense as knowledge for the fae to have been lost in the first place).
These traits aren’t bad ones for a Main Character to have. I just wish Finch could be bothered to put in the effort. It’s like she wanted Aelie to be relatable, to feed into a fantasy of being both extremely virtuous and extremely intelligent, but didn’t stop to actually evaluate if she’d properly established those traits.
My Sister’s Keeper
Aelie’s primary drive throughout the book is supposedly to be reunited with and protect her sister. Rheya is introduced as the person Aelie loves most, and when they are separated (due the dam breach scene), her only thought is ensuring that Rheya is okay. She even blackmails Vaeries into swearing an oath to her to find and protect Rheya at all costs. Once Kairos abducts her, she spends a lot of time worrying about Rheya.
It gets really old, really quickly.
First, the oath thing. The fact that Vaeris is bound to help Rheya, on pain of death, is almost completely forgotten about. Aelie wrings her hands about not knowing how Rheya is doing, but not once does she stop to think, “Vaeris is still alive, so either he’s moving heaven and earth to find Rheya, or else he’s already found her and is fulfilling his end of the bargain.” What was the point of her forcing him to swear the oath if she doesn’t think it will compel him to help Rheya? (Well, we know exactly what the point was, but more on that next week.) Does she really think she could do a better job of finding Rheya than the prince of Skalgard, especially since she had no idea where to start looking aftet the dam breach swept Rheya away?
Second … Aelie makes no actual effort to help her sister.
See, while Aelie is Kairos’s prisoner, he wants her as an ally. He offers her gifts. He grants her requests, provided those requests don’t involve her leaving his castle. And the reason he wants her as an ally isn’t just the attraction that spawned into existence after she’d freed him. It’s also because he values her ability to break runes and doesn’t want that power in Vaeris’s hands.
Why didn’t Aelie ever say to him, “Hello, Mist Daddy, you know how my magical power makes me the most valuable person in the world? Well, my sister is the second most valuable person in the world, with her own special magical power! Why don’t you send your vampire bro and some other elite guys to find her and escort her here? If you do that, you’ll have all the power, and we’ll both be so grateful that we’ll never try to leave your domain.”
It’s not like Finch didn’t think of having Aelie use her influence over Kairos. That’s how Aelie gets access to the library. It’s how she’s able to get the breathing room to steal supplies for an escape attempt (one that never ends up going anywhere). At the midpoint of the story, it’s how she’s able to convince Kairos to take her to a diplomatic conference so that she can speak with Vaeris (both to ask about Rheya and for other oath reasons we’ll get to as this review series progresses). So why did Aelie never consider this very obvious option?
The most likely answer is that Rheya never actually mattered to the story. She’s there to make Aelie look like a caring sister while generating angst about how Aelie is supposedly powerless to help her. She’s an excuse for Aelie and Vaeris to swear their oath. You could lift Rheya out of the narrative just by changing Vaeris’s end of the oath (to, say, helping Aelie to escape) and by making Aelie’s end of the oath the only source of narrative angst.
Speaking of the oath as a source of narrative angst …
IT’S NEVER HER FAULT
I have so much more to say about Aelie, but I’m also trying to keep posts down to a certain length, so I’m going to call this here. We’re going to continue the analysis of Aelie on Sunday, May 3rd.
The issues with Aelie may start with traits that aren’t properly established and a motivation that is only paid lip service, but things only get worse as the narrative progresses. Aelie isn’t just devoid of agency; Finch bends over backwards to waibe her of accountability. Her morality also pivots on a dime. It goes beyond basic hypocrisy, to the point that Finch is just asking the audience to forget the previous moral standards that Aelie set - because, if we remember, than Aelie’s own moral standards would make her the villain of the story.
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