Literature / The Lunar Chronicles

aka: Lunar Chronicles

The Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer is a series of young adult novels that retells classic fairy tales within a sci-fi setting.

Earth is in turmoil. For over a decade, humanity has been fighting against a deadly plague with no cure in sight. As if that wasn't enough, a war is threatening to break out between Earth and Luna. The current ruler of Luna, Queen Levana, is especially determined to gain control of Earth through whatever means is necessary. And since she has powerful Lunar magic and advanced technology on her side, taking Earth by force is a definite possibility.

There's just one thing that stands in her way: there's a rumor that her niece, Princess Selene, is still alive and living on Earth. If true, then Selene could be humanity's ticket to overthrowing the tyrannical Levana and saving humanity from becoming Lunar playthings. Assuming, of course, that Selene would even want to reclaim her birthright at all.

This series includes:

• Cinder (2012): Based on Cinderella.
• Scarlet (2013): Based on Little Red Riding Hood.
• Cress (2014): Based on Rapunzel.
• Fairest (2015): A prequel novella that explores Queen Levana's past.
• Winter (2015): Based on Snow White.
• Stars Above (2016): A collection of short stories, including four previously released novellas.
  • The Keeper
  • Glitches (2014)
  • The Little Android (2014): Based on The Little Mermaid.
  • The Mechanic
  • The Queen's Army (2012)
  • After Sunshine Passes By
  • Carswell's Guide to Being Lucky (2014)
  • The Princess and the Guard
  • Something Old, Something New: A novella set two years after Winter
• Wires and Nerves (2018): A two-part graphic novel that takes place after Winter and before Something Old, Something New.
• COVID-128 (2020): A short story about the characters living in a COVID-19 style pandemic.
• Cinder's Adventure: Get Me to the Wedding! (2022): A Choose Your Own Adventure-style e-book where the reader chooses Cinder's path on her way to her and Kai's wedding.
• An animated film adaptation in development at Locksmith Animation directed by Noëlle Raffaele (DC Super Hero Girls).

Due to the way the series progresses, spoilers from the first book have been left completely unmarked. You have been warned!

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This series provides examples of:

• Abduction Is Love: Subverted. There's a lot more at stake in Cinder and her crew's abduction of Kai than just their feelings.
• Actually, I Am Him: Prince Kai assumes Linh Cinder, the best mechanic in new Beijing, is a man. Naturally, he's embarrassed when he realizes the sixteen year old girl he thought was a shophand is Linh Cinder.
• An Aesop: It's wrong to use petty differences to strip someone of their humanity, and to demand blind ownership of another being- especially the right to kill said being for one's own benefit.
• The Alleged Car: Cinder's "pumpkin", an ancient orange wreck of a ground car she finds in a junkyard and attempts to fix. It barely gets her to the palace before crashing into a tree.
• Alpha and Beta Wolves: The organization of Levana's genetically engineered Wolf Man Super Soldiers is based on the common but mistaken belief that wolf packs adhere to a strict social hierarchy involving alphas, betas, and omegas. This is even an important plot point in the series, as wolf DNA was specifically chosen to create these soldiers in order to make them easier to organize and control. It also helps Wolf overcome his conditioning to obey the thaumaturges. After falling in love with Scarlet, he recognizes her as his mate which means his instinct to protect her overrides his instinct to kill at the command of his superiors.
• And Now You Must Marry Me: Queen Levana is determined to get a legitimate claim to Earth via marriage to an Earthen leader. Prince Kai just happens to be a perfect target: he's young, handsome, available, and, most importantly, desperate. She uses an antidote to the letumosis virus as a bargaining chip, knowing that he won't be able to tolerate that refusal will lead to the deaths of more innocents. Kai is loathe to give in not just because she's a tyrant, but also because he knows their union will certainly end with his death and the eventual takeover of Earth. However, the brutal attacks from the Lunar Special Operatives wears down his resistance to the point where he's practically begging Levana to marry him. They do eventually marry with Levana being crowned Empress the following day (not that she gets to celebrate for very long).
• Author Appeal: Marissa Meyer was a Sailor Moon fangirl, and there are many references to the series (long-lost moon princess, you say?).
• Backstory: The various stories in Stars Above dramatize important events that had previously been background material for the four girls as well as Ze'ev, Jacin, Michelle, Iko, and Thorne.
• Back-to-Back Badasses: Cinder and Thorne at the climax of Scarlet, very briefly. A thaumaturge soon manipulates Thorne into pointing his gun at Cinder, forcing her to shoot him in the leg with a tranquilizer.

• Beauty Equals Goodness: Zig-zagged. Cinder would be considered disfigured by some due to being a cyborg, but otherwise her appearance is average. Her stepmother Adri and stepsister Pearl are described as beautiful, but are as stuck-up and abusive as you’d expect, given their fairytale roles. However, the younger stepsister, Peony, is sweet and kind to Cinder despite her prettiness. Many Lunars appear beautiful thanks to their glamour; Levana in particular is stunning to look at, but underneath her glamour she is severely scarred. Her stepdaughter, Princess Winter, is even more beautiful without any glamour than Levana is with glamour, to the point where the scars on Winter's face only add to her beauty.
• Because You Were Nice to Me: The aristocracy of Luna mind-control servants into following commands instead of asking, use people as puppets for amusement, and otherwise treat the lower classes as furniture, ornamentation, or expendable meat shields. In stark contrast, Winter has earned the adoration of the people by treating them kindly and politely.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: Scarlet and Wolf. For just one example, Scarlet resorts to actually winging Wolf's arm with a bullet to make him back off of killing Ran, after failing to get through to him by any other means. This act seems to impress Wolf immensely.
  Wolf: "When you greeted me with a gun at your doorstep, it was nice to know you meant it."
• Big Sister Bully: Levana bitterly recounts how she was used as mind-control practice and tortured by her elder sister Channary.
• Bond Villain Stupidity: Queen Levana has an unfortunate habit of succumbing to this where the main characters are involved. When she has Cinder right in front of her, Levana just keeps talking instead of going for the kill, giving Cinder enough time to think of an escape.
• Cain and Abel: Wolf and his spiteful, ambitious brother Ran.
• Celeb Crush: Cinder's stepsisters and her android friend Iko have it bad for Prince Kai. Cinder thinks he's good-looking (but won't admit it out loud) and doesn't develop a crush on him until she actually meets him.
• Chekhov's Gunman: It's mentioned early on that Queen Levana's niece, the Lunar princess Selene, died in a fire when she was young. Most of her body was never actually found, leading Kai to suspect she was rescued and hidden on Earth somewhere. He's right. Cinder is Princess Selene, which explains practically every question about her backstory.
• Cinderella Plot: The series follows a teenage cyborg named Cinder who lives in New Beijing with her wicked stepmother and two stepsisters (a mean one and a nice one). Since her stepmother refuses to work, she is the one who provides the money for the family by working as a mechanic. One day prince Kai visits her shop and they form a connection and eventually fall in love. Meanwhile Cinder learns about a plot against the kingdom and goes to the ball to warn Kai. Cinder has to flee when things go wrong, leaving behind her cyborg foot.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: What practically every Lunar is capable of through their mind-control abilities. Poor Scarlet in particular is taken prisoner and given to a Lunar noble family where she is tortured with intense illusions of her body being invaded by vermin, coerced by Sybil to chop off her own finger during her interrogation, and locked in a small cage in the royal menagerie to be gawked at by Lunars expecting her to perform tricks for their amusement.
• Comic-Book Fantasy Casting: According to Meyer, Cinder was modeled after Mew Azama, the actress who played Sailor Jupiter in Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon.
• CPR: Clean, Pretty, Reliable: Averted. In the scene where Jacin resuscitates Cinder from drowning, the narration explicitly talks about the revivee's ribs cracking and the whole experience not being pretty at all.
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: A lot of people seem to believe cyborgs are no longer capable of human emotion.
  Adri: "Do your kind even feel love, or is it all just... programmed?"
• Dances and Balls: The Peace Festival. These are also a regular occurrence on Luna, especially during Channary's reign.

• Department of Redundancy Department: Mech 6.0's alias as a human is "Hoshi Star". Hoshi is Japanese for star. The foreman double takes but lets it slide.
• Died Happily Ever After: Star's escort body finally fails her, but she doesn't mind as her death frees her and lets her feel as infinite and majestic as the stars she's loved her whole life.
• The Dog Bites Back: Levana's entire reign comes back to bite her hard in this book. Lunar civilians, her soldiers, even her wolf packs turn on her less out of loyalty to Cinder and more because Levana was a tyrant they were glad to be rid of.
• Doing In the Wizard:
  • Dr. Erland insists that the Lunarian power of being able to control others is simply the manipulation of living things' bioelectricity, not magic.
  • In the first two books, humans are convinced that the Lunars are using their powers to hide their space ships. It turns out that it was actually Cress scrambling the signals from her satellite.
• Doorstopper: After three reasonably sized books and a novella, Meyer threw us a curveball with the final book being a 800+ page monster.
• Double Standard Rape: Female on Male: Subverted. Levana brainwashed Evret Hayle into starting a relationship with her, two weeks after his wife Solstice died giving birth to their daughter. She glamoured herself to look like Sol and brainwashed him into having an affair with her, which culminated into forcing him to take her virginity. Levana then coerced him into marrying her, and continued to brainwash and rape him for ten years. Despite hating what she's doing to him and begging her to stop, Evret still tries to show Levana kindness, in the hopes that she'll be kind to others in turn. He even sacrifices his life to save hers. He gives her every chance to become not evil and she refuses, displaying what a monster she really is.
• Drama-Preserving Handicap: Cinder's cyborg brain is damaged before the climax of Winter, meaning she cannot count on it to save her from Levana like it did before in Cinder.
• Driven to Madness: Winter suffers badly from Lunar sickness since she refuses to use her mental-manipulation abilities.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Some characters who become important later on in the series get cameos during previous books.
  • The computer hacker with long hair who warns Cinder about Kai's impending murder in the first book turns out to be Cress, who becomes the heroine of the third.
  • Jacin is one of the Lunar royal guards that is part of Levana's entourage when she goes to Earth in Cinder. He's a background character until Cress.
  • Jerrico, the captain of the royal guard, is also present in Cinder and makes an appearance in Cress. He isn't named until Winter.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: It's a lot of work, a lot of death, a lot of pain, and a lot of heartbreak, but the plague is ended, the Luna-Earth war is ended, the people of Luna are freed, and all the protagonists end up well. Of all the fairy tale quotes used in the books, the traditional Happily Ever After at the end was never more appropriate or well-earned.
• Electronic Eyes: Cinder's eyes are synthetic, and she can call up any type of internet-based feed and view them directly. Iko is delighted with her color-changing android eyes at the end of Winter.
• The Empire: Luna. Levana, the Big Bad and an Evil Overlord, rules it with an iron fist with the help of a powerful military and treats the lower classes as little more than slaves made to serve the aristocracy. Luna is also the Arch-Enemy of the Earthen Union, which acts as The Federation, as the Lunar royal family has long sought to conquer the planet. Levana becomes increasingly brazen in her threats to do so at the beginning of the series.
• Establishing Character Moment: Scarlet opens with an introductory scene in which the title character is so enraged by the authorities' lackluster investigation of her grandmother's disappearance, she hurls produce at the wall of the tavern she's supposed to be selling it to. She follows this almost immediately by reading the riot act to the tavern's patrons for their mockery of Cinder. These scenes thoroughly establish Scarlet to have a strong sense of justice and determination, an unusually open mind about cyborgs and Lunars, and a hell of a temper.
• Evil Aunt: Levana is Cinder's aunt on her mother's side. She attempted to murder her three-year-old niece in order to gain the throne.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Levana just can't understand why everyone loves Winter and concludes it must be because of her beauty. She even scars Winter's face in the hopes of wrecking her looks, but this doesn't work at all since Winter is loved for being kind and refusing to use mind-control like the rest of the aristocracy do. Likewise, she genuinely thinks using her glamour to make herself look like Evret's recently deceased wife and forcing him to have sex with her would make him fall in love with her. It seriously never occurred to her that he wasn't interested in a "better" version of the woman he loved, or that her wearing his dead wife's face for ten years would be genuine torture for him.
• Evil Counterpart: We get another reason to view Queen Levana as this to Cinder, as she is secretly a childhood burn victim.
• Evil Matriarch: Cinder, Cress, and Winter all have an abusive mother figure. Cress actually has two, including the birth mother who disowned her after discovering she was born a shell.
• The Evil Prince: While she calls herself Queen, due to Lunar tradition, Levana's technically a princess. A princess who incinerated her three-year-old niece in order to ascend the throne. She also spent ten years raping and brainwashing Winter's father while wearing his dead wife's face.
• Failsafe Failure: To make sure she passed as Earthen, Cinder was implanted with a chip in her spine that suppresses her Lunar powers. Dr. Erland disabled it while inspecting her, allowing her to access her mental-manipulation abilities, but also making her vulnerable to being detected as Lunar.
• Fairy Tale Free-for-All: The series is a futuristic fantasy retelling of several fairy tales, with its main characters being counterparts to Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, and Snow White.
• Fairytale Motifs: Star's story is basically a sci-fi The Little Mermaid. An android, different and more curious than her peers, risks it all to become human enough to woo the man she loves, even losing her voice, but ultimately realizes he loves another and dies. However, having loved someone, she's grown enough to gain a soul so she can live on after death.
• Fantastic Racism: There's cyborg discrimination, Lunars' hatred of Earthens, Earthens' hatred of Lunars, and the Lunars' disgust for shells and androids.
• Fantastic Slur: A "shell" is a Lunar who cannot use the Lunar gift or be affected by it.
• Faux Affably Evil: Jael, a Lunar thaumaturge who controls Wolf and Ran's pack.
• The Federation: The Earthen Union, an alliance of six Space-Filling Empires spanning the different continents of Earth in a decades-long cold war with Luna, which acts as The Empire. While they're mostly good and their constituent governments generally work in the people's best interests, they do have some issues, not the least of which include flagrant discrimination against cyborgs.
• Fiery Red Head: Scarlet has a fierce temper, as illustrated with her produce-smashing in her very first scene.
• First-Name Basis: Due to shyness and protocol, Cinder and Kai have some trouble adjusting from "Linh-mei" and "Your Highness" to their given names.
• Forceful Kiss: Wolf forces an unwanted kiss onto Scarlet. It's the only way to give her the ID chip she needs to escape the cell without the guards seeing.
• Four-Temperament Ensemble: The protagonists form one. Cinder is Melancholic, as The Leader of the Lunar rebellion against Levana who constantly strives to do the right thing despite the difficult decisions she has to make. Scarlet is Choleric, being a Hot-Blooded Fiery Redhead. Cress is Phlegmatic, as she's a Teen Genius and socially awkward Shrinking Violet. Finally, Winter, a mostly bubbly and cheerful Cloud Cuckoolander, is Sanguine.
• Freakiness Shame: Wolf ends up further mutilated by Levana and is heavy with self-loathing, but fortunately for him Scarlet doesn't mind.
• Friend-or-Idol Decision: It is implied that Cinder will abolish the lunar monarchy and marry Prince Kai, becoming his Empress.
• The Future: The series takes place 126 years after World War IV.
• Gadgeteer Genius: Cinder. She's recognized as being the best mechanic in New Beijing at sixteen. Even without her cyborg abilities, Cinder is shown to have a natural knack for figuring out how machines function.
• Get A Hold Of Yourself Man:
  • Thorne literally shakes some sense into Cress after their dangerous escape.
  • Thorne headbutts Cinder to snap her out of a panic attack after she indirectly kills someone with her Lunar powers.
  • Cinder tries this several times on Wolf after he falls into a Heroic BSoD following Scarlet's capture by Sybil, imploring him to snap out of it so they can survive and at least have a chance to rescue her. It doesn't really work until she uses her gift on him to escape the Eastern Commonwealth soldiers sent to capture them.
• Getting Smilies Painted on Your Soul: Queen Levana can pacify an angry mob just by looking at them. It's how she controls Luna.
• Girl in the Tower: Well, a satellite.
• Glamour: Lunars have the ability to create illusions and is frequently used to alter their appearance. The effect only works on the naked human eye so they tend to dislike reflective surfaces, recording devices, androids, and cyborg technology, as all of these can either see or reveal their true appearance.
• Glamour Failure: Cinder's cyborg brain can see through Lunar glamours. Once her true face is exposed to all of Luna, Levana is so devastated that she has great difficulty maintaining her glamour.
• God Save Us from the Queen!: Channary is implied to have been an even worse ruler than her sister. She was sadistic, manipulative, and regularly tormented Levana in their childhood. She once cut off the feet of her favorite seamstress so that the woman would have nothing better to do than sit around making more dresses for her. She was also the one who initiated the shell extermination program. This is not to say that Levana was much better, as the other entries on this list can attest.
• Good Princess, Evil Queen: The series has evil Queen Levana who stole the throne from her sister Channary (who was also evil). She is opposed by good princesses Selene and Winter.
• Great Escape: When Cinder accidentally breaks into Thorne's prison cell, he persuades her to help him escape in return for the use of his spaceship.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Cress takes a while to warm up to Iko after her personality chip is installed into her new escort droid body, because the last time she saw it, it was practically sitting in Thorne's lap as he played cards.
• The Guards Must Be Crazy:
  • According to Jacin, he taught himself to put all his emotions and thoughts aside during duty in order to not attract attention - since guards are expected to be "brainless puppets" that are supposed to be easily controlled.
  • Invoked. Guards on Luna are deliberately selected to be as weak and mindless as possible so it would be easier for a superior to force them to take a bullet for them. As a result, even Lunar civilians can control them.
• Heroic BSoD: Wolf, after Scarlet is kidnapped.
• Human Alien: At some point after colonizing the moon centuries ago, the humans of the moon somehow evolved the ability to manipulate bioelectricity. Physically, "Lunars" look just like "Earthens".
• Human Shield: Cinder enters a Heroic BSoD after accidentally brainwashing someone into taking a bullet for her, just like Levana and her thaumaturges throughout the series.
• Humans Are Psychic in the Future: At some point after colonizing the moon centuries ago, Lunars developed the ability to manipulate bioelectric energy. This enables them to create powerful illusions and control the minds and bodies of other people.
• I Am Who?: Cinder's reaction to Dr. Erland telling her that she's really a Lunar and the missing Princess Selene.
• I Did What I Had to Do: Cinder realizes early on that people will have to die for the rebellion to succeed, and grudgingly makes her peace with it.
• If We Survive This: When Peony falls ill, Cinder promises her that if she gets well she'll introduce her to the Prince at the annual ball. She gets Kai to agree, but Peony succumbs before she can make good on her promise.
• In Love with the Mark: Wolf falls for Scarlet after she shoots him. It Makes Sense in Context.
• Insistent Terminology: Cinder and Cress both refer to the maternal figures in their lives as their "legal guardians" when discussing them with other people. Cinder's not very consistent with it, but she will correct people when she's particularly mad at Adri.
• Internalized Categorism: Cinder in regards to her cyborg status. And later, her Lunar blood.
• Interspecies Romance: Three of the four featured couples are Earthen/full Lunar pairs.
• It's All Junk: Inverted. Cinder ends the series by dropping her childhood cyborg foot into a lake. She hated the foot and everything it represented, making this cathartic to her rather than sad.
• I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: Star's story in a nutshell. She goes to extreme lengths and risks death just to get a locket back to the man she loves, but ultimately realizes that he has no feelings for her and gives it up, along with her chance to get a functioning body, so he can be with the one he loves.
• Karma Houdini: Adri and Pearl are implied to get rich off of Garan's inventions and avoid punishment for years of child abuse. On the other hand, this is after they've gone through a severe Break the Haughty at Levanna's hands, and they're still going to be social pariahs once they get back home. Not to mention Cinder is highly likely to become their country's empress.
• Kick the Dog: After having Cinder arrested and forcibly brought home, making it clear she'll be kept on a very tight leash from now on, and taking Cinder's foot so she'll be forced to hobble around on makeshift crutches, Adri reveals that she finally went through with her threats to tear up Iko and sell her useful parts. Thankfully, most people don't think Iko's personality chip is "useful"....
• Kids Are Cruel: Helped along by Fantastic Racism - apparently it's a fairly common practice for members of the Lunar nobility to take in captives for their children to practice their glamour on. Scarlet spends some time this way after being abducted to Luna, and the little monster in question chiefly seems to enjoy tormenting her with visions of vermin invading her body.
• Little Red Fighting Hood: Scarlet. She starts a tavern brawl, is not hesitant to use the gun she keeps on her person at all times, and is willing to face potential capture and torture by a gang of bizarre thugs if it means she can get her grandmother back.
• Living Lie Detector: Cinder's cyborg implants will display an orange light in her vision when they detect a lie. It even works on Lunar glamours.
• Love Imbues Life: While she always had a "faulty personality chip" and was more aware than her peers, Star's first steps into true sapience begins when she starts having feelings for Daratan.
• Luke, I Am Your Father: Dr. Erland confesses to Cress that he is her father just before dying of letumosis.
• Lured into a Trap: Scarlet willingly walks into the pack's lair, knowing full well they're expecting her and she'll probably be captured and tortured. What she didn't know is that Wolf is a part of the trap. He approached her by order of the pack, not on his own after he supposedly ran away. His job was to convince her to tell him what she knew about Princess Selene of her own free will, and afterwards to deliver her to the pack.
• Mad Scientist: Dr. Dimitri Erland, who is researching a cure for letumosis using drafted cyborg test subjects. He's a Lunar keeping his mind control powers in check, which has the side effect of making him a little unhinged.
• Magic by Any Other Name: The Lunars' manipulation of bioelectric energy apparently has a science to it, but in practice it works more like magic, to the point where many Earthens refer to it as such. Dr. Erland says that calling it such just gives the Lunars more power.
• Manipulative Bitch: Queen Levana is highly skilled in manipulation, whether it's politically backing her opponents into a corner or literally manipulating their minds and bodies with her Lunar gift.
• Muggle Born of Mages: Shells are Lunars born without the ability to manipulate bioelectricity, making them not much different from your average Earthen. The key difference is the fact that they're immune to Lunar glamour and mind control.
• My Beloved Smother: Gender-flipped. Thorne's father was very controlling of him from a very young age, to the point where Thorne was seeking out financial independence by age thirteen.
• My Own Private "I Do": Scarlet and Ze'ev's wedding happens a few days before the official date so she can have a quiet ceremony with her friends rather than a huge media fiasco.
• Never Found the Body: Even though traces of Princess Selene’s flesh were found in the aftermath of the fire that destroyed her nursery, her skeletal structure was never found. This fuels rumors that she's still alive and in hiding.
• Non-Human Lover Reveal: Twofold for Cinder and Kai's relationship. At the ball, in front of Levana and thousands of onlookers, Kai finds out Cinder's a cyborg and Lunar.
• No-Sell: A dramatic example: Cinder resists Levana's attempt to force her to shoot herself in the head when her cyborg programming overrides Levana's bioelectric manipulation.
• Not Quite Saved Enough: Scarlet does find her grandmother, but she's been tortured to the point she can barely move, making escape impossible. She only manages a few moments with Scarlet before goading Ran into killing her, since she knows Scarlet won't leave without her.
  • Also, after Erland gives Cinder the letumosis cure, she races to New Beijing's quarantine area to give it to a dying Peony. She ultimately manages to get past the med-droids and reaches Peony's side, but the poor girl dies right as Cinder is about to give her the cure.
• Now or Never Kiss: Thorne promises to give Cress "a kiss worth waiting for" if they ever get into a life-threatening situation. He does.
• One Dialogue, Two Conversations: Cinder and Kai's conversation while dancing at the ball. Cinder thinks he's talking about her being a cyborg, but he's actually referring to her stepsister's recent death.
• Our Werewolves Are Different: The Lunar Special Operatives are genetically altered soldiers fighting for the Lunar queen. They were Lunar boys genetically spliced with wolves, given canine implants, and even had their jaw strength augmented so they could bite people's throats out. Back on Luna, the later generations of soldiers are even more wolfish looking, complete with fur and altered limb structure.
• Out-of-Character Alert: Ran impersonates Michelle in order to get information out of Scarlet. It works right up until "Michelle" refers to Scarlet as "weak". Knowing that the real Michelle always saw her granddaughter as strong, Scarlet sees through the deception and recoils in horror, leading to the "Grandmother, what big eyes you have!" moment that reflects the original fairytale.
• Parental Issues: Affects nearly the whole cast. Scarlet's mother left when she was very young, and her father, Luc, is a drunk who barely cares about her. Cress believed her parents gave her up to be killed as an infant and has only had manipulative "Mistress" Sybil as any sort of parental figure for the majority of her life. Princess Winter is regularly mocked and abused by her stepmother Queen Levana. Not to mention Cinder's reluctance to think of cruel queen Channary as her birth mother.
• People Jars: Cinder learns that she spent eight years inside of one in Michelle's basement.
• Perfectly Arranged Marriage: Averted. Channary toys with the idea of marrying Selene to Prince Kaito of Earth who, hilariously, falls in love with her as Cinder in the first book, but she quickly drops the idea in favor of murdering the Empress and marrying the Emperor himself. Channary dies before she can do more than consider it, though. Later, the Empress dies of letumosis without any additional interference.
• The Plague: Letumosis, or the blue fever, is a deadly virus that first appeared a dozen years. The virus goes through four stages, though it isn't until the second where the first signs of the disease appear.
• Post-Rape Taunt: A near-miss, but the trope gets a nod when Wolf's brother Ran mentions thinking about raping Scarlet in order to taunt Wolf about it afterwards. He claims he finds the idea of intercourse with a human too repugnant, however, so he decides to skip straight to killing her.
• Prince Charming: Prince Kai. He's completely sincere about it, too!
• Psychic-Assisted Suicide: Levana attempts to force Cinder to shoot herself in the head. While Cinder is forced to pull the trigger, her cyborg programming kicks in and allows her to force the gun away from her head, shooting the ceiling instead.
  • Levana attempts this again during the Final Battle in Winter, and Cinder responds in kind. However, their gifts are almost evenly matched at this point, with neither being able to get the other to pull the trigger without losing control of their own limbs. Levana ultimately gets exhausted first and surrenders. Cinder feels enough pity for her to accept, Levana pulls an I Surrender, Suckers and stabs Cinder with her other arm. Thankfully, Cinder manages to shoot Levana dead and survives.
• Race Lift: Princess Winter, the Snow White of the story, is black.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: What the crew of Thorne's Rampion gradually becomes, and a multinational one at that. There's a Chinese cyborg, an American criminal, a perky android, a French farm girl, a genetically-modified soldier, and a Lunar shell hacker.
• Raised by Grandparents: Scarlet came to live with her grandmother when she was seven.
• Really Royalty Reveal: Cinder, who starts out an unwanted cyborg, is actually the long-lost Princess Selene, rightful heir to the Lunar throne who was smuggled to Earth after Levana tried to have her killed.
• Retired Badass: Michelle Benoit, a decorated air force pilot who risked her life for years protecting Selene, and even after weeks of torture, still has the strength left to defy her captors.
• The Reveal:
  • Scarlet's grandmother had a fling with a Lunar while visiting the moon as part of a diplomatic mission. This resulted in the birth of her son, Luc, Scarlet's father, making Scarlet 1/4 Lunar. She doesn't seem especially bothered by being part Lunar thanks to her grandmother raising her to be open-minded about such things. The thing that bothers her is that her grandmother was keeping such a huge secret from her, and that she never intended to tell her.
  • Wolf is a Lunar spy whose purpose was to gain Scarlet's trust, coax information out of her, and then deliver her to a Lunar thaumaturge so she can be tortured in front of her grandmother to get the woman to talk.
• Ridiculously Human Robots: Most androids seen act like a typical computer program, having limited responses and being incapable of understanding things that don't fit their programming. However, Adri's housekeeping android Iko acts like a teenage girl with a love of fashion due to a "faulty" Personality Chip, and Kai's android Nainsi has been operating for so long that she's developed her own fully-fledged personality.
• Royals Who Actually Do Something:
  • Emperor Kai has to make decisions that affect the entire planet. He tries so hard to secure peace with the Lunars while not becoming a doormat to Levana. Although he is by far the youngest of the Earthen Union leaders, he is doing the most, personally, to deal with Levana. Arguably justified, as he is the one she is determined to marry.
  • Cinder is this as well, especially in Winter when she leads the revolution. Winter herself also gets in on the action, though in a different way; while Cinder is on the front lines of the fight, Winter essentially runs her PR, recruiting the people to Cinder's cause. She even manages to recruit several packs of Levana's mutant wolf soldiers to their side.
• Sadistic Choice: Levana forces Kai to choose between Cinder's life and peace with Luna. He chooses to give up Cinder for the sake of the entire planet.
• She Cleans Up Nicely: Averted. Cinder dons Peony's beautiful dress to go to the ball, but because of the rain and the car crash she sustained on the way there, she walks in soaking wet and spattered with oil. Not that she particularly cares, as the only reason she's going to the ball is to warn Kai about Queen Levana's plan. Kai doesn't really mind either. Cinder's inability to clean up nicely for more than five minutes even becomes a running gag.
• Space-Filling Empire: There are now only six nations in the world, each of them spanning continents, and together they form the Earthen Union. Emperor Kai rules over the Eastern Commonwealth, which is composed of all of Asia and many of the surrounding islands. It is implied that these huge mega nations were founded at the end of WWIV as part of the Treaty of Bremen, which was the birth of the Earthen Union. The damage from WWIII and WWIV is probably why many of these nations are so big—the loss of life was probably massive, and depending on the weaponry used, huge swathes of land could still be uninhabitable. The massive evacuations in wartime and the poisoning of land by radiation and chemical warfare would have forced many disparate cultures to be mixed in unconventional ways. We see this most clearly in the Commonwealth, which has developed an Asian fusion culture.
• Star-Crossed Lovers: Most of the main couples, although they all Earn Their Happy Endings:
  • Cinder and Kai suffer from this on multiple fronts. To start with, he's the Crown-Prince of the Eastern Commonwealth (and soon Emperor), while she's a lowly mechanic. Furthermore, she's a cyborg subject to intense Fantastic Racism by Kai's own government. Finally, it turns out that she's not only a Lunar (and thus technically an illegal immigrant and sworn enemy of the Earthen Union) but the rightful heir to the Lunar throne, meaning that Queen Levana is out for her blood while attempting to force a marriage union on Kai.
  • Scarlet and Wolf. She's a normal Earthen citizen, while he's a Lunar Super-Soldier sent to Earth to kidnap her grandmother in order to hunt down Princess Selene (i.e., Cinder). While Wolf ultimately defects to Cinder's rebellion against Levana after he and Scarlet fall in love, he spends most of the climax of Scarlet under the control of his thaumaturge superior and holding Scarlet prisoner, before saving her from his psychotic little brother. Then, early on in Cress, Scarlet is captured by Sybil and spends the remainder of the book imprisoned on Luna. Finally, in Winter, they briefly reunite, only for Wolf to be captured by Levana's forces, subjected to further genetic enhancements, and placed back under the control of a thaumaturge. Thankfully, he manages to escape their control once again and returns to Scarlet's side.
  • Winter and Jacin. They've been in love with each other pretty much since childhood, but have never been able to act on it since she's a Lunar princess and he's just a palace guard. Not to mention Levana hates Winter out of petty jealousy, while Jacin earns the ire of Aimery Park thanks to Winter's feelings for him, so they each have to be careful about maintaining some distance to prevent people from using them against each other. Of course, Winter rarely puts much effort into hiding her feelings, leaving it to Jacin to maintain a pretense of decorum, not that it fools anyone.
  • It's only averted with Cress and Thorne, who don't have much standing in the way of them getting together other than their own respective insecurities. While he's an Earthen and she's a Lunar, they're both fugitives from their respective home-worlds, so it's not much of an issue.
• Step Servant: Linh Cinder is a cyborg, meaning she is considered a second-class citizen. After her adoptive father died, his wife, Linh Adri, blamed Cinder for it and forced her to act as the breadwinner of the family by working as a mechanic, as well as doing all the work around the house.
• Suicide by Cop: A dying Michelle provokes Ran into killing her.
• Swiss-Army Appendage: Dr. Erland gives Cinder a shiny new titanium hand complete with a flashlight, screwdriver, and even a tranquilizer gun at the end of Cinder in order to help her escape prison.
• Synthetic Plague: It turns out that the Lunar monarchy has been developing letumosis for generations for use in biological warfare. Levana unleashed it by exposing Lunars in the working class domes to the disease, knowing that they would be the most likely to flee to Earth. She then allowed them to escape, knowing they were carrying the disease with them. The plan was to both reduce the Earthen population and to use the antidote as a political bargaining chip.
• Theme Naming: Many Lunars have names that relate to the moon in some way: Levana, Selene, Crescent, etc. Naming children after other things associated with the moon seems popular too, like wolves.
• Token Evil Teammate: Jacin, a Lunar royal guard. He isn't loyal to Levana, but he is a bit of an asshole.
• Traumatic Haircut: Cress gets a haircut after her satellite crashes on Earth. To be fair, the haircut itself isn't really traumatic, it's the crashing.
• Twice-Told Tale: Each book is a retelling of a classic fairytale, mostly following the original's basic plotline while simulatounsly adapting it into a scifi setting.
• Uncanny Valley: In-Universe, Cinder gets uncomfortable reactions from those around her once she's "outed" as a cyborg and the need to make greater use of her abilities prompts her to casually open up her prostheses to adjust wires or use her brain implant to link herself to a machine. When Cinder's Lunar abilities begin to show, they are extremely strong and uncontrolled, having been suppressed for many years and hence never trained by Cinder. It results in a sometimes extreme Glamour, which Kai finds outright painful to look at.
• Understanding Boyfriend: We learn that Kai doesn't care that Cinder's a cyborg. Her being Lunar is another deal entirely, only because it means that she might have been brainwashing him the entire time. In Cress, he shamefully admits that he probably would have stopped speaking to Cinder if she had told him she was a cyborg. But with everything going on, he winds up getting over that long before he sees her again. He also realizes that Cinder never brainwashed him, because if she had, he wouldn't still like her after they've been separated. Plus thanks to Levana, he knows what being manipulated feels like, and he never got that feeling from Cinder.
• Undying Loyalty: Jacin is loyal to his princess alone. He means Princess Winter.
• United Europe: The European Federation (comprising continental Europe and Greenland) is one of six megacountries formed after World War IV.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: Cinder and "Captain" Thorne.
• War Is Hell: While the revolution was necessary, it's also incredibly bloody and very traumatizing to everyone who went through it.
• Was It All a Lie?: Kai asks Cinder this after discovering she's a Lunar. Cinder's answer is painfully unclear to anyone but the reader.
• Wicked Stepmother: Multiple characters throughout the series have one:
  • Adri is this to Cinder. (While technically she's Cinder's adoptive mother, Cinder refers to her and her daughters as her step-family.) Adri verbally abuses Cinder, mostly in regards to her cyborg nature, and uses her as the family's sole source of income, rather than getting a job herself.
  • Levana is this to Winter. When she was 12 or 13, Levana used her gift to make Winter cut her own face with a knife. Not to mention how she publicly humiliates her in front of the Lunar court more often than not.
  • Sybil keeps Cress locked away in a satellite that orbits Earth. She is responsible for bringing Cress food and water and is the closest thing to a mother that Cress has ever known. Sybil is emotionally distant and verbally abusive.
• Withholding the Cure: Levana presents Kai with a sample of a cure for letumosis only days after his father died of it, measured in the exact does that would have cured him. She refuses to provide any more until Kai agrees to marry her and crown her empress.
• World of Snark: It would probably be faster to list the characters who weren't smartasses. The biggest contributors are probably Cinder, Scarlet, and Thorne, but even those without naturally sarcastic personalities, like Wolf, Cress, and Winter, occasionally get in on the action.
• World War Whatever: The far future setting is some time after a World War IV.
• Wrench Wench: Cinder is widely considered to be the best mechanic in New Beijing, to the point where the Prince of the Eastern Commonwealth becomes her customer.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: Cress is convinced she's the Damsel in Distress in a classic fairytale and destined for a Rescue Romance with Thorne. She's not entirely wrong, but his blindness and a confluence of other unlucky circumstances means she does quite a bit of the rescuing on her own.
• You Are in Command Now: Emperor Rikan dies early on in the book, leaving eighteen-year-old Kai in charge.
• You Are What You Hate: Like most people, Cinder is prejudiced against the Lunars. Turns out she is one, and their rightful queen at that!

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