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“Come, then, City That Never Sleeps. Let me show you what lurks in the empty spaces where nightmares dare not tread.”

The City We Became is a 2020 novel by N. K. Jemisin. It is the first volume of the Urban Fantasy duology The Great Cities and the second volume is The World We Make. It takes place in a world where great cities acquire sentience through human avatars. In New York City, a group of avatars of New York, each representing their respective five boroughs (Manhattan, Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens and Staten Island) as well as of the whole city New York City as a whole emerges to face a supernatural threat.


The City We Became contains examples of:

  • 11th-Hour Superpower: Veneza, Bronca's protege at the art center, shows flashes of magical sensitivity for the whole book. When it becomes clear that Aislyn's betrayed them, she gets an emergency upgrade and becomes the avatar of Jersey City (considered a "sixth borough" of NYC). Her presence allows New York prime to fully power up.
  • Abusive Parents: Aislyn's father is a controlling, emotionally abusive, misogynistic bigot. She loves him, but she's also frightened of him, and knows that if she were ever in real trouble, she couldn't trust him to help.
  • Accidental Murder: On a large scale. When she freaks out and attacks Paulo, Aislyn strikes the city as well as the incarnation, not realizing that's what she's doing, which causes a horrific earthquake.
  • Alien Geometries: As befitting a story where R'lyeh shows up. A mere glimpse is frightening enough to break down the normally unshakeable Veneza.
    • Discussed on a Tumblr post that Padmini reads, which jokes about how Lovecraft portrayed non-Euclidean geometry as scary when to people familiar with math it's actually completely harmless.
  • Alike and Antithetical Adversaries: The diverse main cast, representing New York, is contrasted with the uniformity of the Enemy which tries to make cities more uniform, and the Woman in White always appears as a white woman as well as being the Anthropomorphic Personification of a scarily uniform city herself.
  • All Your Base Are Belong to Us: The third act really kicks off after the Woman in White destroys the Bronx Arts Center.
  • Anthropomorphic Personification: The five boroughs of New York and New York city as a whole are incarnated into six avatars that represent their social essence.
  • Apocalypse How: The Woman in White intends to create a class X-5 with her city imposing on New York destroying this universe and several others connecting to it. A class X-5 also happens every time a city is born, "tearing through" universes and destroying thousands of them.
  • Awful Truth: New York is actually the second city to have multiple avatars—the first was London, and something terrible happened when it incarnated, which has all the other cities on edge about New York. London Prime somehow ate her borough's avatars, and is still incredibly traumatized. Hong Kong believes this is a feature of having multiple avatars, and tells the boroughs with little fanfare that they'll probably get subsumed. They don't, though, and when they meet London herself in the next book London explains that of course she didn't literally eat them; she simply took their avatar-ness into herself. And promptly went mad, because London is much too big to be a single person. There's also how the birth of a city destroys many universes, which Padmini is horrified by.
  • Bad Powers, Good People: Manny, as the avatar of the borough "where money talks and bullshit walks", has powers that come down to emotional manipulation and magical late capitalism, as well as a nasty set of skills from his former life, but he's firmly one of the good guys.
  • Batman Gambit: To solidify her control over Aislyn, the Woman in White deliberately puts Aislyn in the path of a rapey neo-Nazi when she realizes Paulo is coming to Staten Island, knowing the man will attack. This means Aislyn is terrified and off-balance, allowing the Woman to manipulate her into attacking Paulo with a combination of fear and ingrained racism.
  • Been There, Shaped History: Hurricane Katrina and the botching of the government response were influenced, if not caused by, the Woman in White, as a way to make it easier to kill New Orleans. The same goes for the 2010 Haiti Earthquake and the birth of Port-au-Prince.
  • Big Applesauce: The story is set in New York.
  • Broke Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu: The reason for the plot. The Prime avatar repulsed the Enemy's first attack, but overexerted himself and fell into a coma. New York was forced to awaken five more avatars to help the Prime and weather the next attack.
  • Brutal Honesty: The Woman In White makes no secret of the fact that she considers humans, and especially cities, to be abominations; that she intends to destroy the city and use it as a stepping stone to destroy the universe; and that the only reward for allying with her is to die last and more peacefully. Staten Island hates the rest of the City too much to care.
  • Cast of Personifications: The main characters embody social and historical aspects of New York and its boroughs:
    • Bronca is an older boisterous Lenape artist, embodying the first inhabitants of New York and the scrappy, artsy side of the Bronx.
    • Brooklyn is a black middle-aged lawyer and city councilwoman who was once a rapper. She embodies both the bohemian past of Brooklyn and its current gentrification.
    • Padmini is a 25-year-old Tamil immigrant graduate student, reflecting the multiculturalism of Queens. She's implied to be Dalit (of the lowest caste), so she also embodies the desires of immigrants to start over in a place with more opportunity.
    • Manny is smartly dressed and ruthless, embodying the business-focused mentality of Manhattan. Much like Manhattan itself, he's just ambiguous enough to reflect whatever the person looking at him expects to see.
    • Aislyn is a timid and mousy white woman afraid of the other, bigger, boroughs, reflecting the whiter and more conservative lean of Staten Island.
    • Veneza hangs around the other avatars for most of the book despite not being one of them. At the climax, she becomes the personification of Jersey City, small and scrappy but daring the rest of New York to say it doesn't belong.
  • Cast from Money: Manny throws money to be able to push back tentacles of the Enemy, due to money working as a construct that has power from how important people find it.
  • Cast Full of Gay: Most characters are LGBTQI.
  • The Champion: Manny is completely loyal to and in love with the primary avatar and feels his mission is to do anything to protect him.
  • Combat Pragmatist: The Enemy never kept to the rules of engagement it had supposedly agreed to with the cities, and even set up a multinational corporation whose purpose is to destroy cities' individuality so they might never be born, or to weaken and sabotage them if they are. The older cities come to suspect that this is how it arranged the assassination of the avatar of New Orleans.
  • Did We Just Have Tea with Cthulhu?: Aislyn thinks of The Woman in White as a friend. She's even a fan of tea.
  • Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Subverted. The heroes beat the abominations with physical violence several times, but being city avatars, they're halfway to being eldritch abominations themselves.
  • Dirty Cop: Aislyn's father arrests someone and charges them with assault for no other reason than they were the wrong color and in his wrong neighborhood.
  • Eldritch Abomination: The Enemy is explicitly and repeatedly called one, word for word. It is an immense, ancient horror from an incomprehensible universe, and it has nothing but ill will for cities and humanity in general. It manifests on Earth in a variety of forms, including feathery white tendrils of various sizes, two-dimensional spider monsters, and - most prominently - the Woman in White. Fittingly, the Enemy turns out to be the avatar of the city of R'lyeh.
  • Everyone Has Standards: It's strongly implied that even the NYPD find Aislyn's father's behavior unacceptable, which is why he has no friends at work and hasn't made detective despite thirty years of trying. We also learn that at least a few NYPD officers (notably, the women) are on the side of the City.
  • Expendable Alternate Universe: Thousands of alternate universes are destroyed when a city is born. While the main characters had no way of preventing this from happening with the birth of New York, they still decide pretty quickly that it's worth it and make no attempt to prevent it from happening again.
  • Five-Token Band: Befitting the ethnic and cultural diversity of New York City. Also played with as the main cast has no White Male Lead like the usual iterations of this trope.
  • Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse:
    • It's clear Aislyn's prejudices and issues stem from being raised by an emotionally abusive bigot, and the narrative presents her terrible home life sympathetically. But it's equally clear that as a grown woman, she has the chance to become someone better, and it's her fault for not taking it.
    • This also applies to Brooklyn when Bronca calls her out for some violently homophobic lyrics she wrote back during her career as MC Free. Brooklyn acknowledges that the sexism and homophobia she herself was facing from the male MCs on the scene doesn't make it okay.
  • Genius Loci: The main characters are this to New York and its boroughs. In fact, all the major cities in this world get one or several: Sao Paolo and Hong Kong are secondary characters in the book, and Lagos and Paris are mentioned. The Woman in White is also one - namely, R'lyeh.
  • Greater-Scope Villain: The Woman in White has a "board" she must answer to.
  • Heroic RRoD: New York is too big for one person to handle all of it; the prime avatar is able to briefly channel the entire city to beat back the Woman In White's initial attack, but the effort nearly kills him, and he spends nearly the whole book in a magical coma.
  • Humanoid Abomination: The Woman in White appears to be a white (Caucasian) woman with white hair and all-white clothing, but she doesn't even bother hiding that she's something utterly inhuman and alien. Her other features vary considerably between appearances, and is once described as having unnatural and unsettling beauty. She is an avatar of the Enemy, and R'lyeh contains many Women in White.
  • Imperfect Ritual: Awakening the primary avatar of New York requires all five of the boroughs, but Staten Island refuses to cooperate and attacks the others. Until they realize political borders don't matter much for this magic, so they can substitute an avatar for Jersey City.
  • Intro-Only Point of View: The primary avatar of New York narrates the first chapter, but he's in a coma for the rest of the book until he gets to narrate the epilogue.
  • Invisible to Normals: City magic hides any supernatural happenings from normal people, unless they need to see what's really happening for their own safety. (Eg, during the ferry attack, the passengers can't see the Woman in White's tentacles, but the crew can, because they need to in order to stop the boat from sinking.)
  • Laser-Guided Amnesia: Manny can remember all the general knowledge he had before awakening, but nothing about the details of his own life. He believes it's because he was not a good person before becoming Manhattan, and the City took away that knowledge so it wouldn't impede his ability to fight.
  • Leaning on the Fourth Wall: The last section of any audiobook tends to have the information about the author, the narrator, the production, and copyright, etc., read by the narrator in a more removed tone of voice, different from their 'narration voice' or any of the character voices they take on. In The City We Became that section is read in the Woman In White's voice, dripping with insincere warmth and sarcasm. Then she laughs.
  • Let's Split Up, Gang!: The boroughs are reluctant to split up but do so near the end of the book, with one half looking for Staten Island and the other half looking for the Primary.
  • Light Is Not Good: Everything associated with the Enemy is a stark, stale white.
  • Line-of-Sight Name: Manny, having forgotten his original name, names himself after seeing the word Manhattan in a subway station.
  • Look Both Ways: The primary avatar runs away from his enemies across the FDR drive, and they get killed by being run over by the cars there.
  • Love at First Sight: When Manny, Brooklyn, and Padmini coming together triggers a vision of the prime avatar, Manny falls for him hard.
  • Lovecraft Lite: Yes, it's a story about unknowable invaders from beyond the universe, but a total victory over the Enemy is possible (and has happened several times before, though not without cost).
  • Mama Bear: Bronca feels strongly protective of the staff and artists-in-residence at the Center, especially Veneza. Brooklyn is the same way toward her daughter, which is part of what helps the women start to bond.
  • Marriage of Convenience: Bronca is gay and so was her late husband, but they stayed married because they genuinely liked each other even if they weren't in love. They also wanted to have kids, and knew it was safer to appear straight.
  • Meaningful Name: Several of the avatars have names that sound like their borough's name—or, in Brooklyn's case, just have exactly the same name.
  • Ms. Exposition: Because Bronca's the oldest, New York decides she's the one who can handle knowing all the background information, so she has to tell the others how stuff works.
  • My Significance Sense Is Tingling: The avatars are able to sense each other's locations. Despite having entire boroughs to search, they find each other pretty quickly.
  • The Needs of the Many: When the boroughs learn that they may have to die to awaken New York Prime, they're not happy about it, but they all eventually agree. Five lives against millions isn't a choice at all. Averted when Bronca's power confirms that the birth of a city destroys countless lives in multiple universes; the avatars decide that living cities are worth the loss.
  • Never Split the Party: The main characters are reluctant to split up because that would mean they could get picked off one by one. However by the end they split up, with one half going to find Staten Island and the other finding the Primary.
  • Not-So-Omniscient Council of Bickering: There is a Summit composed of all the cities on Earth that survived their awakenings. Disagreements among their ranks prevented them from mounting an effective resistance to the Enemy's changing tactics.
  • Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: The Enemy initially says she wants to stop cities from becoming alive and destroying multiple inhabited universes each time. If she has to exploit human bigotries and cause smaller massacres in the process, and cripple humanity's social development, so be it. By the endgame, she makes it clear that she simply considers humans and their cities to be abominations, and she intends to destroy not just the universe where the story is taking place, but every universe connected to it.
  • Obfuscating Stupidity: The Enemy has spent millennia pretending to be a rampaging beast so the cities don't recognize its ability to plan ahead and weaken cities before they're born.
  • Obliviously Evil: The birth of a city collapses thousands of realities into non-existence, killing trillions of people or even rendering them Deader than Dead. But there is no way for the avatars of the city to know this until after the city is born.
  • Personal Hate Before Common Goals: The Enemy openly declares that she's there to destroy the universe. Staten Island wants to see the other boroughs go to Hell so badly that she's okay with this.
  • Personality Powers: The avatars battle using "constructs"—abstract ideas that have real existence in cityspace. Each avatar's preferred constructs influence their fighting style.
    • Brooklyn is a former MC who defeats monsters with literal rap battles.
    • Bronca has fought all her life by running up to bigger, stronger opponents and kicking them before they expect anything. As an avatar, she's always wearing her "boots."
    • Aislyn is so timid that she commands a Perception Filter.
    • Padmini is a graduate student that uses mental mathematical equations to shape reality.
    • Manny is able to hold off the eldritch abominations by literally buying the land they're standing on.
  • Politically Incorrect Villain: While the Woman in White is too inhuman to properly feel mortal prejudices (she's good at Fantastic Racism, though), bigots are easier for her to influence than most, so she cheerfully plays to any and all kinds of -isms to get what she wants.
  • Public Domain Character: At the climax, Manhattan briefly takes the form of King Kong.
  • Refusal of the Call: Bronca and Aislyn are both reluctant to join the rest of the city despite their powers calling to them to do so.
  • Ret-Gone: One of the possible fates for New York if the avatars lose—the Woman in White destroyed Atlantis so completely that it never existed in the first place.
  • Right for the Wrong Reasons: Aislyn finds the Neo-Nazi her father brings home off-putting even before he gets rapey, not because Neo-Nazis are bad, but because he identifies with the Vikings, and her hatred of "invaders" extends to hating the Vikings for invading Ireland centuries ago.
  • Shrinking Violet: Both Aislyn and her mother, thanks to Matthew's abuse.
  • Steven Ulysses Perhero: Brooklyn, Bronca and Aislyn all have names that sound like the borough they will later end up represented, although Manny's name is a Line-of-Sight Name he created for himself due to his amnesia and not the name he was born with.
  • Tentacled Terror: The soldiers of the Enemy frequently sport the classic writhing tentacles. It's hinted that they intentionally took on the Lovecraft look to distract the Cities from the Enemy's newer, subtler tactics.
  • Try and Follow: The primary avatar kills the Eldritch Abominations chasing him by making them follow him onto a highway and get run over by cars.
  • Villainous Gentrification: A tool of the Woman in White. By putting up generic chain stores and pricing out the population and their original culture, she saps the "character" from cities and weakens their power. Becomes very literal near the climax when a race to Staten Island must go through a gauntlet of Starbucks franchises-turned-Eldritch Abominations.
  • White Male Lead: Averted with the main cast. In fact, being a straight white male is a good sign of being on the side of evil.
    • Lampshaded when Hong addresses Manny upon first meeting the avatars, assuming that the only man among them must be the leader.
  • Your Mind Makes It Real: People have the power to create new universes with their thoughts, either from cultural constructs or even just one person's imagination being strong enough.

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