thing about deltora quest that only occurred to me in hindsight is not only just how much jasmine carries the entire party on this quest but also how genre-defyingly brutal she is lol. like, this is a kid's series that hinges on riddles and puzzles far more heavily than combat - even when deaths occur, they're often the result of cleverness in some way rather than straight up combat ability. that said, let's look at the villain kill count at the end of book five of eight of the first series:
- lief: 1 - even there it's with a well-thrown bottle of cursed water rather than his sword.
- barda: 0 - i'm not counting that one unnamed sand beast, that's an animal not a villain.
- filli: 0 - he is a squirrel, this is unsurprising.
- kree: 1 - killed an invincible sorceress all by himself, good bird best friend.
- jasmine: 5 - dropped a tree branch on a mf, drowned two cannibals in quicksand, cut a giant snake's throat, shoved a dude down a pipe full of toxic mold (after having to be told not to cut his throat while he slept jfc).
idk it just suddenly struck me as really funny how this one character who isn't the protagonist is almost from a different, far more brutal story, and uses that fact to consistently be the mvp and save everyone else's asses. i need to read this series again it's been too long.
It's also the fact that Jasmine saved their asses so many times too. In my eyes she was genuinely the smartest because she was the one who was most often suspicious of the situations they were in, and of course she was, she was raised alone in the woods. You see this especially in book six where they separate and Lief realizes just how much they depended on her to survive and dodge danger. MVP for REAL