Vengeance And Loss Of Control: The Young Elites By Marie Lu

Alivia Saer
Mrs. Kuhnen
ELA 3
Date: 1.3.23
Vengeance and Loss of Control Have you ever been in a situation where you felt like you were losing your mind? Felt controlling towards another person? In The Young Elites by Marie Lu the main character, Adelina is often feeling that way. Lu tells the story in Adelina’s eyes, and Adelina is just discovering her power to create allusions, and control things. Very cool right? But little does she know, her powers can turn her in the wrong direction, and hurt the people she loves. A prominent theme in Marie Lu’s The Young Elites is that focus on vengeance leads to a lack (or loss) of control.

Readers recognize that losing control is an important part of this story when Adelina kills her father with powers she did not realize she had. At this moment, Adelina explains that “the phantoms whisper to my father speaking my most frightening thoughts in a chorus of voices dripping with hatred” (Lu 18). When she realizes he is dead, she whispers, “I didn’t mean it” and thinks “this is all wrong.”

Have you ever been tempted into doing something to someone who has done something mean to you just to get back at them? In this story, it is hard to tell if the main character Adelina is an antagonist or a protagonist. During the scene with Enzo, Adelina gets in to deep with her thoughts and realizes as she thinks to herself “I cannot think–I’m losing control over my powers” (Lu 237). She can use her powers for the good, but without control of it, it can lead to troubles and fear just like the character Elsa in Disney’s Frozen. Without control over them, Adelina can fall into a trap that will just bring up more conflicts like in this example where Adelina is slipping, “[...] the true part of me is slowly but surely giving way to something bitter. What was once sadness is making way for anger. The darkness creeps in. Exhausted, I welcome it” (Lu