History Literature / Deerskin

* DoesNotLikeShoes: Lissar, once she's left the mountains for lower country, tells a friend "I like to know where I'm walking. In shoes, I'm always walking on shoes."

* [[OneHundredPercentAdorationRating 100% Adoration Rating]]: Lissar's parents, to the point that everyone adamantly refuses to believe that they are capable of doing ''any'' wrong.

''Deerskin'' takes it UpToEleven in grimness factor--the princess is shown as completely neglected long before her mother dies, the entire kingdom far too fixated on her beautiful, beloved, but fundamentally shallow parents. Neither parent even takes any notice of her until her mother dies, and her father looks at her in a way she can't interpret but ''really'' doesn't like. She spends the next two years largely hiding from him, until, the day after her seventeenth birthday, he announces his intention to marry her. Naturally she's as horrified as the rest of the court, but since the court can't bring themselves to think the King is wrong, they blame it on ''her''.

* DarkerAndEdgier: Than the original fairy tale, which was already pretty dark. Interesting in that almost all other retellings {{Bowdlerise}} the whole issue of incest by making the princess adopted - ''this'' adaption takes it UpToEleven.

* {{Grimmification}}: Where most other adaptions of this fairy tale tone down the disturbing subject matter, this one takes it UpToEleven.

* [[Trauma-Induced Amnesia]]: When she runs away from her father, Lissar's brain suppresses nearly everything of her past, from her name and identity to even the herblore she learned from Rinnol, because all of it is associated with her father's abuse. The memory comes back, very traumatically, when she miscarries. The Moonwoman helps her put the memories away again until she's ready for them. This doesn't mean that the next time she remembers her name it's all fine and dandy, though; realistically, her trauma and recovery are more a cycle than a straight line, though there is gradual improvement.

* BreakTheCutie: More like "smash the cutie's sanity with a mallet."

* RapeAsDrama: More like Rape As Torture.

* CallingTheOldManOut: Lissar eventually lets her father have it.

* ConvenientMiscarriage: Happens to Lissar in the hut in the woods. Considering her injuries, her so-called food, her mental state, and the squalor in which she was living, it's really more surprising that it didn't happen sooner. When a woman is dying, as Lissar pretty explicitly was, her body will naturally jettison any pregnancy it can't support. The strange thing, though, is that Lissar didn't have the miscarriage until the moment she realised she was pregnant; at that point she was actually in pretty good shape compared to how she had been a month or two prior: broken, bleeding, bone-weary and starving.

* ShoutOut: There's a reference to the dragon Maur, from the author's ''Literature/TheHeroAndTheCrown''. Possibly a ContinuityNod, though there's no other sign that the two books share any continuity.

* WomanInWhite: Lissar in her deerskin dress and white hair. The effect is enough to make people think she's not quite human.

* TheyJustDontGetIt: Her father's courtiers are all too willing to think that Lissar has seduced ''him''--even though she's constantly withdrawn and flinching around him even ''before'' his announcement that he intends to marry her, and she ''faints'' when he makes said announcement. This trope, disturbingly, has occurred among readers as well: one reader wrote [=McKinley=] an irate letter telling her that she had ruined Lissar's capacity to be a heroine, because ''fairy tale heroines have to be virgins''.

* TheyJustDontGetIt: Her father's courtiers are all too willing to think that Lissar has seduced ''him''. This trope, disturbingly, has occurred among readers as well: one reader wrote [=McKinley=] an irate letter telling her that she had ruined Lissar's capacity to be a heroine, because ''fairy tale heroines have to be virgins''.