The underestimated catalyst
The people of the village push an ostracized woman toward intense actions that yield serious consequences. This is situational irony because the people indicate their expectation about her (that she is inept, useless, and ridiculous) but then she indicates her true potential by invoking a plot whose action is bizarre and extreme. She replaces the women of the town with her magical mermaid slaves and causes havoc in the town that has rejected her. She is ironic and underestimated.
The absurd plot
With a cursory glance at the plot, a reader might begin to feel they understand where the novel is heading, but unless someone told them, a reader is unlikely to guess that the plot will be what it is. The strangeness of the plot is simultaneously disturbing and playful, because it is just absurd enough for its action to be impossible, but it is still disturbing because it isolates aspects of human character and society which are undeniably present in reality. This novel falls somewhere between fantasy and absurdism.
The irony of the seals
The connection between animal nature and human nature is clearly a central idea in the novel's plot structure, and because of that, the irony of the magical seals is insightful and salient. The seals represent the animal nature from which humankind emerged in the first place. Their animal nature is naturally chaotic and competitive, as the human women in Rollrock quickly learn. The animals are also ironically attractive to humans, a subtle indication that what humans really want from each other sexually is to abandon the strictures of society together, to be more animalistic together. The protagonist invites a wave of animal nature back into her community, which is chaotic and colorful.
The return to water
Missakaela is defined by her relationship to water, a popular association in literature about powerful women, but not as defined by water as her children are. The spawn of her magical union with her merman slave is not only prone to be close to water—water is the only way the child can survive. When the men capture mermaids (according to Missakaela's plotting) they forbid the return to water. All these details are absurdly ironic. Together, the commentary seems to be that the men in the town have a tendency to disconnect their wives from the freedom that nourishes them, like mermaids require the open ocean for their survival.
Drama and exposure
The reader is invited to a comparison and contrast where they can try and identify what changes are yielded by the plot. The answer seems to be that the men in town are exposed, a humiliation that properly avenges the women who Missakaela represents symbolically—women who are mistreated because they are unattractive. Missakaela is an ironic hero because her drama exposes to the community what the men fail to understand or admit about themselves.
