Am I He Only One Who Just Doesn’t Get Why People Flop Their Shit Over Leigh Bardugo? Alina Was Forgettable

everyone say thank you leigh bardugo for keeping kaz and nikolai’s friendship alive

six of crows by leigh bardugo

oh, to be the owner of a small bookshop on a cobblestone street with roses climbing the front of the building, where books are stacked about in piles and there’s always coffee brewing and a sleepy shop dog lifts his head at the sound of the door’s bell and thumps his tail against the hardwood

ALSO, there’s a difference between stanning Joost - who was an innocent boy who literally didn’t mean to harm anyone and was just caught in the crossfire of an experiment gone wrong - and stanning an entitled white woman who wanted to harm a girl of colour because she thought she would find glory in her death. 

Basically: Dunyasha stans don’t try to excuse away your bad behaviour and learn reading comprehension 🙄

ook so what counts as infantilizing wylan? could u give examples please lol. Like is referring to wylan as “my baby” infantilism be cause I literally refer to all characters as my babies 💀

I’m very suspicious of people who call Wylan their baby or their son because, in my experience, those tend to be the people babying him. It’s really weird because he’s the only character that is consistently treated like a child in the fandom.

Mostly in that post I was talking about people treating Wylan like their “innocent uwu gay baby.” Acting like he is unflawed, acting like he is innocent and pure despite the fact that his actual personality in the books is much different. (Yes, at the beginning of Six of Crows, a lot of what we see comes off as very childish. But even by the end of that book we learn more about his personality and capabilities.) Wylan isn’t like that at all, he’s intelligent, he’s insecure about himself, he’s filled with a lot of righteous anger, and he’s even a bit chaotic or violent at times. Not only does making him this innocent childish character not sit right with me, it throws away all of his character development in canon.

In short: Just follow his canon personality.

I think one of my favorite things about how Kaz is written is that his limp was caused by something so mundane. He fell. He broke his leg. It healed wrong. That’s it.

There’s no special cause, and we’re not meant to care about how it happened. It’s not written as a tragedy or some sort of marker of being a chosen or anything like that.

I’m not saying that it’s bad to have a tragic backstory for a character’s disability, but too often that veers into bitterness and demonizing a disability. We also just don’t get boring causes very often. And it’s almost always: something terrible happened to this pure and good chara, usually done to them by someone horrible and evil, because our baby hero is too good and cool and perfect to have been injured otherwise.

Kaz fucked up and fell off a fucking roof. And it’s certainly not his fault he has a bad leg now, but it does show that he wasn’t *always perfect,* the way some protags are written.

And he’s not perfect or portrayed as perfect at all. He’s a jerk. He is absolutely an awful person, but he’s not *just awful.* He has a very strong sense of honor and fairness, even if it’s been twisted by Ketterdam. Despite being described as ruthless and willing to do anything for the right price, we see him bluffing whenever innocents get dragged into things.

He constantly fights not to care about people because he thinks attachments are weaknesses, but very early on he ignores his phobia of touch to carry Inej at least thirty feet. That’s a lot even with his gloves on. He is definitely calculating, but he’s not heartless.

Even with Matthias, despite Kaz’s irreverence, he reassures Matthias about the sacred ash. He tells Matthias that it was only a metaphor, and that depite its significance, he shouldnt feel guilty in having brought it down. It’s somewhat cold, which I don’t really fault him for, because Kaz is not a soft character.

And Kaz is not a fuckboy. Because fuckboys are a very particular kind of gross. They’re womanizing, arrogant, entitled, and sexist. Most of Kaz’s behavior is tied to his trauma - he has severe PTSD and understandable trust issues, and he shouldn’t be demonized for holding people at arms length.

He’s not beingnstand-offish and secretive to be an ass. Kaz genuinely believes that he has to act that way to survive, and nothing about Ketterdam has proven otherwise. He still maintains a deeply trusting relationship with Inej - he keeps very few secrets from her and consistently allows himself to be vulnerable in her presence.

Kaz’s entire moral scale is balanced on what Inej will forgive him for. Theft, violence, scheming: all of this is fine. But killing an innocent woman? Exploiting sex workers? Burying Pekka Rollins’s son? Absolutely not.

He never pressures Inej into staying with him, though he does ask once. When she tells him she plans to leave Ketterdam, he works to make that possible, because her wants are more important to him than keeping her close.

When Kaz has a chance to bargain with Nikolai Lantsov, to ask for literally anything, he asks Niko to find Inej’s parents. He does things for her and does not ask for thanks. When it comes to Inej and the rest of the Crows, Kaz never thinks in terms of debt - none of the Crows owe him anything. He only makes bargains with them twice - once with Matthias, and once with Nina, and in both cases he is bargainng for their help. He pays Inej’s contract - pays, not buys - because he can and that’s what she deserves. He ruins the Menagerie for the same reason.

And when shit hits the fan, and everything looks like it’s going to come down on their heads, he doesn’t try to save himself. He offers to turn himself over to the mob to let the others go free.

Me, naive, reading this Crooked Kingdom scene:

‘aww, so Kaz is one of those characters who, despite everything, is kind to little kids’

Me, paragraphs later:

’nevermind’

Kaz :

Inej :

I think now I am losing my mind, noticing all these parallels between Kaz and Inej.

🛑Rule of Wolves Spoilerrr🛑

The line in Rule of Wolves that goes something like she picked you Zoya, not me, not Kaz Brekker has the same energy as Ron saying it’s you that has to go on not me not Hermione youuuu