“I’m Not Freaking Out I’m Freaking In”- Po

🛑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

Y’all I was just thinking idk if this has been done but six of crows enemies to lovers:

Kaz Brekker x Jan van Eck

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 🙄

Kaz:

*taps microphone*

Inej Ghafa is actually a very morally grey character and failure to understand this proves that you don’t know what morally grey means

CROOKED KINGDOM AND RULE OF WOLVES SPOILER

“Go little rockstar” but it’s Matthias watching Nina have mercy on his people

No cause what if Locke had a crush on Cardan the whole time

"Fine, make me your villain".

- The darkling (shadow and bone) by Leigh Bardugo

That single sentence really struck a cord with me. It exploited multiple things about the darkling and his character.

1. It conveys that he knows Alina (and many others) see him as the bad guy. He understands that they look at him as the villain who must be stopped because what he stands for and does is wrong.

2. He’s trying to make Alina understand that well what he is doing is dark and dangerous business, it’s not the wrong thing to do. He’s trying to make her see that sometimes bad actions must be preformed to generate good results.

3. Despite the fact that he’s attempted to explain his vision of a different future to Alina, he has come to understand that she simply doesn’t see it the way he does. He has come to understand that all she sees when she looks at him, is a monster doing monstrous things.

4. He is upset and frustrated that Alina can’t understand his vision and his actions, that she can’t understand him, that she only sees him as a villain.

5. That sentence also touches upon the subject that the villain never truly sees themselves as a villain. The darkling knows what he’s doing is bad, but he believes in his core that it’s ultimately the right thing to do. He believes that by preforming certain destructive actions, a positive result will emerge from the ashes.

6. That single sentence also shows that in Alina’s perspective, The darkling is her villain, but he doesn’t think he is. He thinks she should be with him, on his side.

The darkling is a very interesting villain because he is written to be very dark and very motivated, yet you can understand his motivation, you just probably don’t agree with his methods.

CHARACTERS OF COLOR: inej ghafa → six of crows

But what about the rest of us? What about the nobodies and the nothings, the invisible girls? We learn to hold our heads as if we wear crowns. We learn to wring magic from the ordinary. That was how you survived when you weren’t chosen, when there was no royal blood in your veins. When the world owed you nothing, you demanded something of it anyway.  

I think one of my favorite aspects of the Six of Crows duology is the fact that Kaz and Inej do not end up together.

And that’s not because I don’t ship them.

It’s because Inej, unlike so many YA heroines, isn’t what “heals” Kaz. Her love doesn’t magically fix him or make him a better person. He wants to change for her– he wants to get over his phobia of human touch. He wants her to love him. But it isn’t some overnight happening. He doesn’t suddenly overcome his affliction because of his love for her.

In the end, Kaz is still morally ambiguous, sometimes outright corrupt, and still has severe PTSD trauma.

And while Inej might love Kaz despite those things, she is not willing to lower her worth to accept them in a relationship. “I will have you without your armor, Kaz Brekker. Or I will not have you at all.”

That was one of the most powerful YA heroine lines to her love interest that I’ve ever read. So many fictional girls (and real girls, for that matter) stay in the hopes of fixing a man, of healing his brokenness. Inej wants to heal him, but she understands that she cannot. Only Kaz can heal himself. Only he can want it enough to change. And it won’t be some overnight affair. Wanting to change and actually changing are two entirely different things. Kaz will have to go through agonizing changes if he ever wants to grow.

So far, he has accepted that he is the “demon of the barrel”. He still wants to burn the world down. He is still angry and hurting. He talks about wondering why over the years, with every violent turn his life takes, why his phobia has only gotten worse. It’s because he’s let himself rot in it. He’s stripped any and all goodness in the world down to the barest threads.

That’s why he is not ready for Inej. Inej, who might have her own issues and flaws, but who still has hope for a better world. Who is still willing to fight for it.

It’s not Kaz’s inability to touch her that she wants him to work on. It’s his mindset. His finality in the evil in his heart and his acceptance of it. He will never get over his phobia until he can understand goodness, the goodness of touch, the goodness of man.

And Inej will not accept him while he still holds on to that armor of hatred. And I think that is beautiful. It is healthy. It shows a level of self-respect that is often sadly absent from our fiction today.