#also I’m sorry most of these names aren’t capitalized my autocorrect keeps defaulting them to uncapitalized and I’m too lazy to fix

[hellsvestibule]

Ok I’m finally ready to talk abt dobrynya. As an aside of Catgirl nikitich from fgo. And as usual please don’t take me as a authority, if you are really curious look the stories up yourself, there are summaries online but you won’t find all the variants of the tales because some of them are said to have like 50 variations because they are meant to be performed as songs, and when performing them they would often be tweaked to suit the tastes of the individual storytellers. So what you end up w online or when handed out summaries in class is probably just a single condensation of a story which in reality has a whole multitude of variants. so keeping that in mind, what I know of these tales comes from a combo of like, 6th grade mythology, my Ukrainian roommate who grew up w these stories and refreshed me on them, and my scrounging around google for as many translations as I could find. Long post long you are warned

I don’t like dobrynya...

I adooore the Catgirl but I’ve had it out for dobrynya since 6th grade when we first read transcripts of these songs and there was a boy in my class who was super adamant about defending the misogyny in these tales. I even forgot about him before rereading a summary of dobrynya and marinka brought back the memories and I was just like oh yeah! This guy saw some pigeons chilling in a woman’s window and killed them, because he took it as a wanton invitation for sex (#symbolism) and after he antagonized her she pulled a Circe and started turning him into an animal to mess with him, and even brainwashed him into falling in love with her just to hurt him more, so like, yes she is definitely a “bad person” but the story takes for granted that in at least some varients of this tale dobrynya antagonized her first, or even just at its baseline that a woman being a bit whorish deserves to be attacked and have her pets killed and maligned as being in league with the devil. The same w another dobrynya story that starts w his mother telling him not to trample the nests of dragons, which he willfully ignores and so again he antagonizes the dragons by killing their young and they retaliate, and dobrynya is written to be the one in the right.

Fgo chose to make the dragons sympathetic and honestly this felt right to me as someone who found this unnecessarily cruel when reading it. Like. I get it, Dobrynya was written to appeal to a certain type of strong wise male authority trope, and back in the day dragons were symbolic of a specific unambiguous kind of evil (in light of reading about the historical man dobrynya was likely based on though, it compounded my frustration, because the man he’s likely based on sure committed a lot of mass murder under a similar mentality that all opposition had to be stamped out as cruelly as possible) idk for me he just feels very preachy and inconsistently characterized, and while there are plenty of good things underpinning the tales and a lot of my points of contention with him can absolutely be said of Ilya and especially Svyatogor, Svyatogor is written as a sympathetic but overtly evil villain, and at least the preachy things like Ilya overcoming being crippled because he was so good and pious, is based on a real historical priest whose spine showed signs of a deformity having been adjusted, and then like allyosha being the unconventional asshole of the 3 is also the point so while I don’t “like” him he didn’t quite irk me the way dobrynya does at times. dobrynya is the most conventional hero of these stories and the most popular to this day, so his sort of paradoxical personality and insisting he’s such a good pious person just…idk

One thing I do like in his tales is the underlying message that despite him being strong, his physical strength is never really enough on its own. It wasn’t enough to defeat the dragon, he had to pray for mercy and hold his place for 3 days, and almost lost the fight we’re it not for gods intervention. And it wasn’t enough to defeat nastasia, who just laughed and put him in her pocket. By this metric, nastasia is absolutely the unspoken star of these stories for me, because she shows up, looks at this often assumed to be a buff tough guy, goes “you are my poor little meow meow” and like that’s that like he’s married now he has a wife and she could crush him like a little bug anytime thereby rendering his strength completely invalid as a tactic for controlling her, its just really funny tbh, I’ve already admitted I love Svyatogor despite his far more egregious cruelty for similar reasons, there is something about a massive sadistic giant who can’t totally relate to humans just putting a little human in their pocket and being like “this is my anime girlfriend now” and I would read Infinite variants of this.

So the Catgirl dobrynya nastasia hybrid we get in fgo is great to me, although if she’s actually nastasia I wish they’d kept her huge. Bc the thing is, everything mean or irrational dobrynya does is so much funnier when rationalized as coming from a catgirl placeholding his identity. The fact that she is both patient and wise but also stupid and impulsive? Catgirl. The mean petty behavior like killing the birds? She is a cat… On that note, her bond with the dragons and use of the last name nikitich rather than calling herself nastasia does still sort of indicate aspects of this character are based more on marinka than nastasia. For example in one version of the marinka tale dobrynyas brainwashing breaks because she deliberately cheats on him with a dragon in front of him. And nikitich fgos max bond CE seems to be alluding to or making fun of this by flaunting her relationship with zmey as a positive one rather than antagonistic one. Considering her whole gag was marrying dobrynya for the lulz I can’t help but wonder. This reveal would not make me love her any less (plus I do think whoever she is she’s earnest about her love for dobrynya it’s just mixed in w frustration) I like both these women as characters and think that fgo would absolutely make Marinka sympathetic bc the writers understand that women like Circe and Medea are interesting and in the modern day deserve more consideration than to be labeled as irredeemably evil.

That’s sort of just where I’m at w the dude. Fgo endeared me to him a lot more specifically because it’s -not- falling back on the portrayal of him as a big buff strongman who is always right, but playing to the parts of the story where he’s just sort of helpless and sad and overtly dedicated to a cause nobody else really understands, then gets bullied by women who are stronger than him. A guy who has to plow through the depths of despair to find hope and this hope is incarnated as a funny catgirl who displays all the machismo and paternalistic authority and all that but makes it fun and lighthearted bc you fundamentally cannot take her seriously. It captures the spirit of the tale in an earnest way and attempts to rectify what might not sit well with modern audiences, you can criticize that if you want, but fate has been doing this with its heroes by and large all along, so in that case its not a contention that would be unique to dobrynya by any means.

If you do like dobrynya and hate the catgirl like. That’s fine…like especially if you grew up w this tale I’m not here to shit on you for liking him. You’re welcome to challenge me on any point but the thing is you’re probably not going to change my mind, I wrote what I considered to be the positive aspects I took out of his stories up there which are often what get recited when talking about him, and which have even grown on me over time, but for me it never quite washed away the unpleasant taste of the more cruel aspects until fgo just decided to make him the most ridiculous character ever