#even if it suffers the same story problem of having to relegate the central political themes to subtext to avoid getting in trouble

[remainingso]

WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON KING OF SCARS???

HELLO FRIEND okay so uhhh i hope you wanted (-checks word count-) nearly 2.5k of meta. Because. That’s what I have. I clearly have so many thoughts on King of Scars. 

So without further ado, let’s dive in!!! (spoilers ABOUND like literally EVERYWHERE under the cut) 

To start: I wanted to love this book so, so badly. In fact, I find it basically unratable? I loved the first 50% with my entire heart and the latter 50% just felt like… the world’s longest disappointment. Ultimately I think this book could’ve been so much more, and the reason I’m kind of mad at it is that it promised me so many things that it never ended up delivering on.

So! Sections, because I’m articulating my salt, dammit.

on breaking open your world

One of the things I loved the most about the first part of this book was the sense of scale we were finally getting from the world. it made sense for Ravka to be isolated in the original trilogy—the whole plot was about getting rid of the Shadowfold to open it back up to the rest of the world. And we got glimpses of the wider Grishaverse politics in Crooked Kingdom especially. I thought King of Scars was going to finally be the book where we go GLOBAL in scope. I adored all the political talk early on—I genuinely thought we were building up to some sort of fantasy World War I! The Zemeni navy starting to challenge the Kerch hold on the seas! Messy alliances between the countries!

I wanted so much more of that—I wanted to know more about why there was war brewing. A lack of resources? The Zemeni new and hungry and eager for more? Fjerda wanting a holy war against the Ravkan Grisha presence? Kerch Greed? I wanted to see what Ravka looks like at war with something outside of itself. I wanted to see Nikolai struggle over how to protect his people and his land. I wanted to see him mess up. I wanted to see him make difficult decisions about how to govern.

Instead, I got half a book of…training montage.

And instead of widening the world globally, we got a lot of Lore.

(Just so much Lore. I really didn’t need to know the origins of why the Grisha are named after a diminutive of Grigori, man. That felt lame and kind of defensive after years of that criticism lol.)

Right off the bat: I didn’t like the revelation of the Saints being real. I didn’t like the weird in-between location Nikolai and Zoya spend literally half the book in. First of all, I never thought that Bardugo’s magic system was built on the most solid of foundations, and I think that this attempt to deepen the mythos, essentially, does more harm than good. I end up with more questions than answers: how does it count as mutual sacrifice when you make an amplifier if you don’t actually die and there’s one obvious dominant consciousness? How does it work that you can become one with an amplifier and then someone else can then become one with you+amplifier? Is there a limit to how many times you can do that? WHY were these particular Saints drawn to the shadowfold? And, beyond that, what are the Saints in service to? I think Bardugo tried to dig into the nature of her religion, but I don’t understand the fundamental Core to this belief system: who’s god? Without god, who are the Saints being martyred for? And when people pray to the Saints, what values are they purporting to uphold? I feel like these are all sort of central questions you need to make clear when you go deep into religious world building, and because she focused so much on the Saints without answering those questions for me, it ultimately felt kind of cheap and hollow.

And because Nikolai & Zoya are…basically stuck there for the whole second half of the book, we don’t get to see them actually interact with Ravka as it is? There’s a lot of narration about Nikolai thinking of what Ravka means to him, but that’s ultimately meaningless for me if I don’t see him make any decisions in service to her. He’s isolated and cut off from the government! This is a book about a King who never does any real King-ing.

the feminist aesthetic

This book has a very empowering aesthetic. And by that, I mean it claims to be empowering without actually supporting that with textual events. There are a lot of nice quotes about powerful women, but at almost every single turn, it undermines the power the women in the book have.

so Let’s Talk About Zoya

I love Zoya! I think YA needs more girls like Zoya, who are unapologetically mean, who gets to be ruthless and prickly and aren’t seen as wrong for it. I love that Nikolai clearly wants her to step on him. I love so much about her.

What I don’t love is how the narrative treats her.

I don’t like that she lets herself be drowned over and over and over, all so Nikolai can level up—and she doesn’t even punch him in the face for it after? She just literally smiles and lets it happen. Why does she have to be reduced to the precious thing he’s fighting for? Why does she have to suffer to force him to action? I love that Nikolai thinks Zoya can be Queen—but, does he really? He says he does. But he literally doesn’t listen to her a single time in the book. And she has good suggestions! Killing his dad? Would’ve solved their problem at the end where he aligns himself with the Fjerdans. Not listening to Yuri? Would’ve solved their entire Darkling problem by the end. Pick a bride? Stay in Ravka? Kill the Darkling at the end? All really good ideas! The book tells us that Zoya can be queen, and then spends the entire run-through relegating her to support role. What does Zoya do for herself? I don’t like that in order to have her “level up” they took away her power, and then had a man give her his power in order for her to thrive.

Okay so this line: “Men looked at her and wanted to believe they saw goodness beneath her armor, a kind girl, a gentle girl who would emerge if only given the chance.” I LOVE this idea so much. I love the notion of like a girl who doesn’t need to be saved, because she isn’t soft underneath; she’s all steel. But I can’t help but feel like the scene where Zoya confesses how she got her amplifier in the first place basically entirely undermines this concept. I thought, going in, that we were going to get a story about baby Zoya who snuck out in the middle of the night to stake a kill for herself, a baby Zoya who stole the tiger out from under everyone’s nose because she was wanted to show them all she could do it, and she didn’t mind the blood on her hands. I don’t like that we got a story about how she wanted to protect the baby cubs instead! I don’t like that this bonding moment between Zoya and Nikolai is one where she…reveals the kind, gentle girl underneath her armour. I didn’t want the story of how she got her power to be rooted in her secret maternal compassion for baby cubs; I wanted her to be ruthless. I wanted her to have killed and regretted it, maybe. I wanted that moment between them to be one where she tells him about her raw ambition and bite, and he understood that about her.

I’m not super here for all the… women have to suffer in order to Overcome vibe either? I mean it’s Bardugo’s prerogative, and I’m not saying it’s problematic or anything, but just that she has a history of making female characters necessarily suffer for growth (see: Genya, Inej) and I don’t like how Zoya’s trauma backstory with being exploited by a shitty man falls into that pattern. Why can’t she have been just angry? Why does she need a reason?

the shu han problem

I’ve had a long-standing issue with the way the Shu have been depicted in the Grishaverse, and this book did nothing to alleviate that. To start off, the strange Mongolia-China mashup culture is problematic in and of itself. In the Original Trilogy, we get the sole asian martial artist teacher trope full blast; not good! I never talk about this, but I actually hated how the Shu were treated in Six of Crows. I really do love that duology, but I sure don’t like that the Shu are…basically one dimensional villains throughout. The committee gets called “greedy” explicitly out of all the other committees present at the auction in Crooked Kingdom? Kuwei doesn’t get to speak for himself, and his entire storyline is basically a proxy for Jesper and Wylan to get together. I still don’t even know what his personality is like.

So I went into King of Scars hoping for…something more. Something better. And I mostly came away cold.

I still feel like we don’t know anything about Shu Han. Sure we know they have poetry. And a single instrument. But the matriarchy thing is so often used as a lazy shorthand to make a foreign country seem interesting and more foreign that I feel like it doesn’t tell us anything. What’s their word for Grisha? What’s their relationship to the Grisha? Are they evil, like in Fjerda? Wanted, like in Ravka? What’s their religion? What do their people believe in? Why do they want to go to war with Ravka? We’ve seen nuance in how a country can be a beautiful place even if its government holds terrible tenants: look at Fjerda. Why don’t we have the same nuance here? Sure, Tolya and Tamar exist, but they’re framed as like traitors? And on the Good side because of that? I don’t like that their number one allegiance is to a white girl, in the end. I don’t like that we got almost nothing from either Ehri or Mayu about their relationship to their country. I don’t like that Mayu was basically forced into helping her country, so we still have this… villainous view of the government & everything it stands for. I don’t like that Ehri is literally still a disposable girl, DESPITE that we supposedly have this matriarchy happening. I don’t like that they’re literally forcing her to marry Nikolai. I don’t like that they framing is the benevolent (white) protagonists, swooping in to save this naive princess from her monstrous home country.

I think Isaak’s POV is ultimately kind of useless and only there so we feel sad about him dying at the end. Functionally, we don’t need Isaak’s POV to know that there’s a fake Nikolai, and not much actually happens that only he can know about. Why couldn’t we have gotten Mayu’s POV? We know Nikolai’s elsewhere; so as soon as “Nikolai” shows up we’ll know he’s a fake. Why don’t the Shu get a voice?

the man of the hour

hey if you’ve made it this far, I’m going to talk about the Darkling now! (…yay?)

So this book spends like 90% of its run subtly reinforcing that the Darkling was Wrong and his ideas were dangerous and that overall he was bad for Ravka. it’s hard not to see this in a sort of metatextual bent—a lot of what Yuri espouses is what the fandom reaction to the original trilogy was and continues to be: That he could’ve ruled Ravka and led them into glory. That he was misunderstood. That he deserves to be worshipped. And I thought the existence of the Cult of the Starless Saint was a clever nod, a sort of guiding hand for Bardugo to reinforce the message of the original trilogy. That message being that like, guys, he’s kind of a shitty dude. And would’ve been a bad leader. I thought there was something really interesting she was doing here about how people always will gravitate towards powerful demagogues. That powerful men often are heard above all.

But I thought she was going to like… refute that. Alina’s entire war was to get rid of this fucker. The original trilogy told us that powerful men can be defeated. That who we should want to emulate instead are the girls who fight against them.

And now he’s back.

I can’t help but feel betrayed. I can’t help but feel like bringing him back, especially as the culmination of the book, reinforces the idea instead that, actually, the whole goddamn grishaverse revolves around him. That Yuri was right. Because he was. He was right about the visions, he was right about the return of his saint, and so what does that mean this book is saying about the voice of this powerful men? That it deserves to be heard? The Darkling gets the very last word of the book—it’s hard not to think that this is what the whole thing has been building up towards, in the end.

I don’t actually think that Bardugo is trying to say that we should all worship the Darkling. But I do think that this was a clumsy move that inadvertently muddles so much of what came prior—and for what? A cheap twist?

on expectation and disappointment

again, at the end of all this, my point is that the core of my issues is that the book simply doesn’t deliver on a lot of what it set up. It feels like I read two different books. I don’t expect this book to be perfect, but I find it hard to forgive a lot of the faults I find when the feeling I came away from was ultimately…dissatisfaction. I felt empty, finishing. I feel empty thinking about it. I’m just really sad about all the things it could’ve been—because I think it could’ve been so great.

There’s so much I loved! Like I said, the entire first 50%? Gorgeous, magnificent, showstopping. I adored all of it. The underground bunker! The science and magic mingling! Nina and Matthias!!! And there’s stuff I don’t really want to get into because it gets nitpicky lol (some logistics stuff with Nina’s plotline near the end). But basically I likened reading this book to feeling like I was on a rollercoaster, and super enjoying the cranking climb upward for the first half, and then, instead of the swooping, exhilarating fall, the entire track just collapsed underneath me.

So that’s where I’m at. I’m happy to talk about it and I really enjoy discussing the parts I loved! And I’m happy to field anyone who wants to tell me why they loved it, because, again, I would love to love this book. Please. Convince me. But at the end of the day, I’m sad and I’m mad and I’m disappointed. What a bummer.