#grishaverse discourse

[koifishanonymous]

I just,,, read SO MANY bad takes about grishaverse on twitter..... like how do you fundamentally misunderstand the point of a story THAT MUCH

[professssor]

Yes, I’ve always read it as the connection was always there, but they couldn’t access it without physical touch (but then again, how much of that is just Aleks being an amplifier?).

I haven’t read the text in awhile, but I think it’s hard to say whether the collar actually allowed them to tap into each other’s minds. I think it definitely allowed them to share powers, but the tv show still seemed to make it seem they needed the physical connection to weild this.

The nichevo’ya bite definitely solidified the tether and I think @stromuprisahat is correct that this was not only Aleksander’s partial purpose for injuring her (he surely wanted to get a little revenge for leaving him to die as well), but it was due to some exchange/infusion of merzost that allowed them to easily access the tether.

Now Baghra being able to tap into the tether? Utter fucking bullshit. I don’t believe for a second she ever used merzost. That writing choice was solely to discredit the unique bond between Alina and the Darkling and to make Baghra somehow redeemable in the eyes of the viewers.

Honestly, if Baghra wasn’t an awful mother, would we even have the Darkling as the character we know him as?

Can you help me to understand the tether between Alina and Aleksander? I've seen people say that it was formed when he collared her but if that's true then why not use it when she's on the run from him? I always thought that's why he got his nichevo'ya to wound her and why he thanked her, because it allowed that connection to form. Am I wrong here?

Okay, well, I'm still re-reading, but...

They're written as two halves of the same whole. They're supposed to be complimentary opposites, that's why Aleksander's waiting for the Sun Summoner instead of settling for just any immortal, why he believes they're meant to be even after encountering other immortals' different worldviews and Alina's refusal to accept her own greatness. She won't only live long, they're bound by the Making, so she's predisposed to ~understand~ (And there are moments, when she does. Only her upbringing, issues and moral police companions prevent her from embracing what's between them.).

The first clear sign of their interconnection's showed during Winter Fete, although from the wording, I've missed at least two earlier ones:

The moment his lips met mine, the connection between us opened and I felt his power flood through me. I could feel how much he wanted me—but behind that desire, I could feel something else, something that felt like anger. I drew back, startled. “You don’t want to be doing this.” “This is the only thing I want to be doing,” he growled, and I could hear the bitterness and desire all tangled up in his voice. “And you hate that,” I said with a sudden flash of comprehension. He sighed and leaned against me, brushing my hair back from my neck. “Maybe I do,” he murmured, his lips grazing my ear, my throat, my collarbone.

Shadow and Bone- Chapter 14

"... the connection between us ..." suggests it's something Alina figured out exists before this time, so she didn't experience it only once.

Then there's the Collar that gives Aleksander access to Alina's powers, although it's not exactly clear how it works.

I had spared the stag’s life. The power of that life belonged to me as surely as it belonged to the man who had taken it. ... The Darkling looked momentarily confused. He narrowed his eyes, and I felt his will descend on me again, felt that invisible hand grasping. I shrugged it off. It was nothing. He was nothing.

Shadow and Bone- Chapter 19

Like: Sorry honey, either the power belongs to you both, or you have the upper hand.

I would kill for Aleksander's LOGICAL explanation.

The nichevo'ya bite deepened the Bond, that's why Sasha did it. My guess is it might be something about merzost affecting the Making, therefore the connection formed by it, AND the tiny little detail the creatures might be created with use of said force, but from his own being. He's basically running around donating his body fluids essence to his closest "enemies"... *wink wink*

We don't know more than what he tells Alina, so perhaps he could feel her presence before that. Perhaps Alina's youth and inexperience played bigger part in her use of their connection, than we think. Perhaps her many issues did. (I hate repeating this phrase, but THE WASTED POTENTIAL!) Why tell your stubbornly uncooperating soulmate you have an in-build compass to help you track them, if they left a trail of more profane kind?

[greensaplinggrace]

“Character A didn’t love Character B because they hurt them” discourse is truly terrible because it assigns a moral value to love that simply does not exist. love doesn’t actually mean anything about someone’s character. it doesn’t make someone’s actions toward another any better or any worse, it doesn’t prevent atrocities, and it doesn’t prevent abuse.

love is a worthless emotion when it comes to morals because it simply holds no bearing on them. true love doesn’t exist. there is no better or more pure version of love. in the end love doesn’t mean anything. it’s a non-emotion. it’s the child of passion and affection and dedication. doing something bad doesn’t preclude a feeling of love, because a lack of love isn’t a requirement for immoral actions, and morality isn’t a requirement for feeling love.

[brainrotfromhorny]

The entirety of Siege and Strorm the Darkling is manipulating Alina, tempting her with power and sex and all that ✨ fun ✨ stuff. Meanwhile Mal is manipulating her like that guy you meet in college who is willing to hook up but he can't be together with you because this semester he's taking like, fifteen credits ;c

[mentallydatingahotcelebrity]

No, this is called gaslighting. It’s blatant narcissism—she’s apologizing to someone who she can never possibly apologize to enough for actions that were never his fault. Sasha is a PRODUCT of her negligence. She literally talks about finding “the most powerful Grisha” and sleeping with him just to conceive Aleksander. The Grisha was so insignificant that she didn’t even remember the guy’s name. And she did that not once but TWICE. BUT THEN, after seeing that Sasha possessed her same abilities—instead of helping him understand them and loving him, giving him the childhood she felt she was denied (and wished she had), she blatantly despises their powers and called them a curse, and destructive, and awful. So this hapless BABY who did not wish to be born, who became an innocent, malleable CHILD, was raised into a young man taught to hate himself and what he is and that he’s dangerous and shameful—he and his mother were IN HIDING FOR CENTURIES because SHE was a truly awful person. He was taught only to fear and be afraid and to be hateful—but suddenly she “loved him”??? Telling him their powers were a curse is love, now???

𝕾𝖍𝖆𝖉𝖔𝖜 𝖆𝖓𝖉 𝕭𝖔𝖓𝖊 ꜱᴇᴀꜱᴏɴ 2 ʀᴇᴡᴀᴛᴄʜ #160 ↳ 𝟸.𝟶𝟼: 𝚗𝚒 𝚠𝚎𝚑 𝚜𝚎𝚜𝚑

[castleofravens]

a lot of people in fandom spaces will hate/demonize female characters for the same reasons they love/romanticize male characters and sometimes it’s not holding male villains/anti heroes accountable for their actions the way that female villains/anti heroes are and sometimes it’s hating female heroes/anti heroes for their personalities/flaws/attributes/trauma responses whilst romanticizing male characters for having the same or very similar characterization?? like hi why so many double standards??

ALSO some of these characters are teenagers??teenagers are really fucking messy, like they’re not gonna make perfect decisions all the time and they might seem unlikeable at times bc they’re … still children …??

[theweeklydiscourse]

I just have to laugh at readers who claim that the Darkling was Zoya’s abuser. The text and the Netflix adaptation does the barest possible minimum to allude to such an idea and then these fans proceed to reframe the shoddy writing and praise for it’s “brilliant” commentary.

Bardugo and the Netflix writers could’ve done that (with proper planning and thoughtfulness) but it’s obvious that they couldn’t be bothered to put the effort in. Sorry- Zoya’s just not all that interesting and cramming in some subtext about how she was supposedly the Darkling’s victim is pure fanfiction. Particularly when even in the show, we see Zoya pursuing him of her own volition and that relationship is never meaningfully explored or elaborated on after the fact.

[a-map-of-gays]

The thing about all the characters is that they're perfect and can do whatever they want forever. Unless of course I don't like them in which case they should explode into a thousand pieces

[professssor]

I’m not entirely sure authors can be “pissed off” at how readers interpret their writing. If you want readers to walk away feeling a certain way, it’s your duty to write the story in a way that does exactly that.

She has a right to be a little pissed off about the 'Darkling was right' people.

She can be as pissed off as she wants to be I mean, it's only human nature to feel hurt and angry if someone doesn't admire your work but be professional about it lol. Like, again I'll say this that if a whole chunk of her fandom likes the dude she wanted them to dislike then some reflection on her own writing and thinking about what went wrong if she couldn't get the point across is needed, more than just being petty and contradicting your own world themes and magic system. Because I'll tell you this that the “darkling was right people” people made up majority of the fandom and she knows it. In her own words on twitter “i've rarely seen people hate him [the darkling] people might not ship him with Alina but I've rarely seen them hate him.” Like at that point you gotta think what you did wrong instead of mocking the fans and making yourself look fickle and petty.

[howtostandinsilence]

“you cannot accuse nikolai of filling the white savior trope when he is aware of his position and his privilege” 

misses the point of saying nikolai narratively fills the role of a white savior in the first place. when the writing sets up a certain narrative sequence, and structures the story around certain messages, then a character’s self awareness is irrelevent. it’s an attempt at a watsonian explanation for a doylist criticism of the text.

not to mention that the way nikolai places zoya into power - and the subsequent highly unrealistic and offensive means by which zoya maintains power - only serves to further highlight him as a white savior. his every narrative function is that of a white savior, and his every action when it comes to the grisha around him proves this. unfortunately, nikolai’s internal character is irrelevent to his external impact, and trying to argue against an incredibly relevent doylist criticism of the racism in the grishaverse with a watsonian argument is offensive.

people need to stop arguing with in-text defenses against criticisms that have been leveled against the writing as a whole based on outside elements and leigh bardugo’s own prejudices. it’s the same useless shit they throw at criticisms of the darkling’s character and how his role within the story is often extremely antisemitic.

[apinchofm]

can we discuss how shadow and bone deals with bodily trauma??

kaz, being the biggest one, is so good. he is shown having a panic attack and jesper doesn't ask but does all he can to try to help. inej knows but wants him to heal before they can have a full relationship, especially with her own sexual trauma. the bastard of the barrel is not like the other men of course but she has to be wary and she will never be at peace until she finds her family and knows that kaz is taking care of himself.

genya, sweet genya - being hurt by the darkling and r*ped by the king every night. she finally gets to use her powers for something other than vanity. she's talented and one of the best. also using her body to kill the king, when all he had to do was leave her alone!! also david?? 'you are not broken??'. the explicit affirmation. love it. she deserved that ruby ring.

alina, who has been trying so hard to find herself in her powers, away from mal and the darkling goes through a lot. she was violated when the darkling forced the stag on her (idk how cute he is, he is a creep who sees her as a possession), so she attempts to reclaim that by getting more amplifiers and she does so by ultimately killing the man who violated her in the first place.

they show that healing is a long process and that's okay. it's painful, it's violent but it's still healing.

[white-boy-bracket]

[professssor]

I was thinking about this the other night, how Mal actually gets to makes mistakes, overcome obstacles, and grows through his character arc. As much as he loves Alina, there is a moment where he realizes that they are on different paths and that she could make a larger impact if she were allowed to continue to grow and explore her opportunities.

Yet Alina continues to reject anything that separates her from Mal. Mal goes from not seeing Alina as a potential partner to trying to force her to fit into a part of his life due to his new found realization that he loves her. But Alina is never afforded the same opportunities to change, evolve, or adapt to her circumstances. She always comes back to Mal, even when he cheats on her, even when he belittles her, even when he emotionally abuses her.

I really wished we could have seen Alina develop beyond her childhood crush and come into her own power— not necessarily as Grisha, but as a woman. There is so much potential to explore with this character and this world, and instead I feel our main character was cut off at the knees and forced to become a victim.

alina and mal's relationship is such an immature codependent dumpster fire and i can't believe the author wants us to ship them

[greensaplinggrace]

yeah you know what? I'm going to get into this. "don't humanize villains"/"this abuser is a monster" is some of the worst character discourse in fandom. abusers are not other. abusers are not always easy to recognize. othering someone who's done terrible things from humanity is an arrogant, poisonous idea.

that is a person who is doing those things, and you want so badly to be unable to fall into such patterns of harm and abuse that you will force that person into another category of species altogether, and in so doing you spare yourself from introspection and you give yourself a pretty little pedestal to stand on and you shame everybody who fell for a red flag that is surely so easy to recognize. and you give into prejudice you assign moral values to attributes outside of yourself and you think you are so above doing harm that you could never act in such a way, even as it is a capability within all of us to do so.

get off your self righteous high horse for a moment and use your fucking brain. I'm sick of people in fandom claiming to be the most moral members that are the "only people willing to discuss this" and then every statement out of their mouth is harmful and pervasive word vomit.

[lestatslefttit]

Please stop beautifying mutilated characters

TW: major spoilers for the Shadow and Bone trilogy (post Siege & Storm/book 2) and minor spoilers for Sally Face

Very random rant about smth that’s been bothering me for a while.

Why can’t people just let “disfigured” (I looked for a different word that explains what exactly I mean and couldn’t find it, but I’m aware that it’s not okay to say that about someone, I’m just trying to express what I mean as specifically as possible) be “disfigured”???!!

I’m so tired of seeing people draw characters like Sal Fisher and Genya Safin as just pretty faces with a couple scars. Can we be for real for 2 fucking seconds? I don’t wanna put any of the fanart I’m talking about in this post because I don’t wanna call out any artist in particular, I’m sure most, if not all, mean well doing this, I just think it’s a little fucked.

Sal’s face was messed up when he was a kid. Canonically a whole piece of his jaw is missing. The cartilage of his nose is at least partially missing. He is not a pretty anime boy with a few lines on his face. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. That’s doesn’t make him a better or a worse person, it’s just a fact about his appearance. It says absolutely nothing about who he is but it is an important part of his character and definitely impacts his actions and personality.

When Alina first sees Genya after what happened to her, this is how she’s described (literally copied and pasted from the fucking book)

“It was not Baghra. I didn’t know what it was. The bites were everywhere, raised black ridges of flesh, twisting lumps of tissue that could never be healed, not by Grisha hand or by any other, the unmistakable marks of the nichevo’ya. Then I saw the faded flame of her hair, the lovely amber hue of her one remaining eye.”

She looks so different that Alina doesn’t recognize her. At first she describes her as a “what”, because that’s how affected her appearance was by that happened to her. So you’re gonna sit here and tell me that it’s perfectly sensible to draw her (post nichevo’ya) exactly the same as before but with a cute little eyepatch and a few lines over her face? Stop trying to beautify characters that have had accidents like this. They’re not conventionally pretty and that’s not a fucking character flaw.

I absolutely hate policing people’s art. Draw thin characters fat, give able bodied character disabilities if you want, make characters black or Asian or whatever you want, I’m all for representation, but please don’t erase this important part of who they are. Because it is an important part of who they are. It impacts so much of their lives in canon. And we can still love them exactly how they look. We should still love them exactly how they look, without trying to erase these horrible things that happened to them.

I chose to focus on these two characters in particular because they’re the ones I’ve seen this being done to the most, but this is true for any characters who have suffered through horrible things that heavily changed their appearance.

And before someone comments on this saying that it’s just fictional characters and all that bullshit, I’m well aware. I’m also well aware that this post is not gonna change jack shit and people are still gonna draw Genya and Sal and any other characters who don’t look “normal” as pretty, conventional faces and there’s nothing I can do about that. I have no intention of fighting with any artist that chooses to do this. I’m just asking that if you are one of the people who choose to erase these kind of physical characteristics about these characters, that you ask yourself why you feel the need to do it. If you like the character enough to want to draw them, why can’t you actually like them how they are? If you read all this and still don’t give a shit, good for you, that’s not my business. I just thought it was worth bringing this up.

Anyways, if anyone wants to actually have a discussion about this I’ll be happy to, this has just been bothering me for a long time and I felt like ranting about it. Hopefully at least one person actually stops to thinks because of this post. Maybe no one will. That’s okay.

If you have had an accident that left your appearance similar to one of these characters, I hope you can still see representation in them, no matter how their appearance is treated by the fandom, and I hope you know that you are worthy of love no matter what you look like.

[magpiesbones]

would you say mal was being and acting like a traumatized young man and lashing out accordingly or would you say he's . a misogynist who hated seeing alina be more powerful than him-

I’d say I’d like some more context for this ask????

Alina spends MOST of the trilogy being much more powerful than Mal and he seems to have for the most part no issue with this. She also spends most of the trilogy on a scale from mildly to suicidally depressed, which he takes a lot more issue with. He is essentially an accessory to her, and a symbol of stability and getting out of politics.

If you could perhaps send something with what part of what book you’re basing these interpretations off of, I’d appreciate it, since most of what I remember of these books is Alina’s arc and essentially nothing about anyone else.