#if i see another post about how shes 'mocking females' im killing everybody with a big big big big big big bomb

[online2002]

Oh so ppl on tiktok think if a trans woman makes a bad sounding song it gives them an excuse to be transphobic... ok now!

[greensaplinggrace]

honestly THANK YOU for saying all that abt baghra bc i thought i was going crazy from not liking her??? bc i haven't read the books and only summaries of them on wiki and like. i dunno why ppl like her actually even in the show bc this guy, her son, is like "i wanna make the world better for us grisha" and she's just like "no." even tho he sees that she's MAKING HERSELF SICK from suppressing her powers! she's literally like in bed coughing in the flashback yet seem much healthier at the little palace. also like after everything, after her disapproval, after the fold, after centuries of waiting for the sun summoner.. he never abandons her. he makes sure she's cares for. he doesn't harm her. and i have to wonder if baghra has ever thanks him for that, for just not leaving her alone. like i dunno how im suppose ro believe aleks is a heartless villain when he still cares for his abusive mom like this. like has baghra even told her she loved him (honestly she reminds me of a classic emotionally unavailable asian parent but maybe that's just me). also im wondering if baghra ever told aleks that he had an aunt.. bc like.. now that u bring up her isolating him it's like hmmmm...

not at me being like alina... why do u trust the bitter old woman who literally beats u with a stick and verbally abuses u every chance she gets.. just bc she showed a bad painting... like.. pls use two braincells to see that who u figured out as his mother... is also using his protection..

like baghra could've upped and left with alina. but no. she stayed bc she knew she was safe under aleks's protection.

alsoim just impressed that after his first friend tried to drown him and harvest his bones... he didn't go into hiding???? he still wanted to make a safe heaven for grisha!!! HE STILL WANTED TO PROTECT GRISHA EVEN AFTER HIS GRISHA FRIEND TRIED TO KILL HIM FOR HIS FUCKEN BONES. like... this is the guy im suppose to believe is the villain???

honestly i feel like part of the reason why LB's plotlines seem so bad and disconnected (and sometimes outright racist but that's another rant) and why darkles is disproportionately more violent and villainous in the later books is bc she didn't expect the darkling to be so popular and wanted to stick with her guns of making him the villain. but also wanted the money from aleks's popularity. but like you can't have ur cake and eat it too.

Well thank you for sending this ask! It's very sweet and very passionate. I'm glad you liked my post! I didn't put as much thought into it as some of my others lol. I kind of just talked. But it was nice to be able to finally talk about some of the problems I have with both her character and the fandom/author's perception of her.

HERE is the post this is referring to, in case anyone's wondering.

👀👀 You've hit the nail on the head for so many things, here!

Baghra is extremely emotionally unavailable, basically to the point of neglect. She's also verbally and physically abusive, traits which I doubt were only reserved for her students and not her son. Baghra claims she would do anything to protect him, but I've known a lot of parents who have that mindset and yet still harm their children because they think it's "good for them".

Aleksander stays at Baghra's side for years, and even when they're opposing each other she's never too far away from him. Idk if you've read the books but he does eventually hurt her. And as much as I don't like Baghra, I think his actions were horrid. But I'm also honestly kind of surprised it took him so long lmao.

Yeah I mean, in terms of isolation, let's not forget that she never wanted to introduce him to his father, either. Baghra's sense of eternity clouds a lot of her judgments on relationships, which means she views most people as dust and therefore teaches her son to as well. The problem with that is that he's a growing child, and he needs those social and emotional attachments for healthy development.

I would bet quite a bit of money that Baghra has either never told him she loves him or she has told him so few times it's practically forgettable.

And everything becomes more complicated because so many of Baghra's actions are understandable because of her life and her history, but the impacts they have on the people around her, especially Aleksander, are permanently damaging. And the fact that that's never gone over in critical depth in the books or how it's glossed over in fandom is just very disconcerting. Like, acknowledging Baghra's failings doesn't mean we're excusing Aleksander's actions, it just means we're holding Baghra liable for her own. Which the fandom should be doing, considering she's the epitome of an abusive parental figure.

And Alina trusting Baghra over Aleksander is even more confusing! Especially in the show!! This is the woman who beat her and abused her and tortured her friends when they tiny little children (and who probably still does so now that they're adults). This is the woman who mocks you and harasses you and insults you on a regular basis. Why does Baghra revealing she's Aleksander's mother make Alina change her mind?! Like fuck, I'd just feel bad for Aleksander. No wonder he kept it a secret, I would too! And that painting is enough evidence?! Really?! A random painting shown to you by this abusive mentor that's been making your life hell. That's what you're going to betray your new lover over?

The friends trying to harvest his bones thing is a good point, too. I think Aleksander, especially show Aleksander, is incredibly idealistic. I think he cares too much for others - those he's deemed worth his care (a sentiment given to him by Baghra). Despite everything she's tried to teach him about hiding and abandoning others and never caring and never doing anything to help or reach out or connect with people, Aleksander still continues to do so. It's likely because he never got it from Baghra growing up, and so is desperate for those emotional needs to be fulfilled elsewhere.

His turning point, when Baghra tells him it was understandable that those kids tried to kill him because the world is such a hard place for them - that's crucial. And the reason it's possible as a motivating factor is because of that idealism and that desire to help and that desire to be everything his mother isn't. Baghra tells him this trauma he just experienced was because of the oppression of his people, and instead of following her lead and accepting that, going into hiding and abandoning everybody to their misery, he goes I can do something about that. I can make it so this never happens again. Which is usually how trauma like that combines with one's core personality traits at a young age, especially when there's none of the essential support systems in place to aid in recovery (ie, the role Baghra should have been filling but wasn't, because she decided to exacerbate the problem instead).

And yeah, one of my biggest problems with the ham-fisted "beating you over the head with a sledgehammer of evil deeds" look-how-bad-this-character-is! portrayal of the Darkling in the later books comes from the impression I get that Bardugo doesn't trust her readers. She's so desperate to have us hate this character and think him an irredeemable villain, not trusting any of her readers to engage critically with a morally gray character, that it feels quite a bit like condescending fucking bullshit. Which ew, I know how to engage with literature, thanks.

She really does seem to look down on a large part of her fandom, and imo, the infantilization of the female characters in her books seems to carry over to her impression of most of her female readers as well. Which is why the Darkling's character arc gets fucking destroyed. But he's still a good cash grab, of course, so she'll shake his dead corpse in front of the fandom for money every time she wants something from it.

Also! Another reason I think her plotlines feel disconnected (I'm sorry Bardugo I respect you as a person, but shit-) is because the writing in SaB is just bad. I mean, nevermind the absolutely nauseating implications of the way she portrays the Grisha as a persecuted group who's situation is never actually fully addressed as it should be, considering Grisha rights is what her main villain is fighting for (imo for a series called the Grishaverse, LB seems to be pretty anti Grisha), but her characters and story alone are just wrong for each other. They don't fit together.

And the ending is one of the main pieces of evidence in that regard! You can’t say the ending where Alina isn’t Grisha anymore is her “going back to where she started” when she’s always been Grisha. She just didn’t know she was Grisha because she denied that part of herself that she was born with.

Alina is reluctant to move forward or change, she struggles with adapting, and she’s very set on the things she’s grown attached to throughout her life. She also has some latent prejudices against the Grisha, and so denies the possibility of being Grisha for those reasons as well.

Alina’s lack of powers in the beginning of her life because she willfully doesn’t learn about them to avoid change versus her lack of powers at the end of the book when she’s accepted them and then they’re stripped away from her by outer forces are two entirely separate circumstances. You can’t make a parallel about lost powers and lack of Grisha status bringing her back to the start when she was always Grisha and she always had powers and she simply refused to come to terms with it because of personal reasons.

The first situation is an internal conflict that indicates a story about growth and a journey of self acceptance. Denying herself the opportunity to learn about her heritage and to find acceptance with a group of people like her because she’s tied to the past and because of the way she was raised is the setup for a narrative that tackles unlearning prejudice and learning how to connect with a part of her identity that was denied her and learning how to grow independent and self assured. It’s the setup for a different story entirely. The second situation is an external conflict that centers around the ‘corrupting influence of power’... for some reason.

In a world where Grisha do not have social, political, or economic power and they are hunted, centering your heroine’s journey of self acceptance and growth around an external conflict about... the corrupting influence of power (in a group of people that don’t actually have any power?!) just doesn’t work. It is literally impossible to connect the two stories Bardugo is trying to push in Shadow and Bone without seriously damaging the main character’s developmental arc.

The only way a narrative like this would work, claiming that she has gone back to where she started, is either a) if the Grisha weren’t actually a persecuted group and instead were apart of the upper class, or b) if the one bad connection between the two instances is acknowledged - that Alina denied a part of herself crucial to self acceptance and growing up, and that losing her powers at the end has also denied her. It is a tragedy, not a happy ending.

Alina suffered because she didn’t use her powers. She grew sick. It was bad for her. This was not a resistance to 'the corruption of power and the burden of greed', it was her suffering because she couldn’t fully accept herself.

Framing the ending as a return to the beginning can’t be done if you don’t address how bad the beginning was for your main character. You brought her back to a bad point in her life. You regressed her. This should be a low point in her arc. It should be a problem that’s solved so she can finish developing organically or it should be something that is acknowledged as a tragedy in it’s own right, for the future the world (the writing) denied her.

This is a ramble and it makes no sense and I’m really sorry, but my point is that Bardugo put the wrong characters in the wrong story. The character arc required for organic development doesn’t match the story and intended message at all. The narrative doesn’t fit the cast. She's got two clashing stories attempting to work in tandem and she ends up with both conflicting messages that fans still can’t comprehend in her writing and an ending that doesn’t suit her main character to such an impossible degree that it’s almost laughable.

So yeah, there's a few reasons why I think the story and the plot feels so bad and disconnected. I hope you don't mind me making this answer so long! 😅 I was not expecting to write this much.

[queenieskamander]

Killjoys, make some noise -Ch.2

Gang/post-apo!AU (requested)  

Member: Jimin (mention of other members)  

Genre: Fluff. Smut, a little bit of everything…

Sumarry: This AU is based around the lives of the “Killjoys”, a group of rebellious rogues living in a post-apocalyptic Seoul. The Killjoys are a group of outlaws who are fighting against the evil corporation Better Living Industries (BL/ind.) and its various “Draculoids” and executors, such as Korse.

Prologue    Ch.1 

It is a time to start a new life

Jimin’s p.o.v

I was awakened by a loud noise, something like a school bell. After a while I heard a very familiar female voice.   -Hey, wake up! You have one hour to get ready. Your first class is in the hall downstairs. Come one!!- She said briskly I opened my eyes, muttering something. I got up slowly, looking around me. My room wasn’t very big, but bright and clean. Just enough space for two people.   Jungkook dragged himself from his bed, tiresomely opening his suitcase and taking some clothes from it. -Im going first to the bathroom, ok?- He wasn’t really waiting for me to answer. I brushed my hair with my fingers, making even bigger mess on my head. I went to the window, pulling the blinds. I opened the balcony door and I went outside. I felt dry and crispy air. I leaned against the railing, looking at view in front of me. Maybe we were on the desert, but there were a lot of plants (trees, flowers, shrubs, grass). My eyes caught disputes pool and sunbeds,tables with chairs, large stone grill around it. However, there was a designated area for volleyball and football. It felt like a holiday resort by the sea. On the left and on the right side stretched balconies. Tae and Y/N had a room on the right side from us.   -Jimin, we must go now. We still need to eat something.- My brother said with a big smile on his face. Its not like I need to go to bathroom too… It is a Time to start a new life All ‘students’ were standing next to a big doors. We hoped that we came to the right place. Nobody here was  eager to explain anything to us . Exactly when the clock struck nine, the door opened. We saw a well known blond lady, she was wearing bright pink t-shirt and ripped, skinny jeans.   -Hello, you can come inside- She said happily as she went straight to her desk- First of all, you have to choose a partner with whom you will be sit- she continued- BUT, You cant sit with you room-mate- class became quite again- Stop looking at me like than, you need know each other better. Come one, I do not have all day- I looked around me How Im going to choose a partner when I dont know people here… -Jungkook…   -Tea…- Great, even my brother found partner. Wait…How could I forgot about Taehyung and his sister?   -Hey Jimin, do you want to be my partner?- That voice…so beautiful… It took me a while to realized that was Y/N. -Yeah…Sure-  Just dont do anything stupid -Great- did she just smirked at me? -Hello everybody- Stella said to us, again…- My name is Toxic Poison- Everybody were surprised, including me- And no, this is not my real name. This is a nickname- no shit Sherlock- You need to choose a nickname for you. You must forget you real name- She looked at us sternly. No one dared to speak. She wasn’t joking. -For your safety, and for safety of you family -How forgetting our name is going to help?- The girl with dark-red hair asked shyly. From what I associate, her name was Minji. Shit. We have to forget our names -Better Living is dangerous place, but government is even more dangerous- Toxic Poison explained, walking around us.Everybody were looking at her- If they will find out your identity,they might arrest your families or…even kill them-  She stopped for a second- Thats why you need your nicknames. Something short and catchy, easy to remember. Understood? - Everybody were quite, listening her carefully- I asked about something. Understood? -Yes!!- Everybody said at the same time. 90% of people here, looked like a typical punks. Born to fight against government. -Good…tomorrow, you have to come in with you new name-She looked around the room with warmer look that before.-And now, please tell me…How do you understand words ‘Art is weapon’?-   Art is weapon? I thought. Suddenly I remembered that I saw this slogan over the main entrance. I raised my hand shyly, feeling the startled eyes of Stella and a few other people. -Yes?- -I think…word 'weapon’ is a…a metaphor.- I said slowly- Better living have their 'perfect system’, exactly how they want. Everything is monotonous. Even their uniforms are the same.  They are white without any dirt on it. Art is an opposite of it. Expressing of your feelings, using your imagination, do not caring about the opinion of others…- I shrugged my shoulders-  It might be use an a weapon against BL. At least I think so. -  Toxic smiled and me widely -Thats right Jimin- I looked at her with a surprise- What? You should believe in yourself more- She laughed- Coming back to the art, thats why we asked you to bring with you things related to arts…Please develop your skills in your free time. You have to have a lot of imagination to fight against the Better Living. -So we are going to fight?- Boy with green hair asked, narrowing his eyes -Some of you…yes- Toxic said looking at all of us- We will selecting you according to your your results, performance and behavior. I should take couple of weeks. Exercises, theoretical lessons, practical lessons…- We all straightened up, hearing about the “practical lessons.” The girl with dark blue hair raised her hand -Yes?- -why were we chosen?- that was a good question. I was thinking about it couple of times-First of all, we were looking for teenagers which could come here without arousing suspicion- Toxic immediately explained. I think she was ready to give an answer to every question- But  we could take everybody. I know i might sound weird, but we know about you more that you can expect- She smiled mysteriously and I felt anxiety.- We looked also at your assessment and behaviour, but in the school they have a different appreciation than here. We need a rebellious people who want to re-build the old system and who are not afraid of danger. -Apparently we will have here a normal lessons here- said the blue haired boy, probably Brandon. - If I will  have insufficient assessment of maths, you are going to punish me by making me to write 100 times 'I will be a better student’?- he mocked. Toxic did not seem to be  surprise about his comment. -No, it would be a waste of time. You wont write a single word. - she said, smiling at him- The punishment for unacceptable behaviour, or very bad academic results will be, for example…-she wondered- Taking away a laser gun, ban on driving, ban going out on a mission…- She began to exchange. All were silent, looking at her. Her coral lips twitched into a smile again. -Before I will let you go, I want to raise another topic concerning art. Jimin come here.- She looked in my direction. Surprised, I got up from the place and went to her, standing in front of all gathered.- This clothes- She pointed at my black clothes- Are unaccepted -Excuse me?- I asked, slightly confused. Why she is doing this to me… -'Art is a weapon’, Jimin- She said slowly and distinctly, later bursting into laughter.- You have to be dressed colourfully. I hope this is note a problem for you-We all looked at each other smiling foolishly-We have a few types of hair dyes, some different materials, sewing machines. You will find something for you. The basics are explained, the rest of the day you have free. If you have questions, come to me. In the meantime, look around the centre. Of course you can enjoy all the attractions: swimming, volleyball, football, everything what you will find. The whole area is at your disposal. You can go now.- People started to get up from their places- I’ll see you tomorrow, in front of the main entrance, also at nine. Your homework is to work on the style and come up with a nickname- She smiled at us widely- Have a nice day, Killjoys.-What do you think about all of it?- Y/N asked few hours later, when we were all sitting in the canteen, lazily taking food out of cans.  BL controlled even what we were eating. Idiots.- These guns sound … wow. Amazing…- She said appreciatively. Some hair agreed with her, nodding. I leaned back in my chair, crossing my legs. -I don’t know..- I said doubtfully- Guns … I do not think they give us real guns…- - And why not?- Brandon asked, looking at me like an idiot.- We have to fight with them. We are not going to beat them by showing them our drawing or playing guitar- He laughed           -Stop- I snapped- You would be able to kill a man? -Draculoids are not people, and you know that- Tae said- But I agree with you, it is easy to kill anyone. -It sounds to me more and more like a fucking, suicide mission- I heard Kookie who was sitting next to Taehyung- The longer im here, the more I gain certainty that he would never return home. -You are right…- Minji murmured- Better Living probably soon will know all about us and…they might kill us…Thats got it will end- She throw her legs on the table- But I’m staying here anyway- She said with determined voice- I have no home to go back. They killed my family… -Minji…- Y/N spoke gently, after a while of silence. -Shhhh, I just want you to know that Better Living kills people- She looked at us seriously  and then he stared at me- So yes, Jimin, I think I’d be able to kill Draculoid -If you put it that way…-I murmured -YESSS!!!- Eunji scream with Joohyun- We will Destroy Better Living, they have no chance with us!! Will kill Korse? -YESS!!!- Everybody were busy screaming some random slogan. Only me and Y/N we quiet.  

Should I continue this story?