#kos spoilers

[purpleyin]

Grishaverse moodboards: Kazolai (Kaz/Nikolai) demonic + black & white

[metvmorqhoses]

I absolutely adored your theory about the whole s2 being about Alina's corruption arc and possible Aleks' return!!!

Actually anon, you are in for a treat.

I was just masochistically rewatching the finale half an hour ago and I was reminded out of the blue of the little detail of the silent bee landing on Zoya's shoulder at Aleksander’s… “funeral”. It's barely there, so I guess it's easy to miss. I didn't understand its meaning the first time I saw it, but I was too outraged to actually investigate and forgot all about it. This time around though I went digging, and lo and behold! Guess whose symbol the bee from Aleksander's pyre is? Sankta Lizabeta of the Roses :)

The Darkling is definitely coming back in season three. They are going to adapt King of Scars!

[tirkdi]

re: that ask you just got, I find it sooo interesting and mildly maddening the way the KoS duology casually revealing that Aleksander knew, met and apparently just disregarded other immortals recontextualizes everything going on with him in the original trilogy. we’re told half his motivation is simply being mad with loneliness and like the earnest belief that Alina is his only possible companion through eternity (aside from his mother lol)

so just trying to square that with KoS is. idk! idk how to reconcile it exactly! is he just somehow certain that other saints aren’t true companions for him? is his fixation with Alina predicated on the fact that he’s met her when she’s so young and therefore he can idk Show Her The Correct Perspective? what else sets her apart! idk!

anyway, I’d love to hear if you have any particular thoughts or theories!

I love this ask because it means it's not just me 😭

He is supposed to be desperately lonely, and while I get that Elizaveta and Juris (and Grigori, lol) (and Ulla, lol again) may not be the best company ... they're definitely company. He's not alone, there's no reason for him to freak out like he does when Alina loses her powers.

I do think that Alina's youth shows him a glimpse of himself that the other saints do not – he believes he knows how her life will go and feels that he can just wait and be there for her when she realizes he's been right all along ... but it's not clear to me why he'd have that belief if he saw how other immortal Grishas' lives do diverge very significantly from his own. It seems that seeing how immortality plays out for other people should widen his viewpoint a bit.

And, honestly, that that's not the only thing that really threw me for a loop about him in that duology. The number of times people say that "all he wanted was for Ravka to love him" when I never, even once, saw him say or do anything in the trilogy that made me think that was the case?? There are enough things like that that make me think we really are dealing with a slightly separate character in KoS & RoW because the motivations just don't seem like they're there for so many of the things we hear in those subsequent books, while also undermining the motivations we do see for him in the trilogy.

Basically: no theories, I now just have separate spaces in my brain for trilogy!Darkling, show!Darkling, and RoW!Darkling. Boy truly contains multitudes.

[lilisouless]

I didn’t spend so much time saying that book!Alina lost her value for not becoming queen is bad, only for people now saying Zoya now is inferior for not being one on the show

[needs-more-hugs]

For any Tolya fans who have not read the books, I am delighted to inform you that his habit of lifting his sister/friends off their feet in massive bear hugs is well documented and delightful (minor spoilers for Ruin and Rising and King of Scars below):

(From Ruin and Rising Chapters 14 and 18, and King of Scars Chapters 26 and 39 respectively)

[boooklover]

“To whatever end?” she breathed. Rowan followed her, as he had his entire life, long before they had ever met, before their souls had sparked into existence. “To whatever end, Fireheart.”

Sarah J.Maas, Kingdom of Ash

[lornaka]

If you ever need us, we'll be there.

[thecmaly]

can't even cat nap in peace 😾

-

more windbreaker comics

[2plolo]

Dealer: j got this new strain 💯 it’s called, “thanergy link to your daughters longsword” 😳🔥 gonna be blitzed off your titz

Me: whatever man I don’t feel shit

5 minutes later: dude I swear I saw some bitch in a hazmat suit at the bottom of that glass coffin

My girl Harrow, pacing: the eggs you gave me all died and you lied to me

[purpleyin]

Grishaverse moodboards: Kazolai (Kaz/Nikolai) modern AU

[mebis-art-dump]

Transcendence

[tirkdi]

Since you're currently writing a story on the darkling's relationship with Baghra, how do you feel about his relationship with Elizaveta? I kind of feel like they were lovers with them using each other, but Elizaveta felt more attached then the Darkling did. I already know Baghra wouldn't like her

anon, you have hit upon my weakness, which is anything related to KoS/RoW. I have Opinions. I go feral. I will try to reign it in here.

I do believe that the Darkling we see in the OG trilogy has lots and lots and lots of backup plans going at any given time. He knows he has to die and come back to life, he knows things happen that he can't quite predict, but he knows the general range of things that might happen and so has plans going in the background for those eventualities. (I have a harder time believing that the Darkling we saw in the original trilogy had ongoing relationships with other immortals – for me, honestly, this makes his fascination with Alina make so much less sense. But here we are, in the KoS duology, where we learn that he did. Okay.)

When we see Elizaveta in KoS, she's pretty unhinged – she's been held captive for 400 years, unable to sleep or eat or drink or talk to anyone other than two of the weirdest and most annoying characters we ever meet, so I don't really blame her. But it also seems that at the point we meet her, she and the Darkling clearly do not share a goal other than bringing him back to life. She wants to rule with him ("We would be gods ... What is power without someone to wield it over?") and he wants to get rid of her (Zoya saved him the trouble of killing her himself). So what sort of prior relationship gets them to that point?

Lovers? Certainly possible. She saw him many times, with different faces, she found him beautiful. We know he's not above using sex to get people to do what he wants. But I'm also not convinced that he and Elizaveta were that close. I think it's possible that she has constructed much more of a relationship in her head than ever existed between the two of them in real life. He seemed to have confidence that she would find a way to bring him back, and that's one level of relationship, but he certainly wasn't planning on sticking around with her after that. Possibly things soured for him in the 400 years since she's been stuck in the Fold, but it's also possible they were never that good in the first place.

Also: it's not really until RoW that we see him wanting to become a Saint. It's interesting to think that he knew plenty of Saints when he was younger, and deliberately chose a different path. I could see Elizaveta finding that intriguing, in the same way he found her power intriguing. Maybe intriguing enough for sex? Certainly intriguing enough to invest in keeping her interested enough to help him stay alive.

I fully agree with you that Elizaveta was more attached than Aleks (and Elizaveta and Baghra ... phew. That's a fic I'd love to see). That imbalance is one of the few things that seems truly established about their relationship, that and that they each believe they're using the other. I haven't been able to make the timelines of their ages make sense for when they meet (she met him "in her youth" when he had "just begun to work for the kings" but also she's way older than Ravka???) – I do think if we had a sense of how old each of them was at the time they met it would give us a better hint of their dynamic.

[thetrailblaze]

my sunday star rail predictions.

[procrastinationaccount]

Pyrrha started an affair with Wake in G1deon's body, and then he unknowingly made it a polycule; this continued until (allegedly) he killed Wake. Cyth killed Dulcie and assumed her identity, unknowingly thwarting the Dulcie/Pal/Cam (queerplatonic imo) polycule. Wake possessed Cyth's dead body to resume her relationship with Pyrrha and G1deon, followed by her attempting to kill both of them and ultimately dying in Cyth's body; G1deon died in an unrelated incident, ceding the body to Pyrrha. Pyrrha then instead became a part of Cam and Pal's dynamic, up to the point where the two of them fused into a single person. Therefore, taking into account the bodies and souls left standing, in order to close the circle Dulcinea needs to come back in Wake's construct to marry both Paul and Pyrrha.

[nero-draco]

SAY IT LOUDER 📢

[athina-blaine]

images saved under folder titled "actual 22-year-old who should have been at the club 😭"

I know there's this idea in fandom that Kabru is already in a place where he's able to easily shoulder others' burdens, or that maybe taking care of someone else would teach him how to better take of himself. I'm sure a huge part of that comes from his fairly utilitarian role in the main story (he doesn't really get the chance to be vulnerable or break down outside of maybe ch 76), but I just don't subscribe to that. If anything, I think it would be excessively easy for him to continue neglecting his own needs if it's for the sake of other people, especially for someone he cares about 👇

I think it's important that, in the end, Kabru isn't the right person to say what Mithrun needs to hear here. The only desires Kabru offers up to Mithrun are Kabru's own desires to help others with their needs; "I want you to live a life that isn't driven by revenge", "I want to help my friend by eating my fill" (as beautifully illustrated by @yuri-puppies here). Mithrun says, "I wanted to die and part of me still does", and Kabru thinks that this is an acceptable thing to feel so long as Mithrun is able to keep his promise and be useful to others. It takes Senshi offering the idea that scraps are useful no matter what that Mithrun is able to finally feel relief. Just look at the difference between,

versus

which I think is a message Mithrun needed to hear as much as Kabru does. All this to say, I hope Kabru is able to get to the point one day where he feels safe and secure enough to put his own wants and needs first, even when it helps no one but himself