#oh wait she has no story or identity outside of being m*l's houseplant

[serpenteve]

I honestly don't vibe with bardugo and her writing at all. If the sab trilogy were published today I doubt very much it would be an instant hit. I think the backlash would be 10x harsher if r&r were to come out today. People these day like strong female protagonists, who are allowed to be a little morally grey and not just the ideal "good girl", fmcs who are encouraged to embrace their own selves (jude, feyre, nesta and the list is long) something tgt completely fails at. That trilogy reeks of purity culture. It gives me the fucking ick with how slutshamey it is towards Alina for daring to have a teeny tiny crush on someone other than mal and how author constantly dumbs down alina to show how "mal knows the best🥰"

I think there would be more disappointed readers as well, especially since there are so many better written alternatives. I mean, I don't think Alina was particularly beloved even when the series was still being published because a lot of readers found her actions baffling or frustrating. It's like she didn't even want to be in her own story and needed a lot of other side characters, evil plot coupons, and contrived coincidences to drag her through.

You know how a Mary Sue is a character who's so contrived that the whole plot of the story and the other characters have to be distorted and mutated in order to serve the needs of the Sue instead of the needs of the story? I've sort of come to understand Mal and Alina's relationship is like an OTP Sue. See, Mal and Alina are Bargudo's OTP and nothing can come between them: not relevant plot points, not other characters, not background social issues, not character development, not death itself, not even the laws of previously-established canon.

We're not really reading a story about a young girl discovering she's got magical powers and is the Chosen One. We're reading a story about how the author's OTP got separated by her own story shenanigans but found a way back to each other through it all. Which is not the story we were expecting, nor was it particularly compelling since both characters are easily the least well-written and least interesting compared to the rest of the cast.