#pro darkling and pro sun saint

[ohdeadlynightshades]

Daily reminder we don’t know anything when it comes to Sun Summoners and their origins fills me with rage.

Ms. Bardugo, you were presented with an amazing opportunity of making Baghra’s sister—a nameless character supposedly important to the narrative—the very first Sun Saint, the one who spread the myth and make Alina her descendant… It would’ve made so much more sense. Saint Ilya could’ve conquered the darkness and the light and turned his daughters into his monsters. Instead you randomly decide to make Malyen an amplifier to add substance to your raspberry.

[disregardcanon]

toh grishaverse au i found in my notebooks today

long ago backstory: functions as the darkling, but with a more Belos TM backstory. he’s the okats’ya younger brother of caleb, who was the first shadow-summoner. he and his brother had to travel a lot as kids because they were still orphans and outcasts

philip knows about caleb’s powers and blames them for having so often, even though caleb tries very hard to hide them.

at their newest village, caleb meets evelyn clawthorne, the daughter of The Miraculous Morozava Clawthorne, the greatest fabrikator in history. evelyn is another fabrikator and they both live openly in their ravkan village, helping openly with ailments more like zowa.

then the village is raided. after the wittebros flee with evelyn and her father, philip turns the rage toward evelyn and ends up killing both evelyn AND caleb.

papa morozova brings back evelyn but is either unwilling or unable to bring back caleb. in a rage, philip steals caleb’s body and escapes under the cover of darkness... CALEB’S darkness. it turns out that in killing caleb, philip inherited his powers. 

most of the other characters are in the 2nd army years and years in the future after belos has created a safe place for grisha... to eventually kill them

slightly less long ago backstory:

Lilith- is kerch, the sun-summoner, and the daughter of grisha who are NOT a fan of the 2nd army. but she comes to ravka anyway because she thinks that it will help things and has been a fan of ravka’s “pro-grisha” propaganda as opposed to the secrecy they have to live with in kerch. she also, uh, tried to give eda a potion to incapacitate her so that lilith could bring her with to ravka and that went VERY wrong. owl-beast kind of wrong.

as a response to the sun-summoner’s arrival, belos sends his current golden guard (darius’s mentor) out to seek morozova’s stag. the mentor tries to draft darius to help him with the job, but darius feels uneasy about the idea of how, exactly, belos wants to use the amplifier. his mentor is hurt but knows that he needs a competent fabrikator to help him, even if it isn’t darius. he asks alador instead.

alador does it despite numerous warnings from darius that it’s a bad idea, and thus he becomes important in the hierarchy and secures himself a marriage to the powerful and wealthy odalia blight.

belos uses his knowledge of what happened to eda as leverage against lilith and promises that if lilith can capture her wayward sister and bring her to ravka, he will “heal her”. (it’s mainly a way to study what happened to her and see if he can implement something similar as a pox against grisha specifically)

The Golden Guard- hunter- a creation of philip’s using caleb’s bones and merzost. he does not have grisha powers of his own, except for mal’s tracking instincts, due to his connection to caleb and evelyn.

blight family affiliations: odalia=heartrender, alador= durast, amity=durast, emira= healer that odalia tries to force into heartrending, edric= alkemi

Darius- all purpose fabrikator. he does it allll and is both feared and envied for that

Eberwolf- squaller

Willow’s dads- alkemi who want willow to be a fabrikator because fabrikators don’t see combat. one of them is a shu refugee and he’s willow’s bio dad

Willow- a grisha with very strange abilities (plant based? what?) trying very hard to to be a fabrikator, but with her lack of ability and shu heritage... it wasn’t going very well.

Gus- prodigy squaller obsessed with different cultures and languages. his dad is zemeni man who was captured by druskelle while traveling and fled to ravka when he managed an escape when he reached fjerdan shores. he’s a tidemaker.

Boscha- heartrender

Mattholomule- inferni, along with his big brother steve

Raine- a squaller with a very niche use of it through manipulating vibrations, especially through music.

Non-2nd Army

The Collector- immortal saint

King- strange offspring of an immortal saint with distinct powers, including being a live amplifier.

Hooty- the sea whip :3

Delll- farmer and keeper of a home for wayward grisha. he has complex powers

Gwen- healer obsessed with trying to “fix” eda

Eda- lives on the outskirts of ketterdam and spends her time trying to help indentures, especially grisha indentures, escape their bonds. she also hones her strange and complex grisha powers

Luz- raised in an insular community in rural kerch by a zemeni man and an transracial suli adoptee raised in kerch by kerch parents, luz is still herself. her school’s headmistress talks camilla into sending her to a boarding school in the north of ketterdam. luz decides to go exploring as she arrives in ketterdam and ends up almost indentured before eda finds her.

might come back to this and try to make it coherent, but right now this is just a transcription of my notes from months ago... so

[dalasteller]

shadow and bone spoilers! malina/mal fans this is not for you but it’s not pro-darklina either. i’m an alina x alina supremacist

so, somehow, the show made me like book!malina more than show!malina after weeks of thinking the opposite would be true. i don’t even like book!mal/malina, but my neutrality towards them is nothing compared to how much i detested show!malina.

I WANTED THE TV SHOW TO MAKE ME LOVE THEM. the trailers made me think i would!!! i'd heard screeners and reviewers talk about this epic love story that transcends everything—these two people who would do anything for each other—and i don't disagree, they definitely would. i just wish they would shut the fuck up about it.

sorry.

looking back, i'd rather the show gave us mal with flaws, who wasn't perfect to alina, who would die for her, but still said the wrong thing and flirted with other girls and was afraid of her power at first. archie did a great job. he just couldn't make me love mal, and neither could the writers opting to make him main character no. 2 and alina’s prince in shining armour who supports her endlessly and has never done anything wrong in his life ever. writers, please, why did you think that was a good idea? when i said i wanted a more likeable mal, i meant i wanted his flaws accompanied by positive traits, by compelling backstory, by personality outside of being alina's hot best friend who never noticed her. i didn't mean i wanted a guy who could be wrapped in a gift box and sold as a robo-boyfriend designed for romance.

no, i mean, they really did write him that way.

what i definitely didn't mean i wanted was over an hour of the show dedicated to watching mal’s perspective of hunting the stag and making besties with his military bros and writing letters to alina and getting shot at a bunch of times instead of letting the book characters who were already beloved by fans get the screentime they deserved. what i wouldn't do to have gotten more genyalina and well-written zoya instead of mal dissecting deer shit...

you would think with how much talk about malina basically being soulmates, childhood flashbacks, fighting and nearly dying for each other at least four times (and did i mention more narration about being soulmates?) that i would take the bait and just let malina set sail. but this show held me at gunpoint for eight hours straight and told me that these two are going to have the same cultural influence as new romeo and juliet and that if i disagree i am going to be killed on the spot. because of this, i have now died.

don't tell me what to do, narrative, because i'm not going to do it!

i am also annoyed that they took the time to redesign mal in perfect childhood-friends-to-lovers dreamboat fashion but refused to retcon zoya's stupid misogyny-fueled bitchy YA girl arc and instead made it even worse by having her be racist to alina? what was the thought process there? they seriously fucked her over. i tried to pretend it didn't happen moving forward but why do they want to use racism as a tool for developing a "bully" character anyway, especially a woc? am i meant to forget about it? they lost me there. i feel like the female characters, with the exception of inej, generally weren't given the same care the male characters were. there was a lot of sidelining in favour of mal's redemptive rewrite and the darkling's 15 minutes of half-assed backstory and crying in every scene for some reason. “make me your villain” .... okay, simpboy, i’ll try my best.

i've already talked about why i hated mal's role (i clarify his role, not his character, because there was literally nothing wrong with him and that’s why i hated him so much) but i'm going to address it from the perspective of my love for alina and why i think this decision was so disrespectful to her. alina in the books was already in need of more characterization, time for herself and her internal development as opposed to her relationship with the three male love interests she acquires through the series. somehow this show took a main character already underused in her own story (though at least the books are told from her pov) and neglected her even further. alina is tied almost entirely to her male counterparts, mal especially, but i'd say the darkling is used as a narrative rebound. i think they both have chemistry and can serve a purpose in the story but the emphasis on codependency is impossible to ignore.

in the first four episodes, every scene that could have been alina struggling to settle into a new life and dealing with the emotional weight of her pressure as a saint was instead about mal. she writes him letters, and cries over him, and slips him into conversations that have nothing to do with him, and gets sad after slipping him into conversations that have nothing to do with him, and can't use her power because she's thinking of him, and then only decides to fully accept her power because of his absence.

alina's feelings are lended to nothing but her missing mal. he isn't just her best friend and love, he's this colossal piece of her identity that she doesn't get to exist without, even when he's gone. the show's exhaustive attempt to make mal loveable and make malina an epic love story turns our female protagonist into a sulking, miserable shell of a character everytime he's mentioned, which, by the way, is like, every two minutes. and apparently it's necessary to draw parallels to the same three flashbacks in all of them. i knoowwwwwwww, they held hands and now they can't anymore, i knowwww. they ran through a meadow, i knowwwwwwwwwwwwww.

watching her scenes almost drove me to printing out a bechdel test and ticking off as many boxes as possible.

i hated it. it made me sad.

i wanted more alina. i want her power to be her own. i wanted that tension between her and mal in the books because his flaws gave her a chance to stand up for herself and say that she liked being powerful. that summoning is a part of her and she would never give it up. that there was a tinge of corruption, of greed, of wanting to be the sun summoner, and it was intriguing! mal's issue of not accepting alina's power allowed her to express how much it meant to her. i wanted the alina who said "the night was velvety black and strewn with jewels. the hunger struck me suddenly. i want them, i thought." i wanted a hint of the sun summoner who decided when it got dark and relished in it (yes i know this can be expanded upon in s2). alina has a cocky side, her insecurities are explored and she finds strength in her new gift and eventually has to find strength outside of it, but in the show the catalyst to her powers is mal. always. is it romantic? sure. but it's hard to enjoy the romance when all we see of alina is her romantic connection to mal. can't she be more than that?