mARTina

Kaz is an asshole. We know all the reasons Why, to some degree Inej guesses at and then learns Why, but he’s still a teenager/newly an adult and a dramatic shitty mess. Like. We know Kaz is a mostly good person and we know Inej knows that before us, because she sees right through his Barrel and trauma induced bullshit. But no wonder she’s so ready to force herself to give up her relationship with him so often. She can’t keep her heart with a man that’s going to keep breaking it out of fear. I’m so proud of her every time lol.

Inej is also so…judgemental. I love this layer. I think her moral code, religiosity, stubborn attempts at optimism, etc, all culminate in a lot of “right versus wrong” thinking that also gets in the way of their relationship. I think Kaz takes her ethical judgements and feels it all as insults and inflexibility sometimes. She struggles to make allowances for him and support him the same way she struggles to look at and forgive herself once survival makes her lie, steal, cheat, injure, lose sleep, and kill too. She’s not particularly motivating when she’s bashing on Kaz and herself all the time. It doesn’t really cut both ways equally, but Inej really has her own attitude affecting Kaz too. Kaz is just….worse. Way more emotionally stunted.

Today’s fun fact (because she knows Haruka and Michiru are the characters I care about with the most intensity): apparently, scientists are hypothesizing about diamond rain inside Neptune and Uranus.

Before I start: if you haven't said any of what I'm going to mention here, then it means I'm not pointing fingers at you. Don't take offense for something you didn't do.

Now I'm gonna try to keep it as short as possible...

Part 1

"I don't think Inej loves Kaz." "Inej doesn't love Kaz as much as he does her." "Inej is ignorant." bla bla bla...

A cousin of mine (15 yo) read the books and said the same things as above.

I asked her what does love mean to her and she responded it meant "two people showing their emotions by acts like kisses, cuddles, etc." and "by being together with that person by the end of the story".

Obviously, that's not all to love. Younger audiences tend to not take note of the faint nuances the same way grownups do. Its just like watching disney movies and only later realising the ambiguous meanings in certain dialogues. But we can't simply say that age plays a major factor here.

While SoC is a YA novel and aimed for age groups 13-17 mostly, many adults enjoy the books.

I myself read the books this year (23 yo) and my perception of love is different from my cousin's. Love isn't simply an emotion or feeling or gestures. LOVE IS WORK. It requires both the parties involved to put in equal effort.

And so, when Inej says "I will have you without armor." , she isn't being ignorant at all. She does mean it in the literal sense. But also more than that. Inej is an honest person and says whats on her mind freely. She expects the same honesty in return. She says this dialogue because while Kaz seems to know a good amount about her— her full real name, how she was taken to Ketterdam and sold to Tante Heleen, etc. Inej knows nothing about him, not even his real name. The first thing she learns about him is that he had a brother and a vague "i had a lot of things."

And even with things Kaz doesn't know about her, she's ready to share. She tells him that it was easy for her to entirely dissociate when seeing her clients but she couldn't do it with one guy, the guy who'd seen her perform on the high wire as a kid. She shares this deep, awful experience with him and says its not easy for her either. In doing so, being honest about her past, she encourages him to take a step as well. To try and be a little honest about himself, share a small part of himself. She wants him to put some effort into their relationship because a simple "i want you" isn't enough. They both need to work on a lot of things to reach that "i want you". SHE ISN'T IGNORANT.

Later on, Inej realises, she can't ask so much honesty of Kaz because that one bathroom scene is an eye opener for both of them. She realises that she may have handled that kiss on the neck but what if she couldn't have? What if she had dissociated on instinct, as her defense mechanism? What if? Kaz adds to all that when he tells her to take the money and leave, forget him. But does she do that? NO. She thinks whether it would be better for her to find a kind man, bear his children and then sharpen her knives at night. And she realizes she doesn't want that because she can only be her true self (a kind woman who wields knives) with Kaz. She can only be her genuine self with Kaz. She thinks "he'd tried, they'd tried. They could try again." She wants to try again with Kaz. SHE WANTS HIM JUST AS MUCH.

Now for a moment, lets consider the other female character in SoC— Nina Zenik. We all call her an "Unapologetic Queen" for being herself, being proud of her body proportions and such. But if Nina was a woman of color, would she get the same hype? Don't say "Yes" because we know that won't be the case. Nina wouldn’t get the same hype for her plus sized representation if she was a poc.

And this, I'm speaking as a Desi. I know what I face in real life from people of other cultures. I've experienced a lot of stereotypes about myself as a South Asian woc. And while not everyone treats me the same, I do encounter alot of obvious stereotypical assumptions about myself.

Similarly, so many people when they read the "I will have you without armor" dialogue, completely stop looking further into Inej. Age factor is very miniscule. Most of this, whether you like it or not, stems from the internalized stereotype that "brown girls are mean and insensitive". Thats how we've typically seen them portrayed in majority of media and that's where many readers' thoughts immediately head to when they read the "without armor" dialogue. Those of you who say the quoted things mentioned at the top, don't bother to look as deeply into Inej's perspective as you do for Kaz or Nina or the others. You simply settle for calling her ignorant.

Did you ever give her more thought instead of reducing her to the stereotypical brown girl?

Did you ever consider that this girl has her own demons? That this girl was captured forcefully and sold into prostitution at 14!? That this girl sometimes even gets scared of touches from her own friends? That this girl finds it harder to handle contact that she doesn't see coming? That she suffered abuse and was rewarded with kindness by the same hands that touched her at the Menagerie!? That at some point she just fearfully anticipated for whatever was to come, be it a gentle caress or a harsh slap across her cheek? That this girl was raped again and again and again every single day when she was only 14? That she was violated and touched in places too private without her consent? That she was continuously treated so by men twice, thrice, even four times her age!?

Did you ever consider that this girl who struggles with so much didn't let her suffering define her!? That she rises above these atrocities and finds a purpose!? That she chooses to pursue her own goals and save any other kids from whatever horrid things she went through!?

Did you ever consider that despite everything this girl suffered at the hands of innumerable people, she wants to try again with Kaz?

For a girl like her to let Kaz kiss her neck completely unguarded (she doesn't have her knives with her in that scene)..to still be able to give her heart to Kaz, is a very beautiful thing. It means she trusts him so much more than she'll ever trust any other person..

Everyone expresses themselves in different ways. Thats what makes each human so unique. Just because Inej isn't saying poetic things in her pov chapters, doesn't mean she loves Kaz any less.

Inej Ghafa loves Kaz Brekker. And she always will. But her love doesn't mean she must give up on her own purpose. Kaz doesn't ask her to. And she doesn't ask Kaz to give up his position as the new King of the Barrel. They're equals who support each other in their goals. They're two people in love who will take their baby steps towards healing together.

Inej and Kaz love each other.

Inej and Kaz are together.

Inej isn't ignorant, just misread.

I spent a lot of time thinking about this line when I first decided I wanted to write a Kanej growing together fic, and I think another BIG piece of what Inej is saying here is that she wants Kaz without armour not because she wants him to get hurt, but because she knows she cannot be with him if his pleasure (and not just of a sexual kind) comes at her expense. Inej isn't saying she wants Kaz vulnerable so she can hurt him, she's saying she wants him vulnerable so he won't hurt her.

Like you said: Inej has given more of herself to Kaz than he has given to her, by this point in their story. Their relationship has been largely on Kaz's terms, dictated by his needs; they don't touch, because he can't; she doesn't learn his story, because it hurts him to tell it. And on the ship in this scene, when Kaz tells her he does want more, wants her, Inej draws the line. Because she loves him, and (to some degree) understands his trauma, she has been willing to meet him where he is in so many other ways, but when he says he wants her she draws a line and says "no; in this you have to meet me where I'm at too." You can see this in the way she asks how he'll have her, fully clothed, gloves on, head turned so their mouths can never touch? Having him that way might somehow work for him, but she needs him to make it about her (and her trauma) too. Otherwise she's going to feel like an object, something to be used for someone else's pleasure, just like she felt at the Menagerie. She may love Kaz, but she isn't going to throw herself on the chopping block like that to accommodate him.

cause i've seen a lot of people saying it's a good thing bc "their ages never made sense, they were too mature and doing things teenagers couldn't/wouldn't do"

and man, it's almost like that's the fucking point??? it's almost like soc is a series about a group of deeply traumatized kids who have gone through things no one their age should have to and have been forced to mature way faster than they should have as a result of their circumstances.

"oh but there's no way kaz could command that kind of respect and fear as a 17-year-old" bro he's fucking unhinged. people have tried to underestimate him bc of his age. he made them regret it.

"oh but thinking about inej being a sex slave at such a young age makes me feel icky :/" IT'S SUPPOSED TO. her backstory is not supposed to make you feel good or be comfortable to read about.

and that's not even getting into all the times in the series the crows do, in fact, act like teenagers despite their circumstances. like the way they acted around colm?? kaz and jesper getting into that petty fight and then instantly backing down like kicked puppies when colm scolded them? c'mon.

"She's right!" I hear someone say. I look to the crowd. there in the 5th row stands Leigh Bardugo and her marketing team themselves.