ruination

Queen of the barrel 💐

Kaz "great with kids" Brekker🐦‍⬛ in a big pretentious Mafia boss coat so he can cram all his loot

Morning Doodle: “A statue of Sankta Lizabeta stood before the entrance. A riot of red roses had burst through the stone, cracking open her veiled skull. The flowers tumbled over the statue in wild profusion, surrounding its marble skirts in a wide circle like a pool of blood. Their sweet smell pulsed in a thick, syrupy wave that seemed to glow with summer heat.” (Leigh Bardugo’s King of Scars CH 11)

Morning Doodle: “A statue of Sankta Lizabeta stood before the entrance. A riot of red roses had burst through the stone, cracking open her veiled skull. The flowers tumbled over the statue in wild profusion, surrounding its marble skirts in a wide circle like a pool of blood. Their sweet smell pulsed in a thick, syrupy wave that seemed to glow with summer heat.” (Leigh Bardugo’s King of Scars CH 11)

characters belong to leigh bardugo

“The village was like all the others except for the pretty lake it overlooked. This time they’d been greeted by an off-key band and a parade of livestock and giant vegetables.” (Leigh Bardugo's King of Scars CH 11)

Morning Doodle: “How can you be so sure?” (Leigh Bardugo’s King of Scars CH 11)

Kaz and Inej

No one writes romance like Leigh Bardugo

apparently I never posted the updated version here??

they were real to ME

jesper: *snaps his fingers* "exactly!"

HOWEVER. You have to write that story with intention. Writing an impulsive or brainwashed adult is going to look different than writing a teen. You have to give the reader an idea of what they have been doing for those extra years, what their mental state has been, why they're still where they are. Take Matthias for example. You CAN write a character who is in a cult for his whole childhood and partakes into his young adulthood, even though his actions are terrible. That character can be written about and, depending on how you write his experiences and thoughts during those terrible actions, can still find redemption. Having a character who takes longer to deprogram himself is not inherently wrong. But that's not the story Leigh Bardugo wrote. She wrote him as a child who had just barely stepped foot into his genocidal role before questioning it. To make him a man of unspecified age leaves us with holes - what did he participate in during those years? What kept him hunting Grisha, when he was shown canonically to have struggled with it emotionally during training? Why did he only start to question his indoctrination once he met Nina? We can't know, because the original story wasn't written with these things in mind. The changes unintentionally create the implication that he only questioned his mission because he was attracted to Nina (unlike any other Grisha he may have captured previously), rather than because he saw humanity in a Grisha. That is a huge insult to his character. Also, it makes Nina's relationship with him incredibly strange, because the way Nina has been written makes it seem very unlikely she would ever fall in love with someone who was possibly years deep into active genocidal efforts without questioning it. It's really not that it makes Matthias "more problematic" - to an extent it does, sure, but that really simplifies the issue here. Because again, you CAN write such a character and have them find some form of acceptable redemption. The problem is that Leigh Bardugo didn't write that character, so those gaps in his backstory just leave us wondering how much evil he partook in and why, considering what we know about his character (particularly his active empathy). Changing his age breaks the logic of who he is and his relationship with Nina. Traumatized teens can become traumatized adults, but that's not the story Six of Crows was telling. Going in to scrub their ages destroys the focus of the story we had and leaves strange, unhappy hollows behind.