"You didn't tell them."

Silence. It stretches, long and viscous, like the honey of Elizaveta's hives, enough so that Zoya can drown in it.

"They wouldn't have believed it."

The answer comes from the depths of the tree, from somewhere within her mind, from beyond the Door that leads to the Making.

"No, they wouldn't have," she admits ruefully. "Monsters can't be heroes."

"What will you do?"

"You kept me prisoner for four hundred years, boy. I will have your little country as recompense. Was it worth the price you paid?" That you still pay?

The cool, youthful voice contains a note of pain. "I regret Grigori."

"Grisha was ever a fool. But he served as good bait. Without him, do you think we would have trusted your invitation?" The laugh that follows is the inhuman crackle of a bonfire.

"It wasn't enough." The boy admits.

"It never is," agrees the dragon. "I owe you four hundred years, Aleksander. They begin today."

But somehow, they found peace

A FATHER IS AN UNNAMEABLE THING.

The demon in the wood

Shadow and Bone, but Aleksander is tormented by his creation of the Fold. It all went wrong, you see? It was supposed to protect Ravka. It was supposed to swaddle her like a babe, but it sliced her in half. He harmed the very thing he was trying to save, as Raskolnikov harmed poor Lizabeta whom he meant to free from her tormentor.

Give me Aleksander and Alina, but as Rodion and Sonya.

Give me Aleksander confessing all his centuries of suffering and Alina, unwanted, orphaned, Alina, understanding such suffering.

This was not the way, this was not at all the way he had intended to reveal it to her, but thus it came out.

no lol. and I suggest you get out of the discourse circles while you still can. they'll be telling you the darkling wanted genocide next, or that he deliberately planned genya's fate from the start.

this fandom has some of the most rampant misinformation campaigns I've probably ever seen. in other fandoms, the discourse is simply arguments that get out of hand. it is only shadow and bone which seems to attract people who will straight up lie about these things.

I don't know if it's because they believe it (maybe they haven't read the books or maybe they're bad at media literacy or maybe they even have trouble separating reality from fiction), or if it's because they like to control what happens in this fandom (the people here act like any post they don't like or that doesn't fit the 'acceptable parameters' is an attack on morals everywhere. there's a lot of thought control that happens in the general discourse tags), or if it's because they don't want to be outcast from the 'acceptable' side of the fandom.

but I recommend taking a step back and remembering a few things:

a) this is fiction. none of it is real.

b) it is ya fiction and attracts a generally younger audience

c) trust in your own interpretation of the text, and don't rely on other people's moral crisis and danger spiraling posts to guide your beliefs.

d) there is a lot of heavy handed 'think of the children' 'we just want what's best for you' manipulation going on in these tags, but you are not inherently immoral for disagreeing with them. don't trust the slogan.

e) block liberally and blacklist every tag you need to. antis will make you think they have your best interests in mind, but they are just as prone to harassing and gaslighting people as any other extreme loud minority discourse group in fandom.

The Cult of the Starless Saint is portrayed as idiots. They are, largely, idiots in fact. None of them articulate any particular points of view or WHY they hold those views. They talk in mystical mumbo-jumbo. I’m not just saying this because I could do their proselytizing way better, but it is Jarringly Ridiculous how flim-flamingly weak the Cult of the Starless Saint’s rationales are

But really, their point of view should be obvious to anyone who’s ever cracked a history book. I love Nikolai dearly, but he’s coming on the heels of long line of bad rulers. The Lantsov family has been in power since Ravka first unified into a country, the country is completely ass-fucking-broke, serfdom exists, poverty and starvation are widespread, Ravka’s been at war with two countries on two different fronts with mandatory conscription for all teenagers, and even our own protagonists are constantly like “well of course the people are miserable, They Live in Ravka, Which Is A Miserable Country.” You have a disaffected, starving, impoverished population who send their children off to die as cannon fodder in war—and most of them, probably, weren’t themselves directly impacted by the Darkling or the Ravkan Civil War With Three Whole Battles

frankly, if Paul Blart Mall Cop had tried to overthrow the previous tsar, your average starving impoverished peasant probably would have been like “oh, good for him, let’s make him a saint.”

But the Cult of the Starless Saint don’t articulate these points, because they don’t articulate any points. They don’t exist to make commentary about the universe or to challenge the protagonists in any way. They exist solely to be brick-wall idiots so that the protagonists can regurgitate “And Here’s Why The Darkling Was Evil” by listing out events that the audience already knows about and already read in the previous books, which really seems to serve no narrative purpose other than lecturing the audience (as well as retconning events of previous books, but that’s another argument on a much longer post)

Take this scene as a case study:

“Of course. Did the Darkling love my aunt who died beside countless innocent civilians in Novokribirsk so that he could show the world his might?”

“Leave them be,” Nikolai murmured, laying a hand on her arm.

She shook him off. “Did he love the girl he forced to commit those murders? What about the girl he tossed into the old king’s bed for his own purposes, then mutilated when she dared to challenge him? Or the woman he blinded for failing to offer him unswerving devotion?” Who would speak for Liliyana, for Genya and Alina and Baghra if she did not? Who will speak for me?

But the pilgrim remained unshaken, his smile steady, gentle, maddening. “Great men are often the victims of the lies told by their enemies. What Saint has walked among us who did not face hardships in this life? We have been taught to fear darkness—”

Zoya raises the important point of “what about individual lives” and highlights those who were directly impacted. It’s a trolley problem, it’s a forest vs the trees, it’s an ideological difference of the individual vs the collective. But the Cult’s only response is “well that’s just lies and slander,” which is a dumb rebuttal because we—the audience—know otherwise. If he had said something like “lives must be lost for greater purpose,” that would have represented an ideological difference between the Cult and Zoya. The general audience still would have sided with Zoya, because she’s the POV character and not a nameless rando, but the narrative’s utter refusal to even engage any ideological discussion is such a cop-out that takes away real tension or real moments for challenging your characters

(This scene is indicative of a continuous narrative problem, in that it was constructed only to allow Zoya to Go Off listing out all the bad things the Darkling did in the trilogy. It’s one of many similar and repetitious scenes in this book where some unwitting NPC goes “oh was he that bad?” and then our protagonists can Go Off giving us this same information. These arguments only exist so that the protagonists can react with Moral Indignation and Self-Righteous Rage, prompting their inner monologue to give us the umpteenth paragraph outlining Everything the Darkling Did Wrong—which, again, is information that the audience already has. It’s, frankly, a lazy writing choice.)

Whereas if the Cult of the Starless Saint were allowed to make points and to have an ideological argument, then it would actually MEAN SOMETHING for the protagonist characters, because they would have to actually GRAPLE with the moral and philosophical questions of where is the line between individual life and larger purpose, what does it mean for the people when a monarchy has failed its country so spectacularly, how is changed accomplished, what are you willing to sacrifice of yourself and of others to achieve your goals. I think this cult could have been a FASCINATING opportunity to explore the political climate of Ravka and what the civil war meant for the common man. But instead, it’s just an excuse to Spoon-feed Moral Lessons to the audience, but it never actually contributes any new information, any new inner conflict, or any new character growth

But the Strongly Held Convictions of your POV characters are meaningless if they never actually have to grapple with those convictions in any meaningful way, because the narrative constantly goes out of its way to make it super easy for them to always be Objectively Morally Correct and never actually challenges them

Because it could have been really compelling, right? Especially as a narrative foil to Nikolai starting his reign, having to contend with “the people of my country are worshipping and rallying around the Darkling, specifically because my family—which has been unilaterally ruling as an absolute monarchy for hundreds and hundreds of years—have been failing them for hundreds and hundreds of years.” Or if Yuri’s abusive family in Novokribirsk had been part of the main text, instead of extracanon material, so that he could have acted as a foil for Zoya. 

But the narrative doesn’t allow the Cult to articulate any ACTUAL views, because that would require a complex understanding of morality. It would require trusting your readers, instead of holding their hands and trying to spoon-feed them an easy and simple tale of good guys and bad guys. The cultists themselves are portrayed as genuine idiots who have no cohesive belief system and whose arguments are innately ridiculous to the reader. No one is challenged to think, no character is challenged in their Righteously Held And Always Correct convictions, no reader is invited to think deeply about the political landscape of Ravka. The Cult offers no stakes. The Cult serves no purpose, other than luring them to a magical sandcastle and acting as a springboard for the umpteenth regurgitation of wrongdoing

and thus, the Cult’s inclusion in the plot—especially when coupled alongside the author’s real-life disparaging comments about her own reader base—is left seeming very, very petty indeed. it's far less about their in-universe watsonian function, and far more about a doyleist understanding of (and objection to) what they were put into the narrative to accomplish