all I did, I did for Ravka. all I did, I did for You.
âof monsters and menâ trilogy by @esssteee

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@darkolaism
all I did, I did for Ravka. all I did, I did for You.
âof monsters and menâ trilogy by @esssteee

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Iâm new to tumblr so Iâm not completely sure how this works. First post, and itâs wolfstar!
ŃОНнŃĐľ âď¸
Zoya asks to be alone with him and no one questions her right. The monks have returned to their cells. The courtyard is silent save for the faint chanting of psalms. She looks at the tree and its immenseness; gargantuan as the dragon is, dwarfing space and time. There is no seam, no scar to hint at the obscene secret the Thorn Wood guards. The bark is uninjured. It feels rough beneath her own smooth palm.
"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."
When Zoya returns to the others her eyes are the silver of a lightning strike, but on second glance they appear blue - the blue of a cloudless day.
But somehow, they found peace
(A doodle from my sketchbook that i decided to color in digital. Messy and all but fun with the colors! Im in the first part of the third book, anticipating the end and already making fanart to cope whatâs coming)

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the reason the darkling thinks alina will be capable of forgiving him for everything he does to her with just a little time is because he has spent centuries forgiving his mother for her abuse of him simply because the alternative is eternal loneliness. he is always always mimicking his relationship with his mother in his relationship with alina.
Enemies to lovers Darkolai (ft the tether)
A FATHER IS AN UNNAMEABLE THING.
Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides // Frank Bidart, Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016; âGolden Stateâ // AgustĂn GĂłmez-Arcos, The Carnivorous Lamb //DesireĂŠ Dallagiacomo, Origin Story // Ilya Repin, Ivan The Terrible and His Son // Francisco de Goya Saturn Devouring His Son // Ocean Vuong, Someday I'll Love // Catherine Lacey, Cut.
The demon in the wood
(I've been feeling randomly stressed today, so I drew a tiny little Darkling for an hour)

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Shadow and Bone, but it's Crime and Punishment.
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 one, no one in the whole world, is unhappier than you are now!" she exclaimed...
I saw people say Darkling is a r*pist and I'm scared of liking him now. Is he really?
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.
and f) every part of fandom has a bad side. no side is actually better or worse than the other. no side actually sends more hate. no side actually has worse people. no side actually has more victims of abuse or more diversity or more experienced professionals. it's all relative. they're going to speak from their own experiences, which will always skew towards their own biased interactions with the fandom. that's just how it works anywhere.
I want to be clear that the darkling does a lot of bad things. he does a lot of canonically bad things, that fans of his have actually discussed at length and incredibly realistically (despite what antis might tell you otherwise)
the problem lies in the fact that people will claim he did things he didnât do (like rape someone), or theyâll overexaggerate something about him (like his neutral views on otkazatâsya being turned into a desire for genocide of otkazatâsya). and then when you say that isnât true, theyâll accuse you of defending every action heâs taken. if you go into detail about what heâs actually done, and the canonical impact heâs actually had, theyâll say youâre excusing his actions. because in their heads theyâve overblown everything about him, and so canonical interpretations and theories about the darkling are always viewed as apology. because canonically the darkling is less than what his antis believe.
those dni that use the term "condone" when talking about pairings are so weird to me like you couldve chosen the normal option of "enjoy/ship" but no you had to go with the one w moral implications. uhm.
I actually condone everything that my ships have done to each other. The horror was for love â¤ď¸
âŞ~
All hail the Starless Saint, patron of outsiders, oppressed and nameless, shadowy friend of all lonely and friendless, propagator of getting shit done.
Some of us think that an author skewering a certain section of her fan base for not viewing her characters exactly as she thinks we should by writing them into her books as dumb puppet cultists is sad, not hysterical. đ
uh oh, besties! the great evil of challenging wealth inequality and class structures!Â
I'm actually interested in getting to know all your arguments for why you'd like to join them. Like, I'm not being ironic, I seriously want to see a deeper analysis of what the cult had to offer to its members and why people (and you) wanted to join them
Oh, the Cult themselves have nothing in-universe to offer, which is itself the problem of their inclusion in the narrative and the purpose theyâre meant to serve
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. Iâm 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 Saintâs rationales are
But really, their point of view should be obvious to anyone whoâs ever cracked a history book. I love Nikolai dearly, but heâs 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, Ravkaâs been at war with two countries on two different fronts with mandatory conscription for all teenagers, and even our own protagonists are constantly like âwell of course the people are miserable, They Live in Ravka, Which Is A Miserable Country.â You have a disaffected, starving, impoverished population who send their children off to die as cannon fodder in warâand most of them, probably, werenât 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 âoh, good for him, letâs make him a saint.â
But the Cult of the Starless Saint donât articulate these points, because they donât articulate any points. They donât 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 âAnd Hereâs Why The Darkling Was Evilâ 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 thatâs another argument on a much longer post)
Take this scene as a case study:
âOf course. Did the Darkling love my aunt who died beside countless innocent civilians in Novokribirsk so that he could show the world his might?â
âLeave them be,â Nikolai murmured, laying a hand on her arm.
She shook him off. âDid he love the girl he forced to commit those murders? What about the girl he tossed into the old kingâs 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?â 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. âGreat 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 darknessââ
Zoya raises the important point of âwhat about individual livesâ and highlights those who were directly impacted. Itâs a trolley problem, itâs a forest vs the trees, itâs an ideological difference of the individual vs the collective. But the Cultâs only response is âwell thatâs just lies and slander,â which is a dumb rebuttal because weâthe audienceâknow otherwise. If he had said something like âlives must be lost for greater purpose,â that would have represented an ideological difference between the Cult and Zoya. The general audience still would have sided with Zoya, because sheâs the POV character and not a nameless rando, but the narrativeâs 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. Itâs one of many similar and repetitious scenes in this book where some unwitting NPC goes âoh was he that bad?â 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 Wrongâwhich, again, is information that the audience already has. Itâs, 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, itâs 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 âthe people of my country are worshipping and rallying around the Darkling, specifically because my familyâwhich has been unilaterally ruling as an absolute monarchy for hundreds and hundreds of yearsâhave been failing them for hundreds and hundreds of years.â Or if Yuriâs 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.Â
But the narrative doesnât 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 Cultâs inclusion in the plotâespecially when coupled alongside the authorâs real-life disparaging comments about her own reader baseâis 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
[and as for us, the readers who all hopped on to quip âlol yeah sign me up for the Cult of the Starless Saintâ : when folks who like the Darkling are constantly writing really thoughtful meta about his role in the story, discordance in the textâs moral structure, meta about Grisha oppression and persecution, the impact of immortality, how the books are constructed, and all manner of meta, yet every two days someone pops into the tags to go âugh you idiots only like the darkling because heâs hotâ in a series where literally every character is preternaturally gorgeous, you start going âyeah alright whatever, the war crimes are sexy, Iâm joining the cultâ to chase people out with a broom, so you can get back to sharing in-depth literary analysis with people who are interested in having those conversations in good faith]

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my love for the darkling as an antagonist and my desire to see him be more monstrous to the point of becoming an eldritch horror and devouring the world vs my critique of the racist undertones of the writing in regards to both the darkling and the setup of the grisha as an oppressed minority and the knowledge that the darklingâs dehumanization within the text is the result of prejudice against his people and especially shadow summoners. fight