饮宴

It’s important to remember that the Wraith persona is not something Inej chose for herself, it’s something that Kaz gave her, and though he did it to give her protection, it still stands that the idea of the Wraith is exactly that stereotype, the powerful baddass stripped of emotions and vulnerability, unbelievable with all of the different powers she has, but is somehow always ending up using those powers in service of the men in the story.

Inej is given this role to play, but because she’s strong and unwilling to compromise on her faith she finds ways to make the Wraith persona her own, by bringing her religion into it for example and naming her knives after Saints.

But there reaches a point when Inej realizes that the Wraith persona is static and limiting her, which is literally represented by her being stuck/trapped in the incinerator.

She realizes that the way she’s been living as the Wraith has made it so that she doesn’t know what she wants, only what Kaz wanted. “Kaz Brekker was just a boy, and she’d let him lead her to this fate.” But she says “she couldn’t even blame him because she hadn’t known where she wanted to go.”

Once she names the fact that she’s been allowing herself to be guided by whatever Kaz’s goals are and hasn’t been living for herself, Inej becomes ambivalent to the idea of being a “dangerous girl,” which were at first the words she clung to to become the Wraith. “She thought of her knives… maybe they’d go to some other girl who dreamed of being dangerous.”

It is only when she realizes that she wants to hunt slavers that she is able to picture her future and who she can be. “She was not a lynx or a spider or even the Wraith. She was Inej Ghafa, and her future was waiting above.” She affirms her own identity which is separate from all of the other labels that people have given her, and chooses her own direction and goal, separate from anything Kaz or anyone else wants from her.

I love that the stakes of this realization are literally presented as life and death. Because yes, without the sentence “she was Inej Ghafa, and her future was waiting above,” Inej would not be the same. If Inej was only a cool acrobat called the Wraith who goes on a heist and has a relationship with the brooding lead, that would be the death of the great, full rounded character we know her to be now. (Not to mention it would be shit. …Anyway.)

After Inej figures out what she wants, her arc in Crooked Kingdom is to kill her previous self. Dunyasha is the physical representation of that YA girl stereotype. She’s constantly talking about her skills and the fact that she’s “chosen,” with her royal blood etc. Dunyasha is a powerful female character in the sense that she’s a female character with a lot of “powers.” She’s not someone who could exist in real life. When Inej interacts with her it’s like she’s talking to a cardboard cut out with lots of one liners. By defeating Dunyasha in the end Inej proves that the things that she might have had to lose to become a cold knife wielding baddass (like her hesitance to kill, her sentimentality, her faith) are actually her strengths. She has proven that Inej Ghafa is stronger than a trope.

However, the idea of being a dangerous girl is definitely still nuanced. I’m not saying that because Inej needed to become a person separate from the Wraith persona and her life in Ketterdam that the idea of being the Wraith is meaningless, or that Kaz is “problematic” for giving her that role or anything. Kaz understands the power of a legend, and Inej makes it clear that by gaining that identity as the Wraith, Kaz saved her. “He’d helped her build a legend to wear as armour, something bigger and more frightening than the girl she’d been.”

I’d go as far as to say it’s normal and good that Inej started out this way. She’s just a teenage girl who’s had to fight every single moment of her life, and wanting to escape into a role/character that makes you feel bigger than yourself is something that I think many others can understand.

When she’s in terrifying situations, Inej still uses the word dangerous to comfort herself. Like in Crooked Kingdom when Jan van eck has kidnapped her and she’s doubting everything she says to herself “I am a dangerous girl.”

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be a dangerous girl. The trope exists because it’s an attractive fantasy. We all want to be bigger, stronger, more powerful than we’re allowed to be in real life. But for most of us, it’s just not real. Dunyasha is not a real girl that could exist outside of fiction. Inej is though. That’s why this quote hits so hard “What about the ones who aren’t chosen, the invisible girls. We learn to hold our heads as if we wear crowns, we learn to wring magic from the ordinary. When the world owed you nothing you demanded something anyway.”

It’s ok to look up to the girls in fiction that may be one dimensional but make you feel a little less small. It’s ok to get caught up in the worlds of the people around you instead of living for yourself. It’s ok to not know who you are or what you want. But there comes a time when you can’t just keep stalling. You can’t keep “holding onto nothing.” You take what you can and create the life, relationships and sense of self that you deserve.