PARADOX

Now this is a big boi

The thing I find really interesting about the character Locke Lamora from the Gentleman Bastards series is how incompetent he actually is. Don’t get me wrong, Locke is a good schemer and he knows his way around a scam, but his real skill lies in acting. Locke is rarely competent at anything, but he’s really good at pretending he is. Most of the time Locke is entirely reliant on other characters to rescue him once things go wrong. This is especially obvious in nearly every fight scene in the books. When Locke wins a fight it’s generally either because he got lucky or because Jean showed up to save him. He’s also incredibly arrogant. He gets overconfident and bites off more than he can chew. He doesn’t back off when he’s in over his head. Characters literally die because of this, but he never quite learns.

Compare this to Kaz Brekker from Six of Crows. Kaz is another schemer character who leads a gang (he also happens to be at least a decade younger than Locke, but we’re not discussing that). Kaz encourages the demon mythos that has built up around him because people being afraid of him makes his job easier. Unlike Locke, I do not think Kaz is arrogant. In fact, I’d argue that Kaz has a very realistic understanding of what he’s capable of and that he rarely if ever does something that’s over his head. Kaz simply does not allow himself to get into situations he can’t handle. He can be outsmarted, but it’s not easy, and he’s never completely outmatched.

I find the comparison between hyper-competent Kaz and Locke who is, quite honestly, a little bumbling, very interesting. On the surface, these characters are very similar (they are the same type of characters and perform very similar roles in the story), but the way they are handled is very different. Incidentally, while neither character is traditionally heroic, Kaz reads as far more of an anti-hero than Locke does, probably because of these differences in characterization.

Jean Tannen: