If a minority group has to leverage basic human rights from a position where they hold zero sociopolitical power from the group of people who have a centuries long history of persecuting them, then thatâs not privilege. Thatâs not comfort and thatâs not power. Itâs safety through submission because thereâs no other option. Itâs selling yourself to your oppressors under threat of death.Â
Saying the Darkling didnât care about his people is ignoring the core premise of Demon in the Woods. Thatâs a biased opinion, and you canât just pass it off as a fact because you donât like his character. The fact of the matter is that he did care about his people, and he dedicated an eternity to seeking a way to make them safer through power. Thatâs what makes him an anti-villain. He had a noble goal, he wanted Grisha safe and he cared about his people. But he went about it the wrong way and lost himself in the process. That is literally, textually, how his arc progressed. You canât just retcon that because you happen to have a different opinion.Â
Perhaps the Darkling isnât a savior to his people, but the Little Palace was still crucial to the Grishaâs survival and protection as a vulnerable and marginalized people. He elevated them from a position of no power to a position where they could at least not worry about the constant threat of torture and death because of who they are. Yet that is still a concern within a vast majority of Ravka as a country. Grisha persecution still exists outside of the Darklingâs influence. There is still the root of prejudice nurtured over centuries of constant abuse from Grisha oppressors. This is not the Darklingâs doing. This is systematic oppression.
Theyâre literally top in the army just for being Grisha.
Theyâre not at the top of the army. Theyâre in a compromised and powerless position wherein they can only operate on one level within the boundaries of their oppressors. Comparing the First Army to the Second Army will always be a false equivalence, because the foundation of basic personhood and rights and power is fundamentally different.Â
The recruitment is different, because Grisha do not have the basic, inherent protection otkazatâsya have from birth for being non-Grisha. If a Grisha is discovered, they are immediately brought to the Little Palace not because the Darkling is trying to separate them from society, but because otherwise they will be subject to all kinds of hell. And no, this isnât fanon, itâs canonically talked about multiple times within the text. Recruitment for Grisha into the Second Army is founded on the persecution and required safety of their people.Â
They are forced into service not because they have been drafted, but because it is the only way to make themselves useful enough to not get killed.
There is a balance of power between the Grisha and the monarchy. They are forced to serve because it is a means of survival, not because they are citizens to the King. And they do not get the privilege that otkazatâsya have of waiting, because even a Grisha thatâs a child can be slaughtered and tortured simply for being born as they were.
Considering the Darkling a savior in all aspects may be extreme, but people believing heâs some kind of savior isnât as problematic as youâre trying to make it out to be. He singlehandedly fought for centuries to create a place where Grisha are not only trained to defend themselves but also kept safe from their abusers. Consider where the people that call him a savior are coming from. Perhaps they donât mean it in the most literal sense. Perhaps they just acknowledge that what he did for the Grisha is something that had a lasting and positive effect on their peopleâs success and safety as a whole.
Thatâs the thing though, any sort of oppression that the Grisha have⌠is the Darklingâs doing in this century. Yes, in the past they were outcasts for being different, but that was hundreds of years ago (you canât compare it to real life systemic racism - because no real life people have been moved to palaces).
This is patently false. As discussed above, there are multiple instances of other characters discussing oppression the Grisha have suffered that is not the result of the Darkling, but rather an ingrained sense of prejudice in Ravkan people.Â
Blaming the Darkling for Grisha oppression isnât accurate, because he may have othered the Grisha as a means of protection, but the prejudice was always there. In fact, the reason he had to other the Grisha in the first place was because of the prejudice and oppression.
Circling around to say that itâs the Darklingâs fault is ignoring some of the most basic and crucial facets of the way systematic oppression works.
Yes, in the past they were outcasts for being different
âŚThey were not outcasts. They were persecuted. I donât know if this word choice was accidental, but it definitely should not have been used. In the past, Grisha were not simply outcast, they were subject to government sanctioned abuse, torture, and murder. They were subject to an attempt at genocide. They were not simply outcasts. They were a persecuted minority.
Grisha as a people have a culture of generational trauma due to a long history of persecution and systematic oppression at the hands of otkazatâsya. They now must submit themselves to their oppressors so that they can move up on from constant torture and murder to being removed from others entirely as a means of protection. That is not privilege.
Furthermore. The situation of the Grisha now is better than it was before because of the Darkling.Â
Now though, the Darkling uses the power that he has created because of the war torn country, to purchase his Grisha and keep them in the little palace.
The Darkling uses the power he has worked to pull inch by inch away from his oppressors to bring Grisha somewhere safer.Â
A thought: If the Grisha in modern Ravka were, somehow, still safe without the Darklingâs Little Palace, they would still be conscripted but would have no training, no protection because they are an oppressed minority working within a system that sees them as undeserving of basic rights, and they would have zero leverage or opportunity to gain even a semblance of safety in the army.Â
The Grisha in modern Ravka at the moment have even the barest slip of power that they have right now because it is something they have fought tooth and nail to wrangle away from their oppressors.
Interestingly enough (âthe Darkling uses the power that he as createdâ), the Darkling doesnât have nearly as much power within the Monarchy as many who arenât aware of the sociopolitical climate (and subsequently many antis) seem to believe he does. This is mentioned at least three times within the text itself. It is expanded upon through actions and other vague hints at it as well.Â
The Darkling does not have as much power as people seem to believe. In fact, he must still work from a position of little and entirely conditional power to advance the Grisha in any way.
Also, that war torn country is tactically the best way to protect his people. This is, again, why heâs an anti-villain. Because this war is something he needs to keep his people safe, because as long as they are needed for the war then they are too useful to harm. This is, again, not privilege or power. This is basic safety and the barest of human rights leveraged from whichever way it can possibly be with the limited resources provided. Even if those resources are not morally sound.
Can you actually name a Ravkan main character in the series that isnât Grisha but abuses them?
Funnily enough, I donât think LB would make a bigoted main character for readers to sympathize with. Straw-man, meet the Grishaverse.Â
Mentioning main characters⌠well letâs not mention main characters, because what kind of main character would ever be presented as someone who abuses a minority unless you wanted them to be hated? (But letâs not forget the prejudiced things the main characters will say about the Grisha on occasionâŚthough I suppose that just doesnât count đ). Instead, letâs mention the dozens of side characters, minor characters, mentioned characters, people within the Ravkan upper class, people within the Ravkan lower class, the minor characters of the SoC duology. Letâs talk about them.Â
These are characters that abuse Grisha. These are characters that treat Grisha horribly. These are characters that display the prejudice Grisha now face that is outside of the Darklingâs control.
Still it points out that in Ravka, they are in a position of power that the rest of the population doesnât have.
This is not power, this is, as @thewillowbends pointed out, compromised exploitation. It is a façade of power in order to exploit their position of powerlessness and use them as the Ravkan monarchy deems fit.
Also, Otkazat;sya is a slur used by the Grisha to say non-Grisha.
Otkazatâsya is not a slur. This was mentioned above but itâs so important that it bears repeating. Otkazatâsya is a word used by a minority with a history of persecution to describe their oppressors. The meaning of the word is irrelevent, but even if it was, a word to mean abandoned and orphaned used to describe those who are not apart of the Grisha minority isnât all that strange or bad in the first place. But especially the âto refuseâ part, because Grisha have every right to refuse their oppressors from their cultural spaces.
Heâs a complex villain, who may have helped his people rise from being outcasts hundreds of years ago, but also completely isolated them from the rest of the country as a means to keep power over them, and also mistreats them the most in the entire series.
He may have helped his people rise from blatant persecution to subtle oppression âbeing outcastsâ, but he also took things in the wrong direction afterwards. Thatâs something we can agree on, and something that I think is the fault of LB as an author for perpetuating harmful ideas and stereotypes in a bad attempt at making her villain more sympathetic.Â
He may have also isolated them as a means of keeping power over them, too, but I think itâs important to remember that that isolation is not all the Darklingâs fault. It isnât all the Grishaâs fault. Itâs the fault of prejudice within Ravkan society, combined with the way the Ravkan monarchy, over the years, has treated and exploited the Grisha for itâs own gain.
Is some of it the Darklingâs fault? Sure. But saying itâs all his fault is blatantly ignoring the other aspects of the situation at play here. In fact, itâs blatantly ignoring about ninety percent of the situation in order to create a false dichotomy between the ideas that itâs either the Ravkan monarchyâs fault or the Darklingâs fault. The answer is that itâs Ravkaâs fault, but the Darklingâs later actions simultaneously benefitted and harmed his people. And yet many of those actions only took place because of the way Ravka has oppressed the Grisha.Â
The Darkling used the war against the other countries to create a situation that gives power to the Grisha, and in a country like Ravka itâs given privilege to the Grisha that most of the population doesnât experience. In this context, Privilege in this situation is power and comfort.
So, in conclusion. No, the Grisha do not have power or comfort. Yes, the Grisha are given luxuries a lot of the population doesnât have. Yes, this is because the Grisha do not have any power and are being exploited by the Ravkan people because they donât have any power to avoid it. Yes, the Darkling uses war to create a situation to give power to the Grisha. And yes and no, this fact is both bad and good, and is not inherently an evil action in an of itself because it simultaneously works to protect the Grisha and also put them in harms way. Which is a morally grey action, despite many of this fandomâs apparent aversion to the word.
No, the Grisha persecution in the past century is not the Darklingâs fault. And yes, the situation is always more complicated than people will want to make it out to be when it comes to systematic oppression worked into the foundations of a society based on monarchy and prejudice and the exploitation of a vulnerable people.
Also, I donât really have anymore spoons to get into this right now, but Alinaâs solution at the end of the trilogy didnât actually help the Grisha situation much, because literally one book later in SoC we see that that idea is patently false. Fact is, things actually seem to get worse for the Grisha when the Darkling goes, and thatâs made especially evident in the SoC duology. Like maybe the Darkling wasnât great for them or a savior, fine, but people acting as if Alinaâs âsolutionâ helped anyone? It barely solved any problems for the Grisha at all. It actually seemed to make those problems worse. So saying the Darkling was the sole reason for recent Grisha persecution is again, literally, canonically, false. Because after the Darkling is goneâŚthey still suffer.Â
She just plops Zoya and Nikolai down on the throne in the duology and says âsituation resolved! everything is fixed!â
đ this is not a real solution. This is a fairytale that clearly displays the authorâs lack of knowledge on how prejudice and systematic oppression works. Like if you want to put a marginalized and oppressed group in your world, fine, but donât trivialize their struggles because you canât be bothered to tackle the very real issues that would arise for them within society head on. This is not a sign of Grisha having sociopolitical power, itâs a sign of massive cognitive dissonance in regards to how this sort of thing works, and how harmful the ideas that LB is perpetuating are.
