If You Can't Beat The Odds...

Remember in Crooked Kingdom, Inej remembers being horrified by a marketing artistic depiction of Suli girls who were drawn in an extremely sexualized, fetishized way with the phrase “Rare Spices”? Well, the same way those Suli girls were objectified in that advertisement, Inej is clearly objectified in the new official art/cards. It makes me so saddened. Inej would not want to be depicted like this at all. Why couldn’t she be drawn as a pirate, as the Wraith, or in non-sexualized, traditional acrobatic clothes? Her entire trauma stems from her being fetishized as a girl from a racial and ethnic minority, and as the only girl from a racial minority out of the crows, she’s the only one drawn like this.

There’s something about the way Kaz defines himself by his clothes that really gets me; he says he feels nothing like himself as he is now during the Ice Court Heist and although there are other factors to that he specifically cites being dressed in strange clothes and not having his gloves amongst those factors, and it makes him feel like the child he was in the first weeks after Jordie died. It makes him feel “unhinged”. I think that there’s maybe another layer in there with the outfit, yes, mocking the upper class merchants, but also the outfit looking so starkly different from a terrified, homeless child, a boy who was dehumanised over and over again, who even in the ranks he’s risen through was called “Haskell’s rabid dog”, so strongly defining himself by the clothes that force you to see him as an equal, or even above the other citizens of the Barrel. To distance himself as far as possible from the boy he was, and even when he calls himself a monster to beg you to see that he is human