another thing i like: they turned the “not like other girls” trope into a racially charged proposition.
when the grisha guys ask alina in the carriage in 1.02 why no one has noticed her before, it’s not supposed to be one of those YA moments where the plain white girl gets to shine. alina tells them she had to make herself small and unnoticeable because of her race, because she stands out racially and has been routinely persecuted for it (and we saw plenty of evidence of that in 1.01). so, alina’s answer here is a total game changer. a white protag would’ve stammered out a weak “me? i’m no one”, folding into the typical romance fantasy, whereas alina’s anger shows the hollowness of that fantasy. and don’t get me wrong, i love me some tropes, but i also really dig that the racial aspect is integral to the story. when one of the guys tell her she’s not safe “now that you are you” it’s so much more interesting, because before, alina was aggressively shunned, but now she will be actively hunted, and this change is not really a change. it skillfully shows the dichotomy of being a racialized body: the fetishization and the repulsion, the awe and the abjection. alina, in fact, cannot escape being “special”. for alina, there is no “now that you are you”. it has always been this way.
