#mal slander

I just love how the showrunners (Eric and Christina) desperately wanted Aleksander to be seen as a monster, the embodiment of tyranny and cruelty, yet when you actually look at his decisions, they are not only logical but the only ones grounded in political and historical reality. What the writers labeled as obsession was in truth survival strategy. His struggle against Fjerda was not some petty fixation but the simple recognition that Grisha had no future if they remained passive. History is filled with oppressed peoples who were forced to fight for their very existence. To frame this as villainy is not only lazy, it betrays a childish refusal to acknowledge the realities of persecution and war.

The same applies to the Fold. The narrative painted its destruction as an unquestionable act of good, the great triumph over darkness. But in practice tearing it down stripped Ravka of the one natural barrier that kept its enemies at bay. The nation will be even more vulnerable to foreign armies. That is not liberation, that is strategic suicide. Alina, Nikolai, Zoya, Mal and the rest of the so-called heroes were nothing but traitors, tearing down the only defense their nation had and delivering Ravka straight into the hands of its enemies. To put it in real-world terms, calling for the destruction of the Fold during an active war is no different than urging a country like Ukraine to open its border to Russia in the middle of invasion. It is madness. It is not an act of peace but the guarantee of slaughter, the invitation of conquest, the green light for massacre and occupation. In the logic of war and geopolitics it amounts to treason, a betrayal of one’s own people and collaboration with the enemy. And in this sense, the so-called heroes of Ravka echo the same naivety we see in certain politicians today — those who parade themselves as peacemakers while in truth advancing the aggressor’s cause. What they offer is never victory, never safety, but betrayal disguised as moral virtue, the slow death of a nation presented as progress.

And here lies the absurdity of the show’s moral framework. By insisting on a childish black and white narrative, they turned genuine strategic foresight into supposed evil and dressed naive recklessness as heroism. Their world became incoherent, because reality does not bend to such simplifications. Viewers saw through it. They recognized that Aleksander, for all his flaws, was the only character thinking in long-term terms, the only one who treated survival as more than a convenient slogan.

do one or both of these things

1. find a phone book and beat them up