Lately I have been thinking about why Aleksander has always remained so different to me from most characters, and why my thoughts about him so often return to the history of the Second World War specifically.

Part of it comes from the way war on that scale exposed something deeply uncomfortable about what prolonged fear does to the human mind. Not simply cruelty itself, because cruelty has existed throughout all of history, but the way survival gradually reshapes a person until the individual who emerges afterward no longer relates to the world in the same way they once did.

The Second World War left behind millions of people carrying psychological wounds that at the time barely had language attached to them. PTSD as we understand it today was not widely recognized. Many survivors spent decades living with symptoms nobody properly understood. Soldiers returned home unable to sleep because their nervous systems remained trapped in permanent anticipation of danger. Some became emotionally detached from their own families because emotional closeness itself had started to feel unbearable after years of suppressing grief and fear. Others developed obsessive control over their surroundings because unpredictability had once meant death. Entire generations learned how to survive, but survival and healing are not the same thing. Aleksander is one of the few characters who genuinely reflects that kind of psychological deterioration.

What makes him linger in my mind is the exhaustion underneath it all, the feeling that he has existed inside survival for so long that survival itself has become inseparable from the structure of his personality. When I look at Aleksander through a historical lens, especially through the lens of twentieth century war trauma, he begins to resemble people whose minds adapted to violence so completely that they eventually struggled to imagine lasting safety at all.

Many people who survived prolonged occupation, bombings and military violence carried permanent hypervigilance for the rest of their lives. Ordinary sounds triggered panic because the body no longer distinguished between present safety and past danger. Emotional distance became instinctive because attachment had become associated with grief and loss. There were survivors who later admitted they no longer recognized themselves emotionally after the war ended, because years spent existing inside terror had fundamentally altered the way they interacted with humanity itself.

Aleksander reflects that same kind of erosion stretched across centuries, because there is something deeply tragic to me about a person who has spent so long expecting persecution and destruction that fear eventually becomes intertwined with love itself. Protection begins transforming into control because control appears safer than trust. Emotional restraint begins resembling strength because vulnerability has repeatedly led to suffering. The mind adapts to survival conditions over and over again until survival stops functioning as a temporary state and slowly becomes an entire worldview.

The twentieth century already demonstrated what human beings become after enough exposure to fear, war and dehumanization. It demonstrated how easily constant danger reshapes attachment, morality, emotional openness and even identity itself. People emerging from war were often not the same people who entered it. Some remained psychologically trapped inside survival mechanisms decades afterward because the nervous system does not simply return to normal after years spent anticipating death.

Aleksander reads almost as an extreme literary manifestation of that same phenomenon. A person who has survived conflict for so long that the entire architecture of his mind has reorganized itself around preventing loss at any cost. A person whose understanding of safety has become inseparable from power because history repeatedly taught him that weakness invites destruction. A person who no longer approaches the world with the emotional instincts of someone raised in peace, because peace itself has never truly existed within the reality he inhabited.

That is why discussions around him become so emotionally charged, because beneath the fantasy there is something disturbingly familiar in him. The Second World War forced humanity to confront the reality that prolonged violence does not merely injure bodies or destroy cities. It reshapes people psychologically, sometimes permanently. It teaches human beings to suppress softness in order to continue functioning. It conditions entire generations to live in constant anticipation of catastrophe. It leaves survivors emotionally exhausted long after the physical war has ended.

So when I think about Aleksander in that context, I think about a person psychologically formed by centuries of conflict until fear, protection, control and survival became impossible to separate from one another anymore. And that is precisely why he lingers in my mind long after simpler characters disappear from memory, because there is something painfully human about the way endless war can turn even love into a form of survival.

I originally posted this on my dear friend Ewa's YouTube Community page. Thank you, love! @evejustlovebooks

I love how Crows fans constantly talk about media literacy and critical thinking, yet every time they have to defend their point, they discover an uncanny knack for blocking people. This time, a certain Maja replied to my comment, blocked me before I could reply, and then blocked my friend as well. What courage. Apparently, for some Crows fans, debating means making sure you have the last word and then running away before anyone can respond.

Leigh Bardugo: I actually have always been, by all means ship it.

The video was originally posted here:

I saw a post asking why the women of the Grishaverse seem underrated and why fandom spends so much more time discussing male characters. I think the answer is much simpler than people want it to be.

Characters such as Alina, Inej, or Zoya are largely written to secure audience approval. Both readers and viewers are encouraged to sympathize with them, support them, and ultimately see them as heroes. The narrative rarely challenges that position in any meaningful way. Even when these characters make mistakes, the story almost always guides the audience back toward the same conclusion. They are good, admirable, and deserve support. The problem is that approval is not the same thing as fascination.

After three years in this fandom, I still struggle to find anything about Alina that invites deeper analysis. I see her less like a force driving the story and more like a protagonist being carried through it. Zoya is essentially the embodiment of toxic male traits in female form, yet for some reason many younger girls choose to celebrate them as empowerment, even though they would condemn those very same traits in a male character. Inej is not a character. She is a product, carefully designed for teenage girls to project themselves onto another badass YA heroine. Strip away that fantasy and there is remarkably little left to analyze. Even among their own fans, discussions about these characters are often short, repetitive, built around headcanons, aesthetics and ships. Once the story is over, very little remains to unpack because the audience has already arrived exactly where the narrative wanted them to be.

Darkling is the complete opposite. Whether you love him or hate him, he offers endless angles of analysis. I can still write about him without running out of things to say. His politics, his morality, his relationship with Alina, his view of Grisha persecution, his methods, his loneliness, his vision for Ravka, and even the question of whether history ultimately proved him right remain open to interpretation. One of the most interesting things about him ist that he was never presented as a character the audience was supposed to accept unquestioningly. He was presented as a solution that some still do not want to accept.

I can find more posts about Aleksander from antis than about their own favorite characters. Even when they make edits, write analyses, or create content about Alina or Zoya, the conversation often circles back to him. Their relationship with him, their opposition to him, their reaction to him. It is remarkably difficult to find discussions that treat these characters as entirely self-sufficient individuals rather than extensions of a conflict that ultimately revolves around Aleksander. For characters supposedly overlooked by fandom, they seem strangely dependent on him to generate engagement.

So the issue is not that fandom overlooks the women. The issue is that these female products (not characters) are designed to make you like them and root for them without asking questions, while others are written with enough depth, ambiguity, and complexity to sustain years of discussion. One gives the audience a conclusion. The other gives them an argument. And people will always return to the argument.