ruination

nev • fae/xey • grishaverse blogging since the free rein reign • FIC REQUESTS OPEN!!

[alinastarkovautism]

Welcome to the Grishaverse!

This is a side blog dedicated to all things grishaverse (the series written by Leigh Bardugo as well as the Netflix show and various fan works)! If you want to see my other posts go to my main @swordlilyoftheravens

You may call me Nev, I use fae/xey/they pronouns, and I'm a writer, musician, amateur historian, and full-time girlblogger. You may know me as grishaverse-wraith from the clownverse and free rein reign.

My favorite GV characters are Wylan Van Eck and David Kostyk and my favorite ship has to be Genyazoyalina or Darkolai for the crack ship fans

Aside from the GV I like project sekai, mcyt, anime (Chainsaw man and AoT are some of my favs), medieval history, and occasionally reading (aftg is my favorite series by far)

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Fanfics:

Completed:

The Babysitters Club (Crows are little kids and are babysat by the trilogy characters)

Too Close to the Sun (Darklina one shot)

Little Red Strings (Fivan soulmate oneshot)

First Kiss (Fivan oneshot)

Countdown (Fivan soulmate oneshot)

In Progress:

You Were Always Meant to be Mine (Darkolai crack fic)

FIC REQUESTS ARE OPEN!!

[nevergraciee]

kaz being unable to fathom fathers disliking their children is so funny to me. this man has literally ended people’s lives, but his father was good, jesper’s father is good, inej’s father is good, and even pekka rollins is a good father, so surely wylan was being dramatic? kaz was so sure fathers had to love their kids that he bet on it (and lost! because jan van eck truly did despise wylan, and kaz was blown away)

[bloodyplunder]

Queen of the barrel 💐

[bloodyplunder]

Kaz "great with kids" Brekker🐦‍⬛ in a big pretentious Mafia boss coat so he can cram all his loot

[kolarpem]

Morning Doodle: “A statue of Sankta Lizabeta stood before the entrance. A riot of red roses had burst through the stone, cracking open her veiled skull. The flowers tumbled over the statue in wild profusion, surrounding its marble skirts in a wide circle like a pool of blood. Their sweet smell pulsed in a thick, syrupy wave that seemed to glow with summer heat.” (Leigh Bardugo’s King of Scars CH 11)

[kolarpem]

Morning Doodle: “A statue of Sankta Lizabeta stood before the entrance. A riot of red roses had burst through the stone, cracking open her veiled skull. The flowers tumbled over the statue in wild profusion, surrounding its marble skirts in a wide circle like a pool of blood. Their sweet smell pulsed in a thick, syrupy wave that seemed to glow with summer heat.” (Leigh Bardugo’s King of Scars CH 11)

[jadeddraws]

pictured above: thing 1, who constantly finds new & astonishing ways of engaging people in conversation,, and thing 2, who’s in possession of a social battery in the negatives & needs to be reminded to fix her face

insp by a photo of david bowie & iman!

characters belong to leigh bardugo

[kolarpem]

“The village was like all the others except for the pretty lake it overlooked. This time they’d been greeted by an off-key band and a parade of livestock and giant vegetables.” (Leigh Bardugo's King of Scars CH 11)

[kolarpem]

Morning Doodle: “How can you be so sure?” (Leigh Bardugo’s King of Scars CH 11)

[wylanvaneckz]

rereading crooked kingdom i forgot how completely crazy jesper and kaz's dynamic is. what if you used to have a crush on your best friend slash boss but he took advantage of your loyalty to him and he knew all the worst parts of you and shoved them back in your face and he would always always put your other best friend first and he could never tell you how much he really cared for you and the closest he would ever get was calling you by his dead brother’s name. and then you finally found real love and it was with his narrative foil but all the reasons you loved him were all the ways in which they were different from each other. what then.

[avendell]

Kaz and Inej

[lilxmoo]

Kaz loving magic tricks as a boy and falling in love with a girl who can dissapear. Inej being told to find a boy who remembers her favorite flower, and falling in love with a boy who remembers her most important dreams. Jesper losing the one person who saw him as blessed and falling in love with a boy who sees him as even more than that. Wylan seeing magic in every mundane thing, and falling in love with a boy with magic in his veins. Nina growing up knowing she would always be targeted and falling in love with a boy who vows to protect her. Matthias losing his love for the world as a child and falling in love with a girl who loves even the simplest of pleasures.

No one writes romance like Leigh Bardugo

[1very1fancy1doilies1]

apparently I never posted the updated version here??

[maybemacdc]

they were real to ME

[drieddpetals]

*well into the wee hours of the night*

jesper: "the saying is always, 'innocent as a rose' but i would argue that roses are not innocent at all. they have thorns for pete's sake, what's innocent about that??"

wylan: *half asleep but trying his best to be supportive* "right. nothing pure about inflicting pain"

jesper: *snaps his fingers* "exactly!"

[six-of-cringe]

Having seen what everyone else has said about the changes to the new editions, I have something to say. I hate the scrubbing of characters' ages for many reasons, but I overall don't think the argument that them being a few years older makes them "more problematic" is accurate or salient. Though as far as I am aware we don't know exactly how old they are supposed to be (dumb, bad writing decision, etc), they are meant to be young adults, so probably 18-21. I dislike the expectation many fans seem to have that upon turning 18, a character (or any person tbh) must instantly become mature and therapized, lest all their wrongdoings be immediately irredeemable, almost embarrassing. Many of their personality traits and responses to trauma are also being attributed to their ages when that is not the case. Adults can be impulsive, arrogant, insecure, brainwashed, hopeful, reckless, naive, flirtatious, idealistic, and more - to imply that these traits only exist because the characters are children (and therefore that they would go away upon "growing up") really detracts from their stories. And is also not how adults work. I think people are putting too much emphasis on how "problematic" they think the morally gray aspects of the characters become, even though they are at most like 4 years older and are trapped in the same systems that they were as children. Traumatized children, without intervention, become traumatized adults.

HOWEVER. You have to write that story with intention. Writing an impulsive or brainwashed adult is going to look different than writing a teen. You have to give the reader an idea of what they have been doing for those extra years, what their mental state has been, why they're still where they are. Take Matthias for example. You CAN write a character who is in a cult for his whole childhood and partakes into his young adulthood, even though his actions are terrible. That character can be written about and, depending on how you write his experiences and thoughts during those terrible actions, can still find redemption. Having a character who takes longer to deprogram himself is not inherently wrong. But that's not the story Leigh Bardugo wrote. She wrote him as a child who had just barely stepped foot into his genocidal role before questioning it. To make him a man of unspecified age leaves us with holes - what did he participate in during those years? What kept him hunting Grisha, when he was shown canonically to have struggled with it emotionally during training? Why did he only start to question his indoctrination once he met Nina? We can't know, because the original story wasn't written with these things in mind. The changes unintentionally create the implication that he only questioned his mission because he was attracted to Nina (unlike any other Grisha he may have captured previously), rather than because he saw humanity in a Grisha. That is a huge insult to his character. Also, it makes Nina's relationship with him incredibly strange, because the way Nina has been written makes it seem very unlikely she would ever fall in love with someone who was possibly years deep into active genocidal efforts without questioning it. It's really not that it makes Matthias "more problematic" - to an extent it does, sure, but that really simplifies the issue here. Because again, you CAN write such a character and have them find some form of acceptable redemption. The problem is that Leigh Bardugo didn't write that character, so those gaps in his backstory just leave us wondering how much evil he partook in and why, considering what we know about his character (particularly his active empathy). Changing his age breaks the logic of who he is and his relationship with Nina. Traumatized teens can become traumatized adults, but that's not the story Six of Crows was telling. Going in to scrub their ages destroys the focus of the story we had and leaves strange, unhappy hollows behind.

[waywarrdsunshine]

not enough love in this fandom for Genya Safin killing her rapist by putting poison on her body so all he needed to do to avoid death was not come to her room in the first place.