Be Gay Do Crime

Mainly Six of Crows but with some other Grishaverse occasionally (Side Blog) | Haha can you tell who my favourite is...

[aquamoonstone24601]

a fave headcanon of mine is jesper being the first person kaz is able to hug after jordie’s death, this is really important to me actually 😭😭😭

[the-heavenly-option]

what i've gathered from the grishaverse fandom

[victorian-ghost-bones]

i think the reason wylan is the only crow willing to argue with kaz is because he hates cruel authority figures. his father has always ordered him around, and often with the threat of abuse or neglect.

think about it, both times he stood up to kaz, it was on the behalf of someone he felt needed protection.

-oomen, who kaz had promised to set free but then killed

-inej, who kaz refused to admit he needed to rescue

wylan fights because no one fought for him, but now he has the opportunity to be that person

[barrel-crow-n]

Characters are defined by a single core motivation. If you look at the Crows, every couple's motivations match.

Helnik? Both want to compensate for past mistakes. Nina wants to compensate for her betrayal of Matthias and Matthias wants to compensate for how he treated Nina's people.

Wesper? Both want to prove themselves. Jesper wants to prove that he's more than just a gangster with a gambling addiction and Wylan wants to prove that he's more than just his inability to read.

Kanej? Both want their family back. Kaz's grief over Jordie and wishing he was still alive is the driving force behind almost every one of his actions. Inej wants to get back to her family. Both do morally bad things as a result.

[investmentofmyheart]

Yes yes yes: Helnik is about morality, Wesper is about identity, Kanej is about family.

[barrel-crow-n]

Characters are defined by a single core motivation. If you look at the Crows, every couple's motivations match.

Helnik? Both want to compensate for past mistakes. Nina wants to compensate for her betrayal of Matthias and Matthias wants to compensate for how he treated Nina's people.

Wesper? Both want to prove themselves. Jesper wants to prove that he's more than just a gangster with a gambling addiction and Wylan wants to prove that he's more than just his inability to read.

Kanej? Both want their family back. Kaz's grief over Jordie and wishing he was still alive is the driving force behind almost every one of his actions. Inej wants to get back to her family. Both do morally bad things as a result.

[barrel-crow-n]

If i wrote a Jordie survives fic would anyone be interested 😭😭

[barrel-crow-n]

My Official Darkling Post™

I want to preface this by saying I'm neither a fan nor an anti. He's my favourite Shadow and Bone character because he's more interesting than most of the others put together, but I don't like him as a person. Yes, it is possible to separate the two.

I also want to say that I've read the trilogy, both duologies and The Demon In The Woods. Plus watched the show but I'm not going to talk about the show

Motivation

The Darkling had two: Power and Bettering the lives of grisha. They were linked and the second one got twisted out of shape as time went on.

Obviously, everyone can agree that power was a big motivator. He wanted to be the most powerful, to not be restrained by anyone, to be in control of everybody. This would by proxy allow him to better the lives of grisha since no one would dare hurt them.

And he did genuinely want to help grisha. I don't want to hear it. This was his motivation from the very beginning, from since he was a kid. This is what he vowed to do and why he did everything he did, became what he became. You cannot deny that this was a motivation soley because of his methods and ruthless acts.

You have to remember how old he is. How long anger and bitterness had time to grow and swell, how much hate and death and discrimination he has seen. "Protecting the grisha" slowly started to become "Protect them by destroying anyone who dares hurt them" which was accompanied by "Destroy anyone who dares defy me" - this then became "Destroy anyone who dares defy me, even grisha". But it does not erase the roots of the mission or the core theme.

Even when he wants to destroy everyone who dares defy him, he still wants to protect grisha. Not all grisha, now he chooses who deserves it, but they are still important to him.

Alina and Her Powers

The Darkling never truly loved Alina. We can see that in his reaction after she loses her powers. He felt a connection to her because of her sun summoner abilities but that was what his "love" was based on. However the same can be said for Mal who never fully accepted the grisha Alina (and never had to, because she lost her powers anyway :/).

Despite the fact he only had interest in Alina because of her powers, I think some of that interest was genuine. I think he was being genuine when he said that she could make him into a better man - at least, the scene was framed that way. He was toxic and controlling and he wouldn't be a good partner but he thinks that she could fix him. He verbally states this. He thinks it because he genuinely likes her.

He views her as his balance - but this isn't true. He's older and wiser and smarter. Her powers may be his opposite, but he can overpower her. He would've realised this in time and any "love" he felt would've faded. However, it never got to this point.

The Cycle

But despite it all, despite all the bad things he did, you know what? He was right. The persecution of grisha won't end. He'd know. He's tried everything.

I bet he was laughing his head off at Alina and Zoya and all of their friends, wanting to scream I already tried! It didn't work! And it won't. It's naive to think it will work now, when he's failed all these millenia.

The threat of extermination was a last resort. He tried everything else. He TRIED to negotiate! He tried literally everything! He is thousands of years old, and all this time, he was trying to help his people. It. Didn't. Work. That, alongside his greed, is why he ended up escalating.

Anyway he's so interesting. I didn't really like Shadow and Bone but he was a redeeming feature.

[barrel-crow-n]

All of Kaz's strengths are simultaneously his greatest weaknesses.

His need for vengeance is what saved his life on the Reapers Barge and makes him keep on living. It's the cause of his resilience and determination. Without it, he would've given up and died many times over. And yet, it's what almost gets the Crows killed during the heist. He compromises everything solely because he can't handle the idea of Pekka Rollins being punished by anyone's hand but his own. Pekka would have suffered in the Ice Court, but it would not be by Kaz's hand and was therefore unacceptable. In fact, many of Kaz's mistakes can be led back to his maddened need for vengeance.

Similarly, his gloves make people fear him. They add to his mystery and aura of danger. However, their true purpose is to protect him from touch. His gloves are a symbol of his debilitating weakness, his inability to handle any sort of skin on skin contact. What he uses to scare people is used to hide his own terror.

The alias Brekker is similar. He associates the name Rietveld with weakness and naivety, and it is tied to the memory of falling for a con. He replaces it, and his personality, with something harsh and ominous. He is no longer Kaz Rietveld - naive farm boy; he is Kaz Brekker - hardened criminal and conman. However his need to change his name stemmed from his failure - the need to conceal himself so that Pekka wouldn't see him coming.

The cane, on the other hand, is a weakness he makes into a strength rather than the opposite way around. It's the only time people saw the source of the persona before the persona itself. The anger, the gloves, the name - this all came before Kaz reached notoriety and are internal. The cane came after. It was the first time Kaz had to spin his persona with people watching. Because it's always the weakness that comes first. However, the cane is harder to hide. That's possibly why the associations he creates with the cane are more actively violent - a weapon. Not a warning like the gloves or the anger or the name. Instead, it is an active tool he uses to create harm. When people are watching, he immediately turns to violence.

[grishaversefaketweets]

[burntfork]

its their turn

[helvarcult]

there’s something so violently funny about kaz brekker, a man who has built his entire existence on vengeance and cruelty, being allergic to matthias’s goodness. not just wary of it. repulsed in a “what the fuck is your problem?” way, like he’s being sprayed in the face with febreze: moral edition.

matthias isn’t even trying to be good in a performative way. he’s fundamentally that way. that is what drives kaz up the walls because matthias would choose goodness even if no one is looking. especially if no one is looking.

matthias is over there trying to redeem his soul and kaz is just trying not to choke on the fumes of it. and it all boils down to this,

[burntfork]

sometimes I forget that the six of crows characters are teenagers. I cannot believe these are real interactions between them

[grishaversefaketweets]

[reyloscoven]

More of the crows as things my friends say in the groupchat😚

[yourstupidface]

the crows are so young. they're so young. they make fun of wylan for playing the flute and being a bad criminal. they love waffles. they mock kaz's bad haircut. matthias mentally addresses kaz only with insults for nearly the whole two books. they have all been jealous of each other showing other people attention at some point -- jesper is jealous of anyone kaz gives attention to. matthias is jealous of anyone nina gives attention to. kaz is jealous of how comfortable the others are with each other. wylan is jealous of kuwei flirting with jesper -- they're all insecure at some point. nina gets mad at them for eating her cookies. they're all horny and fantasize about their crushes while actively running for their lives. they all want to kill the woman they kidnapped because she's whiny. they tease inej for sounding philosophical. they have secret hand signals. jesper and nina make sex jokes all the time and love to make others blush. they spite each other. they threatened to tattletale on each other to each other. they compete over who has the biggest bounty on his head. inej uses "being a matthias" as an insult. kaz and jesper have a physical scrap and have to be pulled apart by an Adult. i adore them so much

[dilf-din]

Is this anything

[thetooclevercrow-deactivated202]

What I find interesting at the beginning of Six of Crows is that the reason Kaz knew about the geraniums in Geels' girlfriend's windowboxes is that Inej was most likely the one spying on Elise; she saw the flowers that reminded her of her home and mom, and that detail struck her enough to mention the geraniums to Kaz, likely not mentioning how much it meant to her. Kaz, on the other hand, out of all the other details Inej could/would have reported to him, chose THIS specific detail to say to Geels; he DID see the emotional value of these flowers, but only to use as a manipulation technique: he probably thought that the geraniums were dear to Elise, not Inej. I think this says a lot about what their characters and the way they see objects of emotional value, and I think it's a nice coincidence that the geraniums struck both Kaz and Inej in that scene, for similar yet different reasons