I’m putting together a response to another anon, and they had an aside in their response that I’ve been kicking around:
“In relation to Matthias/Nina, I’ve noticed the ongoing theme of violence being acceptable and humane when done through non-magical ways. It’s displayed briefly on the show with Alina and Aleksander talking about the Drüskelle who attacked her. She wasn’t horrified by the violence inflicted on her, but she found the Darkling monstrous because he didn’t use a sword to kill the poor man.”
And certainly that exchange immediately stood out to me when I watched it.
I consider it THE big thesis statement on Alina’s perception of power and violence within the show.
Alina is standing on the edge of the question the narrative will keep returning to: would it have been better if he had used a sword? Would it have been less frightening? Less monstrous? More recognizable? More human? What types of violence are justifiable?
And I think, in the end, the show’s answer is clear: Alina understands ordinary violence as something that can be separated from the person committing it. A sword is external. A gun is external. A uniform is external. A state is external, or at least can be treated that way. The man who wields the sword may be violent, but the sword itself carries the responsibility of the act. The weapon becomes the thing through which violence happens, which means the person holding it can still be imagined apart from it.
He can put the sword down. He can change. He can be convinced. He can be redeemed.
That is part of why characters like Matthias and Nikolai can be treated differently within her moral framework of the show. Both directly benefit from states built on corpses. Matthias is the hand of systemic anti-Grisha violence. Nikolai is the son and beneficiary of a monarchy that has turned Grisha bodies into kindling, sacrificed upon the altar of endless war. But because their violence is mediated through institutions, weapons, uniforms, ideology, inheritance, and duty, there is a way to imagine them as separable from it.
The blood is on the sword, not the hand.
The Darkling does not get that separation—in Alina’s mind, his power is the weapon. There is no sword to put down. No object to step away from. No clean division between the violence and the body committing it. His power means that he does not merely use a weapon—he is one.
East Ravka has turned them into children born to die in its wars. Cradle to grave, their bodies are understood through use: what they can do, what they can defend, what they can destroy, what they can provide to the state. The Grisha are not allowed the fantasy of clean hands because their power is treated as inseparable from their personhood. They are the weapon before they ever choose to act.
That is what makes Alina’s reaction so interesting. She is horrified by the Darkling’s violence, but the shape of that horror reveals something deeper than personal fear. She has inherited a worldview where non-magical violence can be civilized, contextualized, forgiven, or displaced onto the instrument, while Grisha violence is treated as an expression of nature. A sword can be sheathed. A soldier can be reformed. A prince can become better than his inheritance.
But a Grisha body remains suspect because the weapon is understood to live under the skin.
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