we need to invent a way to explain how deep running and pervasive and subliminal racism and antiblackness is without immediately sounding like an insane conspiracy theorist
female characters are always lighter than male characters. strong characters are almost always dark. aggressive characters are almost always dark. peaceful and intelligent characters are almost always light. even amongst darker characters the lightest one is usually either the leader or the girls. dark is evil and light is good.
briefly pursuing a career in animation radicalized me on this. So many stories from the industry about how you have to start with your character design as dark as possible, because INEVITABLY you'll get "notes" from higher-ups asking you to make them lighter.
In a class about making a pitch bible my teacher once role-played as a shitty executive with a classmate, pressing them in intentionally abrasive ways about why they made their characters diverse. He emphasized that we had to learn to defend these things, because the racism in the industry is extremely deliberate.
Before I begin I want to preface this with a reminder that there are no actual rules that a writer or author is required to follow in the construction of an opening chapter, and what I refer to as ‘rules’ in the title and in this essay is more so just the most typical broad strokes that a) writers are expected to cover in their opening chapter and b) readers have come to naturally expect in the opening chapters.
Anyway with that out of the way let’s chat, because the subversion of expectations in six of crows chapter 1 is done fantastically and I want to talk about it.
One of the classic things I’ve heard about advice for writing your opening chapter in my own writing journey has been that the first 5 characters introduced in your story should all be very important to the plot, and this is mostly about not overloading the reader with a bunch of names that they don’t actually need to remember or care about and starting with an enticing pace to the story. If we disregard the offhand mentions of Joost’s unnamed mother, his friend Peter, and his unnamed siblings, the first 5 characters we are introduced to in Six of Crows are as follows:
Joost Van Poel, Anya, Councilman Hoede, Henk, and Rutger.
All of these characters will be reported dead or close to it before the end of chapter three: Anya’s body is found washed up in the harbour, Hoede has been removed to the country with his family in the state of permanent waiting that will lead him to death, Henk and Rutger are either in the boathouse dying or have already died and been removed, and Joost dies in the boathouse in chapter 3. This subversion of expectations sets up for the tone of the rest of the duology incredibly well, because this is an ongoing theme throughout with hints that look like foreshadowing being subverted for something else that was hidden deeper in the foreshadowing being the real plot (I wrote one of my first long analysis posts on this, it’s called She’s Treating Us Like Marks: Leigh Bardugo’s Use of Red Herrings in Six of Crows and I think it’s linked in my intro post but if it isn’t then I can tag anyone who’s interested). The impact this has on the reader to subvert their expectations is particularly interesting, because as we read this chapter with no knowledge of what’s to come we immediately start to form opinions and biases about the characters that we subconsciously assume are going to impact our enjoyment of them and their story - I’ve seen a lot of people online making jokes about how ready they were to ship Joost and Anya, only to have them taken away from them so quickly. This also opens up some really interesting thoughts about Joost and Anya that I’ll get to in a minute, but this is exactly what that chapter is trying to do - and we know that because, despite how little we know about them, these are well-written characters. If chapter one had been condensed into a short prologue that featured an officer watching a Grisha being forced to take parem and immediately taking some kind of possession over the minds of the people in the room and all of them presumably dying then, yes, it would be intriguing. But we as the reader wouldn’t have felt nearly the kind of loss, nor been intrigued by the wrong-footedness of the experience, in that the way we are, because ultimately what’s so ingeniously brilliant about this chapter is that Bardugo makes us care. I can’t know the word count, but on the audiobook chapter one is 26 minutes long. In 26 minutes, Bardugo introduces us to brand new characters, fleshes them out, gives them drives, goals, personalities, layers and dimensions, and then kills them. And you care.
You care because you know that Joost is new to the stadwatch and desperate to prove himself but isn’t enjoying his job as much as he thought he would, because you know that he used to be picked on by his brothers and now he’s being picked on by Henk and Rutger in a similar way, because you know that he feels diminished by even his own mother, because you know that he’s got a growing crush on Anya and is young and idealistic, already imagining marriage with a girl he hadn’t yet asked on a date or ever made laugh, because you know that his friend is named Peter and they talk about crushes together, because you know that he doesn’t come from the upper class of this society you’re just being introduced to for the first time but that he hopes to win the favour of its higher-ups to further himself in life, you know that his love language is gift giving and he constantly spends the little money he earns on presents for Anya, you know that his drive is justice but that he fails to see the flaws in the system because it isn’t one that’s hurt him and you therefore begin to understand the flaws of his character and see how his relationship with Anya, who has been hurt by the system, could stand to help him learn and grow. You care because he feels real. In a single chapter, we learn more about Joost than we even realise until we actually think about it for long enough.
And you can apply all these same thoughts to Anya, a character who’s POV were never given and whose appearance in the book is briefer:
Anya was a naive, younger girl tricked by the system into selling herself into slavery without knowing what she was doing, a woman who had been forced by circumstance to remove herself from her past and yet also a whimsical, happy person whose favourite gift from Joost was a cheap tourist map of Kerch where there were monsters drawn in the water and the winds were “depicted as fat-cheeked men”, she smiles easily but laughs rarely, she has been hurt by Hoede, she has a strong sense of justice, protecting people who cannot protect themselves is of high importance to her (see the kitchen boy whose thumb is ordered to be cut off by Hoede) but being a Healer instead of a Heartrender made it hard for her to stand up to anyone until she had parem.
And although you could do it in less detail, we arguably know a lot about Hoede and a little about Henk and Rutger too. If you look at it just in this condensed scale, as a group of characters to get to know just about as well as you can do so organically within the timeframe and then have them snatched away from, chapter one is a warning: I made you care and then took them away, you know I won’t hesitate to do that again. And we care way more about the crows, so that makes our fear of losing them the way we lost the early characters way higher and adds, even if its subconscious, to the tension carried throughout the high stakes of the duology.
The other important character we meet in chapter one is Emil Retvenko, whose name is not mentioned after his meeting with Joost until the opening chapter of Crooked Kingdom. Joost’s conversation with Retvenko is a massive part of how we get to see his flaws; despite having openly stated that many Grisha unknowingly sold themselves into slavery at the end of the Ravkan civil war and that there are rumours Retvenko fought for the losing side of the Civil War, Joost is judgemental of him and tells him that the price of the broken window will be added to his indenture.
I could talk a lot more about Retvenko but then we’d be venturing into Crooked Kingdom chapter one territory more than Six of Crows so instead I’m gonna turn back to Joost and the other key moment that we get to see his character flaws on display and that is when he’s watching Anya being forced to take parem and the guard being ordered by Hoede to cut the boy’s thumb off. I’m just gonna transcribe the moment from my audiobook for you here:
I should stop this, Joost thought, I should find a way to protect her - both of them. But what then? He was a nobody. New to the stadwatch, new to this house. Besides, he discovered in a burst of shame, I want to keep my job.
This tells us not only so much about Joost, but so much about the world he lives in - and I’m going to use this to segue into my next point: the opening chapter of six of crows also subverts our expectations in how it deals with the setting.
Another key aspect of the opening chapter is introducing readers to the world, whether it’s a second world fantasy or contemporary fiction we have to undertake where the book takes place and why that’s important. Whilst it’s true that many stories can be told anywhere, and we see it in folk and fairy tales that have many renditions throughout different cultures, there are always key differences influenced by the setting that they take place in. Our main settings in Six of Crows are the Barrel and the Ice Court, with our “home” setting being the Barrel as where our characters live and where they aim to return to after the journey’s end in a typical story structure (home, call to action, hero’s journey, climax, aftermath, return home and deal with what’s changed).
The Barrel is mentioned once in this chapter, when Joost says that he imagined being in the stadwatch would mean chasing down criminals in the Barrel rather than wandering around a rich merchant’s house grounds, but what we are actually initially introduced to is one of the mansions from the Geldin District. Joost is most likely middle class, based on context clues, and we learn about the upper class section of Ketterdam through the eyes of a boy who wishes to be part of it (he likes to look through the windows and pretend that it’s his house, but actually he’s only even been inside a couple of times). We learn about the classism of this society very quickly by seeing it from the inside out, and then being thrown directly into the parley and the very different world of our main characters in Inej’s POV in chapter 2. This is really cleverly done, because despite the sudden changes between both setting and cast of characters, we go into the parley with an absolute wealth of information about Ketterdam that we wouldn’t have otherwise possessed.
I’m gonna stop here bc I’m tired and it’s getting late but I would like to talk about the worldbuilding another time, it’s just that if I get into that here and now then I want to get into it within specific different contexts because I read shadow and bone after I read six of crows and although I loved the way the worldbuilding was set up in Soc there’s an interesting discussion to be had there because I’ve heard others say that they didn’t feel they would have understood the worldbuilding without the prior knowledge from s&b and I just think that if I start talking about that now that I’ll never stop so that can be for another time if anyone would like to read it.
Thanks so much for reading these ramblings, I hope they were interesting!! <3
put this list together for a friend a few weeks ago and thought i may as well share it here. it's mostly wesper :)
without a mouth i can swear your name by @kvothes - 32k - the only hogwarts au i've ever read that was genuinely great. wylan goes missing and the others go on a mission to find him.
the pugilist's creed by bardelow - 123k - post book canon. wylan and matthias are kidnapped and the other have to get them back. this is whump and angst and ahh but i swear it is also comfort.
if you love her by heavenlyshadows - 3.9k - modern au. kanej take their relationship at their own pace. this is just so sweet
dance with me, darling by @demigodbeautiies - 3.8k - a cute and fun and messy wesper propsal fic
somewhere full of bright colors and beautiful sounds by @demigodbeautiies - 15k - an absolutely beautiful marya hendriks character study
the handmaid by maudeelise - 78k - the crows run a con where jesper is to pose as wylan's handmaid. it goes predictably awry. this one is so so slay and has an amazing plot twist and just ?? reading it as it was updating was insane
keep you safe by @aphroditestummyrolls - 42k - in a post-canon au which has elements from the show and where jesper took the parem (it makes perfect sense when you read it i swear) colm shows up in ketterdam looking for jesper. complicated but heartwarming family reunion
big reputations by @downn-in-flames - 61k - the college au chatfic that has become such a core in this fandom for all the right reasons. so so much fun
Three years ago I was bored out of my mind in lockdown.
I had just finished reading an Six of Crows after watching a funny little TV-show and suddenly found myself in a discord server with writers and artists, all equally mesmerised by six teenage characters. With the world basically hiding itself away behind closed door and screens, I was craving some sort of creative output and so when one of the writers in that server asked for a beta reader I was hooked.
In the last three years I spent hours talking about fic ideas, chasing plot bunnies (or floating alligators ;)) and I learnt so much about storytelling, about what makes a scene, a characterisation, or a piece of dialogue work. I beta read love stories, adventure stories, and - there is no other way to put it - straight up porn. I learnt to explore every nook and cranny of the world as we get to know it in the books, and got spirited away into new worlds and alternative universes.
I got to witness the uglier sides of fandom, I left one discord server and found another one, but through all this I kept close contact to an amazing bunch of writers.
I made friends in this fandom, real life friends, who invited me into their homes, who‘ll send me pictures of their cats, their bookshelves, their spouses, and who I explored tiny bookshops and huge botanical gardens with. I now have a network of friends all over the world who I not only can share my love for stories with, but who are part of my every day life (and -due to cursed time zones- of my nights as well).
My life is richer for being in this fandom, not only bc people yell at me at 2am to go back to sleep, but for the myriad of little prompt, snippets and daydreams that make their way into my inbox. And it all started with a funny little TV-show.
What I‘ve learnt in the last years is that fandom works because of the people in it. It’s not so much about new material, but about keeping a conversation alive and talking about ideas, plot lines and our favourite characters. In the last days I thought about how I can contribute to this fandom, while it is rallying up in watch parties and petitions. And I think the best way to do it is doing what we‘ve always done: Sharing our love for stories.
I have read so many fanfics these last years. So let me share some of them with you:
Six of Crows Kanej fic recommendations - AU edition
Say it right - ev0lution
"In the last two years, Inej had learned to run on rooftops like they were high wires. She’d learned to slide her knives in the soft tenderness under ribs, to wear black so she could move in and out of buildings unnoticed. She’d learned how to plant her knee into a groin and how to bite back. And now her hands were shaking and her neck was stiff from sleeping in a corner after being too afraid of a bed.
Relapse. The word was coppery in her mouth."
A story about the difficulties of leaving your old life behind for good. Features the Crows hiding in an old bunker.
Rating: T // Status: complete
honey honey - halfahint
A Kanej friends-with-benefits AU. Sounds bonkers, works beautifully. The author just knows how to put yearning and humor in words (I can also highly recommend their other kanej work. Just a hint: Crows in 1970s America)
Rating: not rated (nothing too explicit though) // Status: complete
Big Reputations - down_in_flames / @downn-in-flames
College text fic AU (yes I know) that never fails to cheer me up. I‘ve yet to met another text fic that is so consistent in the characterisation of the crows.
Rating: T // Status: in progress
The Casebook of Kaz Brekker - dappledndrowsy
SoC/Elementary AU with Kaz as Holmes and Inej as Watson. I have zero knowledge of the original series and I'm still very much intrigued. I especially enjoyed the adaptation of the Crow's backstories in this one.
Rating: M // Status: in progress
I see your face in every flower - rainstormdragon & dimtraces / @rainstormdragon @doorsclosingslowly
Jesper Faher/Reader smut. And by "reader" I mean unfathomable Lovecraftian creature. This is absolutely a wildcard in this list but I laughed way too hard during my beta reading for not to include it.
If you'd rather read a little more traditional pairings I highly reccomend rainstormdragon bc she has a talent of showing healthy (and smoking hot) sexual relations, and dimtraces for the best potrayal of Jesper I've ever seen in fic.
Rated: E // Status: finished
l'appel du vide - alltheworldsinmyhead / @alltheworldsinmyhead
Kanej Marriage of Convenience AU or: "Kaz comes to the Menagerie for Inej many years too late and bites off more than he can chew" I'm always slightly wary with this author bc she regularily manages to break my heart and this story is no exeption. If you're looking for a writer with a talent for depicting the vast landscape of messy human emotions, and doing so in the most poetic language, look no more, you've found her.
Rated: M // Status: finished
The last Songbird - Frick6101719 / @frick6101719
Inej and Kaz meet at the Menagerie - only this time Kaz is the customer. I admit that I struggled with this concept in the beginning but it is an interesting premise and just shows that fanfic can explore all kinds of ideas and directions. The author chose not to use archive warnings but the fic touches non-con issues. Intriguing read!
Rating: E // Status: finished
Voices - decafperception / @decafetherealki
"As Nina’s corpsewitch powers grow, the voices of the dead get stronger." And there's the voice of one particular boy that is louder than the rest. This fic is the perfect example of how to write a complete story within a oneshot. Love this not only bc it is very moving but because of the Kaz&Nina-friendship.
Rating: T // Status: finished
***
And finally. I could not close this list without three of my absolute favourite stories. Yes, I might be biased here because I watched them grow from the very first row over the last months and years. But, personal attachement aside, these are just really really good:
safe the undone years - Whitherward / @whatanybodygets
"Northern France, 1917. In a battlefield hospital, Corporal Kaz Rietveld lies gravely wounded. His nurse is determined that he will not be another thing she loses to this war." What an exceptional premise! This is truly one of my favourite fics of all time. I doubt there is a person in this fandom who doesn't know this author but in case you haven't read this particular story yet: go! read it now! I wait 'til you come back.
AUs face the challenge of staying true to the characters while setting the stories up in vastly different circumstances. This fic absolutely delivers and I will never not be in love with the potrayal of Inej and her Corporal.
Rating: M // Status: in progress
Out of the Brambles - thegoldenkneazle / @wylanvanfeck
"A child is promised to both forest witch Inej and industrial witch Kaz." A witchcraft-kanejbaby AU. What is not to love? With the slowest of slow burns and desciptions of nature plugged right out of my heart. This fic is like tea and a blanket on a misty grey autumn day.
Rating: M // Status: in progress
The Four Season - Totchipanda / @totchipanda
A fake relationship - idiots friends to lovers- college/modern AU. All the right tropes and all the right places with one of the most despicable villians. I must've read this fic hundreds of times by now and it is still my absolute comfort fic. That reminds me: I should probably go start beta reading the next chapter ;)
Kaz Brekkar in the world of ATLA: everyone would think he was a nonbender, but I'd argue that he's actually an earthbender.
He comes from a line of nonbenders and an earthbender must have been distantly in the past, leading to nobody (esp Kaz) ever thinking about his potential earthbending and he never has a reason to really try it (besides... everyone knows that earthbenders in his area get forced to join the army --- it'd be foolish to induce such a skill).
So he's a weak bender (at first!), but Kaz would never admit to being any one of his skills being than perfect. I'd imagine he figured it out or it "unlocked" a when #traumaplot happened. But he doesn't have long to hone his skills before he got hurt on the job, and now not only can he never walk right again and has chronic pain, but it'd be a miracle if he could earthbend the "correct" way. Nobody expects him, of all benders, to be an earthbender because they rely so much on their strong stance, which brings in a whole new degree of backstory to Kaz.
But Kaz is a tenacious barrel brat and learns to earthbend his own, scrappy way. His stances are completely abnormal, but his odd movements throw his opponents off. He joins Earthbending Rumble to hone these skills under a pseudonym "Dirtyhands" with a mask and gloves underground. Above ground, he remains much like he is in canon, taking on impossible heists and nurturing his grudges.
obsessed with the idea of a six of crows/grishaverse with atla characters.
aang would be the sun summoner + squaller. zuko would be an inferni. katara would be a tidemaker. toph would be materialaki.
and it would be where zuko is the son of the king ozai who wishes to control the sun summoner/aang to control the darkness. and then shenannigans happen. or something.
I've considered SoC au before but never Shadow and Bone. Like your tags said I also didn't really find SaB to be memorable like SoC (which I've read more times than any other book ksbdndnd), except now I desperately want to reread it because Aang sun summoner is scratching my brain. Taking "hes a ray of sunshine" and making it literal also smth smth Aang being Zuko's light (the beam of light in ep 1 ect. ect.) and he literally lights up and shit and ksbdjsndndnd. Also, translating the different bendings to the grisha types and turning last airbender into last sun summoner and fuck I need to reread the books.
Also have you considered SoC au where it's not one-to-one but like: Aang and Inej being seperated from their people who 'walk in the sky'. Zuko and Wylan having shitty fathers who tossed them out for not being good enough and also smth smth explosives. Sokka and Jasper and the personality plus sharpshooter (Sokka with his boomeraang). The rest are harder but Katara and Nina and being able to heal-esque but then getting a really creepy version of the ability. Kaz some mix of Sokka's intellegence and Zuko's "fuck everyone" mentality. Toph and Matthias is the weakest link but you know, tank.
I'm just saying, AU where Zuko gets kicked from his home, Sokka and Katara are the ones thrown from their farm into the city, Katara being the one with a deep hatred and determination to bring down Yon Rah or whatever his name was (I also forgot the name of the guy Kaz hates but I hope you know who I'm talking about). Aang's the one stolen from home bc he strayed too far and, you know, exoticism (like how people react to him being an airbender). Toph's in the arena but by choice and them 'breaking her out' still looks more like a kidnapping.
The heist is against "Caldera" or the Pohai stronghold, which Ozai runs. Sokka learns of the really expensive prize and is like "yo, but what if we broke in and got ✨money✨", Katara is on board bc money will help with destroying Yon Rah, Zuko gets recruited bc explosives, connection to Ozai, and a freakish ability to break and enter. Aang gets recruited for the same reasons as Inej, both the abilities and the already established deep connection he has with the siblings. Toph gets kidnapped rescued but ultimately agrees to it because her parents are wrapped up in all this and stealing whatever it is would really fuck up their day. Aang being Wylan and being extremely out of place among all these bloodthirsty people but hey, he's got stakes in it and also being seperated from the trope but knowing they're still alive would probably dim that pacifism just a bit.
And then they go on a heist and absolutely ruin Ozai's (and Yon Rah's and Toph's parents') day
YES I SEE THE VISION AND IT IS GORGEOUS. This take on SoC is so cool and i absolutely love it. The gaang going on a heist and it's like zuko + sokka's break into the boiling rock times a hundred. and omg yk when inej is praying to the sankts and holding onto her beliefs desperately in the face of it all, just like you said it parallels aang so well. and well ozai would definitely be the type of councilman to throw him out. and zuko changes from initially thinking he could get back into his good graces as he does stuff w/ the rest of the crew.
iroh is like jesper's dad as he gets involved (zuko and sokka get into a fist fight over it) and they all worked together and get their revenge.
i'd argue labelling legitimizes problems in society's views, but it also creates a perception of people with those disabilities since the labels themself carry an implicit stereotype with them (i.e. adhd and the overactive, fidgetting white boy).
*climbs up on stupid little soapbox and screams* there is absolutely NOTHING “toxic” or “problematic” about inej telling kaz that he needs to remove his armor to be with her. he puts up so many walls and is so afraid of vulnerability that, if anything, what would really be toxic is her getting into a relationship with him and letting things continue that way. neither kaz NOR inej herself are ready to be together in an even remotely healthy way when that line is delivered in six of crows, and inej recognizes that. the idea that she should’ve just “accepted him as he was” absolutely fails to acknowledge how unhealthy relationships can get when the individuals in them aren’t emotionally in a good place for a relationship. the idea that she (or anyone) has to accept a partner who is in a toxic place as they are “if you really love them” and doesn’t have a right to draw a boundary is a deliberate misreading of that individual scene at best and an extremely damaging sentiment to transfer into an outlook on real life relationships at worst. thank you, goodnight. *climbs off stupid little soapbox*
One of these days you need to get zuko's dick out of your mouth and actually engage with the story in a way that shows you have sense because too many of you think that guy is just a slightly ignorant baby-child who would do no wrong when he was actively burning villages to have the last hope for the world killed so his colonizing nation could take over the world with further impunity
Sokka looked at Zuko was the sun. In the sense that he was squinting in rage and on a verge of a migraine due to being blinded by Zuko's utter stupidity.
baratheonpilled
izzy806
theartofmadeline
pixelskylines
