i need to talk about jesper fahey. i live for all the discussions about how positive inej is as representation, but i canāt sleep on my lovely son, who i identify with the most from these books. first off, heās bi!!! and thank god for leigh bc she didnāt pull a itās complicated. she wrote him as such an audacious flirt, iām pretty sure everyone in the barrel knows. the entire city probably knows! heās openly bi and in a ya series!! we all know how society tries to invalidate bisexuality. do i even need to tell you how important this representation is??? and letās talk about how heās described as having darkĀ andĀ deep brown skin. colorism is astoundingly prevalent in the media, where the ādiverseā cast of characters (whether in books or films or whatever) only have light brown skin. if theyāre black theyāre usually conveniently mixed race (and i know jesper is but stay with me) and look racially ambiguous. and thatās disgusting. but leigh gave us jesper, who is dark brown. dark brown!!! and guess what??? heās proud of that too, as he should be. and i canāt talk about his zemeni skin without mentioning his iconic mother, who was easily the purest person in the book regardless of her short appearances. it was so heartwarming to read these characters without those stereotypes. you know the ones. jesperās mom raised him to be good natured and it showed. and lastly, mental illness. there was implied adhd which could have been a factor leading to his gambling addiction. which felt so real. obviously mental illness doesnāt always lead to addiction, but sometimes they coexist, and this was handled so well.Ā it was never glorified and his struggles were glaringly obvious. and i think both inej and matthias at some point implied he had a sickness. a sickness, not that he was broken, he was sick. and idk that wording meant a lot to me. also, he came across as someone who desperately wanted to be better, but addiction had a way of consuming his life and it led to poor decisions. what was so important to me about it was, no matter how much kaz wanted to villanize him, none of this made jesper a bad guy. he still had good intentions. he still had morals, and he still deeply cared for his friends, and we could see how much he regretted his actions. mental illnesses, and especially problems with addiction, have been used as cheap writing techniques to create the bad guys far too often. leigh is so aware, so amazing, she didnāt let that happen with jesper. and i just love him so much and i need more characters like him.
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