Soulmates in the Grisha Trilogy
Someone sent me an ask asking ‘how did Leigh make the darkling and Alina perfect but connected opposites and not make them endgame (Or something to that effect, I may be screwing up the wording), and then in my tiredness this morning, I deleted it accidentally.
BUT this does bring up a topic I’ve wanted to discuss in the Grisha trilogy–namely the concept of soulmates. (Spoilers for the trilogy!)
Funny thing is, while I LOVE it when characters are paralleled, foiled, connected etc, I’m not automatically sold on the concept of soulmates for one very important reason–it often takes choice out of the love story and makes the end a foregone conclusion. I don’t like it when a love is predestined or certain. Soulmate concepts are only good to me when there’s a twist on it or something that keeps them apart. They gotta fight for it or, better yet, they have to choose it.
With the Darkling and Alina, there is a twist. They met at the wrong time. The Darkling has lost much of his humanity over the years (classic symptom of immortality) and he is bad at the emotions. And then, shortly after, they are ENEMIES. It’s a great, tragic ‘we’re meant together but the timing sucks’.
And honestly, I would be fine with that sort of relationship. I like tragedy. I like pain. And I acknowledge that in order to make Darklina endgame, Leigh would have had to write a very different book 2 and book 3. It was possible after book 1, but once book 2 happened, the Darkling was locked into endgame villain and their relationship was destined for tragedy.
What weakens this is her constant waffling on whether or not they are actually soulmates or whether or not there was real feelings, because on one hand she’s CLEARLY written that their are, but on the other hand, is her main heroine TAINTED if she had real feelings for the evil man? Corrupted? Terrible? You can only have one love, kids. One soulmate.
And here is where the stumbling block happens. She tries to make Mal Alina’s soulmate.
Now if I shipped Malina and I were writing them, I would have embraced the fact that Mal and Alina are NOT soulmates. This is a classic ‘predestination vs freewill’ dilemma. Like “yes, the fates are SAYING that this person is my other half and we are connected. But ultimately, it is my choice and I choose you.” That’s powerful. It’s powerful to say ‘my personal feelings are more important than any sort of cosmic connection and this is my choice at the end of the day’. Now I don’t ship Malina, but it seemed like Leigh might be setting herself up for that kind of dichotomy.
She does not. Instead, Mal’s an amplifier and soooomehow this connects him to Alina? I still don’t get why because Alina is not connected to Morzova’s amplifiers until she claims the stag. She’s someone who happened to get light powers and that’s not inherently connected to the amplifiers. Plus its confusing because the stag already further connected Alina and the Darkling? So your muddling your soulmate connection there.
This kind of plays into why the ‘Mal being an amplifier’ twist is bad and I’ll have another post on that. But Mal’s powers and Alina’s have never been paralleled or connected. They won’t be unless she claims him as an amplifier. And I still don’t buy the explanation of ‘Mal and Alina being close and in love drew the amplifiers’ because it does not fit with the magic system lore or anything else. Especially not with the stag. MAYBE with the sea whip because she already had one amplifier, but I don’t think a one time only connection qualifies as ‘soulmate magic’.
She uses this new thing about them being soulmates to claim that ‘even if they were raised in different circumstances they would have found each other’ which…no. Obviously they’re not the pair that’s connected and able to talk even at a distance and the way they were raised is actually EXTREMELY key to why they grew close. And she uses it to claim that Alina has only ever loved him. The stuff with the Darkling wasn’t like…real. Again. You can only love one person. Loving multiple people makes you bad :)
The thing about Malina is that ‘soulmates’ is not what draws people to them, at least from what I’ve read. People are drawn to them because they grew up in similar circumstances and when they were orphaned and alone, they had each other. They like them because they choose to be together. Not because of any destiny. Trying to make them ‘soulmates’ as opposed to just, you know, people who chose to be together, removes some of that agency from both of them and undercuts the ship. Because when it tries to do what Darklina does (the connection, the soulmate thing, the parallels) it PALES in comparison. I think she knew Darklina was popular so she tried to make Malina more grand at it just fell very, very flat.
So no, I’m not surprised Leigh didn’t make Darklina endgame. There’s was a tragic soulmate connection. But I will always be annoyed that she tried to invalidate their connection by proposing that Mal was ALSO connected with Alina and also the only one that mattered. It confused world building, character and themes, and was just very unnecessary.
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