okay so my best friend, my older sibling and I just found out something insane. leigh bardugo has rewritten and edited massive parts of six of crows in the new editions, erasing any mentions of the crew being teenagers and chopping other random scenes. it seems incredibly random and somewhat rushed, and genuinely confusing and more then a little distressing to me for many reasons.
to start, six of crows as a book was revolutionary to me, to my older sibling, to our friends, and so many people that we’ve met. the crew of highly skilled, world-weary, humorous, loveable, tragic, vibrant, criminal teenagers changed me fundamentally, taught me so much, and have never left me since the first time I was introduced to them (when I was ten years old, with these characters being only six or seven years older then me).
their stories—their dark pasts, their finding each other and surviving insane jobs and near deaths together, saving each others lives and finding themselves and their causes, purposes, and homes again side by side, bound together for reasons not even they truly understood—are such a large part of my heart and always will be.
when I first saw the netflix shadow and bone show I was honestly heartbroken. to see the book that is so important to me and so important to people I love be butchered beyond recognition in an adaption that felt a little like a purposefully damaging, harmful, and offensive piece of media makes me so angry and so upset. the six of crows characters literally saved my life and brought me back from hell on multiple occasions and it made me physically sick to see them portrayed in such a way.
kaz brekker, a seventeen year old, disabled teenager with severe, debilitating trauma and touch aversion, that walks with a limp and uses a cane, and who means so so greatly much to me—was portrayed by a thirty year old, able-bodied, ignorant man, who alongside the showwriters turned kaz’s character, his story, even his disability into what felt like an ableist, degrading parody. kaz is a character I see myself in and a character who means the world to me and I was so hurt by the casting and anything to do with the show.
they portrayed inej ghafa, a sixteen year old girl from a marginalised community who is haunted by her trauma from the horrific experiences of her past—as a woman who is owned, forced to return to the menagerie numerous times, and who in the end joins the crew of some random man with a ship instead of being the captain of the ship that she owns, and pursuing the cause that is all hers. I love inej so much, she is my greatest inspiration, and knowing that they did this to her character is such a source of anger for me.
jesper, nina and wylan were all turned into shallow, blank cutouts of queer stereotypes in turn. jesper was made into something further then comedic interlude and nina was treated similarly. the importance of their young ages in the story was stripped away and the plot and the characters were completely changed and emptied of meaning and of essence and of the message behind six of crows as a result. they were pathetic, comedic, completely butchered tryhard replicas of the characters that book fans love and relate to, and on top of that they were portrayed incredibly harmfully in the sense of disability, queerness, and other such topics.
I am barely scraping the surface of my issues with the adaption and the casting here but anyway. all of their relationships, friendships, connections, and what makes them all special and unique and interesting and complex and beautiful were liquidated and butchered. the show was warmed-up hell and felt like a fever dream of the worst adaption someone could think up.
however, what made it better was just having the books. the beautiful and intricate books, with the real characters that I love, the teenagers that pulled off suicide missions and survived hopeless situations, finding friendship and love in each other after the world left them alone, left them for dead.
kaz, the deadly, unafraid, boy of black glass that was the first physically disabled teenager with a mobility aid that my sibling and I had ever read about, who changed my relationship with my disabilities fundamentally. inej, the girl that didn’t need a crown or a title to be held in high regard, whose character gives me strength and confidence. the books that couldn’t be touched by the netflix adaption or anything no matter what.
so it hurts, probably even worse then the show, to know that something so important could be erased from the books, that the texts are being altered at all. that this is an attempt somewhat to pull the characters further and further from their original, timeless beauty and turn them into what the show did, and make them like the characters in the adaption.
it makes me so upset to know this. I can scarcely believe it. changing who the characters are and their ages changes everything. it is not the same story, message, meaning, impact, and it doesn’t make the same sense. and it is also fucked for so many moral reasons on many varying levels.
making them adults throws everything off balance, and the entire plot, the characters motives, what makes them them and their stories are entirely hurled. the books shouldn’t be being changed and edited. they have been the same and solid for 10 years. they are a separate entity and so far removed from the show and from everything related to it. the books are not meant to be reprinted and taken out of their original contexts and story and characters. how this can possibly be happening is beyond me, as well as how it could possibly be beneficial. it genuinely makes me physically ill.
their young ages are SO important, as is everything in the books. they are children that have been exploited and abused and are victims of their impossible situations. they are mirrors of our own world and the teenagers in it. they’re like me, and my sibling, and my friends. it is so essential to their plot that they are children.
and it makes zero sense for them to be adults, less and less sense the more I think about it. their being adults alters the entirety of the storyline and the timeline as well.
insane that no one who owns this book has noticed this which does prove a theory I’ve had for a long time that performative fans fuelled by glittery consumerism don’t even read the books properly and just want to have the new editions for the sake of it, but that’s not relevant right now
