Talk to me about Zoya and the tiger :3
zoya!! didn't want!! to kill the tiger!! i think that's such an under-appreciated fact, it gets buried under the (admittedly badass) way she saves the cubs. but that's the thing, really. she tells the darkling the others can go to hell, it's her blood on the snow. but her blood is on the snow not to prove herself, not to kill the tiger and get the amplifier. it's to save the cubs. to put herself in the line of danger to protect the defenseless. and, in doing that, the way zoya acquires that first amplifier is actually much, much more similar to the way alina gets hers from the stag and the sea whip (those elements of mercy, of getting the amplifiers not through pure ambition/determination but with elements of mercy and sorrow and even regret). i think zoya looked at the full-grown tiger, saw how big and powerful and beautiful it was, and she did feel a twinge of regret. of regret and something like kinship, because she, too, has wanted to just attack. she, too, wants to snap and growl and show her own rage, her own ferocity.
AND it comes much closer to the way juris describes the old way of animals/amplifiers than anything else we really see. zoya doesn't just kill the tiger, she's also almost killed by it. she carries those scars for the rest of her life: she took something of the tiger's, but the tiger took something of her, too.
she treasures that amplifier, and not just for the power it gives her. she treasures it because it makes her remember that moment, remember saving the cubs and the feel of the claws on her back. it reminds her what she's really in the second army to do, and that it doesn't matter who likes her or doesn't like her. it reminds her to be fierce and bold and brave, reminds her that things can be beautiful and deadly at the same time. and, when she lets herself, it reminds her that the part of her that would throw herself between a full-grown tiger and helpless cubs is, in fact, the best part of her.
send me a topic to write a meta about my muse on