#sab salt

[greensaplinggrace]

“Character A didn’t love Character B because they hurt them” discourse is truly terrible because it assigns a moral value to love that simply does not exist. love doesn’t actually mean anything about someone’s character. it doesn’t make someone’s actions toward another any better or any worse, it doesn’t prevent atrocities, and it doesn’t prevent abuse.

love is a worthless emotion when it comes to morals because it simply holds no bearing on them. true love doesn’t exist. there is no better or more pure version of love. in the end love doesn’t mean anything. it’s a non-emotion. it’s the child of passion and affection and dedication. doing something bad doesn’t preclude a feeling of love, because a lack of love isn’t a requirement for immoral actions, and morality isn’t a requirement for feeling love.

[xiehuaian]

i will never not be angry at white fantasy authors being like "this is fake russia and this is fake germany and this is fake scandinavia and this is fake netherlands and this is fake amsterdam" then turn around and be like "oh but there's only one fake collective african country and one fake collective asian country"

[kallypsowrites]

Me: I just think that if Leigh wanted to write a cautionary tale about a manipulative man who is beautiful but not as he seems, she should have made him a non-grisha prince like Nikolai. Because then you have someone who pretends to sympathize with the oppressed Grisha but is actually just exploiting them for his own gain which is a much more interesting commentary on society. And then Alina could have been the revolutionary trying to overthrow the system and help change things for the Grisha, opposed by a non-grisha who wants to control them. 

Instead, she makes the villain the one person actively fighting to improve things for the Grisha and ultimately gives Alina very little interest in the cause and makes the non-grisha characters nice and understanding and gives us a message of ‘you just need the nice people to be on the throne and then it will be fine’ which is a naive point of view. Its not about whether or not the Darkling is good, its about where she ultimately decided to place the villain in the story/world that bothers me.

Therapist: Can we please get back to your trauma.

[queerthoughts-gaybrainrot]

Darkling “showing his villain self” is honestly just, like a breakdown. 

look at this man and tell me I'm wrong. 

He was raised exclusively by an abusive, emotionally unavailable mother who taught him to be proud, how to kill, that lives of many are less worthy than his own, to do anything for survival, that he will always be alone (without her)

Was born as a Grisha (a hunted, oppressed minority), a Shadow Summoner (an Other / freak / abomination for other Grishas), an amplifier (a sought out power-boost for desperate Grishas trying to survive, which leads to isolation)

Spent his formative years running, hiding, being hunted. Basically being in Fight or Flight mode 24/7.

Near death experience at 13 (as his so-called friend tried to murder him for his bones, so for something he was born with and as, was forced to harm himself to avoid lynching).

Served under heck knows how many Kings (many of which saw him as less than, a demon, a monster, a tool to be used), ridiculed, having to fight to have his voice heard

Watched many of his friends, (lovers), and people who served with him die

Listened to countless stories of how Grisha are still experimented on, tortured, burned alive, sold into slavery, etc.

Even after generations and generations, not much has changed for Grishas, despite his efforts to make a safe haven for them

King had the nerve to assault and hurt a Grisha in his service, the First Army treats the Second Army horribly despite profiting from just their presence

Vasily is next to the throne and he’s even worse than his father, so he’s running out of time

His own mother betrayed him

The Sun Summoner decided to desert

The people he tried to protect desert him and fight against him

Being left in the Fold and attacked by volcra probably did some mental damage as well

Also he knew the saints apparently, so probably knew their stories (and they are not happy stories)

like, honestly, I'm only surprised he didn’t go “violence is a question and the answer is yes” just, 200 years before Alina was born. when did being a Grisha and being good to non-Grisha ever ended NOT horribly in the history of Ravka (before Alina) 

[winelover1989]

the dialogue and acting in the s02 of shadow & bone is so BAD I couldn't even fast forward through the "good parts" because there were none 🙄 finished the whole season in 15 mins???

[helenvader]

Grishaverse rant. Spoilers for RoW.

The other day, I was reading the ending of Rule of Wolves and realized something that maybe many of you have noticed before, but I hadn’t really thought about it prior to reading the passages I am going to quote.

The „good guys” talking about someone who is going to suffer for eternity.

(I have bolded some parts that made me feel like having a shot of vodka. I even might have had a shot of vodka. And now there might be no vodka left in my household. Because I have might read much more of RoW on that day).

1.

“You know what we did in the mountains.”

 “Yes,” said Alina.

“You saved the world and doomed Ravka’s most deadly enemy to an eternity of torture.”

“Very efficient questing,” said Genya.

Zoya tapped her fingers against the desk...

“I’ve … I’ve been having nightmares, about the monastery, the thorn wood.” When she had touched the ancient tree, she had felt the Darkling’s pain. The dragon hadn’t let her forget it.

2.

​Do you have a fever?” Genya asked.

But Alina’s expression was knowing.

“You’re afraid you’ll become him. You’re afraid you’ll be the avalanche.” Immortal and unstoppable, another tragedy to befall Ravka.

“What are we meant to do?” Genya said. “Free him? Forgive him?”

“Grant him death,” said Zoya.

Genya stood and walked to the mantel.

“Does he deserve it?”

“That’s not my choice to make,” said Zoya. “Not on my own.”

Alina rested her head on the back of the couch.

“Why are we even discussing this? From what I understand, the Darkling knew the bargain he made. He stands at the doorway between worlds. If he dies, the Fold ruptures again and the void comes pouring through.”

3.

Genya made a kind of humming noise. “So, if we decide he deserves the mercy of death, where does that leave us?”

-----------------------------------------------------------

So. What did I realise? That the books ​have no message. That's the problem. They're empty.

The „good guys“ are a bunch if selfish people who think themselves perfect.  They are quick to judge. They never question themselves. They never try to see anything from another perspective. They are unable of mercy (with the exception of Zoya in the above passages). There is nothing moral about them. They do not care for anything but themselves.

And since the story is empty, we keep filling the void with fanfiction on the quest to add some meaning to it all.

I have spoken.

I must add that I do not think that everything in the books is bad. There are some good parts that are actually well written. If they were all bad, we would never bother discussing them or writing fanfiction. It’s the unused potential that is so frustrating. And LB not understanding her own themes. And that tragic lack of a deeper message.

Edited to add: They doomed Sasha to an eternity of torture??? HE VOLUNTEERED.

[butter-week]

currently thinking about mal saying "...i will hunt you down and i will claim the bounty the old king put on your head." currently thinking about all the layers of fucked up it has.

i get that mal wants to kill aleksander, yeah okay whatever, don't really care, but THIS is how the writers decided to phrase it?

mal's talking about claiming the bounty put on aleksander's head, you know, the bounty put by a prejudiced and bigoted king who feared grisha's "unnatural" power after aleksander won a war for him. the bounty that forced all grisha into hiding again. yeah. that bounty? soldiers killing and hunting grisha again, as if it ever stopped. oh wait, what was the word mal used? hunt? yeah.

are the writers trying to make mal sound like an insensitive bigoted asshole? when persecution of grisha is still very much still happening? did the implications just fly past them or did they fall into the same pitfall as the books and just Not Care about the persecution of grisha as a whole?

i know what i'm betting on.

[firelxdykatara]

Ship whatever you want obviously but Leigh Bardugo has posted before that she wrote Shadow and Bone to cope with an abusive relationship and said Alina’s feelings reflect hers so I understand her not wanting to redeem the darkling

I’m gonna be real honest, here: then she shouldn’t have baited the audience from the very first book.

Like, I sympathize, but I’m not gonna stop criticizing bad writing just because it comes from a sympathetic place. (And, frankly, it makes very little sense to me that she’d condemn the Darkling to a fate worse than death [in the sequel books] because she was writing s&b to cope with an abusive relationship, but then she.... put Alina in an abusive relationship. Mal, in the books? Is horrid. And Alina has to be reduced to a shell of herself in order to make the relationship work. And like I can understand writing that way if it’s all she really experienced in terms of romance but that doesn’t make the writing any less bad.) But that also doesn’t change the fact that Darklina was heavily, heavily baited from the moment the first book was teased.

“A dark heart. A pure soul. A love that will last forever.”

That was the tagline for the first book. If I’d picked up Shadow and Bone, seen that tagline, read the back cover, and then someone told me that the Darkling dies and Alina winds up with her childhood bff who wouldn’t give her the time of day until someone else wanted her? I’d have been baffled. And from what I can tell, having read posts by people who were following the books from the start, Leigh also heavily baited the fandom up until the final book in the trilogy was released, people realized they were baited and got mad, and she decided she hated the Darkling and Darklina and everything to do with them (to the point of eventually doing him and his relationship with Alina even dirtier in sequel books released nearly a decade later; honestly, that’s nearly Bryke levels of pettiness).

So, at the end of the day, I don’t really care that Leigh didn’t want to redeem the Darkling. I don’t really get it (especially since she herself admits that Kaz Brekker is, morally speaking, even worse), but if the books were well-written and marketed as childhood friends falling in love and defeating a great evil, I wouldn’t really care. It probably would never have caught my attention, but I wouldn’t think anyone had much of a reason to feel cheated. As it is, though, I suspect that Leigh knew that the real money is in enemies-to-lovers relationships--they generate the most buzz, the largest followings, the most fan engagement--and decided to pull a bait-and-switch rather than being honest about her intentions from the beginning.

And that just means I really don’t respect her, at the end of the day. I’m grateful for SoC/CK (though I have my issues, and Helnik is another example of how allergic she is to enemies-to-lovers having happy endings or fulfilling lives together), and I love the show, but I just don’t have a whole lot of respect for the author as a creator.