whatever you do, don’t think about how much it must have meant for kaz to hear inej say “it isn’t easy for me either.”
leigh herself has said that she wrote kaz’s backstory and trauma as a way to isolate him in every way possible. he has spent the last 8 years without true emotional connections AND incredibly touch-starved. he has to give up the hope of ever being normal and becomes extra ruthless as a way of further isolating himself so no one will go near him. sure, there’s probably others in ketterdam who have lived on the streets. there’s definitely other people who have been conned out of their money and who have lost family members. but this particular trauma is so isolating and so unique to kaz that he had probably convinced himself no one would ever understand that particular pain.
and then comes inej, a girl who’s suffered so much, and she sees kaz and tells him “it isn’t easy for me either.” she’s the first person who shows kaz that he’s not alone in that pain and that healing is possible! no wonder he falls for her.
“awwww wylan is so cute and innocent!!!!” WRONG he’s a 16 year old boy who was abused and almost killed by his father yet refused to lose his morals despite all of the evils the world threw at him pack it up
“My mother is Ketterdam, she birthed me in the harbour” is deeply underrated not as a quote but for appreciating the truth in it (that Kaz was metaphorically reborn after the Reaper’s Barge and that Kaz Brekker didn’t exist before he crawled out of the harbour the night that Kaz Rietveld metaphorically died) and the fact that Kaz is the most honest only when he knows he’s speaking in such a way that no-one will believe it
Things Kaz canonically does in the two years between Crooked Kingdom and Rule of Wolves:
(presumably) massively expands the Dregs' territory
buys Pekka's old club (the Emerald Palace) and completely renovates it, turning it into The Silver Six
massively expands the Crow Club to the point where it's "three times the size of every other establishment on the block"
builds an underground tunnel that goes from the Crow Club to the Geldstraat, where the Van Eck Mansion is
takes Jesper out on jobs with him often enough that Wylan has jokingly banned Jesper from answering the door when he knocks
learns about Ketterdam's Suli laborers and picks up additional knowledge of Suli culture
keeps up with Inej's whereabouts and helps her take out slavers
expands his information network to the Kerch colonies
is on friendly enough terms with the King of Ravka that he taught Nikolai how to pick locks and Nikolai feels comfortable personally writing him a letter when he needs to steal the titanium from Kerch
disguises himself just to follow people around on the streets
was planning to steal the titanium from the military base anyway just for fun
And that's just the stuff we see from Nikolai's and Zoya's incredibly limited perspectives during their Ketterdam sidequest
I 100% agree with Zoya when she thinks that "maybe Kaz was like Nikolai, a boy with an unquiet mind, a man in perpetual need of challenge" because ROW makes it so obvious that Kaz is bored and incredibly restless in his success. Someone get our boy a new life's purpose and a subscription to a long-running unsolved mystery podcast stat
Kaz Brekker is someone who's spent so long surviving Ketterdam that survival has shaped nearly every part of who he is. By the time Six of Crows begins, he's already Dirthands, already feared in the Barrel, already running jobs for the Dregs with a reputation for strategy, ruthlessness, and getting results other people can't. He's seventeen and has still made himself into one of the most dangerous young men in Ketterdam, which tells you a great deal about both his intelligence and how completely he's adapted himself to violence, leverage, and profit.
His reputation isn't built on swagger alone - Kaz has shaped himself into someone who can read a room, keep secrets, make plans several steps ahead, and use fear as efficiently as other people use friendship. Ketterdam rewards that kind of mind, and he's become very good at speaking its language; money, debt, information, humiliation, intimidation, and revenge all sit comfortably inside the way he moves through the city. The books keep showing that he understands systems as well as he understands people, which is why he can lead the heist at the centre of the duology and keep characters much older than he is reacting to him rather than the other way around.
The harder edge of the character only fully comes into focus once the books start to peel back how he was made. Kaz and Jordie arrived in Ketterdam young, were swindled by Pekka Rollins, then devastated by the Queen's Lady plague. Jordie died, Kaz was mistaken for dead, and he woke on a barge surrounded by corpses, using his brother's body to survive. His history sits underneath almost everything about him afterward: the gloves, cane, touch aversion, fixation on control, hatred of weakness, and near-total refusal to let anyone see him in a position of need again. He's calculating, yes, but his calculation is wrapped tightly around shame, grief, fear, and a need to prove that the boy who was once powerless has been completely erased. The books never let that erasure succeed fully, which is exactly why he's so compelling.
Psychology
A great deal of Kaz's adult personality grows around the plague barge and Jordie's death. He survives by clinging to a corpse and then spends years making sure he'll never again be trapped in a position where someone else's strength, mercy, or honesty determines whether he lives, which is the emotional logic behind how intensely he values control. He needs plans, leverage, and distance because chaos once reduced him to something helpless and nearly unrecognisable, and he has no intention of letting that happen again.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder/PTSD fits naturally here. The trauma is extreme, the physical trigger is very specific, and the consequences keep showing up in concrete ways: his severe haphephobia, panic around skin-to-skin contact, bodily recoil that overtakes him when intimacy gets too close, and degree to which memory keeps intruding on the present. His fear of touch isn't a quirk or an affectation - it comes from a nervous system that still links flesh, closeness, and helplessness with plague, death, and drowning.
His trauma has also made him extraordinarily defensive. Kaz rarely approaches another person as just another person - he approaches them as risk, opportunity, weakness, leverage, or, in very rare cases, someone whose presence unsettles the whole structure he's built to stay safe. This is why he can be so merciless in one scene and so almost painfully careful in another - he's trained himself to translate feeling into strategy because strategy is controllable and feeling isn't. When he can't make that translation, he tends to lock down, lash out, or retreat behind the Dirtyhands persona.
He's also deeply ambitious, though the ambition is often discussed less than the trauma. Kaz wants money, power, the Barrel, and revenge, and he wants them in forms that will prove he's never going to be that boy on the corpse barge again. His greed isn't shallow, but bound up with dignity, safety, and the fantasy of being so powerful that nobody can ever humiliate him the way Pekka did. He's someone who's built an entire identity around winning in the language of the city that first destroyed him.
Strengths and Flaws
Kaz is highly intelligent in a way that's both abstract and practical. He can design long-range plans, understand how multiple interests will collide, and improvise when those plans crack under pressure. The Ice Court job only works because he can think structurally, assign people where their strengths matter most, and adapt when the situation changes. Plenty of criminals in Ketterdam are ruthless; Kaz stands apart because he can combine ruthlessness with planning, patience, and social reading at a very high level.
He's also disciplined, which gets hidden sometimes by the theatricality of Dirtyhands, but it's one of his defining traits. Kaz works, waits, watches, and keeps himself under tighter control than almost anyone around him. He doesn't spill emotion casually, doesn't show fear unless his trauma physically overrides him, and very rarely lets appetite outrun calculation. Even his revenge against Pekka is something he carries for years before he can shape it into the form he wants.
Another strength is loyalty, though it's selective and often hard for other people to recognise while they're living inside it. Kaz trusts Inej and Jesper more than anyone else, and his relationship with Jesper makes clear how much strain can exist in his relationships without ever ending the bond altogether. He does care for his people - the books simply give that care a difficult shape. He protects, pays, plans, rescues, and avenges far more easily than he reassures, confesses, or comforts.
Kaz can also be manipulative, vindictive, and willing to treat other people as pieces in a larger design if that design gets him closer to revenge, money, or control. He understands humiliation very well and sometimes uses that understanding cruelly. Dirtyhands isn't only a mask for safety, but also a persona that gives him permission to become frightening enough that nobody will think to look for softness underneath.
He's also emotionally withholding to the point of damage. Kaz doesn't simply struggle to express feeling, he often seems determined to contain it so completely that it can only come out sideways, which hurts nearly every close relationship in his life. He wants Inej and can't touch her, wants Jesper's loyalty and still keeps him in the dark. The novels make clear that the pain in him is real, but they never pretend that pain leaves the people around him untouched.
Relationships
INEJ GHAFA
Inej is the person who most clearly exposes the limits of Dirtyhands as a complete identity. Their relationship is full of mutual respect, dependence, protectiveness, and desire, but the emotional centre of it isn't simple longing - it's the fact that Inej sees the boy under the armour and insists on treating him as someone who could be more than the thing Ketterdam made. Kaz wants her badly enough to buy her indenture, build plans around her freedom, and eventually imagine a future that contains her, yet his trauma keeps turning even the smallest physical closeness into panic. Their relationship works because his feeling is unmistakeable and still not enough, by itself, to solve what he's become.
JORDIE RIETVELD
Jordie remains the most formative relationship in Kaz's life even after death. He's brother, first protector, first partner in hope, and the body Kaz had to use to survive - that final fact leaves such a deep wound that it keeps shaping Kaz's nervous system and his moral life years later. Pekka's theft destroyed the future Jordie had imagined for both of them, and the plague destroyed Jordie himself, which leaves Kaz's grief tangled up forever with revenge and the conviction that innocence is fatal in Ketterdam. His fixation on Pekka never really makes sense unless Jordie stays at the centre of it.
JESPER FAHEY
Jesper brings out a more complicated kind of attachment in Kaz because their bond is full of affection, frustration, dependence, loyalty, and mutual useulness. Kaz counts on Jesper constantly, yet he also exploits Jesper's need to be needed and keeps information from him whenever secrecy seems strategically cleaner. Kaz does care for Jesper, but the care doesn't stop him from treating trust as something to be rationed. Their friendship is one of the clearest examples of how hard it is for Kaz to choose relationship over control even when he genuinely values the person in front of him.
PEKKA ROLLINS
Pekka is the original humiliation that Kaz keeps trying to master. He swindled Kaz and Jordie when they arrived in Ketterdam, and the books keep returning to the fact that this wasn't only a financial loss - it shattered Kaz's first real belief in what the city might allow, then left him and Jordie exposed to the chain of events that killed one brother and remade the other. By the time Kaz corners Pekka and forces him to remember Jordie's name, revenge has become something larger than retalation - it's become a way of proving that the frightened boy Pekka ruined has turned into someone far more dangerous than the man who once fooled him.
Just for Fun / Typology
MBTI - ENTJ
Te sits right at the centre of how he functions. He organises people, assigns roles, thinks in terms of leverage and outcomes, and moves very quickly from private judgment to external method - the Ice Court plan is a perfect example of that. Kaz doesn't approach problems by sitting inside possibilities for too long, he wants an actionable structure, a pressure point, a route through, and a result. His leadership style is managerial, strategic, and often ruthless in exactly the way high Te tends to be when empathy is heavily armoured.
Ne also fits the way he locks onto long-term patterns and builds whole lives around them. Kaz isn't improvising his identity day by day - he has a vision of who he means to become in Ketterdam, a vision of what Pekka owes him, and a vision of how power works in the Barrel, and he keeps arranging his actions around those fixed internal conclusions. The touch aversion and the trauma make him reactive in certain intimate moments, but his larger way of moving through the world is still highly directional, concentrated, and future-oriented.
INTJ is a believable alternate reading because Kaz is private, highly self-contained, and often seems to operate from a sealed internal world that other people can barely access, but the difference is in how strongly his intelligence externalises. Kaz is constantly managing people, setting terms, making others move in response to him, and using organisational pressure rather than only private strategy. The public face of Dirtyhands isn't incidental - he's built himself into an active force inside the Barrel, and that outward command suits ENTJ better than the more withdrawn authority of iNTJ.
MORAL ALIGNMENT - Chaotic Neutral
His relationship to structure is too adversarial and self-directed for a Lawful reading. Kaz can operate inside gang hierarchies and understands systems extremely well, but he doesn't treat order, law, or institution as something inherently worthy of respect. He uses whatever structure gives him leverage, reshapes it if he can, and ignores it whenever it obstructs his own aims. Ketterdam's rules are useful to him as tools, not as obligations.
Morally, he sits in a narrower and harsher place than a Good alignment allows, while still stopping short of outright Evil. Kaz hurts people, manipulates people, and can be terrifyingly cold when revenge or profit are involved. At the same time, he has real loyalties, real love, and a conscience that does surface in selective but meaningful ways, especially around the Crows. He isn't guided by altruism, but neither is he empty of attachment or concern. Survival, vengeance, desire, and the need to stay in control pull much harder on him than any broad moral principle.
Conclusion
Kaz's hardness only works because the books keep letting you see the cost of maintaining it. The intelligence, ambition, cruelty, gloves, cane, revenge, impossible restraint around Inej - all of it belongs to one coherent shape. He's turned himself into something Ketterdam can't easily break again, and that transformation has given him power at the price of almost every ordinary route into intimacy.
He's most interesting when the books let both truths stand at once: Kaz Brekker is genuinely dangerous, and Kaz Rietveld is still in there, terrified of touch, grieving Jordie, furious at the city that made him, and wanting more from life than vengeance alone can ever give him.
hmmm I know we can surmise that kaz & jordie were the iphigenia of the series, in that, whether it's fair or not, they had to be sacrificed for the benefit of everyone else. jordie had to die and kaz had to suffer it and live with it, because if kaz had lain down and died on the barge, it would have had a crazy knock-on effect. inej likely would never have escaped the menagerie, or matthias from hellgate, jesper would probably have fallen foul of debtors or gangs some way or another (he gets at least one beating from enforcers), nina would have been caught up w the dime lions trying to get matthias out of hellgate, and there's even some more tangential ones, like kuwei probably dying at the ice court and marya being stuck at saint hilde.... but I wonder what would have happened to wylan.
kaz had him under dregs protection, so he never suffered the way he did ("kaz is your luck, merchling."); no beatings, etc. without that... well, it's tempting to think that wylan would have just been killed some way or another. and yeah, maybe, but miggson and prior couldn't get him, could they? wylan has that scary glimmer of the biting-animal, kaz-style survivalist in him, and he had a goal; amass enough money to get the hell out of ketterdam and start anew. but how far would wylan have gone to get that money? van eck's letters pushed him into the arms of dregs munitions building. without the perpetual intervention of kaz-- protection, constant jobs even when there were better people for it, good pay-- how quickly would wylan have turned into someone more like kaz? he has a core of decency, but he gets the privilege of keeping that, because kaz helps him to. alone, would he have surrendered it, or been forced to surrender it, just for a chance to survive? I don't think he would have ever willingly given up. it's not an accident that kaz and wylan's first days in ketterdam are so closely paralleled, or that they have a set of similar skills/traits; it's explicitly said that wylan would also be able to count cards and control decks like kaz can, if he wanted to. and after he finds out about his mother, wylan's comforted by the idea of retribution for van eck, that kaz could destroy his father's life. they're a little bit too similar. but kaz is there to take the moral fall, for the most part; all wylan has to do is help him. but without kaz... well. that's another story, isn't it?
Having seen what everyone else has said about the changes to the new editions, I have something to say. I hate the scrubbing of characters' ages for many reasons, but I overall don't think the argument that them being a few years older makes them "more problematic" is accurate or salient. Though as far as I am aware we don't know exactly how old they are supposed to be (dumb, bad writing decision, etc), they are meant to be young adults, so probably 18-21. I dislike the expectation many fans seem to have that upon turning 18, a character (or any person tbh) must instantly become mature and therapized, lest all their wrongdoings be immediately irredeemable, almost embarrassing. Many of their personality traits and responses to trauma are also being attributed to their ages when that is not the case. Adults can be impulsive, arrogant, insecure, brainwashed, hopeful, reckless, naive, flirtatious, idealistic, and more - to imply that these traits only exist because the characters are children (and therefore that they would go away upon "growing up") really detracts from their stories. And is also not how adults work. I think people are putting too much emphasis on how "problematic" they think the morally gray aspects of the characters become, even though they are at most like 4 years older and are trapped in the same systems that they were as children. Traumatized children, without intervention, become traumatized adults.
HOWEVER. You have to write that story with intention. Writing an impulsive or brainwashed adult is going to look different than writing a teen. You have to give the reader an idea of what they have been doing for those extra years, what their mental state has been, why they're still where they are. Take Matthias for example. You CAN write a character who is in a cult for his whole childhood and partakes into his young adulthood, even though his actions are terrible. That character can be written about and, depending on how you write his experiences and thoughts during those terrible actions, can still find redemption. Having a character who takes longer to deprogram himself is not inherently wrong. But that's not the story Leigh Bardugo wrote. She wrote him as a child who had just barely stepped foot into his genocidal role before questioning it. To make him a man of unspecified age leaves us with holes - what did he participate in during those years? What kept him hunting Grisha, when he was shown canonically to have struggled with it emotionally during training? Why did he only start to question his indoctrination once he met Nina? We can't know, because the original story wasn't written with these things in mind. The changes unintentionally create the implication that he only questioned his mission because he was attracted to Nina (unlike any other Grisha he may have captured previously), rather than because he saw humanity in a Grisha. That is a huge insult to his character. Also, it makes Nina's relationship with him incredibly strange, because the way Nina has been written makes it seem very unlikely she would ever fall in love with someone who was possibly years deep into active genocidal efforts without questioning it. It's really not that it makes Matthias "more problematic" - to an extent it does, sure, but that really simplifies the issue here. Because again, you CAN write such a character and have them find some form of acceptable redemption. The problem is that Leigh Bardugo didn't write that character, so those gaps in his backstory just leave us wondering how much evil he partook in and why, considering what we know about his character (particularly his active empathy). Changing his age breaks the logic of who he is and his relationship with Nina. Traumatized teens can become traumatized adults, but that's not the story Six of Crows was telling. Going in to scrub their ages destroys the focus of the story we had and leaves strange, unhappy hollows behind.
Jesper “guard against pain” vs Wylan “guard against joy”
Jesper’s jokester and confident façade was to protect himself from feeling pain, but inside he’s insecure and vulnerable. He hid his grisha nature because the only person who ever treasured it was taken away from him, and grew up being told that it was a curse. So instead he acts like he doesn’t need it. He acts like he takes all the losses and all the hurtful things in good stride but deep inside he’s feeling lost and guilty all the time. That boy is always bouncing on his feet with guilt all the time in the duology. Guilt for disappointing everyone: his father, Kaz, Inej, his mother, and himself. When he thought about Wylan at the end of SOC he thought Wylan wouldn’t want to hang out with criminals like him anymore once he got the money and that had stung more than he thought: it’s the boy inside him feeling abandoned again, the boy that does no good to anyone other than in a fight. And he cope with all that pain, that guilt, with his addiction and his gunslinging - which no one really paid any mind until Wylan saw through his façade.
Wylan, whose joy and hope was taken away from him by his father, was always made to feel less than, shared the same constant feeling of guilt for just being who he is. His father made sure of it, that he knows he’s not allowed to feel anything but anxious and guilt, and his joy was to be choked out of him (metaphorically and literally). Wylan in the show couldn’t even believe when Jesper told him he was smart, thinking it was just a trick to coddle him into some false sense of joy before it would be taken away again. Wylan in the books still holding on to the last shred of decency for his father until that moment at Saint Hilde, instead blaming himself for it, maybe because it would give him a false sense of control over his own pain. Until Jesper saw his own guilt mirrored in Wylan, and helped him to his feet.
Both Jesper and Wylan were able to keep some part of goodness in the face of everything that happened in their lives: Jesper with his good spirits, Wylan with his morals - standing up against Kaz again and again despite being threatened every time. In Jesper, Wylan learned to accept joy again, and that this won’t be taken away from him. And in Wylan, Jesper knew that he has a safe space where he can accept his pain and heal from it in a healthy way.
“You can love something despite seeing all of its flaws.”
