I love the Darkling, I love a good villain with a tragic backstory who truly believes he’s doing the right thing, but my god is he wasted.
I get it, the author wanted to write a story about a dark handsome villain who presents himself as a hero but is really a delusional power hungry monster, but when the world that he is written into is in constant conflict and his people face atrocities everyday just because of who they are it makes the whole thing taste bad.
This man, born into a minority group is forced to watch for centuries as his people are brutalized and murdered for something that they can’t control. This man had to spend his childhood running and hiding, living every day knowing it could very well be his last and that he could trust no one because the stranger you meet on the street could want you dead simply for being born. He was even ostracized from his own people for being a human amplifier, just imagine how horrible and traumatic that had to be to live with.
And despite all this he still fought to get his people a position that they could be safe in. People hate him for forcing his people in the army but what option did he have? He got power by being useful to the king, the only reason they acknowledge him is because he had to dehumanize himself and present himself as a human weapon. These people don’t look at grisha as human, they don’t care about them like their people, and what can the Darkling say to convince them otherwise. What can you tell a person to make them understand that your should care about living breathing people that you have been murdering for centuries. He had no choice to present his people as useful tools better to be used than killed.
So when you try and tell me that this man is actually a power hungry mad man, it just doesn’t sit right with me. Like yeah I get it, power corrupts and all that, but when the heroes themselves hardly care about the minority group that they’re fighting for then it all kind of ruins it for me.
What exactly does Zoya do for the grisha that makes her better than the Darkling? Her amplifiers make her the most powerful and can now turn into a dragon to strike fear in the hearts of others, great but how does that make her better than the Darkling. Like if you didn’t decide to spit on the man by writing him out to be a power hungry psycho for reasons, why is she better?
I get it, he’s done bad things and the ends don’t justify the means, but why did you have to ruin this man’s character by making him care more about power when his whole driving force was protecting his people? Why are the horrible things done to the grisha treated like a minor background inconvenience?
The author just had such a great character with such potential that she just ruined for no other reason than to be like ‘o men in power are bad and always want more power, who cares about his people suffering over there, he’s bad and I’ll show it by giving him cartoon villain traits because I can.’ Why do you need to make a man from a persecuted minority group the villain when you already have one in the royal family and other countries that’s actually doing the persecution?
