I just think there’s something really integral to Kaz’s character and the concept of “was there no one to protect you?”

Kaz who watched out for all the others and saves them (albeit for non altruistic motivations). Every one of the crew would be in a worse place without Kaz’s intervention despite its uncharitable reasons, Jesper to his creditors and rival gangs, Inej to the Menagerie, Nina to Pekka’s brothel, Matthias to Hellgate, and especially Wylan, who serves as a direct character foil to Kaz, to harbor or the violence of the Barrel.

Kaz who had and lost his older brother to watch out for him. Who saw his brother fail. Who only is beginning to grapple with the fact that his brother was also failed and deserved someone to watch over him too.

Kaz who was left all alone and had no one, who treats gangs as a means to an end as opposed to the lens of family others treat it. Kaz who never joined the gangs until he was much older and only because it would give him leverage against Pekka. Who kept Per Haskell at an arm’s reach after learning how characters like him only pretend to watch out for you. Only pretend to protect you

Kaz who takes on the symbol of the crow because “they tell each other who to look after and who to watch out for.” Kaz who protects his crows, the only way he knows how. “Was there no one there to protect you?” As a character Kaz refuses weakness and believes caring for others makes you weak and he preaches this to the end but his actions demonstrate again and again that he will go down the ship. He goes back for Inej at the harbor, he wants Inej to have a net, he gets Jesper HIS guns back, he won’t give over the pareem, he let’s Nina try to get the Grisha out, he encourages Wylan, reveals Wylan’s mothers location and gives Wylan back his money, he can’t face Matthias’s final send off, he tries to sacrifice himself at the Geldrunner so his crew can get out.

And I think that’s really neat. He’s a twisted version of ensuring that no one else goes through what he did. I mean he definitely isn’t nice about it but I think that’s why Kaz doesn’t scoff when Inej askes that question. Deep down he wants that too and he makes his own, making the creation of the Silver Six all the more telling.

Jesper: Now are you going to mind your own business or do I really need to give you a piece of my mind?

Kaz: Oh, I couldn’t take the last piece

Wylan: *approaches with spray bottle*

I'm dying 😭😭 This is amazing!!

This post by @dwyntwo has been in my head

Tbh from the moment I saw his name I was reminded of the word "cat" because the German name for it is "Katze" and I always pronounced his name "Kahs" and not "Kess" 😂

I like to think that Kaz is sort of like Wylan's and Jesper's cat. Like they hear some small noise downstairs at 3 AM, and they'll roll their eyes and say "It's Kaz again".

One day Wylan leaves the house and screams in terror because Kaz is casually chilling on the roof. "For a better view on my targets," he says. What targets does he mean? No idea. How did he get up there? No one knows. Can he get down on his own? No. Will he climb up again tomorrow? Absolutely.

He comes by- uninvited!- just to eat their food, and when they ask him to stop, he gives the "You told me to take better care of myself!" response. Oh, and he pushes things off tables, just to be an asshole. Once Kaz is more comfortable and has learned to trust his friends and be vulnerable around them, they randomly find him napping in strange places of the house as if he pays rent.

When he's sick or hurt, he hides and hisses when approached.

Sometimes he kidnaps people that annoy or threaten Wylan and Jesper and drops them at their doorsteps. As gifts ❤

The final straw is when one day Wylan and Jesper plan to take a romantic bath together, and when they enter the bathroom- surprise!- Kaz is already in the bathtub with a glass of brandy in his hand, having the audacity to look scandalized and be like "Can you KNOCK?!"

It has come to the point where he's their mean, murderous, asshole roommate who just eats all their food and breaks all their locks constantly lol

Okay, so... as a collective fandom, we can agree that bullying Kaz is fun, yeah? There's just something about seeing the guy down at his lowest and then prodding him with a stick and going "Come on, do something."

But I'm going to stand in his corner for a bit in this post.

Something that never really sat right with me is the collective implication that Kaz isn't good enough for Inej (and never will be).

I'm totally with you: he didn't deserve Inej in the first book and maybe not even yet in the second because he didn't give her anything to work with. He didn't even visit her after she was stabbed, or show her how relieved he was when she recovered. And this is just the thing: he didn't deserve her because of his BEHAVIOUR, not because he's inherently less important or less valuable or less of a person than her.

However I've read so many post-CK fanfictions where Kaz has been working on himself, is openly communicating with her, basically kisses the ground she walks on, treats her as his equal and goes above and beyond to make her as comfortable as possible, and still everyone INCLUDING Inej (and Kaz) goes "I/she deserve/s so much better than me/him". And THAT implicates that the reason Kaz wasn't good enough for her was not his behaviour towards her, but the fact that he as a whole human being is just "not enough" and "less valuable" than her, and that viewpoint has always made me super uncomfortable, especially considering his trauma.

Now I know what you're going to say, and I absolutely agree: trauma never excuses abhorrent behaviour. But there's just something icky to me about looking at a traumatized person who has not only been making an EXTREME effort to overcome their issues, but also shown amazing results, and going "They don't deserve X", "They're less than X" etc. just because they haven't fully healed yet or might never fully heal. It gives "Traumatized people are damaged goods"-vibes, which is especially weird considering my next point: INEJ IS TRAUMATIZED TOO AND HER TRAUMA GETS IN THE WAY OF A GOOD AND LOVING RELATIONSHIP JUST AS MUCH AS HIS.

She literally admits to herself that she wears as much armor as Kaz does and was being kind of hypocritical when she told him to remove his. Inej is a flawed character (which somehow seems to be a controversial take in the fandom), and to put her on a pedestal because of how virtuous and "better" she is than Kaz takes all the nuance out of her. There are definitely some parts in the books where I felt like she was in the wrong or toeing the line, but the others never really call out her behaviour the way they do with Kaz, not even in their internal monologue, so we're left with this image of an Inej who can do no wrong and a Kaz who simply got lucky.

The fact that in aforementioned fanfictions (that I still absolutely adore btw) Inej too thinks he isn't good enough for her despite everything he does for her and for himself, and despite how far he's come also turns her acknowledgment of her own self worth into something ugly and vain in my eyes. She loves herself, but she also loves Kaz, so I don't think she, or any good partner, would look at her boyfriend who clearly already thinks very little of himself and go "Yep, this fucker isn't good enough".

So often people will look at a healthy happy couple and go "He/she could do so much better than her/him". Like that's a whole person you're putting in a competition of "Who's more worthy?" as if they were some object that is of better or worse quality.

I don't think I articulated this too well and there's a lot more to be said about this, but I hope you understand the gist of it. Post CK-Kaz who works on himself and openly communicates ABSOLUTELY deserves Inej, and I will ROT on this hill.

Now I've been nice to him for long enough I think *whacks him with a crow bar*

I like to think that Kaz is sort of like Wylan's and Jesper's cat. Like they hear some small noise downstairs at 3 AM, and they'll roll their eyes and say "It's Kaz again".

One day Wylan leaves the house and screams in terror because Kaz is casually chilling on the roof. "For a better view on my targets," he says. What targets does he mean? No idea. How did he get up there? No one knows. Can he get down on his own? No. Will he climb up again tomorrow? Absolutely.

He comes by- uninvited!- just to eat their food, and when they ask him to stop, he gives the "You told me to take better care of myself!" response. Oh, and he pushes things off tables, just to be an asshole. Once Kaz is more comfortable and has learned to trust his friends and be vulnerable around them, they randomly find him napping in strange places of the house as if he pays rent.

When he's sick or hurt, he hides and hisses when approached.

Sometimes he kidnaps people that annoy or threaten Wylan and Jesper and drops them at their doorsteps. As gifts ❤

The final straw is when one day Wylan and Jesper plan to take a romantic bath together, and when they enter the bathroom- surprise!- Kaz is already in the bathtub with a glass of brandy in his hand, having the audacity to look scandalized and be like "Can you KNOCK?!"

It has come to the point where he's their mean, murderous, asshole roommate who just eats all their food and breaks all their locks constantly lol

Most underrated book part

These are the kids planning a heist

I'm crying laughing at the reblogs. RIP, Kaz

Had a dream that beyonce tried to kill kaz brekker

Imagine this. The stadtwatch finds a tunnel underground somewhere in Ketterdam. They're like "Wtf is this doing here", climb in and follow the tunnel, thinking it's leading them to an underground crime syndicate or something, only to find Kaz freaking Brekker at the end of it with a shovel in his hand. They just stare at him for a moment and he stares back until he eventually says "Leave" with his appalled, scratchy ass voice as if they just broke into his living room and invaded his privacy. The stadtwatch officers are entirely confused and unsure how to handle this situation, so they just awkwardly retreat, one of them even mumbles a "Sorry".

Kaz turns back to his work shaking his head, being all like "The NERVE of some people"

Did you know that rain :) makes period pain worse :))) Because I found that out today :)))))) It's raining :))))))))) I AM WRITHING :))))))))))))))))))

How does Kaz react to being sick with a common cold or the flu?

On the one hand, I feel like he'd panic because the Queen's Lady must have deeply traumatized him for so many reasons. It killed his brother and it almost killed him and it's responsible for his experience on Reaper's Barge.

On the other hand, Kaz doesn't seem to care about his life much since he's only driven by spite, caffeine and revenge, and he convinces himself that he doesn't care about others so he won't have to worry about losing them. I'm more inclined to think he's going to push through and ignore his sickness until he's fine again, maybe even under the guise of "I survived it once, I'll survive again". But once he admits to himself that he DOES care about others, that man is going to SPIRAL once he gets a scratchy throat. "What if it's the plague THIS time? What if I give it to Inej?"

How does Kaz react to being sick with a common cold or the flu?

On the one hand, I feel like he'd panic because the Queen's Lady must have deeply traumatized him for so many reasons. It killed his brother and it almost killed him and it's responsible for his experience on Reaper's Barge.

On the other hand, Kaz doesn't seem to care about his life much since he's only driven by spite, caffeine and revenge, and he convinces himself that he doesn't care about others so he won't have to worry about losing them. I'm more inclined to think he's going to push through and ignore his sickness until he's fine again, maybe even under the guise of "I survived it once, I'll survive again". But once he admits to himself that he DOES care about others, that man is going to SPIRAL once he gets a scratchy throat. "What if it's the plague THIS time? What if I give it to Inej?"

Kaz at the doctor's office.

Doctor: "Okay, so I found nothing wrong with your stomach."

Kaz: "So I'm healthy."

Doctor: *laughing fit* "No." Wipes tears out of his eyes. "SAINTS no."

I wonder if people who are disgusted by husbands trying their wives' breastmilk realize that regular milk is literally breastmilk too. And, to make matters worse, from A DIFFERENT SPECIES.

New Kaz and Wylan parallel just dropped, unless it isn't new, in which case I'm just going to look like a dolt and walk into the sea dramatically.

Both of them had a good life until they were maybe roughly nine years old. Wylan's father was kind and loving and read him bedtime stories; until he found out that Wylan couldn't learn to read, which must have been when Wylan was maybe nine years old. Most kids learn to read between six and seven, and Jan van Eck moved heaven and earth to get his son to learn it, too. I think to say that he tried for two years until he gave up and became abusive is realistic, right? So Wylan must have been eight or nine, an age where kids are usually able to read. So his childhood was stolen around the same time Kaz's was.

The fact that Kaz was a farm boy with a loving father and caring older brother still blows my mind btw. He had a stable home life and people who cared about him, he was one child among hundreds, nothing very special really. And like Wylan's, his childhood was horrifically stolen from him and he had to survive around the same time Wylan started to survive (Leigh really looked at a bunch of bland happy farm kids, said "give me this one", killed his entire family, put him under severe emotional distress and then just tossed him in the Barrel and left him there)

They were both normal, loved children and both became Barrel rats who had to claw their way out.