KANEJ ALERT OMG

they are still everything to me <3

Kaz: *is without his crow cane*

Citizens of Ketterdam: A bastard?

Kaz: *gets his crow cane*

Citizens of Ketterdam: Bastard of the Barrel!!!

(idea creds: @swiftie-as-a-coursing-river)

s2e3 like calls to like / s2e6 ni weh sesh

Joost had three problems, actually. the moon, his mustache, and the fact that his girl was literally about to murder him

For some reason my brain can't imagine kaz brekker in pajamas. Like, I just can't 😭 he would look so goofy

kaz brekker is the best book boyfriend to ever be written. like he wants inej to stay with him but he also wants her to be happy, so he buys her a boat so that she can leave him, knowing that it will make her happy. like you just can't beat that.

You know, I kind of find it interesting when the narrative of fanfics is always like Kaz is in a bad mood because Inej isn't there... rather than Kaz is bored because Inej isn't there. I guess two things can be true at the same time... but also, in the following years, Kaz built the following: an underground tunnel in Ketterdam, the Silver Six, expanded the Crow Club, expanded the Dregs territory (presumably). That's two years... of pure restless energy.

We are also told that he really only talks to Jesper and Wylan when there's a job he needs help with presumably because he's so busy. Kaz also finds time to correspond with a king of a whole other nation... and has been known to roleplay as a beggar (yes, I will keep bringing this up bc it's funny). Imagine, if you will, an 18-19 year old Kaz coming into all this wealth and so much time to just build because he can. Maybe because he's a little lonely, or bored, or both.

I don't think Kaz is angry, I think Kaz is restless.

"The boy beside her. The future before her. Anything was possible."

Wylan: Is Kaz… singing..?

Jesper: He mumbles Taylor Swift lyrics when he thinks no one is listening.

Nina: It’s been Come Back Be Here ever since the Wraith left the harbor.

Wylan: …but that was five months ago..

Jesper and Nina sighing: Yep.

I think often of the last chapter of crooked kingdom. not the one everyone considers the last chapter, the last last chapter, the pekka chapter. weeks (months?) after kaz scared him out of ketterdam, pekka starts making moves to salvage his businesses. not much, just reading papers and correspondence, maybe answering letters. and that very night, like he's summoned her, inej appears to warn him off. if he ever thinks of coming back to ketterdam, she says, they'll meet again so she can make the second cut. I love love love it. we know that kaz didn't send her ('I have my own message to deliver'), so her knowledge of pekka's attempt to return suggests she's been keeping tabs on him for her own means. or she has supernaturally good intuition, which is probably the sort of thing she'd want pekka to think-- he worries that maybe she isn't entirely human after all. but regardless, this scene serves a couple of purposes-- it hammers home exactly how scared the slavers should be of inej (very lol), it illustrates the contrast between the complacent old ketterdam (pekka & jan van eck) and the frankly feral new one (kaz & wylan), but I think it also draws a pointed line under the closeness of kaz and inej that we saw in the last chapter.

the only witnesses to the kaz-pekka showdown were pekka's men, and inej. we know that pekka's men will have taken pekka's weakness & kaz's monstrosity from it, but what did inej take from it? because put mildly, kaz lost his absolute shit in that chapel, and let slip more than he probably would have done if he'd just been talking to inej alone. inej, at that point, had been aware for a while how obsessed kaz was with rollins, but that probably put into a hard perspective exactly how badly his presence and involvement affects kaz. kaz describes it as a 'dark door' that's opened in him; if rollins was to come back, there's a good chance kaz would be dragged back into that (to use an inej phrase) undertow, of obsession and revenge and irrationality. they don't really discuss it, and we don't get much of inej's perspective on it, but I think it's not surprising that she wants pekka out of kaz's way permanently. he's a threat to any progress she has made or might make with him. he's the tangible reminder of the worst and least reasonable side of kaz that always teeters on the edge of going where inej can't follow.

so yes, we talk a lot about how inej influences kaz... but maybe less about how kaz has influenced inej. inej takes a page out of the kaz playbook, here, probably because she's doing this for him (even if I'm not entirely sure he even knows that she's gone there). she gets into pekka's head, plays on the potentially supernatural and the impossible, sets up a 'what if?' and plants a seed of paranoia. she uses the nickname kaz gave her, 'the wraith', and rollins thinks of her as kaz's 'wraith queen'. kaz says to her that 'sometimes fate needs a little assistance', and clearly she took that to heart. we know that when kaz needs extra morality, he often draws on inej; but when inej needs extra monstrosity, she often draws on kaz.

hey have you ever thought about how inej describes kaz's hands as being for making things vanish? how one of his classic magic tricks is making things disappear? how she describes her trauma response/dissociation as vanishing? how she is the Wraith and it is her greatest skill to disappear?

how we can imply from this that she feels like a) kaz's touch will trigger her and make her vanish and b) he only values her for that skill?

but how, the one thing he does, every time, is see her? is not let her disappear? is ask her, multiple times, to stay? is tell her, "don't slip away from me?"

"but it's what I do best."

So, you are leaving. Stay with me.

1x07 THE UNSEA 2x08 NO FUNERALS

The argument that "well of course they had to include all those important crow moments even if they don't make sense, they need to drum up excitement for season 3!!!" is genuinely so funny to me. Like, 'they had to make the story bad so they could make more of it!' you're so close bestie