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spaceshipkat · 3 years

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how did the actor playing kaz do? i actually haven't watched it yet bc im so nervous kaz is the fictional character i relate to the most (not that im a criminal lol i have a cane and ocd) and while i've heard inej and jesper kill it i've heard nothing about kaz

honestly? i thought Freddy Carter was superb. it took a little while to warm up to him (especially toward kanej, but i think their plot this season was to get them to the point they’re at in SOC, which i assume will happen in season 2--or, i hope anyway, bc i don’t see how else they can blend the Crows’ plot into the S&B plot without the Ice Court coming into play. they also name-dropped the Ice Court, so it seems reasonable to assume that’s where the Crows will head next, especially since the season does end with Matthias headed toward Hellgate and hating Nina due to her being responsible for his current predicament, but i digress), but once i did, i loved his acting and his nuances and how much respect his disabilty was handled (though i really could’ve done without the ableism in the church scene, however awesome that church scene was).

i don’t have a cane myself, but i do have a bad knee and a bad hip that impede a lot of my mobility and cause me trouble most days (my knee in particular), and i found Freddy’s portrayal of Kaz’s disability really accurate and respectful. i think it helped that Leigh was on set a lot (she does have a cameo after all), and since she has the same disability as Kaz, she could provide a lot of guidance for how to portray him. for instance, there were scenes where, when Kaz was in disguise and therefore couldn’t have his cane on him, he had to stop to rest his knee and Freddy Carter made it clear that that knee was causing Kaz a lot of pain. the show also didn’t make him do any crazy stunts that other people who don’t understand disabilities or who don’t seek to be respectful would probably make Kaz do, so it’s already improving from a lot of disabled characters in shitty media.

i think the Dirtyhands part could have been a little more clearly displayed (what he does with Alina at the end does lend itself to showing Kaz’s humanity and the good side we all know he has, but it also does detract a bit from his Dirtyhands MO), but i hope that we’ll see more of it next season thanks to the hints we did get. and personally, i am so looking forward to that scene in CK where Kaz takes out everyone on the staircase with his cane.

but anyway, that’s beside the point of this post. in my opinion, Freddy Carter did an exceptional job with Kaz and was such a wonderful portrayal of a disabled person. it was thrilling to see that in a fantasy show, where people like you and i rarely exist.

#ask #anonymous #shadow and bone #shadow and bone spoilers #kaz brekker #disability rep

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olympicreads · 5 years

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king of scars by Leigh Bardugo rating: ★★★ 1/2 warning: this review contains spoilers. the paragraphs containing them will be marked accordingly.

I’ll find a way. All his life, Nikolai had believed that. His will had been enough to shape not only his fate but his own identity.

I was on the fence about giving this book 3 or 4 stars... Because this is a 4-stars novel, but I know that Leigh Bardugo can do much better, so I thought I’d be more strict in this case. I wish I was giving it the 5 stars it should’ve had, though. However, I can't do that in good conscience, because in more than one way this book was a regression to the bad aspects of The Grisha Trilogy.

I’m not going to say that this book was terrible, because it wasn’t. Leigh Bardugo is an incredibly talented author. The prose was great. The book as a whole was great... If you consider it a stand-alone.

King of Scars, as we know, presents us three main perspectives: Nina’s, Zoya’s, and Nikolai’s, with a fourth in the second part of the book: that of a new character called Isaak. I will be dividing this review into sections for each character, highlighting my likes and dislikes for each of them.

Nina Zenik

She is the only one that’s had a POV before this book. Incidentally, she’s the one who’s characterization jumped out the most at me, especially in the first half of the book.

[spoilers] When we first see her, she’s in Fjerda as a spy, working along with a familiar face, Adrik, and a new one, Leoni Hillis. She’s been on a mission for over two months, and for over two months she’s been dragging Matthias’ body along, refusing to bury him, hallucinating his voice in her head. That was my first indication that there was something “funny” going on: Nina had already let him go in Crooked Kingdom:

“In the next life then,” she whispered. “Go.” She watched his eyes close once more. “Farvell,” she said in Fjerdan. “May Djel watch over you until I can once more.” - Crooked Kingdom, Chapter 39.

And yet, despite having already accepted Matthias’ death, she drags his corpse along with her. I’m not going to lie: when she finally does bury him, I teared up. Her eulogy was beautiful. That doesn’t mean that it should’ve happened when it did. The importance he is given to Nina is far greater than that he had in Six of Crows. She loved him, but she loved Ravka too. She also loved her friends, and she missed her life at the Little Palace.

But for the first half of King of Scars, all she thinks about, all she cares about, is Matthias. I thought, “ok, maybe she’s rationalizing all the things that happened during her time at Ketterdam, her obsession with him is just a way to cope with PTSD”... but this all goes to hell when, despite her feelings, she willingly moves in with Brum at the end of her arc. She deserts Ravka and infiltrates Brum’s home instead of, oh, shooting his ugly face? When she’s got him defenseless, she chooses to keep him alive and not take him to Ravka for trial, despite the fact that she’s learned from him that they are planning something that relates to a Lantsov that’s not Nikolai, and that her country is at the brink of a war. She neglects to tell this to her allies as soon as she finds out and deserts the Second Army. [end of spoilers]

All of this plus the fact that almost nothing that happens during her arc is connected to the other POVs makes for an overall confusing portion, the poorest of the novel, that’d have been so much better if Nina hadn’t had a perspective in Six of Crows. She was wildly OOC, in my opinion. But again, that doesn’t mean that everything about her parts were bad. I loved Hanne, one of the newly introduced characters, and I love her chemistry with Nina. I really hope they get together in the second book.

Nikolai Lantsov

I love him. His inner dialogue is one of the wittiest I’ve read, and we can finally see that he’s as sharp on the inside as he is on the outside, despite his insecurities (or maybe because of them). The first half of his story was the easiest, most interesting to read. Learning about his trauma, his struggles, his (literal) inner demon, and how he puts on a smart-ass brave face in spite of everything he has on his plate, plus seeing his wit first-hand, was great. One of my favorite parts of the book, along with Zoya’s, but that’s for later.

[vague spoilers]

The second part, though... I don’t know how much the Grisha Saints are based on Orthodox ones, but I’m not a fan of their storyline. While I’m not entirely familiar with Orthodox tradition, I am (or, well, I was brought up as) Catholic, and unless I’m severely mistaken, there are many similarities in the way Saints are depicted by both. However, the way that they were showed in King of Scars left a lot to be desired, in my honest opinion. Saints are not “edgy” and “inhuman”. Alina was a more accurate representation of the “older” or more primitive versions of Saints than Lizabeta and Grigori were in King of Scars. While the idea of powerful Grisha who helped people in a way that made them be seen as miracle-workers or holy people is alright, them being “beasts” or animals doesn’t follow any traditional lore that I am aware of.

The idea of them being “wickedly evil”, or of someone like the Darkling being considered for Sainthood is not feasible I think, if not for anything else than the facts that he wasn’t a man of faith, he didn’t perform any miracles, he wasn’t a martyr, and he wasn’t particularly heroic or loved by the people, so I don’t see how he could be proclaimed a Saint or get such a large cult following that is not, let’s say, “Satanist” or heretic (to be fair, neither do most of the characters who have at least a pair of working braincells, but I digress). Hell, one of the Darkling’s own nicknames was “the Black Heretic”, so why the U-turn?

I suppose, though, that we could be given an explanation for this last part in the following book, so I’m going to be open about it.

[end spoilers]

Zoya Nazyalensky

I. Love. This. Woman... So much. She’s amazing. She’s one of the strongest, as of now most fleshed-out characters Leigh Bardugo has written, on par with Inej Ghafa, my overall favorite. Her POV was the one I enjoyed the most, her inner dialogue as sharp as her tongue, her story heartbreaking, and her personality as unapologetic but lovable (for those of us not under her glare, at least) as ever. I loved reading about her thoughts, her opinions, her likes and dislikes (though mostly her dislikes), and she’s 100% the type of female character we need more: women who don’t take no shit, but who are still human. Those who are strong but have feelings other than “murder”, that are not defined by what other expect of them, but still bask in the benefits their reputations as heartless give them.

[slight spoilers]

The only problem I had with her POV, one that is extremely easy to fix, is related to her backstory. It’s established that her father was a Suli man, meaning that Zoya is now canonically a biracial woman. This is amazing! The most beautiful, powerful Grisha in all of Ravka (or, dare I say, the Grishaverse) is a woman of color. However, the way that this was established left something to be desired: there was absolutely no indication other than that of her mentioning it that she’s in any way Suli. Compared to Inej, whose culture is shown in absolutely every part of her character, the difference left me a little bit disappointed.

I’d be completely fine with it if she hadn’t known her father, or if she had been taken to the Little Palace when she was too little to remember anything about her family, but she lived 9 years with her parents, and she never makes absolutely any mention of any cultural aspect that she likes or misses about her heritage. This could be done in different ways: a throwaway comment about liking a particular type of Suli food, an art piece that reminds her of Suli art she liked/hated as a kid, a cultural tradition that she still participates in privately, a type of cloth, anything. None of that is there, though, so I was left with the impression that Zoya was whitewashed. Not in the “common” way, of for example a white person playing a black character, but in the characterization sense.

A little bit more on that: when you’re writing characters of color, you have to be careful of many things. To name a few: not falling into stereotypes, making sure colorism has no bearing in the story, not oversimplifying issues faced by people of color, especially if you’re not part of that group, and that you’re not putting a “poc” label on a character that is otherwise white. The last one is in my opinion what has happened with Zoya. This can be avoided (and resolved) easily by including nods towards her culture. An acknowledgment that she’s not a monoracial white Ravkan through anything other than just one comment about how her father was Suli would resolve this issue and give us the most badass WoC in the Grishaverse.

[end slight spoilers]

Isaak

[major spoilers]

As for Isaak, I don’t have a lot to say about him, because overall I think he didn’t need to have a PoV in the story. He wasn’t a character we knew from before, so we didn’t care about him. He dies at the end of the story, his only purpose is to look like Nikolai and have the shortest almost-romance ever. All of this could have been shown through the eyes of either Tolya or Tamar, who always followed him around, so they could’ve shown the same story with no problem. All in all, his part wasn’t bad, but I didn’t care about it, which could maybe be a problem on itself.

Lastly, my biggest problem, left for last: it doesn’t make any sense to me that Nikolai and Zoya would willingly align themselves with the Darkling. Zero. They were extremely and personally affected during the Civil War, the book does an amazing job of showing their trauma as a result of it, but by the end they willingly accept to work with him? No. I don’t want to believe that. It’s a disservice to the sacrifices the characters made in The Grisha Trilogy. Are you telling me Alina lost her power, her friends, faked her death and married Mal for that? For the Darkling to be back? This ending is a disservice to her sacrifice. I didn’t like that plot-twist at all, and I really look forward to the next book, to know how this is all going to play out, because I’m extremely unsure about how good this development will be, story-wise, for the duology.

[end spoilers]

However, and to wrap my longest review yet, I want to say that this isn’t a bad book. The writing is fantastic. The characters, whether I agree with their characterization or not, are fleshed-out and sympathetic. The pacing is great, I read the whole novel in less than two days. While the world was already established in previous books, we got a lot more of depth and information about Ravkan and, mostly, Fjerdan and Shu culture. Bardugo remains one of my favorite writers in the YA and Fantasy genres, but because she is capable of so much, I wanted to give her work a review that reflects what I think of her talent, and of how much more I think she can do as a writer.

"Yet now that the time had come to speak, Nikolai did not want to tell this story. He did not want it to be his story. He’d thought the war was in the past, but it refused to remain there.”

#lbardugo #review #book review #kos spoilers #my review #king of scars spoilers #leigh bardugo #my diverse recs #3 stars #king of scars

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timeandspacelord · 3 years

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I agree that Kaz is implied to be queer but my brain won’t do the work so,,, please expand

Okay, so obviously there's something to be said for ace-ness, but there's equally something to be said about not equating trauma to a sexuality. Some people do identify as ace because of past trauma (of multiple varieties), but I think it does a disservice to both asexuals and people with trauma to automatically lump them together. Kaz has a serious touch aversion, but he's also shown to want to overcome it for the sake of having some kind of relationship with Inej. (Similarly, I don't think it's fair to equate Inej's trauma from her time in the Menagerie to asexuality since she also seems to be willing to try overcoming her trauma response to have a, at least somewhat, physical relationship with Kaz.) There's also the bit where he talks about having wanted relationships in the past. But I do think that, outside of his trauma, it's very likely he falls somewhere on the aro/ace spectrum, because even when he mentioned wanting relationships, it felt very familiar to my own complex feelings on relationships as an aspec person. Maybe that's just more of me projecting onto Kaz, and I obviously don't speak for every aspec person (especially aros), but at worst that just makes it a headcanon based on seeing myself in him, right?

But I also don't think Kaz's implied queerness ends at the aspec stuff. It's implied that he does care very deeply for Jesper (which, yes, is probably meant to be more brotherly based on the whole "Jordie" thing, but I would also like to cite "He'd failed them. He'd failed her. All because he seemed to have some kind of blind spot where Pekka Rollins was concerned. Jesper could be dead already. Inej could be bleeding on the streets of Sweet Reef" as evidence that it could very well be something beyond that. Also QPRs exist, but I digress), and though I can't pull anything from the top of my head right now, my most recent reread of SoC and CK (literally like three weeks ago) left me feeling pretty confident in my assertion that Kaz isn't just attracted to girls. I wish I had more evidence for that one, but it kinda falls in my "just Vibes™️" category. (I also don't know if anything else comes up in the second half of Rule of Wolves, so it's possible I'm missing even more evidence there.) Plus I think there's absolutely something to be said about poly Crows relationship, although I think that one's a little more firmly on the headcanon side of things.

I hope this helped/was what you were looking for lol

#asks #answered #anon #thank you for coming to my 'Kaz Brekker Is Not Straight' TEDTalk #six of crows #soc #kaz brekker #pride #this is also not an invitation for discourse I will actually block anyone who starts anything in bad faith

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