I like shadow and bone a normal amount

We forget that Kaz found his Dad's corpse split open in a barley field like. Not even a month after his 9th birthday.

We forget that not even a month after his 9th birthday he and his brother leave everything he'd every known behind and move to a strange new city.

We forget that forget that 2 weeks after his father's death they meet Pekka Rollins.

We forget that a month after his father's death Kaz and Jordie end up living on the streets.

We forget that a month after his father's death Jordie dies

We forget that Kaz spends nearly 24 hours floating on the Reaper's barge.

We forget the sheer tragedy of Kaz's backstory, to go from happily living on a farm in Lij with his father and brother to floating on corpses for 24 goddamn hours in the span of 6 weeks at absolute most.

We forget that

Or at least I do, idk about y'all

so we all know about “who the hell is jordie?” “someone i trusted. someone i couldn’t afford to lose”, right, but what we forget is the significance of kaz calling jesper ‘jordie’. it’s not just that jesper is a brother to him- jordie was kaz’s protector. jordie was the 13 year old that protected kaz and who kaz protected, the goofy one who made him smile and bought him hot chocolate at night. he felt safe around him. he trusted jordie with his life. in calling jesper ‘jordie’, kaz shows that subconsciously, he trusts jesper to protect him, that he could turn to him should he need it. and every time he yells at jesper, the gambler who couldn’t stay out of the red, for losing another bet, getting in debt again, all he can see is that same thirteen-year-old boy, swindled out of everything he owned and left for dead on the street. with every word he yells at jesper, he silently urges him to stay alive. with every bet jesper makes, all kaz can think is “i can’t lose a brother. not again.”

Shadow and Bone s2 spoilers without context:

holy hell I just realised that when jordie and kaz had firepox they called their makeshift home 'the nest' and then years later, kaz calls his new family the crows. it started off as him and jordie in a nest and then he kept the bird motif and built a new nest with his crows and- babe why are you leaving? for kaz it all goes back to jordie! are you even listening? he and jordie nicknamed their makeshift hovel the nest and he named his future family after birds!

What if the Crows travelled back in time, accidentally saved Kaz' father's life, and came back to a future where Kaz is a farmboy with a family while the rest of them suffer in Ketterdam?

What if they visited him on the farm and discovered that Kaz Rietveld is even more punchable than Kaz Brekker? What then?

Oh my god I just realised that the first time Kaz and Jordie got cornered by gang members they shoved Kaz in the canal and Jordie fished him out and it’s all a metaphor not only because Kaz used Jordie to survive to get back to the city from the Reaper’s Barge so it was once again Jordie who helped him out of the water but because now Kaz is drowning and Jordie isn’t there, he’s drowning in the Ketterdam harbour and his brother isn’t there to fish him out excuse me I’m just gonna go cry for eternity I’ll be right back

I know I've definitely seen posts abt this before, but I can't get over how much the 'Jordie' in Kaz's head is just... not Jordie. Like obviously it's not, bc he's dead, but it's also not even accurate to Kaz's memory of him.

Like these are the sorts of things that are attributed to 'the voice of' Jordie:

Jordie had come for his vengeance at last. It's time to pay your debts, Kaz. You never get something for nothing. But he could hear Jordie laughing. No, little brother. No one is stronger. You've cheated death too many times. Greed may do your bidding, but death serves no man.

While Jordie was no stranger to grandstanding statements, and one might argue Kaz actually picked that habit up from him ('The city is winning so far, but you'll see who wins in the end' for example), these aren't the sorts of things he'd have said to his kid brother??? Yes, he could be arrogant, and he's snappy with / acts superior to Kaz a few times, but as far as we see, Jordie is mostly very good with Kaz; he has a remarkable tolerance for/patience with him, especially for a newly orphaned thirteen year old. Kaz admittedly comes across as a quiet kid and is pretty compliant; he rarely talks to anyone except Jordie and Saskia, he seems to just watch for most of their interactions with 'Hertzoon', he largely does as he's told and doesn't wander off, but he's still like... nine, and wants to do stuff like see the magicians and make all the dogs walk at once, and sulks when Jordie stops him from doing stuff and makes him stay inside. We also see Jordie pretty frequently lying to Kaz to try and make him feel better. But this mental-Jordie is not a comforting presence. The start of SOC is literally set up to make you think Jordie is someone that Kaz has swindled or betrayed, that he fears will come back for vengeance, so it's a big 'oh wait wtf' moment when you realise that he's not a rival gang member or anything, he's just his brother, and it wasn't his fault. But you wouldn't know it! Kaz wants 'Jordie's' voice silenced 'forever' and seems afraid of it, almost— at least, it turns up in vulnerable moments. He thinks that 'paying his debt' (i.e. taking out Rollins) will get rid of it. (Sorry hon. It won't.) Kaz thinks at one point that he still sees Jordie as "infallible" and looks at him through the eyes of the child he'd been, but in other scenes he's glove-puppeting 'his brother' to punish himself. I guess he still sees Jordie, even in death, as the ultimate authority figure, and to cope with guilt/stress/grief he imagines that this is something he's being compelled or commanded to do, and that when he does it he'll have redeemed himself, when really it's just desperate flailing to get the closure he couldn't have. I'm sure he knows goddamn well that this isn't actually what Jordie wanted for him ('You'll go to school') and that's why the mental 'Jordie' is really off, because Kaz knows its not really the will of his brother— it's just him. It talks like him! He doesn't even try to imitate the real Jordie! It's just Kaz, alone— but he's never really been able to come to terms with that.

IM NOT READY TO EXPERIENCE THIS AGAIN

They’d been fools. Maybe one day Kaz could forgive Jordie for not being the perfect brother he held in his heart. Maybe he could even absolve himself for being the kind of gullible, trusting boy who believed someone might simply want to be kind.

was there no one to protect you?

I was just thinking about how Kaz built this heartless persona for himself and how everyone falls for it to varying degrees: He's widely regarded as a monster and as "not made right"; Inej thought he wouldn't come for her and that once she was useless to him that he would discard her; Jesper never knows where exactly he stands with him; Nina "doesn't want to know what dark hole he crawled out of"; Wylan calls him "the most vengeful creature he had ever met"; Matthias believes he's a demon. But in reality his true motives for most things are love and grief and loss of family.

Kaz only wanted money for revenge, he didn't want to try and build a meaningful connection with Imogen because she would distract him from pursuing his vengeance, he only mentions how Pekka conned them out of money to explain how they ended up on the streets, how it was never about the money but about Jordie.

Kaz says that he and Jordie were such easy marks because they missed their dad. Kaz's biggest gripe was not just the loss of Jordie but the illusion of a home and family that Pekka had snatched away before the plague snatched Jordie away too.

It all always leads back to Jordie and his loss and avenging him and about never wanting to be that vulnerable again. Kaz created Kaz Brekker to protect himself, to hide his vulnerabilities. His grief is hidden behind a fake name, his naivety is hidden behind violence, his touch aversion is hidden behind the gloves.

Kaz pushes people away because he fears what will happen if he lets them in. He gets mean when he's vulnerable to hide said vulnerability. He did it in the clocktower, he did it in the bathroom. After he accidently calls Jesper Jordie he lashes out verbally and physically, when Inej asks about Jordie and Pekka's involvement in what happened he recounts how he tortured someone. In both incidents it's again Jordie that he's hiding, that is causing him to be vulnerable. It always leads back to Jordie. Even with Van Eck! He's again angry that he fell for what he fell for before, the thing that made him lose Jordie making him temporarily lose Inej.

In both the Jesper and Inej examples he hides behind violence - by brawling with Jesper and recounting a time when he tortured a young boy. He does this because he loves Inej and Jesper, and it scares him, and he doesn't know what to do with it. Because everyone he's ever loved has died in horrible ways (his father was torn apart by a plough, his brother died from a horrible sickness) and he doesn't want to go through it again - especially since he still hasn't let go of Jordie, although it has been eight years.

Kaz is a person who loves so deeply. Who is mainly motivated by love. Who, when Pekka asks him what he wants, replies "Bring my brother back from the dead." because he never cared about money, nor power, nor anything else. He just wants his brother. All he wanted this whole time is his brother, and since he no longer has him he lashes out, all hurt and grieving. He's hurting so badly that he destroys everyone even mildly involved in what took Jordie away from him. But he only did that because he loved Jordie. It wasn't revenge for the sake of money it was for the sake of love. It was for the sake of Jordie.

Kaz loved Jordie so much that he became the most feared person in Ketterdam, that he took down the King of the Barrel and a merchant from one of the oldest families in Ketterdam (because even if his gripe with Van Eck was unrelated, it's because of Jordie's loss that life snowballed into their interactions and the consequent betrayal and destruction of everything Van Eck held dear). Kaz loved Jordie so much that it changed the entire course of the narrative.

If not for Jordie's loss the heist wouldn't of happened, all of the Crows lives would've been different, some of the Crows would even most likely be dead, and this extends even further to much more major things. The King of Ravka managed to steal the titanium because of his help which will aid Ravka in wars, the path to jurda parem is no longer in the hands of the Fjerdans and a cure is being safely developed in Ravka because Kaz rescued Kuwei, Wylan took over the Van Eck empire because Kaz tampered with Van Eck's will and papers, Inej is working on taking down the slave trade which is only possible because Kaz freed her from her indenture, Nina became the queen of Fjerda because of things that Kaz started (her joining the Dregs instead of being indebted to the Dime Lions, him freeing Matthias, him organising the heist, Matthias dying in the aftermath, her going to Fjerda to bury Matthias and the results which ended up being her and her new lover on the Fjerdan throne trying to fix prejudice against grisha, and women, in the most conservative country).

All of it leads back to Kaz. And he did all of it for Jordie. It all always leads back to Jordie. Jordie and Kaz's love for his big brother and his grief over having him snatched away from him.

GUYS

the contrast between jordie in kaz’s memories, and the ghost of jordie that haunts him, is something so jarring to me. because we all know jordie was kind, kaz’s older brother that bought him hot chocolate and a coat and would stop at nothing to look after him. he even died cuddling his little brother. so then why is the jordie that haunts kaz so mean? why does kaz seem to seek jordie’s forgiveness, despite doing nothing wrong? underneath it all, he believes it was his fault jordie died.

Can’t wait to have this pair absolutely SHATTER my heart tomorrow <33