#Shadow and Bone

[lilxmoo]

Kaz loving magic tricks as a boy and falling in love with a girl who can dissapear. Inej being told to find a boy who remembers her favorite flower, and falling in love with a boy who remembers her most important dreams. Jesper losing the one person who saw him as blessed and falling in love with a boy who sees him as even more than that. Wylan seeing magic in every mundane thing, and falling in love with a boy with magic in his veins. Nina growing up knowing she would always be targeted and falling in love with a boy who vows to protect her. Matthias losing his love for the world as a child and falling in love with a girl who loves even the simplest of pleasures.

No one writes romance like Leigh Bardugo

[planetary-silver]

i feel a little crazier every time i reread soc because genuinely why are they the found family of all time. like kaz always looking out for and taking care of wylan because no one looked out for him… kaz calling nina “nina dear”… inej and nina’s friendship… matthias’s bond with inej… kaz calling jesper jordie because it was the name of someone he trusted and didnt want to lose… jesper protecting wylan from his father and saying “i can read to him”… matthias taking care of nina after the parem… inej and kaz being broken in the same way and protecting each other… genuinely i get sick to my fucking stomach everytime i read these books. and don’t even get me started on crooked kingdom chapter 40.

[maybemacdc]

sometime, somewhere in ketterdam

[the-guild-codex-and-other-things]

Wylan: So... What are we doing?

Kaz: Oh. Crime.

Wylan, mildly shocked: Crime. Good. Okay. Crime.

[apollos-constant-crisis]

Thinking about the ruin and rising epilogue because yeah I do want a life full of ordinary things. I want to tell stories and teach things and have friends over during the winter. I want tea and lemon cake and love

[meanitlikethat]

It’s the way I need to reread six of crows

[titansandcurses]

it should be against the law for streaming services to use shows they canceled to advertise. stop parading her dead body around you bitch you literally killed her

[fan-a-tink]

A LIFETIME OF QUESTIONS Shadow & Bone | 1.03 "The Making at the Heart of the World"

[dungeonbat]

“My love for you is dangerous, but it’s the safest place you’ll ever be.��

them: but he’s my sweet baby boy!

him: a literal war criminal, has a kill count that needs scientific notation, once leveled a city because someone looked at his person the wrong way, breathes in moral ambiguity, walks into ambushes like he planned them, sharpens knives just to think, holds grudges like sacred texts, is banned from six galaxies and still wanted in nine, would burn the world and everything in between just to save the one thing he loves

[thesongofvillains]

Ohmygod I don’t know if someone’s thought of this already but I just realized to think of this for the first time: in the show Wylan’s playing flute for money on the street until these guys come to rob him and he goes home looking sad and Kaz is there waiting. They have a conversation about how Kaz needs Wylan’s help again but Wylan only agreed to do it once bc he needed the money then, so Kaz points out he’s still broke, asking when was the last time he ate. So clearly he got Wylan recruited bc he needed money again.

In the book Jesper says he met Kaz after some guys jumped him and Kaz saved him from a beating so Inej says Kaz probably hired them to attack him so Jesper would feel indebted to him and come work with him. And Jesper goes ”He wouldn’t— of course he would.” Making it a pretty solid theory considering nobody knows Kaz as well as Inej and Jesper seems to think it seems like something he’d do too.

So did Kaz hire those guys to rob the little money Wylan had made so he’d have no choice but to agree to help to get paid? Because clearly they didn’t hurt Wylan or take anything else, he came back with his bag and not looking any worse. Two burly guys just took whatever coins he had in his flute case apparently. I’d say Kaz orchestrated that too because he knew to wait for Wylan at his place and knew he was in need of money and didn’t even have enough to eat (tbf Kaz seems to know everything anyway) so he could convince him to help by offering a job like he had last time after which Wylan said he wouldn’t do it again. Son of a bitch.

[bazkrekkerbrokemyshin]

you know how in the show jesper and inej got into the little palace by joining the circus act or whatever and kaz refused, saying he'd get in his own way? book kaz would have ABSOLUTELY just done a ton of epic magic tricks to get in. like??? it would have been so easy

[storyadler]

YESSSS!

[bobosaur]

I am aware and acknowledge Aleksander’s trauma, and I never minimize or dismiss it entirely, unlike your pro-Darkling followers who constantly do to Alina. I am sure you are not blind to these posts, and I defend her in that context the same way you do for your character. The show does make him seem more sympathetic than the Darkling in the books, so I can understand your enthusiasm for defending him. But if you read the later books, you’ll see he was extremely cruel to Alina, especially after the collar incident, retraumatizing her repeatedly to force her submission. I won’t spoil it for you, but one of his worst acts involves her childhood orphanage, the way he carries it out in the last book is heartbreaking to read.

Regarding the Fold, I was referring to its expansion, not its creation. The destruction of Novokribirsk - he knew full well the act would result in a massacre of innocents, both civilians and Grisha. Yet he did it anyway. What would that have accomplished? He already had Alina under his control. Was this about brokering peace for his people by killing en masse? No. It was about expanding the Fold, which was always his intention after discovering the Sun Summoner - with or without her consent (though her consent would have made it easier).

“He uses merzost to protect Grisha from slaughter.” “And yes, it hurts him, but that does not erase the reason he reached for it in the first place. It was not selfish. It was a response to centuries of loss and genocide.”

I understand his original intention may have been noble, but not afterward - especially when he uses the nichevo’ya created via merzost to indiscriminately cause mass deaths across Ravka - killing innocent Ravkans and Grisha. This is driven purely by his ambition to control Alina and Ravka, not to protect Grisha - not anymore. The “noble cause” becomes a facade for control and his personal suffering doesn’t negate the harm he inflicts on others.

“Meanwhile, Alina also bears responsibility. She engages in warfare, and people die.”

At this point, how is the Darkling’s merzost-driven, homicidal rampage her fault? Should she just lay down her arms and surrender to his demands like an obedient little puppet? This is the agency I keep emphasizing - the one that seems to fall on deaf ears. She defies him and chooses to hunt for the amplifiers instead. Yes, war has casualties, but she isn’t the one going scorch-earth across Ravka.

“She follows Aleksander’s path almost immediately after his death, despite swearing she would never use merzost.”

Sorry, I don’t follow. She immediately loses her power afterward, she doesn’t use merzost. I’ve seen antis use that quote from ROW to push that narrative, so I’ll address it in a future post when I have the time. The same goes for her giving up power in the books.

“She would not last even a few years in what Aleksander endured for centuries.”

Nor would he if the roles were reversed. In Demon in the Wood, he was equally vulnerable at a young age - betrayed, nearly drowned, and almost killed for trusting the wrong person. His inexperience led to betrayal, just as Alina’s trust in him led to the collar. Neither was inherently more resilient in their youth. The difference? Alina overcomes her naivety, rejects him, and sacrifices her power, while Aleksander’s survival hardens him into violence and distrust.

“Yes, her pain is real. But so is his. And if we are going to talk about cycles, power, and choices, then let’s do it without turning one character into a villain just to paint the other as a savior.”

Again, I never dismissed his trauma. I use it to highlight the hypocrisy in your supporters’ arguments. If you’d read any of my posts, you’d see I never called him a villain. Alina is the protagonist, he is the antagonist. Neither is morally superior. My issue is with Aleksander’s later choices and how you and your supporters use his past trauma to justify them.

I've „love” reading comments from antis saying things like “The Darkling is 500 years old, he should have processed his trauma and gotten over it by now” and honestly, it’s disturbing how common this line of thinking is. Especially when it comes with the second part: “Our (enter all Grishaverse characters) have a right to be traumatized, they were just kids dragged into war.”

Yes, they were young. Yes, they suffered. No one is taking that away. But what shocks me is how quickly these same people dismiss the concept that long-term trauma doesn't fade with age. If anything, untreated trauma accumulates. It changes a person in ways that are invisible until something breaks. There is no magical threshold of years after which you're “supposed” to be healed. It doesn’t work like that. Being exposed to war, death, betrayal and existential fear for centuries without a moment of true rest or help does not heal someone. It destroys them gradually. It reshapes how they think, how they love, how they connect. Some of the most devastating cases of PTSD I’ve ever read about were people who didn’t even begin to feel the full weight of their experiences until decades later. Some were veterans of the Second World War who never spoke about what they saw until they were in their seventies or eighties, when their defenses started slipping. Some carried guilt and grief for over half a century and it still haunted them in their sleep. And those were people who had families, support, and the knowledge that the war eventually ended. Now compare that to a person who never gets peace. Never had the war end. Never had help. Someone who is constantly under threat. Who sees each generation repeat the same mistakes and bury the people they once fought beside. Who walks through the ashes of every hope and must start again, knowing how it will end. That’s not an excuse for every decision he made. But it is a necessary perspective if we’re talking about trauma. What antis are doing is trivializing the condition they claim to care about. Because if trauma only matters when it’s happening to a 20-year-old, and not to a person who’s been in survival mode for centuries, then you’ve reduced the concept of PTSD and depression to a short-term teen plot device. Some of these people don’t even realize how dehumanizing their arguments are. I’ve seen people say that age should equal healing—as if time itself is a cure. It isn’t. People live and die with trauma. They carry it into every relationship and every silence. Healing is possible, yes, but not in conditions that keep re-traumatizing you over and over again. Not in a world that refuses to change. And certainly not alone. I don’t know how anyone can genuinely think that after 500 years of war, grief, and loss, someone should have healed unless they fundamentally don’t understand what trauma is. Or unless they’ve only ever seen trauma in fiction—specifically in stories tailored to let them insert themselves into young protagonists while disregarding any character who doesn’t fit the healing narrative they prefer. This kind of thinking doesn’t come from people who understand war. It comes from people who need their heroes clean and simple, and their villains easily disposable. And that’s not analysis. That’s comfort.

[kaz5370]

They are just so cute.

[astridhoff03]

More cultures represented in animation and movies in general

I‘m all here for what Maggie Kang, one of the producers of K-pop demon hunters said in an interview. We need more representation of cultures and other countries in animated films as well as in live action ones. There’s a trend going on with the Huntrix girls if they were hunters from other countries and every art piece looks incredible how it represents the country through clothes and how the people look. How K-pop demon hunters combined modern K-pop popculture with Korean mythology was just wonderful and gives the movie even more depth as it already has. I also wouldn’t mind seeing more fantasy movies and series going more into this representation like Shadow and Bone or like in Black Panther were it was influenced by African culture. Personally I would really love to see a film about native Americans, their culture, their beliefs and their folklore in an animated movie.