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nightbloomwitch · 3 years

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All the Wizards I've Loved Before - Inspirations for the Darkling: Dragonlance Legends: Time of the Twins - Book 1, Chapters 5, 7

<--- Previous part

This chapter is the reason why I spent so many words ranting about POV choice in the previous part. I'll try to stop banging on about this so much, but I really can't overstate the amount of difference between the two stories this is going to make from here onwards.

Welcome to

"...the ancient Tower of High Sorcery. Shadow surrounded it by day and by night, for it was guarded by a grove of huge oak trees, the largest trees growing on Krynn...No mortal being, not even a dragon, could enter that accursed ring of guardian oaks...Their vast, spreading branches blotted out the light of moons and stars by night, of the sun by day. Around their roots flowed perpetual night. No soft breeze touched their hoary arms, no storm wind moved the great limbs..."

From Dragonlance: Towers of High Sorcery, 2004

Both Dragonlance and the Grishaverse get a lot of mileage out of dark, spooky forests as liminal spaces. This concept first appears in S&B when Alina arrives at the Little Palace:

"Then we entered a thick stand of trees, large enough that it felt like a small wood, and passed through a long, dark corridor where the branches made a dense, braided roof above us...[I had] that sense of crossing the boundary between two worlds."

(That last line is so obnoxious; normally Leigh's problem is with telling rather than showing, but in that case she just did both, as though she really, really needed to make absolutely certain that the reader realised how clever she was being by using the physical environment to represent the heroine's Threshold Crossing into the Special World).

She uses the concept again at the end of the novel, when Alina encounters the mythical Morozova's herd in the Permafrost forest.

The enchanted thorn wood in Ayama and the Thorn Wood fulfills this role again:

"...a shadowy wood. The gray-bark trees were tall and so thick with thorn-covered brambles that Ayama could see nothing but darkness between them...The wood was lit by stars - though she knew very well it was the middle of the day."

The Thorn Wood is vaguely implied to be in the same location as the Shadow Fold and/or monastery of Saint Feliks, which in RoW, where the central quince tree is described as "the doorway between worlds".

I'm mostly certain that the thorn wood imagery in the Grishaverse is derived from Biblical imagery of the "thorns and thistles" that were man's lot after his exile from Eden, and Abel-Shittim (the Field of Thorns) where the Israelites dwelt in Numbers.

"Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field" - KJV Genesis 3:18

In addition to that, sacred groves and so on are universal mythic concepts which are found everywhere in fantasy fiction - the sacred grove is the dwelling place of the Goddess, and the traditional site of the ritual battle between the Waxing and Waning kings we discussed last chapter - so I'd never accuse her of copying the idea from anywhere, but I still think it's worth noting that it appears repeatedly in the same context in both stories.

---

The POV character for this chapter is Caramon and Raistlin's half-sister Kitiara Uth-Matar - Dragon Highlord, seducer and destroyer of men, and all-round baddest bitch in Krynn.

Hands of Doom, from the 1987 Dragonlance Legends Calendar

simp simp simp simp, I love herrrrr

This is a case of could-be-borrowing, could-be-coincidence; the Darkling also has a half-sister, as revealed in When Water Sang Fire and "confirmed canon" in RoW; both Kitiara and Ulla are dark feminine villain-ish types; I'm mostly certain that the Darkling having a half-sister who's a mermaid is a reference to the Greek legend of Thessalonike the mermaid, who was half-sister to Alexander the Great, but quite possibly it's a combination of the ideas from both sources.

Alexander the Great with his sister, by Mentis Bostantzoglou (Bost), 1984

Like the Darkling and Ulla in WWSF. Kit and Raistlin have a tense, mistrustful relationship, but the bond of blood can't be denied. Kit and Raistlin share a lot of personality traits (though often manifested in opposite ways), whereas Caramon is more or less the "white sheep" of the family.

We're reminded of the likeness and unlikeness between them by another parallel drawn between the openings of Chronicles and Legends.

When the heroes reunite after five years at the beginning of Chronicles, Kitiara is the only one not to show up. Instead, she sends a note with "her regrets and best wishes to all of [her friends] and her love to her brothers". Later it's revealed that the new Lord to whom she has sworn allegiance is Ariakis, the champion of Takhisis, Goddess of Evil, and general of the enemy forces. To make a very long story short, Kit schemes and fights against her former friends until Ariakis is defeated, then she replaces Ariakis as commander of the dragon armies and lets the heroes go, because...well, now they'll have to spend the rest of their long, happy, peaceful lives knowing that they owe her for sparing them. Not because she cares, or anything. Definitely not.

In Chapter 3 of Legends:

"Caramon wrote to him, Tanis. I saw the letter. It was - it tore my heart. Not a word of blame or reproach. It was filled with love. He begged his brother to come back and live with us. He pleaded with him to turn his back on the darkness. ... "It came back," Tika whispered. "Unopened. The seal wasn't even broken. And on the outside was written, "I have no brother. I know no one named Caramon." And it was signed, Raistlin!"

This time, there's no need to shock the reader with the fact that Raistlin has sworn allegiance to Takhisis, because we already know about it from the last book. In fact, a different betrayal is implied. In the prologue, Astinus suggests that Raistlin's loyalty to Takhisis is false.

Kitiara is generally affable to everyone, but then she'll stab them in the back as soon as the need arises, whereas we have known Raistlin to be the opposite - caustic and spiteful to (almost) everyone's face (seeing him take a leaf out of Kit's seduction playbook in this trilogy is really something else), but up till now he could always be relied upon to save the day, no matter how treacherous he seemed.

So...could this deliberate parallel mean he's up to something? (Yes. Raistlin is always up to something). At the end of Chronicles, he told Caramon that it was time for them to go their separate ways, because he had Very Important Things to do that would surely result in Caramon's death if he followed. Is this some kind of ruse to keep his brother out of whatever he's cooking up? (Also yes). When he comes back into the story, will he be on a different side, as Kitiara was?

---

Raistlin invites Kitiara to his Tower, and they sit around drinking wine and arguing about whether or not to team up and take over the world.

"With your help, we could rule [the continent] Ansalon, you and I. In fact" -- Kitiara turned suddenly, her face alight with eagerness - "with your power we could rule the world! We don't need Lady Crysania or our hulking brother --" " 'Rule the world,' " Raistlin repeated softly, his eyes burning. "Rule the world? You still don't understand, do you, my dear sister? Let me make this as plain as I know how." ... "I don't give a damn about the world!" he said softly. "I could rule it tomorrow if I wanted it! I don't." "You don't want the world." Kit shrugged, her voice bitter with sarcasm. "Then that leaves only--" ... He could help me! she thought angrily. He is truly as powerful as they said. More so! But he's insane. He's lost his mind... Then, unbidden, a voice spoke to her from somewhere deep inside. What if he isn't insane? What if he really means to go through with this? Coldly, Kitiara considered his plan, looking at it carefully from all angles. What she saw horrified her. No. He could not win! And, worse, he would probably drag her down with him!"

The relationship between Baghra and the Darkling is a bit of an enigma, and might be an original idea from Leigh or inspired by something else she hasn't disclosed; none of the wizards on our list have significant mother figures (Flagg is...complicated, he very occasionally has one, because Stephen King is awesome and doesn't waste time on boring concepts such as canon or continuity, but that's a story for another time).

Caramon and Raistlin were raised by Kitiara since their mother became very ill after they were born. Just in this one chapter, there's multiple connections we can draw between Kit and Baghra.

In S&B, the Darkling tells Alina about his plan to destroy the Shadow Fold (with her help) almost immediately, while they are traveling to the Little Palace, then it's revealed later that he was (sort of) lying. Here in Legends, we're still kept in suspense about what Raistlin's plan is for several more chapters. Even so, Kit's reaction to figuring out The Plan is fairly similar to Baghra's.

"I never wanted him to feel the way I had as a child...So I taught him that he had no equal, that he was destined to bow to no man. I wanted him to be hard, to be strong. I taught him the lesson my mother and father taught me: to rely on no one. That love - fragile and fickle and raw - was nothing compared to power. He was a brilliant boy. He learned too well.”

Like Baghra to the Darkling, Kit values her brother's immense magical power, which elevates him above all other men, until she decides his ambitions have gone too far, and then she decides he must be stopped.

Also like Baghra, she rejects the child/sibling that can't be used to further her own ambitions (Ulla/Caramon).

"Something within her rose to the challenge. The baby would live! She would make him live, whether he wanted to or not. "My first fight," she used to tell people proudly, "was with the gods. And I won!" And now! Kitiara studied him. She saw the man. She saw -- in her mind's eye -- that whining, puking baby. Abruptly, she turned away."

Like Baghra, her relationship with her family is based more on power, pride and control than genuine love; there is love in there somewhere struggling to show itself, but the world is cruel and love is weakness; in each case the guardian's determination to ensure the child's survival comes from the guardian's pride and will to defy the odds than it does from love of the child.

Kit also goes about trying to derail The Plan in the same way Baghra does:

"He must be stopped...But we do not have to confront Raistlin directly. His scheme hinges upon Lady Crysania. Remove her, and we stop him. He need never know I had anything to do with it, in fact..."

This last one speaks for itself, really.

"When he was small, I taught him that to refuse to do my bidding meant a whipping. It seems he must learn that lesson again!"

This is an awful lot of comparisons over the course of just three pages. There are even more similarities between them if you take the rest of the series into account. I honestly don't think Leigh did this consciously, or that Baghra is based on Kit at all (I do think Zoya is inspired by Kit though, which we will come to much later on), and their roles in the story aren't equivalent, so I don't think there's much value to be had in comparing them as characters. What is worth comparing though is the way the impact of this harsh upbringing is depicted in each story.

Dragonlance in general (not just this trilogy) expends a lot of time and effort on debating about "who's to blame" for Raistlin's descent into villainy, and whilst the conclusion it comes to is broadly the same as TGT (i.e. himself), you definitely can't say they didn't explore every other possible alternative first. It's obvious that whilst a certain degree of Raistlin's (and Caramon's) problems can be traced back to Kit's harsh substitute parenting and eventual neglect, that's not anywhere near the whole story. Raistlin has significant, complex relationships with other people and societal groups in the world (although those relationships generally involve him deliberately excluding himself from the group), and being flogged as a kid is definitely not the most traumatic event of his life (it barely even rates). About the most you can say is that if the point of this was to harden him up, then it really worked. He never expects loyalty from anyone, on the basis of blood or anything other than self-interest, and in Chronicles, he's not at all bothered or surprised when it's revealed that Kit has betrayed the group.

When Raistlin departs to the Tower of High Sorcery in the epilogue of Chronicles, he's fully accepted the world's judgement of him as the villain. He knows himself to be in the right and has convinced himself that he neither wants nor needs loyalty, validation or acceptance from his family or anyone else, and this is why it's so difficult for anyone to get through to him in this trilogy. His internal conflict begins when, to his own disgust, he finds that his human heart and body aren't so ossified as he thought they were, and he does want Crysania's love.

The Darkling's inner world is for the most part left to the readers' interpretation, but it appears to me that he is the complete opposite to Raistlin. He is starving for love, obsessed with his self-image, and he seems to define himself by his layered group identities. His creation of the Second Army and the Little Palace is for the sake of the Grisha. His appeals to Alina are for the sake of Ravka. When Alina comes to the Palace, he wants to give her a black kefta because she is the only Etherealki like him, and he is distressed when she rejects it, because she is excluding herself from their group of two, thus leaving him alone again. When Alina finally concedes to their shared identity on the night of the Winter Fete, he is unable to resist his desire to be with her. Rather than being confident in his own self-knowledge, he is constantly agitated about forgetting his original self, which is why he gives Alina his name in R&R.

Genya tells Alina that it is at the Darkling's insistence that the Grisha in the Little Palace eat (and by extrapolation, dress) like peasants, "Saints forbid we forget we're real Ravkans."

No origin for these customs is given, so it's left up to the readers' imagination . You can theorise that this is purely performative, because the Grisha need to prove to the otkazat'sya that they are loyal to the Crown and the country; you can equally validly theorise that this is a manifestation of the Darkling's personal quest for authenticity, the need to prove to himself that he is still the same peasant boy as when he began, that he is a good Ravkan, by clinging onto the memory of things from that life and making them visible around him at all times.

His relationship with Baghra is the only significant personal relationship he has, due to their longevity and the secret of his true identity. It seems that he wants to have her around, since she lives at the Little Palace under his watch, and he appears to visit her regularly and (foolishly) shares his plans with her. Even so, he's resentful of the fact that she still has an emotional hold over him, and she can still make him jump by shouting at him, like he's twelve years old again. When she betrays him, he's deeply hurt but he can't stand to kill her. He's distressed when she throws herself off a cliff in R&R, and it's not anything to do with the fact that she has attempted to thwart his plans.

Because he doesn't get the love he needs from Baghra, he casts around looking for it in other places. In RoW it says "he'd searched the world for his mother's other children, hungry for kinship, for a sense of himself in others." Since he is immortal and other people live and die so quickly, he eventually begins to seek love from intergenerational groups - the common people of Ravka, the Second Army - rather than individuals. After his (first) death, Alina says that "For all his crimes, the Darkling had loved Ravka, and he'd wanted its love in return," and since this is the denouement, I believe we're supposed to accept this as truth from the author through the mouthpiece of the protagonist. Then in RoW he sacrifices his life (again) "for Ravka", and asks to be remembered as a Saint, so that he will forever be loved by the people.

This fixation on group identity also affects the way he judges other people - when a person joins the cause (Alina, Genya, Zoya, Azarov in RoW), he expects that they will have the same unwavering loyalty to the cause that he has, regardless of personal cost.

(Of course, what's so irritating about all of the above is that due to the non-existence of his POV and Leigh's known opinions on the matter, absolutely anything he says or does can be written off as "manipulation!!", but I refuse to buy into that).

This isn't a negative criticism - it's obvious that she's picked the bits she liked out of all these wizards and left out the bits she didn't, Raistlin's chronic illness being the prime example of that - but I do find it troubling that the Darkling is already the most abused out of all of them in some ways (due to his minority status), and yet she still chooses to add more pain and expects us to not feel badly for him.

---

"Now you see the importance of this Reverend Daughter of Paladine! It was fate brought her to me, just when I was nearing the time for my journey." Kitiara could only stare at him, aghast. Finally, she found her voice. "How-how to you know she will follow you? Surely you didn't tell her!" "Only enough to plant the seed in her breast." Raistlin smiled, looking back to that meeting. Leaning back, he put his thin fingers to his lips. "My performance was, frankly, one of my best. Reluctantly I spoke, my words drawn from me by her goodness and purity. They came out, stained with blood, and she was mine...lost through her own pity."

gasp

Just imagine how different things could have been if Leigh hadn't been so completely committed to this idea that the Darkling must deceive the reader in order to serve as a warning against real wizards.

Raistlin is the same scheming, conniving, tricky bastard he has been for years, and we hear this from his own mouth on page 81 of 398 (of Book 1 out of 3); after the prologue (which is supposed to be unsettling), Legends allows the reader to be confident in their interpretation of what is real and what is not, because we are told from the very beginning that Raistlin intends to use Crysania for some dark purpose, and even the methods of his manipulation. Like the Darkling, it's rare for him to outright lie; generally he tells (select parts of) the truth as he sees it, in the way he thinks will be the most appealing to Crysania, and he does everything he can to make sure she feels sorry for him. When we're in his POV we get to witness him planning how to string her along and weighing up how far he thinks he can push his luck.

This is so much fun. It's interesting. Occasionally it's hilarious, in an oh-gosh-how-sweet-he's-so-scared-of-catching-feelings kind of way. It's increasingly maddening every time he refuses to give in. If you have ever in your life considered lying to someone to get what you need from them, maybe you can find it relatable. Maybe it does make you hate him just the tiniest little bit. By the end, when everything has gone out of anyone's control, it's tragic.

But perhaps most importantly, it doesn't make the reader feel stupid or unwanted for caring about him.

I love Raistlin to bits, I really, really do, but I still find him less sympathetic than the Darkling (at least in S&B), because I know for certain that he has chosen to do things that he knows, in his heart-of-hearts, are wrong. I was there, Gandalf; I lived through it with him. My problem with the big reveal in S&B is that it's entirely possible that the Darkling has actually changed his mind (or is in the process of changing his mind, or would have changed his mind later) about "enslaving" Alina if the relationship had been allowed to continue and Baghra hadn't pulled the rug out from under him. Because we're never allowed to see his side of the story (until RoW), it's open season for the reader to interpret and project onto him however they want to, and incorrigible bleeding-hearts like me who always insist on the most generous possible interpretation of every character (because people are good by default, actually!) are willing to let him get away with far more than Leigh wants us to (as she always complains about).

In fact, the story even seems to be constructed with this in mind.

At the time of the reveal, the reader is still intended to view the Darkling as Alina's primary love interest, and therefore we are well-disposed to him; right now he's looking even better in comparison to Mal, who has just had a great no-holds-barred argument with Alina and made her feel terrible about herself. Even Alina (briefly) doubts Baghra's accusations. As an isolated incident, I don't regard Alina's snap decision to flee the Palace as poor characterisation. After the deprived, lonely, unhealthy life she's had, everything seems to be going too well for her all of a sudden, she's only just started to be confident that she really fits in at the Little Palace, and now Mal has come along planted the seed of doubt in her. She's not even sober at the time. It makes in-character sense for her to catastrophise and run away.

What sours me on it is that taking into account what we discussed at the end of the prologue chapter about the Darkling's introduction and the establishment of narrative expectations, it seems that it should be a mistake that Alina misjudges him based on the accusations of others. We were told from the very beginning that he was Bad, when we actually met him he seemed to be not so bad, but then in the end it turns out he was Very Bad indeed. What have we learned? Always believe the rumours that people in your own in-group tell you about people in the out-group, just in case? Very troubling, especially when the out-group in question is clearly identified as a persecuted minority with an close real-world equivalent.

The repetition of tasks is a standard fairytale (and fantasy) motif; if the hero fails the first attempt to complete the task assigned to him by the story, then it's only fair that he be given another attempt (or two, or five. However many it takes). As was previously mentioned, the early chapters seem to be setting up for Alina the lesson or task of overcoming her fear of and prejudice against the Grisha and the Darkling.

In the camping scene before they arrive at the Little Palace, the Darkling confronts Alina with the question of whether it would be "better" to kill an enemy with a sword, rather than with the Cut, to which she replies that she doesn't know.

"But I thought of the look that had flickered over his features, the shame in his voice when he'd talked about the Black Heretic, and I couldn't shake the feeling that I had failed some kind of test."

She has failed the "test", explicitly identified as such in the text, of understanding him, and accepting the nature and necessity of his (and thus, her own) Grisha powers.

On the night of the Winter Fete, Alina has just about fully accepted her new life with him at the Palace - she is about to pass the "test". The Darkling almost chooses to forgo news of the stag for the sake of being with her, but changes his mind at the last minute.

"Tonight, we received word that my men have spotted Morozova's herd. The key to the Shadow Fold is finally within our graps, and right now, I should be in the war room, hearing their report. I should be planning our trip north. But I'm not, am I?"

Alina's "test" is to understand the Darkling and accept his and her own powers; the Darkling's "test" is to give in to love for Alina and thus abandon his quest for Morozova's power (and the rest of the plan).

When they reunite when the stag appears at the end, that ought to be the second chance for each of them to learn from their previous mistake and make the correct choice; instead, the Darkling has now fully descended into villainy and goes straight to forcing the collar on Alina, and thus she never considers hearing him out or letting him back into her heart.

I know I said in the introduction that I would resist talking about Jane Eyre, but very briefly, the whole sequence of events in S&B - Alina's "imprisonment" in the Little Palace, followed by her discovery of her lover's dark secret, followed by her escape and time spent in the wilderness, and so on - as well as certain aspects of the imagery, really do make it seem as though S&B is supposed to be some kind of fantasy appropriation of Jane, except then there's another two books and Jane murders Rochester in the end.

How unsurprising.

Manipulation is the beginning of Raistlin's character arc, but it's the end of the Darkling's, since as Mr Barnes keeps pointing out (to everyone's amusement), the Darkling is "a little bit conceptual" and more of an "allegory" than an actual character after the first book. Leigh never lets him progress beyond the (alleged) evil of his original intentions, which is tragic because, like Raistlin, he really does think that this is the only way to save the world. The Plan is far too important to risk it all on a girl being uncooperative, and if only she knew everything he knew and had suffered as he had suffered, she would agree with him and go along with it anyway.

---

Kitiara hangs out with Lord Soth, the Death Knight.

"Knight of the Black Rose," continued Raistlin, "who died in flames in the Cataclysm before the curse of the elfmaid you wronged dragged you back to bitter life."

The placement of this scene and dialogue is really clever. The above quote is all that is told of Soth's backstory in this chapter, but Kitiara narrated the full story back when Soth was introduced in Book 3 of Chronicles:

This is the same chapter in which we revisit the prologue scene, and learn that Raistlin has lied to Crysania in order to lure her to his Tower, which recalls Soth’s seduction of the elfmaid Isolde. In the prologue, Raistlin’s offer to Crysania is specifically described as a “proposal”. His current allegiance to the goddess Takhisis substitutes for Soth's first wife. Like Isolde, Crysania believes that it's her mission from her god to redeem her dark lover from his past misdeeds.

In the event that the reader has missed this or forgotten the story from Chronicles, much later on in the book the priestesses of Paladine will explicitly compare Crysania with Isolde:

“...There was a young girl in our Order who had the power of true healing. That young girl who was seduced by the Solamnic knight. What was his name?

“Soth,” said Quarath. “Lord Soth, of Dargaard Keep.”

( I rag on Leigh about this sort of thing all the time, so it’s only fair that I point out that this bit of dialogue adds nothing to the scene and appears to exist only to make sure the reader notices the parallel. Even Dragonlance isn’t completely immune t o my editorial pen).

Since the Soth/Isolde story seems parallel to the Raistania story so far, it hints that Raistania could progress along the same lines. On the other hand, Raistlin knows the story and deliberately mentions it, so does that mean he knows he's initiated a perilous chain of events, and has he planned ahead to avoid suffering Soth's fate? Or will his pride cause him to disregard the story's warning, until it's too late?

We’re not told whether Crysania also knows the story, but if she does, it isn’t in the front of her mind, because she doesn’t recognise Soth when he looms out of the shadows and kills her at the end of Chapter 7. (Yes, really). Crysania considers her brief death and subsequent resurrection to be sure signs of Paladine’s support for her mission to redeem Raistlin, but to the reader, taking into account the additional knowledge gained from the other POVs, she appears to be marching onward to certain doom.

It’s not all bad news, though, since there's going to be another parallel in a few chapters' time which foreshadows a different possible outcome for Raistania.

This is not exactly something Leigh could have recreated, since she was starting a brand new story, but the fact remains that all of the Grishaverse worldbuilding that could have been used to foreshadow a good or bad ending to Darklina was done after TGT had ended. Like Raistania, Darklina does have two possible outcomes paralleled in other stories, but instead of being used for foreshadowing, both the other stories were published after R&R when it was too late for them to generate any narrative tension, and so they feel like missed opportunities instead. The "bad ending", where one of them murders the other, is Eryk/Annika in DitW – Eryk, of course, is the Darkling, Annika seems to be specifically equated with Alina due to her white-blond hair and her status as a war orphan; the "good ending" is Ayama/Beast in Ayama and the Thorn Wood.

This is admittedly more of a stretch, but it’s possible to read AatTW as connected to TGT because:

The setting is an unnamed pastoral kingdom in a “western valley”, which recalls the farmland of the Tula Valley in west Ravka where the Shadow Fold is located;

The Beast is a dark, werewolf-like creature. Leigh wrote the song “Winter Prayer” which describes the Darkling as a “shadow hound”; my first thought was that this was a reference to Rochester being associated with the gytrash in Jane, but maybe it also has something to do with “The Hound” Clegane? In The Stand, Randall Flagg appears to Mother Abigail as "a huge Rocky Mountain timberwolf, its jaws hanging open in a sardonic grin, its eyes burning. There was a beaten silver collar around its thick neck, a thing of handsome, barbarous beauty, and from it dangled a small stone of blackest jet..." The Dog (of the Underworld, i.e. Cerberus) is also one of the symbols of the sacred kings in the Goddess story. The poetic meaning of the dog is 'Guard the Secret' - the Secret being the true name of the King, on which his magical power and his life force depends.

Ayama is a poor girl, and considered to be unattractive, like Alina in the beginning, but she discovers the “monster” inside her through her romance with the Beast. Like Alina and the Darkling, they recognise the loneliness in one another;

The first story Ayama tells, about a boy who can never be full because his mother swallowed the night sky, which is now inside him, meaning that he must swallow a piece of the sun in order to complete himself, is impossible not to relate to Darklina.

If Leigh had had the Language of Thorns ideas earlier, she could have woven the Ayama/Beast story into S&B as a Ravkan folktale that Alina knows, or something, which also would have served to pad out her very thin worldbuilding. According to her interview with Hypable on 28 September 2017, she wrote three of the stories at the same time as TGT as a worldbuilding exercise, but the two stories that really matter to the main characters – AatTW and WWSF - were written afterwards.

If she had written any scenes from the Darkling's POV, she could have used his memories of Annika to explain why he has trust issues about giving Alina an amplifier.

---

There's a great analysis post on the "If I had cut him down with a sword would that make it any better?" scene by black-rose-writings

Go read it!

I was intending to aim for one post per week, but at that rate we will likely be here for years; honestly I didn't think there would be this much to talk about in every chapter. Everyone who has seen the Twitter thread will know that I'm a few chapters ahead there, the parallels between the stories are only ramping up, and as I think further ahead to the other books and films on the list, I'm starting to think that they might all be like this.

This one gave me a lot of trouble because I kept getting side-tracked thinking about how terribly written Baghra is and how I have no idea how Leigh wants me to interpret her (many, many paragraphs were written and deleted, count yourselves lucky), let's see if I can update a little faster next time...?

Next part --->

#shadow and bone #the darkling #darklina

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