#honestly I want to go more into Kaz's disability and how it canonically affects him

[fantastic-nonsense]

going to be quietly controversial on main and say that I don't think Kaz and Inej would live in and/or retire to Kaz's childhood farmhouse outside of Lij

Besides it being an incredibly impractical decision from a travel/communications standpoint and frankly a probably traumatizing experience for Kaz to live in a house where there's nothing for him but the ghosts of people he watched die, I just don't see either of them wanting to live there even semi-permanently. Give them a cute townhouse or apartment in a nicer district of Ketterdam, or have them renovate the Slat and make it super nice, or have them retire to the Suli caravans in Ravka, even, but a country farmhouse life just doesn't seem like a future either of them would want.

Kaz spends a significant portion of Crooked Kingdom refusing to abandon "his" city even though he'll be arrested and killed if he's caught. By the time of the duology he's spent nearly half his life in the city and will certainly be spending many more years there as leader of the Dregs. Ketterdam is his home; he's recreated himself as a Barrel Boy and even after stripping away his armor for Inej and his friends I don't think he'll ever want to go back to being the farmboy he once was. Do I think he probably needs to acknowledge his past and stop mentally separating "Rietveld" from "Brekker" at some point? Yeah. But you can't recreate the past after growing up and experiencing trauma. There is no back; there is only forward.

Meanwhile, Inej isn't "fit for a normal life" any more than Kaz is (which is something I think a lot of people forget), and we get at least two instances rejecting the idea of Inej "settling down" somewhere:

Inej noted that Matthias’ mug sat untouched before him, slowly cooling as he stared out the window. “This must be hard for you,” she said quietly. “To be here but not really be home.” He looked down at his cup. “You have no idea.” “I think I do. I haven’t seen my home in a long time.” Kaz turned away and began chatting with Jesper. He seemed to do that whenever she mentioned going back to Ravka. Of course, Inej couldn’t be certain she’d find her parents there. Suli were travellers. For them, ‘home’ really just meant family. -Ch. 21, Six of Crows

So he wasn’t fit for a normal life. Was she meant to find a kindhearted husband, have his children, then sharpen her knives after they’d gone to sleep? How would she explain the nightmares she still had from the Menagerie? Or the blood on her hands? -Ch. 27, Crooked Kingdom

Granted, Inej is 16 here and your perspective on what you want your life to look like can and will change a LOT as you grow older, but I think it's worth noting that the narrative supports the idea that Inej isn't built for a "white picket fence life" and doesn't want one anyway. She also refers to Ketterdam as "home," for all that she resents the circumstances that brought her there in the first place:

She’d called the ivory-and-amber girl her shadow, but maybe she was a sign as well, a reminder that Inej hadn’t been made for this life. And yet, it was hard not to feel that this city was her home, that Dunyasha was the intruder here. -Ch. 32, CK

Inej’s foot caught the edge of one of the metal scrolls, and then she understood. She didn’t have her opponent’s training or education or fine white clothes. She would never be as ruthless and she could not wish to be. But she knew this city inside out. It was the source of her suffering and the proving ground for her strength. Like it or not, Ketterdam—brutal, dirty, hopeless Ketterdam—had become her home. And she would defend it. She knew its rooftops the way she knew the squeaky stairs of the Slat, the way she knew the cobblestones and alleys of the Stave. She knew every inch of this city like a map of her heart. -Ch. 35, CK

Inej is Suli and an acrobat and a spider and a pirate. She's built for high places and close quarters and close-knit familial ties and freedom of movement...none of which are things that are easily accessible on a pre-industrial farm in the middle of nowhere countryside of a country not her own, far from the rest of her family and friends.

And this is all without factoring in Kaz's disability, which realistically would make him incapable of doing most of the work required of a small, family-owned farm owner. He could certainly do some of it without many problems, but the chronic pain and somewhat limited movement he experiences because of his leg would necessitate hiring farmhands to do the vast majority of the hard labor a working pre-industrial farm requires of its inhabitants. Which, granted, he certainly would have the money to do, but it does kind of defeat the practical purpose of moving Kaz and Inej out to a farm in the first place.

I get it. Cottagecore!Kanej is adorable, and so is Farmboy Kaz; there's a lot of really lovely stories that have been told using those tropes and I'm not trying to pick on them at all. But I do think that the fandom largely wants these things for them without understanding the lack of desire Kaz expresses for it within the books and the practical implications of what that would look like, especially given that neither of them are portrayed as being particularly suited for a quiet farming life, even in retirement.

[ladyknightellen]

It's a Mobility Aid...Not a Fucking Prop!!!

I guess it's just my brand at this point to go mia for a few weeks, then come back with a rant about some new, mildly infuriating realization I've had.

This particular realization is one that's kind of been buzzing in the back of my head as something that was kind of off, but I couldn't quite put my finger on what it was until now. The 'aha' moment came when I was looking for pictures of Kaz Brekker to add to my collection of stickers on my binder for school. As I scrolled through, I began to notice a frustrating trend in the fan art...

Kaz Brekker, a canonically disabled character, who uses a cane to walk is consistently being drawn holding his cane as if it's just a prop, or a weapon, rather than what it actually is A GODDAMN MOBILITY AID!!!!

And before you start with 'but he hits people with it' I'm going to stop you right there. Yes, he does use it as a weapon sometimes, and it's even described in canon as being designed with the intention of using it as a club if needed, but it's still a cane. It is still a mobility aid that he needs TO WALK, and when you treat it like nothing more than a prop or a weapon, you erase a very important aspect of who Kaz is as a character, and honestly, as a cane user with chronic pain myself, it feels almost violent to see how often it happens.

Whenever I see art of Kaz standing with his cane in his hands like a billy club, or holding it across one or both shoulders, all I can think about is how much pain he would be in to hold a position like that without using the cane for support. At numerous points in the books during Kaz's pov chapters, we get several very detail descriptions of what it feels like for him on a daily basis as a result of his chronic pain. We also get several instances of how it feels when he has his cane taken from him, when he uses it to fight, or when he's disguised and doesn't want to give himself away. We see the toll it takes on his body to do this, and he always pays for it later.

Kaz does not swagger around Ketterdam with his cane over his shoulder, occasionally taking a swing at rival gang members. If this is the image you have in your head of him, please, I beg you to get rid of that image. Kaz is DISABLED. He has severe chronic pain and walks with a heavy limp and that cane is making contact with the ground on every step. Based on the kind of injury he had, I would imagine that his injured leg might even be a bit shorter than the other, which would possibly be evident in a visible lack of symmetry in the height of his shoulders. And that's just one possible way it could affect his body beyond just his leg that would be outwardly visible.

There are many more, but the point is that injuries like the one Kaz experienced can affect the entire body even with the best care and therapy, and Kaz didn't have any of that. I'm not asking you to be a medical expert just to draw fanart, but I am begging you think about things like this and at the very least, PLEASE draw the mobility aid being used as a mobility aid, not a prop. Stop erasing and sanitizing what little representation we have. If you think it makes him 'look more badass' or whatever to have his cane over his shoulder, I kind of don't really care.

P.S. And don't use the tv show as a reference because Freddy Carter is yet another example of a non disabled actor playing a disabled character.