veerbles - Tumblr blog

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every now and then i gotta do an art style check by drawing kaz and inej again

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more kanej parallels because I love pain: kaz's rebirth scene in the harbour vs. inej's rebirth in the incinerator shaft.

both nearly died burning - kaz of the fever of firepox, inej of the hot coals. both resurfaced in water - kaz swimming back to shore, inej climbing up in the rain. both found their purpose in vengeance - kaz deciding to become dirtyhands to take down pekka, inej deciding to captain a ship to take down slavers.

both were hopeless and aimless until they were reborn in pain and struggle, and maybe they came out a little bit angrier, but both had found their path.

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just have to put this somewhere so pls don't cancel me

but what am I doing wrong if I read 1/3 of daisy jones & the six and didn't like it enough to finish? 🫣

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kaz brekker, the boy who never let anything go, and his love language (buying out an indenture, paying off an indenture, procuring a ship): letting his girl go.

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love a character that's like. i survived (<- not a brag) (<- this is a curse that weighs on me every waking hour)

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I keep thinking about this line from ck.

this is the culmination of the van eck job; the 'post-credits' scene that tells us where each of the characters is going forward. nina is 'going to find a way to make it matter', which teases row. inej is starting her journey of ending slavery on the seas. jesper and wylan's futures are explicitly intertwined and implicitly turning to politics.

what does kaz's line mean? what was leigh trying to foreshadow?

I refuse to believe the phrasing of it means nothing, because in the context of this scene, it can't mean nothing. this is kaz's next big journey. and it also references another big conversation from ck:

this scene from the geldrenner bathroom is so important because, in it, inej confronts kaz with the truth of his revenge arc (which essentially drives the plot of the entire duology): how is the person he became to ruin pekka different from pekka himself?

and again, kaz mentions building an empire and burning it.

so it has to have meaning. is it literal? will a big plot point in soc #3 involve kaz setting fire to the barrel? but if that's the case, why is it significant that he rebuilds it into something new beforehand?

or maybe it's figurative. at the very end of ck inej asks kaz to help her end slavery from his side of things in ketterdam. she mentions taking down the crooked politicians, the slave-owners, the... even less-moral barrel bosses. while it seems obvious that kaz's 'new empire' is a barrel under his control, what would become of a criminal empire under the thumb of a man indirectly helping to destroy it? perhaps it figuratively 'burns to the ground'.

so either kaz builds his empire, and then literally burns it to achieve something else, or kaz builds his empire and uses its own power to 'burn it' by helping something cleaner grow instead. maybe that's the connection to the bathroom conversation: maybe it's the way he finally proves himself to be different from pekka.

or maybe it's neither of those, and I'm completely off-base? either way it has to mean something big, and I would honestly love to hear more interpretations.

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I know this is one of those unsexy subjects that fics and fiction novels love to gloss over, but human bodies have needs and I have a need to understand how those needs are met, even if I'd never mention it in a fic. just for realism.

so this is the weirdest poll I ever posted, but I HAVE to know:

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had to kanejify this one

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Kaz's attic rooms in the Slat

(canon notes under the cut)

All canon descriptions of Kaz's attic rooms:

"The Slat wasn’t much [...] crowned with an attic and a gabled roof." -> most likely a room with slanted walls.

"The attic rooms had been converted into his office and bedroom." -> the attic is partitioned into two separate rooms.

"The [office] room was mostly taken up by a makeshift desk – an old warehouse door atop stacked fruit crates – piled high with papers." -> the office isn't large; considering the dimensions of a warehouse door, and that it takes up most of the space, the room is VERY ROUGHLY 4x3m (13x9 ft).

"...he walked through the door to his tiny bedroom. [Inej darted] a glance at him through the open doorway [as he] dipped a cloth in the wash basin." -> (1) the office and bedroom are separated by a wall and door. (2) the bedroom is even smaller than the office - around 4x2m maybe. (3) assuming Inej was standing in the middle of the office, she had a line of sight to the wash basin through the bedroom door.

"Whenever he sat down to try to get some work done, he’d find his eyes straying to the window ledge." -> the window has enough room to sit, and there is a direct line of sight from kaz's office chair to it.

the slat is pretty clearly modeled after amsterdam's canal ring houses. I based the room's overall set-up and position within the house on this incredible post by @arany-studio.

furniture designs and bedroom features are inspired by 17-19th century rooms. I didn't try to be very specific with the style because (a) Ketterdam is not really a direct adaption of the early 19th century, (b) Kaz is a barrel rat and his furniture just came from wherever he could get them, including the street, abandoned buildings and mansions he robbed.

there are probably more things in the room that aren't depicted. I didn't want to crowd the drawing.

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always fascinated by people's different takes on the language barrier between kaz and the ghafas.

I think my personal opinion is that kerch, being the language of the center of commerce and an overall neutral party in the war, is kind of like english - in that it's an internationally spoken language, but certainly not by everyone. considering jesper spoke it well enough to go to university in ketterdam, even though he was a farm boy, it must be pretty widespread. matthias didn't speak it until hellsgate, but he also grew up very sheltered.

inej didn't speak kerch when she was taken, so it's reasonable to assume her parents didn't either. but maybe they spoke a little of it, like in some countryside places in europe? or maybe they learnt in their efforts to find her? or perhaps they focused their efforts inside ravka, and never learnt a word of it.

it's always suspicious to me that kaz never bothered picking up ravkan, being the strategic businessman that he is. I think he wouldn't hide that ability during the ice court/van eck mission if he had it, so either he can speak very little, or not at all; if not at all, it supports the assumption that kerch is the international business language, which is why he never bothered picking up a second language.

so would the ghafas learn enough kerch to communicate? I don't doubt that using inej as a translator would frustrate kaz to no end; words are his strongest weapon, so he'd definitely put effort into being able to communicate with them. but would he learn suli? or ravkan? suli would be a more personal gesture, which he'd see as a leverage to get the ghafas to like him. ravkan would be more useful in other ways, and we know how much kaz likes having more than one reason to do something.

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we all heard about 'jordie lives' fics, but what about 'kaz never explicitly says his mother is dead, so what makes you think that she is' ones?

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KAZ BREKKER + text posts 

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One thing about Kaz is that instead of thinking "I don't deserve her" he went "I will work on myself to deserve her" Bro is a simp, not a quitter.

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Reminder that Kaz made a literal 'your mom' joke while breaking Matthias out of jail

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I like to think that part of the reason Inej is drawn to Kaz is because he's such a damn performer... I feel like it's easy to forget it bc her job in the Dregs is to go unseen, but Inej was raised in the circus. She performed until she was fourteen, and her tell is still squaring her shoulders like she's performing to an audience. I think it's fun to consider that she likes Kaz exactly because he's a bit of a showman, not in spite of it. That even though he's a conman and a thief and coddles his reputation so hard its difficult to tell where the truth even is, there's still something she finds familiar, or even comforting, in his theatricality and weakness for magic tricks.

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shes climbing your dashboard

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hot take but I fully do not support the 'kaz becomes king of ketterdam by ascending to a position of power equivalent to a literal king' because. do you even know kaz. that is the WORST idea lmao. for his benefit and also ketterdam's benefit and frankly also for several other nations' benefits

but while on most days I trust in captain inej ghafa and believe maybe ketterdam can be saved, other days I think: actually maybe kaz SHOULD burn his city to the ground 🙃 let them dismantle the government and build literally nothing in its place. a little anarchy couldn't hurt that fucking city at this point. it's not a good solution it's just a funny one