When will we talk about the parallels between chapter 39 of SoC and chapter 37 of CK

Paraphrasing here, but chapter 39 of SoC says this when Inej is choking Heleen “it was not enough- it would never be enough- but it was a beginning”

And then, when Pekka is on his knees in front of Kaz, “Kaz looked at Pekka Rollins, Jakob Hertzoon, kneeling before him at last, eyes wet with tears, pain carved into the lines of his flushed face. Brick by brick. It was a start.”

This was so intentional, showing their parallels and how they’re the only ones for each other.

Chapter 27, Crooked Kingdom: “Was she meant to find a kind hearted 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?”

Portrayed by: Calahan Skogman Book | Show: Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows, Crooked Kingdom, and Netflix’s Shadow and Bone 

Matthias Helvar is the kind of character you hope that real-world shitty people could be more like. He’s conditioned to believe one thing and fully fights with it, but through communication and love, he realizes that he’s in the wrong and chooses to grow. As a Fjerdan, the last thing he should’ve done was fall in love with a Grisha woman, but that didn’t stop him from giving all he was to protect Nina Zenik. His story should’ve never ended the way it does, but too often, people believe that the ultimate character redemption equates to death. None of the Crows should’ve died. Period. 

Matthias Helvar is a complex, well-written character haunted by guilt and unwavering loyalty. The show’s unfortunate cancellation doesn’t let us see what the Six of Crows duology does, but it gives us more of his origin—it shows us the beginning stages of his relationship with Nina, which in turn acts as the catalyst to helping him grow. 

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something about the slat being described as “gloriously dry” and most of the crows having water related trauma

do you ever wonder if at Jan Van Eck's party there was someone praying for divine intervention or something and then Kaz Dirtyhands Brekker and Wylan disguised as some guy from Shu Han fell through the ceiling

Kaz Brekker is such an important character to me. There are like. No characters with mobility aids. And the fact that the author of the grishaverse series uses a cane too oh my god.

And and and!! I know this was likely not the intention but Kaz is SOOO autistic coded to me. I have a list of symptoms in my docs from when I read the books a few years back let me find it (I need to reread them </3) if/when I reread them, I might actually track the symptoms

And AND!!!!! Kaz sometimes doesn’t use his cane. He’s an example of people who don’t always need their canes or can go a little bit without it. Like me!!!! I use my cane whenever I go out but I usually don’t use it at home unless I’m in a lot of pain and I can set it aside if doing something like theatre

AND HE USES IT AS A WEAPON I LOVE WHEN DISABLED PEOPLE GET TO DO VIOLENCE IT’S MY FAVORITE EVER

no but like no one does religious imagery like kaz and inej? how many conversations have they had in the books and onscreen about religion? about inej’s faith and kaz’s lack thereof? and kaz telling inej that hope is dangerous and she needs to let go and move on? but then it’s all “he was a boy again, sure that there was magic in this world” and “‘i feel sorry for you brekker you have nothing sacred’ there was a long pause and then kaz said, ‘you’re wrong’” and kaz drowning in djel, water sacred to fjerdans, literally getting baptized and all he can think of the whole time is inej and “she stood in the center of the tile floor, framed by white and gold, like a gilded icon” and kaz describing inej’s voice as “the voice that had once led him back from hell” and inej saving kaz’s life while they’re in a church and joe trapanese literally writing a hymn for the soundtrack so that the plagal cadence where everyone’s supposed to sing amen happens right when kaz looks up at inej above him in the church and “no saint ever watched over me not like you have” like jesus fucking christ doesn’t it make you absolutely insane thinking about how “kaz was still the boy who had saved her she wanted to believe he was worth saving too” but kaz already and always will view inej as his sacred something his salvation his saint i’m literally going to swallow a rock and cartwheel off a building

thinking about the fact that jan was so horrible that he fell short to kaz’s expectation of the world.

If we are getting a SOC3, I really do want to see the Jesper Kaz relationship outside of Kaz being angry at Jesper and punishing him. I want to see the bestie moments. I want to see Jesper angry with Kaz. I want to see them joke around, fight and make up, save each other. Jesper was able to move on from his unrequited crush on Kaz with Wylan (which is what he deservesss), and Kaz showed his hand with how much he really cares for Jesper in CK, but I still want a sense of reconciliation between the two, after the years of hurt caused by Kaz's distance and casual cruelty.

Kaz v.s. Inej analysis

This generally drums down to speed vs strength, to which, anyone who played Pocket God in the early 2000s would know that speed always wins in that line up. But there is other elements to consider in a battle between these two bad asses, like experience, initiative, and ruthlessness. Inej is faster than Kaz but that can barely compete with Kaz’s combat experience, and if inej had given Kaz the right reason, there’s little Kaz wouldn’t do to win. As well as the fact that Inej’s usual advantage (surprise, the ability to disappear) would not be the case in this fight.

you’ll see a weird little graph above, the blue is short range combat and the red is long range. (Notice how I didn’t give Kaz a long range? That because I’m saving my self the headache of mapping out the whole location where this fabricated fight would be taking place. Kaz uses his surroundings as his long range weapons. When he took over the dregs he was hucking bottles, glasses, chairs, other people, all of which have different ranges of throwablility, so for the sake of my sanity he just doesn’t have a long range attack, but quite the large immediate attack range)

The yellow, is the sweet spot where Kaz would have the advantage. Keeping inej far enough away where she can’t throw her weapon and she can’t reach him. That being said if inej was any further away there is little Kaz can do to block a knife coming at him, and if inej managed to get past his cane Kaz is pretty much screwed. If Kaz doesn’t manage to keep inej in that sweet spot I don’t see an opportunity for Kaz to win this fight. There is no doubt that Inej is much better at 1 v 1 combat than Kaz, and there is no doubt that Kaz is much better at 1 v +1 combat than inej is.

Thank you for always being so enthusiastic about my ramblings in the tags?? I was not expecting actual thought to be put in this okay.

Firstly, I was referencing this lovely excerpt from Six of Crows

This quote is from a memory, so it might not be completely accurate to the present day, but it does give evidence to Kaz not having much in the way of fighting technique. He's still a good fighter and I'd say his strengths come from his quick thinking (improvisation, using his environment etcetera) and his, as they say, tenacity.

Meanwhile, Inej, while she has fewer years of fighting under her belt, has a more refined technique. After all, what she does takes more practiced skill, I would say, than Kaz's method of "hit them until you win" (so valid of him). Then again, those fewer years fighting as well as the kinds of fights she's been in (few close-range 1v1 fights) would work against her.

An interesting thing about Kaz is the way he views a hierarchy within everyone he meets, an attitude probably defined in him by the Kerch culture of trade and the environment of Ketterdam. Kerch is a country that in many ways is designed to reflect the American Dream as it is portrayed in classic literature such as The Great Gatsby: as an ultimately unattainable and useless lie, designed to control and quell the masses in the danger of extreme capitalism. The social hierarchy in Ketterdam is well-established and discussed throughout the novels, though mostly in Crooked Kingdom since the plot stays almost entirely within city limits, and the attitude of viewing a miniature hierarchy amongst those around you as part of the overall societal structure is evidenced in Kaz, and possibly reflected in Wylan; a link both to their different upbringings within the Ketterdam social structure, and their position as literary foils. (I wrote a whole long thing about how Kaz and Wylan had/have the potential to become each other, so feel free to check that out for more detail if you want it). The city’s hierarchy and the unattainability of joining the rich upper echelon of society is cleverly hinted at from the very beginning of Six of Crows, when Kaz is jumped and then wakes up in what he expects to be the deb of a rival gang. He instead finds himself in Councilman Hoede’s Manor House, which I believe is on the Geldstradt, and the way he makes the distinction is by realising that the decor in the room he’s in “takes real money”. We know that people like Pekka Rollins or Tante Heleen have become truly rich from what they do in the Barrel, and so it’s strange to suggest that you’d need “real money” for this since we would generally use that phrase to refer to a large amount of money. What Kaz actually means here is “old money” or “family money”; you need the kind of money that the Merchant Council have been hoarding for generations, making supposedly risky trades when they have millions of savings to cushion the blow if things go wrong, not the kind of money that comes from the popular gambling dens and brothels of the Barrel. He means the kind of money that Daisy and Tom have in Great Gatsby, people who’ve never worked a day in their lives and yet like to think of themselves as very successful at life when all they’re truly succeeding in is spending their parents money, not the kind of money that Gatsby scraped and saved and began to chase through undisclosed illicit means. Even when men like Gatsby and Rollins make their money, and their name, they are never equal in the social hierarchy to people with old money. (To be clear, not that this is a defence of either character, I have criticisms of both, especially Rollins).

But the hierarchy Kaz places upon himself and upon the others is slightly more subtle, and arguably subversive. He looks down on Matthias because he “stinks of decency” and because he supposedly hasn’t struggled, arguably gaining slightly more respect for him when he learns of him losing his parents and baby sister but still maintaining the idea of ‘everyone has a sob story and you were clearly more lucky in your options to deal with it than I was, it’s not my fault if you made the wrong choice’. We as readers obviously know that Matthias had no options but to go with Jarl Brum and spent the next 6 years of his life (I think that’s the right amount of time, please correct me if I’m wrong) being emotionally manipulated and abused by him, but Kaz simply refuses to accept has suffered because it would be psychologically damaging to him to admit that Matthias was able to go through that and still come out a good person, when Kaz sees himself as having become truly demonic. Matthias looks down on Kaz for the exact same reason, unable to understand - especially since he knows far less detail about Kaz’s trauma - how someone who ever had a core of decency couldn’t maintain it through their pain, he assumes Kaz was never a good person, or never had the potential to be one. Kaz also looks down on Wylan, arguably far less for his attempt to maintain a core decency but because he views Wylan as having had the option to do so. Kaz seems to have more respect for Wylan in Crooked Kingdom than in Six of Crows, when he knows more about (but never, it should be noted, the full extent of) Jan Van Eck’s abuse to his son, once again showcasing that he struggles to accept the idea of someone feeling bad when they have supposedly suffered less than him. His trauma has clearly warped him in many ways, and one of them is losing the ability to see relative pain and how different things can affect different people in different ways; he effectively views everything in the manner of ‘I had it worse, and I’m fine so you need to get over yourself’. He labels Nina “a snob” for staying away from the Crow Club and the Slat despite being a Dregs member, and her response is “she didn’t much care what Kaz Brekker thought”. I think that Nina is possible the person Kaz holds the most respect for in his platonic relationships, and that is mostly because she simply couldn’t care less whether he respects her or not.

His relationship with Jesper is more complex; he judges Jesper for his addiction and yet continually eggs him on, giving him a line of credit to play cards at the start of Six of Crows and having the first step of his planning in Crooked Kingdom to make Jesper play all night, although it’s unclear whether Jesper has ever shared anything about his mother if anyone knows then the most likely parties are Kaz or Inej and yet Kaz forces Jesper to give up his revolvers in Crooked Kingdom, his most treasured possession and his constant connection to his late mother, he consistently infantilises Jesper, but mostly in his head and this is possibly an interesting link to the final nail in the coffin of their relationship; Kaz sees Jesper as a substitute to Jordie. I think it’s possible that he likes to see him as younger because that’s how he remembers Jordie - it’s also important to remember that Kaz is now several years older than his elder brother ever was so seeing him in someone his own age is possibly even more painful because that’s a point Jordie never reached (he was only 13 when he died). Jesper is someone that Kaz feels the need to keep at arms length, not because he doesn’t respect him but because he fears having a close relationship with someone who could so easily slip away from him like Jordie did. I think we can also arguably see aspects of Jordie within Jesper, the naïveté of thinking you can make it Ketterdam followed by the city swallowing you whole, killing Jordie and driving Jesper to his slow self-destruction - “I’m dying anyway, Da. I’m just doing it slow”. (If y’all have read many of my analytical posts you may have begun to notice that’s one of my favourite quotes)

Then we have Inej. Kaz places Inej on a pedestal whatever she does. I’ve spoken before about how she claims to be bad at picking locks whilst he claims to have done “a shoddy job at teaching her to pick locks” because he’s incapable of accepting that she is incapable of something; if there are flaws, they must be his because she cannot have any. In a lot of situations this can be harmful, going back to the romance of Daisy and Gatsby where Daisy is placed on a pedestal and idealised so much that she become more of an image than a person, so when she does not live up to his every high expectation Gatsby is destroyed by it. But with kanej this seems only to elevate their position, possibly because Kaz isn’t claiming that Inej is flawless, but rather that she is capable of working on her flaws in a way that he isn’t; it is almost a form of envy. For example, Inej also has a fear of touch and human contact, but she purposely forced herself to cope with small amounts of it, such as allowing Nina and Jesper to hug her even though it makes her flinch, because she fears it becoming a debilitating condition, as it has done for Kaz (not that she knows that initially when it’s first implied that she too fears contact). In the bathroom scene when she admits to him that she also struggles with touch, it has such a massive effect on Kaz not because he refuses to accept that she has flaws but because he sees her as so much stronger than himself and wishes that he could be more like her. Although both of them are ultimately unable to go any further than a few light brushes of contact, it’s suggested that what trigger Inej more than the touch itself is the sexual implications of those touches based on everything she went through at the Menagerie. Kaz doesn’t see Inej aligned with with himself or the other gang members, but as above them - and not in the way he labels Nina as a snob, but in a genuine manner he refuses to acknowledge her as low in society because he sees her as deserving of so much more. He notably never refers to her as “a canal rat” and he never even comes close to defining her by her time at the Menagerie, a start contrast between him, the supposed low of the hierarchy, and Van Eck, the supposed upper, he yells at her “you little skiv! You little whore!”. However, there is one way in which Kaz arguably looks down on Inej and it’s in a similar way that he looks down in Matthias: how dare she still try so hard to remain truly good, and decent, and to find her Saints and to politely ask them for forgiveness, when it would be so much easier to let the world beat that out of her? Arguably, it’s not that he judges either of them for their faith, but it’s that he fears them judging him for losing his, be that in religion or in the world at all. (I don’t think we know if Kaz was raised in a religious household or not, but based on societal structure in Ketterdam and the way most of the population in most of the countries are religious I think it’s safe to assume he at least grew up with an understanding of Ghezen). Kaz fears that they’ll judge him for failing to maintain his core of decency, which is exactly what Matthias does, and so he aims to offend or challenge them before they can him.

Ok I’m not gonna lie to you guys it’s like quarter past one in the morning as I’m writing this, and oh my god it just got so long out of nowhere… I might have lost my point somewhere in there, I don’t even know, this came from one quote I was thinking about and I’m not sure I even wrote that quote in there so, yeah, I guess. If you bothered to read this far the tysm I hope it made sense

I will never be over the time Kaz broke into a man’s house and then bumped into the guy on the street afterwards and pointed out that he’d dropped his wallet so the guy PAID HIM FIVE KRUGE FOR “BEING HONEST” it’s so funny I can’t cope

Such an underrated Kaz moment to be honest

The fact that Kaz lets Inej do death defying things, let’s her put her life on the line over and over again but the second Jesper tries to do it he gives the firmest no we’ve ever seen from him. That gets me everytime. Inej has to scale a giant incinerator? It was his suggestion. Inej has to go scope out the house of her previous captor? Reluctantly he lets her. Inej has to walk across tightropes to kill the sugar? He worries but he doesn’t force the net on her. Jesper suggests he takes a life altering drug? Absolutely not, he forbid it.

At first I looked at this as him trusting Inej more and not wanting to loose Jesper like he lost Jordie. But the more I look into it, the more my mind starts turning into something else. He knows Inej needs freedom and independence. So no matter how reluctant or worried he is, he lets her go. He knows Jesper is reckless, that he needs restraint. So he says no when Jesper doesn’t know how to.

He loves them both so much, and he knows what they need so he gives it them and I think that’s beautiful.

Does it ever make you a little crazy insane thinking about how Jesper and Wylan both have these gaping absences in their families, these needs that haven't been met for years, but as their stories become parallel, they find exactly what they need in each other's lives?

Because okay, hear me out, Jesper couldn't save his mom, nor can he ever bring her back, but he was able to help Wylan save his mom. His mom who was supposed to be dead. He was able to help bring her back in a way that he will never able to do for his own mom. And no, she'll never be Aditi, but I think she'll grow to love him as a son-in-law.

Wylan, meanwhile, lost his father's love at a young age. He will never be good enough for Jan, because Jan refuses to love or accept him as he is. But Colm, Jesper's father who loves him, who only wants the best for his son, meets Wylan when he's easily at his lowest point in life, when he's wrapped up in crime and scandal, and what does he say? "I think you’d be good for [Jesper]." And that means everything.

Jesper and Wylan don't just complement each other as a couple, their lives thread together like stitches closing long open wounds.

Listen I know we make fun of Kaz for being absolutely awful at flirting with Inej but LOOK AT THIS!!

Literally most underrated Kanej moment!! I have not seen a single person talk about it and it makes me insane !! LIKE HELLO?? What happened to his rizz why did it just evaporate

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.”

anyways the point of kaz and inej's relationship and them not getting together at the end of their story is because they are meant to show what you're supposed to find in a relationship with someone else, romantic or otherwise. a person who you are comfortable being "without armor," a friend who will go to the ends of the earth with you while also knowing when to put you in your place and putting themselves first in situations that require it. its about the recognition of them not being in a healthy enough place to seek each other out romantically but still sticking together through thick and thin as friends, because their feelings dont change their loyalty. in this essay i will