IF GOD WON’T SAVE YOU I WILL

once again, you're 100% correct and this is such a good way of explaining the "why" of things. i feel like they really watered Mal and D*rkling down for the audience. Mal got the "clueless boy next door" treatment which undercuts his mistakes and his ability to learn from them and grow, D*rkling got turned into "kind of okay guy except for that One Thing" instead of the genocidal p*do that doesn't understand what "no" means that he was in the book.

yea my biggest disappointment with show mal is that the writers didn’t let him be ANGRY. they really wanted to pound home that mal would do anything for alina and interpreted that to mean “he loves her so much so that prevents him from feeling anything other than devotion and kindness towards her” and so they stripped a lot of nuance from him/their dynamic. mal has such a complicated relationship with the military and people in power and how that pain gets reflected in alina’s journey and it’s such a real and compelling struggle and they took all that out. i don’t mind their romance being a slow burn, but it’s like they were so focused on that that they forgot that lifelong best friends have fights! that doesn’t mean they don’t love each other! 

the darkling......yea i could go on and on about how irresponsibly the writers/cast are treating him. i was really looking forward to seeing how the show would talk about consent. i wouldn’t have minded the change of alina explicitly giving consent if they took that as a moment to talk about how much more complex consent is than just saying yes to making out with someone, how that kind of consent through manipulation extends into the darkling’s relationships with zoya and genya, etc etc. but all they’ve done is “alina consents so it’s ok!! what a sexy girl power moment” and it drives me mad.