Me: I Think Im Going To Reread The Folk Of The Air

me: i think i’m going to reread the folk of the air

As a polish girl ...

I want to abort polish government

***** ***

Poland just made it legal to torture women.

abortion law in Poland was already the strictest in Europe, abortion was allowed in only 3 cases:

if the pregnancy was a result of rape or incest

if the mother's health was at risk

in case of foetal defects.

another problem is that there is something called "conscience clause" among Polish doctors which means that they can deny a patient certain treatment if it's against their conscience or beliefs (yes, it mostly applies to conservative, catholic doctors). some doctors went as far as not telling women about foetal defects until it was too late to terminate pregnancy. what's more, abortion in case of rape happens very rarely, since it's difficult to prove rape in the eyes of Polish law.

in 2019, only 1100 legal abortions took place in Poland, a country populated by 38 milion people. 98% of these abortions happened because of foetal defects.

on October 22nd 2020, Poland's top court ruled abortion due to foetal defects inconstitional, basically making abortion illegal.

Polish women will be forced to give birth to children with basically no chance to live. they will be tortured physically and mentally. rich women will be able to visit neighbouring countries to have abortion there but there are plenty of women who will have unsafe, illegal abortions, endangering their lives.

there are protests happening all over the country. not for the first time though, we've been protesting abortion ban for few years now. there's a sense of solidarity among us but the truth is, we're afraid.

this is how catholic extremism looks like. Poland is becoming a real-life Gilead and it's fucking terrifying.

What really baffles me is how LB would defend Alina being stripped from her powers and identity by claiming she’s transformed Keramzin by raising orphans. Like how on Earth does she think this is better and more noble than her helping her fellow Grisha and making changes that would actually mean something in the long run because at the end of the day as hard as B*rdugo can try to romanticise peasant life(in what is supposed to be based on Imperial Russia!)Alina is pretty much a nobody no one at the orphanage likes or distrust her and she has no real power of her own except relying on the new king(Nikolai)and her friends which is pretty much the main reason she and M*l end up being rich(B*rdugo trying so hard to have her cake and eat it).🙄

absolutely. i think it really comes down to an anti-revolutionary bias in her writing, and presumably in her own worldview also. there's a line alina and the other 'good' guys can't cross in order to bring about change because it would make them like the 'bad' guy, and so the only alternative is to lionize a version of the status quo and value peace over justice.

family values (marriage with a husband and adopted children) and support of the general status quo (maintaining a lantsov as king, fighting against the grisha uprising and generally leaving things be) are given precedence over non-traditional ideas about justice and political upheaval (joining aleksander's revolution and leaving all that behind). alina ends up relying on men in power rather than harnessing her own very literal one for her own political emancipation, and the part of her that makes her likely to prefer revolution is cut out and cast aside for an idealised idea of an ordinary life - which, as you say, romanticises peasanthood and a lack of political change by presenting the whole thing as a fairytale, despite the obvious fact that life in ravka rarely allows people happy endings

it's mixing political realism with an ending that refuses that realism completely, and it should be jarring. alina ending up where she began, in a ravka much the same as before, is seen as coming full circle and not some kind of awful groundhog day scenario like it actually is. written with a different tone, it could have been a commentary on the way nothing ever really changes and how all uprisings are quashed by those with power and a desire to keep things as they've always been; it could have been an incisive political commentary. but instead it's presented as positive for some reason i can’t fathom. it could even be about being backed into a corner in which one’s moral integrity stifles the ability to create change - although i would dislike that moral argument myself, i could at least respect it as a narrative choice that framed things with some self-awareness and nuance.

it also bugs me because after all alina has experienced, her complete lack of investment in the plight of grisha - even discounting revolutionary tactics or ideas - is just staggering. she heard anti-grisha slurs in the first army; she felt the fear of realising what she was and what it meant for her; hell, people were willing to help aleksander massacre an entire town if it meant making things better in the long run. like ivan said, everyone is sorry but aleks is the only one willing to do anything about it, and there’s plenty within the narrative that should give alina reason not to relinquish her identity even without her power. it’s a struggle that’s uprooted her life and change her fundamentally, and she shouldn’t be able to be naive and myopic anymore, but she is and it’s celebrated.

the really annoying thing is that the morality inherent in alina’s choice to abandon the grisha is nullified by the overwhelming assumption embedded into the narrative that destroying aleksander is the only way to save ravka, despite plenty of evidence that he is hardly the worst threat to ravka’s wellbeing and that, with him gone, the fundamental machinations causing most problems have not ceased. the creation of the second army was the greatest contribution made in known history to grisha welfare, and the fact that it’s all aleksander’s handiwork is just brushed aside because people decide they don’t like him. but alina’s complete refusal to engage in political reality is treated as positive. it just makes no sense.

THE GRISHAVERSE By Leigh Bardugo (2012-)

hot female villain: *exists*

me:

shoutout to all the blogs that pretend they are not polish until some day they reblog a joke about dziady or słowackiewicz an i'm like,,, bruh you as well?