Grishanalyticritical - Tumblr Posts
When I see people fighting with darklina shippers I wonder what they took from the Shadow and Bone trilogy. And I don't mean the basic things like "he's a bad person". I mean the fact the story is at it's core a story on how different people process the struggles of war, and the outcome of their actions while doing so.
I wonder if they understand malina is not the good, healthy ship, but rather the result of two very young orphans who lost everything and everyone else and bonded on an unhealthy level, to the point where Alina is willing to give up parts of herself to fit Mal's insecurities.
It's not meant to be cute and fluffy. It just is. And in that sense, I wonder if they actually look at the darkling as the full character that Leigh worked her butt off to portray, past the "ewwww, this man is problematic". Especially in times like right now, where genocide and "how far is too far when you are responding to aggression" are being openly discussed by everyone.
Sure, it's easy to reduce the darkling to this toxic abuser. It fits a box you can check and not think about it later, but I find that to be a disservice to Leigh. So many of you are old enough to think about what makes a character tick, and the context that the story is giving you, regardless if you find the characters' actions justifiable or not, and I see so little of that nowadays in every fandom. Where is y'all's media literacy? Comprehension skills? The ability to reflect on such a complex universe as is the grishaverse?
People are allowed to ship the two characters that are opposite sides of the same coin, and grieve over the boy the darkling was and the man he could have been, before the weight of war destroyed him.
Alina certainly did.
thinking about how aleksander called Alina an apt pupil...and thinking about how Alina spent all of shadow and bone feeling stupid and kept belittling herself for being a slow learner when it came to all the grisha theory and controlling the light and how she carried that complex of thinking very little of her own intellectual capacity throughout the rest of the trilogy even though she made sm progress(up until the last battle)...and despite that or because of that perhaps, aleksander called her an apt pupil...
Aleksander: “Perhaps now you’re getting an inkling of what it’s like to be hunted. But you still have no idea what it means to fake countless deaths, to have to reinvent yourself after every rebirth, to lose every loved one to sickness, desperation, hate, and time.”
Alina: “Is this how you justify your actions? Your loneliness? A wound that won’t heal?”
Aleksander: “You’ve yet to see the full shape of things. My Alina, you live in a single moment. I live in a thousand.”
Alina: “You’re already dead.”
I might be getting old, but one of the qualities I appreciate most about characters is empathy. When you show me “villain”, who has plenty of it, and “heroine”, who has none, it’s an easy enough choice for me. And I WON’T be rooting for her.
Aleksander lived through countless horrors, but he doesn’t make it about himself, he’s telling Alina it’s awaiting her too. He’s warning her. She hears only excuses for perceived wrongs and doesn’t concern herself with future that far.
Alina’s the one to drag Darkling’s “actions” into conversation, but the fact those were designed with certain goal in mind doesn’t matter. Somehow the end of wars is about Sasha’s loneliness. I fail to see how…
Alina calls Aleksander “dead”, yet he’s the one who keeps sacrificing his lives for his people. If he were as heartless as she wants to believe, he could simply fuck off to trip over the world instead of dealing with blind, stubborn, entitled smartass.