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Okay don't mind me I'm in the middle of a Crooked Kingdom reread and feel overwhelmingly inclined to rant about Jesper Fahey because this fandom just doesn't give him the treatment he deserves. I'm specifically going to incoherently ramble about the scene in Crooked Kingdom where he, Colm and Wylan are being shot at because I feel like that scene is representative of Jesper's arc - but, before we dive into that, let me contextualise a few things first. Jesper does things for the thrill of it: he thrives off chaos and spontaneity, hence why he "always felt better when people were shooting at him". It's because the sound of gunfire "called the scattered, irascible, permanently seeking part of his mind into focus like nothing else" - and it also provides a distraction from his pain and trauma, because whenever he'd think about it, "everything in him recoiled. Trying not to die was the best possible distraction". Whenever anything to do with his past or his debt is brought up, "his hands returned to his revolvers" because he found himself "longing for the cool, familiar feel of their pearl handles beneath his thumbs". It steadies him as much as it possibly can when he's not in a dangerous situation, momentarily calling his mind into focus, an attempt at distracting himself from his afflictions.

Based off similar instances, the scene in Crooked Kingdom where he, Wylan and Colm are being shot at should have brought him that same satisfaction that any other shooting would. He "should be buzzing from the excitement of the fight. The thrill was still there, fizzing through his blood, but beside it was a cold, unfamiliar sensation that felt like it was draining the joy from him." What makes this situation so different to the others is that he can't ignore his problems and trauma now: it's staring him right in the face. Colm is right there. The thrill of the fight doesn't feel the same because "all he could think was, Da could have been hurt. He could have died." And we know that Jesper's debt would cost Colm the jurda farm Jesper grew up on, forcing him to acknowledge the reality of his problems: with Colm being right there, Jesper just can't ignore his afflictions because all he could think about is how his father would "suffer for his antics". If you ask me, this is so representative of his character arc as a whole.

This is further emphasised by how he's reflecting on the first time he spun Makker's Wheel right before this ambush, its intention being merely "harmless fun", but it ended up evolving into an addiction that "split [his life] like a log into two distinct and uneven pieces: the time before he’d stepped up to that wheel and every day since". The rush of a high-stakes situation is the equivalent of the "harmless fun" - it's a thrill that Jesper enjoys feeling, but in reality it's doing much more harm because it's preventing him from acknowledging and facing his pain. And he's indeed in so much pain: there's so much anguish inside of him, but he'd do anything to distract himself from it because the reality is just too painful.

This is where the tables come in: later in Crooked Kingdom, when the crew are being ambushed by the Khergud, Jesper "could feel the pull of East Stave" because he didn't have anything else to occupy his mind with. Then, the minute he thinks about facing his father, "the need to be at the tables was overwhelming" because he desperately needs to distract himself from the reality of his circumstances: "since Kaz hadn't obliged him with something to shoot at, Jesper needed a pair of dice and long odds to clear his mind". He can't use the ambush as a distraction, so the tables it is. As Inej tells him, "they feel like medicine. They soothe you, put you right for a time. But they’re poison, Jesper. Every time you play, you take another sip." This isn't the first time poison has been used to represent something that is preventing the Crows from healing - we also see it with Matthias, when he tells Brum in Six of Crows, "the life you live, the hate you feel - it's poison. I can drink it no longer". Just like how the exploitation of Matthias' grief and pain as a means of fueling hatred prevented him from healing because it kept exacerbating the anguish within him (he had to stop drinking the poison to do so), Jesper's addiction - and, by extension, the thrill of a high-stakes situation - prevents him from acknowledging the wound inside him and working towards healing it. It gets to the extent where “he had always thought of himself as lucky… what if he’d been bluffing this whole time?” - he’s gotten so used to suppressing his pain that he, in a way, loses sense of who he is. His façade has distorted his perception of himself. It's not until Colm arrives in the Barrel that Jesper is forced to acknowledge just how deep that wound is and how much it's festering - just like how he couldn't even feel the thrill of a fight properly because of the possibility of his father getting hurt.

That scene is one of many cracks that start to form as Jesper continues to bottle up all of this pain and trauma, until he finally breaks when Wylan proposes that he's such a good shot because being a Fabrikator allows him to direct the metal of the bullets. Jesper protests, asking Wylan why he can't "just let things be easy" - why can't he just let him keep ignoring his problems, when it's so much easier than facing them? But Wylan stands his ground, explaining that "they’re not easy... You keep pretending everything is okay. You move on to the next fight or the next party. What are you afraid is going to happen if you stop?" This is why Matthias calls Jesper “angry and frightened” - he’s afraid of stopping, because he knows stopping means that he’s forced to face the reality that he’s deeply wounded. This is when he finally breaks under the burden of his own pain, under the reality that he can't keep ignoring it anymore - hence why he chooses to put his share of the reward in Colm's name because, as he explains to Kaz, "I don’t think I’m ready for that kind of money just yet". For the first time, he's acknowledging his problems and working towards fixing them, no matter how much time it takes (because trauma and addiction don't just disappear overnight).

n e ways this ended up being significantly longer than anticipated but this is what happens when I start analysing these books: it snowballs out of control and suddenly I can’t shut up.

It genuinely keeps me up at night that when Van Eck attempts to reveal to the Merchant Council that Wylan can’t read, they all react exactly as Wylan feared they would. (Spoilers ahead!) Of course since they don’t believe him and Wylan’s brilliant memory for Jesper’s words protects him we don’t see the full force of their response, but it is made PAINFULLY clear that they all would have responded the same way Van Eck did - “How could you say such things about your own blood?”. It’s an incredibly meaningful and arguably subtle detail that Bardugo implements to remind the reader that although Van Eck was our main antagonist in this case, there is no singular villain in this story because what the characters are fighting is an ultimately unbeatable source. The system is impossible to truly defeat because it is a hydra, we see that when Dryden’s father died he took on the role of the Council and acted the exact same way he did, and if Van Eck had raised Wylan to one day take over from him then he too would have been forcibly moulded into that shape by the poisonous environment of this governing body. The defeat of Van Eck, had Kaz not amended his will to name Wylan his inheritor, would have been only that: the downfall of a singular man, to be easily replaced by another with the same dangerously capitalistic values and crude methods of implementing them. It would not have been any change in the system that oppresses the main characters - I think it’s kind of similar to the Hunger Games (spoilers ahead) when Katniss chooses to kill Coin instead of Snow because she realises that killing Snow doesn’t actually change the system if someone else will simply step into his shoes. We also see this reflected in Kaz and his mission to destroy Rollins, since by doing so he too has taken the actions Rollins did. When Inej points out their similarities he denies it, saying “I don’t sell girls, I don’t con helpless kids out of their money”. Inej replies with the gentle, HEARTBREAKING sentence: “Look at the floor of the Crow Club, Kaz”. And this is so important because Kaz has no consideration for what happens to those people once they step outside his door. How do they fair after he scams them? How many of them have had no other money to fall back on? Did one of them sell their daughter to be able to pay off their debts to him? He’d never know, he just had the money and that’s all he thinks about. But if that girl survived long enough to want revenge, who would she blame? Say she didn’t want to blame her parents, like Kaz doesn’t want to blame Jordie, then who becomes the manifestation of all her hatred, the one thing she has decided that destroying will cure her? Kaz does. Just as Rollins has for him.

Every system of this city is a hydra, and there are so many beautifully written reminders of this without forcing it down our throats, but there is also the hope of genuine, real change. In Wylan, joining the Merchant Council as someone opposed to its views, as someone who has lived in both sides of this city and been abused by both of them, as someone who understands that real change is hard to implement. In Inej, as she journeys against the system that abused her not for revenge, but for the protection of all the children who have been hurt and killed, of all the children being hurt and killed, and of all the children who would have been hurt and killed if she didn’t stop the slavers who sought them, as someone who knows that real change is action. In Jesper, as someone raised far from the suffocating closed-minded atmosphere of the Merchant Council and who can support Wylan through it, as someone who knows that striving for real change is messy and chaotic, but that it’s where he thrives. In Matthias, who died believing that the world could truly change, who died believing in Nina, believing in himself, and believing that his death was a necessary sacrifice to real change, even though he wanted it to be peaceful. In Nina, as someone who had learned that real change cannot always be won with violence, as someone who will learn to use her new power to restructure a civilisation, as someone who will spend the rest of her life striving for change because nothing could ever be worse than her beloved having died in vain. And in Kaz, in the small ways, in the fear of what he could become that will hold him back from becoming the next head of the hydra, in his love for Inej shifting his perception of the world, and in his slow journey of healing, maybe one day killing Rollins will be enough. And if that doesn’t work, he’ll burn the world down and start it all again.

That’s okay, I totally get it!

I think what you’re trying to say is that Kaz and Wylan are foils of each other. There are undeniably a lot of parallels between them and I love it, however that doesn’t make Wylan a “‘baby version of Kaz”. I get what you’re trying to say now that you’ve explained yourself, but referring to Wylan as a “‘baby’ version of Kaz” is still extremely harmful to Wylan’s characterisation. Are there a lot of parallels between the two characters? Absolutely! But those parallels only emphasise the differences between them in terms of how they each end up as a result of their circumstances. That's why "foils" is the more appropriate term to use.

Wylan doesn’t want to be hardened by the Barrel the way that Kaz was and actively clings to his decency in a way that Kaz never did - however, as we’ve both said, Wylan is forced to sacrifice that decency to survive, just not to the extent that someone like Kaz would. That’s why calling Wylan “ruthless” just doesn’t work (I’m not referring to “we could wake them up” here, I’m referring to his character as a whole, because I never use “we could wake them up” to counter Wylan’s infantilisation due to it being incredibly overused when there are many stronger instances in the books to do so). It’s implying that he’s relentless the way someone like Kaz is when that couldn’t be further from the truth. Wylan had the potential to end up like Kaz, just like how Kaz had the potential to end up like Wylan, but he chooses not to because that’s not the type of person he wants to be. I get what you mean by "you can be ruthless in a situation and kind in another", but it’s just not an accurate description of Wylan's character because he's never exactly "ruthless". He’s just doing what he needs to for the sake of the mission, but he ensures that he keeps that decency intact as much as he possibly can. That’s why, even in those situations, he isn’t ruthless.

I think this all stems from the general misconception that a character who’s kind and good can’t be competent or “badass”, that that “badassary” has to be attributed to ruthlessness. It’s something that honestly infuriates me, especially because Wylan choosing to cling to his goodness despite having every reason to end up like someone like Kaz is one of the many things about him that I deeply connect with. Wylan making bombs or blowing stuff up or concocting these dangerous chemicals isn’t ruthlessness in any capacity - they’re simply his contributions to the mission because he recognises the stakes of the situation and acts accordingly. He doesn't particularly enjoy it, but he's willing to do so if it meant ensuring the mission's success and, more importantly, if it were for the sake of his friends. Regardless, Wylan is a morally grey character: at the end of the day, he's still a criminal. He's had to commit actions that go against his moral compass, but that doesn't necessarily make him a bad person. At his core, he's not a bad person: he's simply met with circumstances where he needs to sacrifice some of his decency to survive a world that has been nothing but cruel to him, that he's never had to navigate before. I just don’t think that can be attributed to ruthlessness in any way.

And don't worry, I get what you mean by the tank scene - I just didn’t address it properly previously, and I apologise for that. I personally wouldn't call it Wylan "having fun", however I do think there was definitely some delirium attached to his reaction because he was quite literally snorting with laughter at the end of the chapter. After all, the crew did just steal a tank from a high-security prison.

When will we start acknowledging that Wylan suggesting to wake the unconscious guards up before killing them isn't actually ruthlessness but blunt logic because he's taken Jesper's "I'm not big on killing unconscious men" at face value and responds accordingly since he has a very literal thinking pattern? When will we start acknowledging that this is autism?

You know what makes Kaz a great boss? What makes him a better boss then both Pekka Rollins and Per Haskel?

He gets to know his crew and basically any people he’s working with. I know it’s basically an opposite of what he says about barrel gangs, but hear me out.

The main reason why Kaz was able to know that Big Bolliger was a traitor is because he knew that Bol was lazy. And knowing what he did in the "Crow club" it would be hard to know if he was lazy or just relaxed while on the job. Kaz knew that he was lazy - he took time to know the guy.

And also the thing that makes Kaz's plans good is that he keeps in mind all his crew's bad habits and vulnerabilities and plots around them. Its really easy to see that if you look at Jesper.

He keeps in mind that Jesper is late and that he can accidentally give up important info. We see that clearly in the beginning of the book. During the “set the wolf free” plan he made sure to tell Jesper the “wrong” time so that he would “be late” and free the animals at the right time. He knew Jesper would(or could) give up info by accident so he took precautions(saying this again: no one arranges an extra ship just to gather in front of it)

And we also have it in the end of CK.

I think both Inej and Jesper had been told the wrong time. Kaz knew that Dunyasha would be there, so he added some time for Inej to fight her. He talks with Jesper about kergud(I have no idea how to spell that, sorry) and also adds time for that fight. He might have actually putted the wyvil it Jespers pocket(as I do not remember Jes actually putting it there, or mb he just made sure it was there).

I mean, it would have been weird if there would be just the sound of one shot fired, but after the siren it would sound better.

When Kaz told Dregs that he won't be their father, he meant it, your father doesn't know you that well, but your sneaky annoying little sibling does.