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#it's very crooked but also

laughable-umbrella · 4 months

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lena in the magnus protocol trailer: “you don’t want this job. unless you’re stalking your coworkers, lying on your cv, threatening to kill the boss, or literally just a monster pretending to be you, you unfortunately won’t be a good fit here 🤚”

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wylanslcve · 5 months

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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?

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charl3ss · 7 months

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It’s very important to me that once Inej gets her ship, she comes to be known as the Sankta of the Sea. People pray to her and sell relics with her face on them. Inej, just a girl, now with the weight of being a living saint. Much to think about ‘tis all

#I think it’d be really interesting to see hold it affects her #also just comparing that to Kaz’s reputation is both very funny and makes me go 😵‍💫#Inej ‘Sankta of the seas’ Ghafa and her husband #the Ketterdam. mob boss Kaz ‘Dirtyhands’ Brekker #thinking thoughts #grishaverse #six of crows #crooked kingdom #inej ghafa #kaz brekker #kanej

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fantastic-nonsense · 1 month

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I love your thoughtful SoC meta! I would love to know your thoughts on Kaz and Jesper’s relationship. Specifically, I adore Kaz but one thing in particular that always seemed so dark to me was that he enabled Jesper’s gambling addiction even though he obviously does care about him. Kaz is obviously willing to do a lot of fucked up things in service of his goals, but this one in particular, toward his own brother figure, I find sad. It’s kind of addressed during their fight at the end of CK but still feels a little unfinished.

I love Kaz and Jesper's relationship. There's sooooo much to dig into there (way too much for a single meta); it's super juicy and complicated, and one of the best complexities of it is that they often enable and feed off of each other's trauma. The pre-canon status quo is a situation where Kaz and Jesper are, in many ways, using and abusing each other as a way of avoiding dealing with their own trauma. It's a fascinating push-and-pull dynamic because neither of them are pushovers and yet neither one is particularly interested in facing their Issues™ head-on, and they both seemingly recognize that in each other and give each other an uncharacteristic amount of grace in helping the other avoid dealing with it.

In Kaz's case, that most often looks like enabling Jesper's gambling addiction and then repeatedly bailing him out of trouble under the justification of "he's loyal and competent, it would be wasteful to let the other gangs kill him." In Jesper's case, this looks like ignoring Kaz's countless and extremely obvious issues in favor of playing the loyal second. Basically, it's not just Kaz enabling Jesper's gambling addiction; it's also Jesper enabling Kaz's unhinged ruthlessness with little pushback other than a few snarky comments.

They also project a lot of their own issues onto each other! Kaz pushes Jesper away in part because he's projecting the grief and blame he feels over Jordie's death onto Jesper, but Jesper is using Kaz's ruthless pragmatism to escape the crippling disappointment of returning home to face his father's judgement for being a college drop-out, gambling addict, and gang member. And Kaz withholds praise and verbal declarations of trust from Jesper because he hates acknowledging that he cares about people, but Jesper uses Kaz's emotional detachment as a crutch to avoid dealing with his own commitment issues by pining after a boy he knows will never reciprocate his advances. This status quo is, of course, insanely unhealthy for both boys long-term, but where would we be if any of the Crows actually dealt with their issues in a healthy way?

That dynamic, imo, is also only possible because Kaz and Jesper have known each other for longer than anyone else in the main crew; Kaz may have let Inej in further, but he let Jesper in first. As far as we know, Jesper is the first person Kaz genuinely lets past his mile-high walls since Jordie died...but he very deliberately holds him at arms' length in a way that he does not with Inej (something that Jesper notices and is jealous about!). Being "the first" in this case unfortunately comes with a lot of baggage, and Kaz and Jesper would both lowkey rather die than talk about how much they care what the other thinks of them.

Kaz clearly didn't recruit Jesper looking for a friend or someone who reminded him of his dead older brother; he recruited him because he saw someone with a useful skillset who he preferred to be at his side rather than in a rival gang or dead in the canals. It's to Jesper's credit that he managed to break through those walls anyway, but there's only so much he can do in the face of Kaz's armor. And like Inej, Kaz's closed-off personality and actions hurt Jesper repeatedly. But he stays anyway, because he (like Inej) sees the boy underneath the mask that Kaz wears and cares a little too much to let him go:

“He wouldn’t—” Jesper stopped short, and then he laughed. “Of course he would.” Jesper flexed his knuckles, concentrated on the lines of his palms. “Kaz is…I don’t know, he’s like nobody else I’ve ever known. He surprises me.” “Yes. Like a hive of bees in your dresser drawer.” Jesper barked a laugh. “Just like that.” “So what are we doing here?” Jesper turned back to the sea, feeling his cheeks heat. “Hoping for honey, I guess. And praying not to get stung.” Inej bumped her shoulder against his. “Then at least we’re both the same kind of stupid.” “I don’t know what your excuse is, Wraith. I’m the one who can never walk away from a bad hand.” She looped her arm in his. “That makes you a rotten gambler, Jesper. But an excellent friend.” “You’re too good for him, you know.” “I know. So are you." -Ch. 17, Six of Crows

Kaz is unused to verbalizing the trust he places in others and actively in denial about how much he cares about them until Crooked Kingdom; he spends his time deliberately being cruel and pushing people away even as he proves over and over again that he doesn't actually want them to leave him. This casual assholery hits those closest to him (Inej and Jesper) the hardest because they are clearly trusted with his life but not with his heart, and that hurts them both.

For Inej, resolving that behavior looks like giving him an ultimatum ("I will have you without armor or I will not have you at all") and telling herself to walk away unless he meets her challenge. For Jesper? That looks like duking it out on top of the Geldrenner when they're both at rock bottom, because of course that's the only way either one of those boys is ever going to verbalize the tension that underlies their relationship. There's just a lot of baggage and mutual toxicity and unsaid words that neither of them are very interested in dealing with until everything comes to a head during the Clocktower fight.

I think we also forget that the Kaz-Jesper dynamic we see in the majority of the duology is not their normal dynamic: it's how they interact when Kaz is mad at Jesper. And a mad Kaz is, within the scope of canon, a pretty cruel Kaz, which is something that I think a good portion of the fandom likes to handwave away in favor of pointing towards Kaz's active attempts to be better in the back half of the duology.

Ultimately we only see the "normal" Kaz-Jesper dynamic for the first 12 or so chapters of Six of Crows (when the Dock Fight/Eyeball Incident happens) and the last few chapters of Crooked Kingdom. Those chapters are a really interesting look into what that relationship looks like when they're on good terms. It's clear that they're good friends, trust each other a hell of a lot, and joke around with each other quite a bit (the "saves ammo" joke in the parley chapter, their interactions during the Hellgate breakout, the "man with a knife!" "man with a gun!" exchange immediately after Kaz throws Oomen overboard, etc), but we also see the stress points: Jesper getting mad at Kaz for not telling him about Big Bolliger's betrayal, Kaz sending Wylan with Jesper during the prep chapters to keep an eye on him, and Jesper's bee and honey conversation with Inej on the Ferolind, for example.

These stress points are what fracture and crack in the aftermath of Jesper accidentally alerting the other gangs that they were headed out on the Ice Court Job and nearly causing Inej's death, and further buckle under the stress and pressure that Kaz and Jesper deal with during the following month and a half: the Ice Court job, Van Eck kidnapping Inej on Vellgeluk, Colm showing up in Ketterdam, and the Sugar Silo/Auction scheme.

In this way, I think Kaz enabling Jesper's gambling addiction is less about Kaz being actively cruel towards someone he sees the ghost of his brother in and punishing Jesper for the sins he percieves Jordie to have made (which is also true, and a meta for a different time!) and more about the weird balance of toxic mutual leniency Kaz and Jesper have allowed the other to provide for them for over two years...and how that leniency breaks down once it's not just Kaz's life or time on the line when Jesper fucks up.

Put more succinctly: for a long time, Kaz and Jesper existed in a toxic balance of enabling each others' worst impulses and behaviors, which was only able to be verbally addressed when they were both at rock bottom, desperate, and seemingly had very little left to lose. This conflict is somewhat addressed and resolved in the conversation where Kaz refuses to give Jesper the last of the parem and offers up a tiny bit of information about Jordie—showcasing his own growth and how he's finally trying to break the cycle by refusing to enable Jesper's self-destructive tendencies—but that level of tension is unable to be properly resolved in one single blowout argument. And I think it's deliberately left a bit unfinished because neither of them are really in a place where they're ready to address everything they've left unsaid for so long, even in the epilogue chapters.

However, we do see the beginnings of that reconcilitaion (Kaz asking Inej to tell Jesper that he's "missed around the Slat") and the story ends on a hopeful note regarding Kaz's commitment to removing his armor, which implies a lot about the resolution of that dangling thread. And of course, we know that by Rule of Wolves they're back to being thick as thieves and fucking around as usual, so clearly they hashed it out at some point in the in-between (and personally? I don't think it took either of them very long after the CK epilogue chapters to do that hashing out).

tl;dr: I love it when two traumatized and emotionally constipated teenage boys use each other to avoid facing their own personal problems and then get into a fistfight to avoid talking about how much they care about each other. Top-tier dynamic. Chef's kiss. I could talk about them for hours.

#also thank you so much for the ask and kind words #I hope this meta did your question justice and makes up for the fact that I didn't answer it for so long #kaz brekker #jesper fahey #six of crows #crooked kingdom #soc meta #asks #long post #(very long post; rip and sorry for not using a read more but it didn't quite fit anywhere)#queue

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your-average-multifandom-mess · 1 year

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Is it just me that finds the INSANE amount of Kaz Brekker smut on this site rather icky

I mean the boy was (canonically!) so traumatised and repulsed by human flesh that it took him two whole books to briefly hold hands with the girl he loved more than anything in the world and you’ve got him doing all THAT in your fics?

I get that its fan fiction and you can write whatever the hell you want but it just seems a bit wrong no

#its like when people get rid of his limp like no thats a very important part of him #also not to mention that kaz is UNDER EIGHTEEN IN THE BOOKS #(I think)#grishaverse #kaz brekker #inej gafha #jesper fahey #nina zenik #wylan van eck #mattias helvar #crows #six of crows #crooked kingdom #the crow club #shadow and bone #kanej #wesper #helnik

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veerbles · 23 days

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I keep thinking about this line from ck.

this is the culmination of the van eck job; the 'post-credits' scene that tells us where each of the characters is going forward. nina is 'going to find a way to make it matter', which teases row. inej is starting her journey of ending slavery on the seas. jesper and wylan's futures are explicitly intertwined and implicitly turning to politics.

what does kaz's line mean? what was leigh trying to foreshadow?

I refuse to believe the phrasing of it means nothing, because in the context of this scene, it can't mean nothing. this is kaz's next big journey. and it also references another big conversation from ck:

this scene from the geldrenner bathroom is so important because, in it, inej confronts kaz with the truth of his revenge arc (which essentially drives the plot of the entire duology): how is the person he became to ruin pekka different from pekka himself?

and again, kaz mentions building an empire and burning it.

so it has to have meaning. is it literal? will a big plot point in soc #3 involve kaz setting fire to the barrel? but if that's the case, why is it significant that he rebuilds it into something new beforehand?

or maybe it's figurative. at the very end of ck inej asks kaz to help her end slavery from his side of things in ketterdam. she mentions taking down the crooked politicians, the slave-owners, the... even less-moral barrel bosses. while it seems obvious that kaz's 'new empire' is a barrel under his control, what would become of a criminal empire under the thumb of a man indirectly helping to destroy it? perhaps it figuratively 'burns to the ground'.

so either kaz builds his empire, and then literally burns it to achieve something else, or kaz builds his empire and uses its own power to 'burn it' by helping something cleaner grow instead. maybe that's the connection to the bathroom conversation: maybe it's the way he finally proves himself to be different from pekka.

or maybe it's neither of those, and I'm completely off-base? either way it has to mean something big, and I would honestly love to hear more interpretations.

#six of crows #crooked kingdom #grishaverse #kaz brekker #I think I previously made it clear that I'm team 'kaz would never clean up his act and go honest'#but honestly burning everything he achieved to help ketterdam become less corrupt and then fucking off is pretty on-brand for him #'if I can't be a criminal then NO ONE gets to be a criminal. I'm going down and I'm taking the barrel down with me'#I am also VERY carefully not mentioning the possibility of kaz literally burning down the barrel and burning with it...#we all know who dies if someone dies in soc3 ok

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padfoot-lupin77 · 2 months

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This morning I started reading crooked kingdom after finishing six of crows just to realize the font in ck is several times smaller than in soc. Let’s hope my eyes survive.

#also Inej’s pov is killing me cause she thinks Kaz isn’t gonna rescue her meanwhile she’s the only thing he thinks about #Wylan is still stuck with kuwei’s face which is very annoying #Matthias and Nina are so funny though #crooked kingdom #six of crows

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whosthatfunkyrat · 4 months

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I think there are two types of Soc fans.

The Kanej shippers and the Wesper shippers.

Helnik is also there but they most likely hardcore ship either Wesper or Kanej too.

I don’t mean to say you have to pick one, for instance I ship all three.

But you will have a favorite, and that will determine what kind of fan you are.

#Kanej shippers are angsty as hell but also they crave something of love that is very hard to find #Wesper shippers are more lighthearted individuals who value a flirty relationship and a good laugh #six of crows #soc #kaz brekker #shadow and bone #inej ghafa #grishaverse #kanej #crooked kingdom #jesper fahey #wylan van sunshine #wylan hendriks #wesper #helnik #nina zenik #mattias helvar

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in-with-the-blues · 6 months

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honestly i feel like one of the most underrated moments of the kaz & nina friendship is when nina is pretending to be johannus rietveld's heartrender assistant for the auction job and they meet with van eck in the geldrenner.

basically after van eck told colm he'd confirm the "investment" of the jurda fields with the merchant council for kuwei's auction, van eck addresses nina and asks her about her involvement with the dregs. nina then asks van eck about wylan's "kidnapping" and then proceeds to throw the shadiest insult at van eck (that is very iconic of her btw):

like, even though nina finds kaz infuriating and inmoral and has threatened him a couple times, we also see that she cares for him and also respects him a lot, even if she doesn't give a flying fuck about his opinion.

nina literally (though subtlely) calls van eck an idiot and shades him for having crossed kaz and i really love moments like this that show the mutual respect nina & kaz hold for each other in spite of their rocky relationship.

(take also as a supporting point when, in the sweet reef job when nina is cornered by the dime lions, she begins negotiating with them to buy inej time, and she tells them that if they wanted her to go with them they had to go find a way where kaz wouldn't go after her; yes she was bluffing but she's absolutely right: one does not cross kaz brekker and people who do it (insert van eck) are complete idiots)

#i am very passionate about this okay??#also fuck van eck <3 #nothing quite like a 3am rant #nina zenik #kaz brekker #six of crows #crooked kingdom #grishaverse #shadow and bone #for the curious it's at the end of chapter 29 of ck

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