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comingoutofthecauldron · 4 years

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on malyen oretsev as a character and a love interest

this might be slightly rambly and incoherent but i need to say it. malyen oretsev has been the underdog in this fandom for as long as i can remember. a little while ago it was the “malaria” jokes (very classy, folks), and then waves upon waves of mal antis and darkling stans/apologists, and even now a decent majority of the fandom is convinced he’s just boring or an asshole. and fair enough on that last account, if you genuinely don’t like him as a character, that’s fine. but there are a lot of accusations people throw mal’s way that i am really sick and tired of hearing, and hopefully this will help put a stop to them.

mal is not boring. mal is witty and charismatic and an easy friend, and he is also incredibly brave. when he thought alina was being tortured and brutalised by the darkling, he volunteered for a suicide mission to track the stag—which he didn’t even know existed—into fjerda because it was the only way he thought he could help her. that mission killed two of his best friends. people say mal is an asshole because of the way he treated alina when he saw her (months after she’d been dragged away from him against her will) happy and healthy in amongst the people who had looked down on the both of them their whole lives, after having just lost his best friends for her. i say his being upset was pretty understandable. and yes, he was a bit of asshole in siege & storm, but he’s a teenage boy and you cannot hold him to all these ridiculously high moral and behavioural standards (especially when you don’t hold other characters like nikolai or the darkling to those standards). everyone has their asshole moments. nikolai’s is ongoing. holding mal’s against him just because he’s not all-powerful like the darkling or royal like nikolai is bullshit, plain and simple.

as for malina, i have a lot to say on that front. a lot of people say that mal was only interested in alina after she got her powers, but that is blatantly untrue. the quote, “just you and me. it’s always just you and me, alina” literally happens in the first chapter of shadow & bone. mal himself said that he always loved alina, and her being taken away was the wakeup call he needed. if anything, alina’s powers only complicated their relationship—mal didn’t know how to deal with her becoming the very thing they’d both grown to resent after being treated like shit in the first army while the grisha were treated like royalty, which explains a lot of the tension in their relationship surrounding alina’s abilities.

people tend to say that mal didn’t like it when alina became powerful and less dependent on him, but that’s not right. mal never wanted alina to be less. he was afraid of what would happen to her if she became more. from his point of view, all that alina’s powers brought them was trouble; the darkling’s grooming of alina and his subsequent manhunt for them, nikolai’s proposal to alina (when he was an adult and alina was a minor), the apparat’s cult and imprisonment of them, the death of the only mother figure they’d ever known. in his mind, alina’s powers only ever brought them misery, and mal was scared of losing her to that misery. we saw how they were torn apart throughout the books, because mal was otkazat’sya, and he was not the only one who felt that that might never be good enough for alina. neither of them ever wanted the power that alina was given. that’s why it was so hard for mal to accept that alina wanted to keep it—he was scared it would corrupt her the way it had the darkling. he was scared of losing her.

the argument that really frustrates me is when people call malina abusive. say it with me, folks: malina is not an abusive ship. mal and alina loved each other unconditionally. even if he wasn’t happy about alina’s powers, he knew that it was important to alina that she use them to save ravka, and so he helped her. he owed ravka nothing. this was the country whose monarchy had essentially taken his life from him to force him into being little more than a foot soldier in their army; the country his friends had died for thanks to the darkling being placed in such a position of power; the country whose king let the people starve whilst he sat in his golden palace and wasted more money. mal helped alina save ravka not because he loved his country, but because he loved her. hell, he literally died for her.

whilst we’re on the subject, let’s talk about that quote that people like to say is abusive: “i love you, alina, even the part of you that loved him.” do you understand how monumental that quote is? mal found out that the darkling is the same darkling who made the shadow fold, the shadow fold that had taken numerous lives and that had gotten them into this mess in the first place. he was beginning to realise the extent of the manipulation alina had undergone at the hands of the darkling, the grooming and abuse. they both knew the atrocities that the darkling had committed, and yet mal has it in himself to tell alina that not only does he not care that alina ever thought she loved the darkling, he loves her all the same anyway? how is that abusive?

lastly, i want to talk about his most infamous quote: “i am become a blade.” this is one of my favourite quotes in the entire grishaverse, and i’m going to explain why. a lot of people think that it’s grammatically incorrect, but as your local grammar nerd, i’m here to tell you that it’s not! as alina notices, the actual tattoo is written in ancient ravkan: e’ya sta rezku. because of that, the quote translates with slightly strange phrasing, but that phrasing still makes grammatical sense. it’s sort of like how shakespearean english is still english, it just sounds different.

now, grammar aside, i want to talk about why the quote is so beautiful (to me, anyway). mal has been used all his life. when they were at keramzin, he tracked and hunted animals for them to eat. in the first army, he was used as a foot soldier and a tracker, and the darkling (and nikolai, to an extent) used him to track the amplifiers. he’d always had his agency taken away from him by those with more power, and he’d been used and mistreated almost every time. then he turns around and offers himself and his agency up to alina without a second thought. because he loves and trusts her that much. at this point, it doesn’t seem to him as though there’s any chance of him and alina ever being together or getting a happy ending. he’s not doing it for that. he’s doing it because alina wants to save ravka, and he loves alina, so he wants to help her do that. in all of his indecision about his life and what he is and who he is for alina, he is able to decide that to live in service of her, to live for her, is exactly what he needs to do. he is essentially saying, “i recognise your power and though i am afraid for you, i won’t hold it against you now. instead i’ll help you wield it and fulfil your destiny, even if that isn’t what i want/what i want for you and even if it gets me killed.”

mal is a teenage boy who had to mature very quickly under terrible circumstances. of course he’s not perfect and he makes mistakes, but i cannot for the life of me understand why he is hated on such a large scale. he was an asshole to alina at some points, yes, but alina was usually an asshole right back, and it was only because they were both pining and angry at their situation. if you still don’t like him, fine, but for the love of god, stop calling him abusive/toxic. he’s a good character and a healthy love interest (a rare sight in ya) and malina is a healthy romance. it’s that simple.

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