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[dolorosa_12]

We're up to Day Twenty of the fandom meme:

T: Do you have any hard and fast headcanons that you will die defending?

I'm not sure I'd quite go to the extreme of dying to defend it, but I remain eternally irritated with the ending of Leigh Bardugo's Six of Crows series. I'll explain my irritation (and the headcanon which negates it) behind a cut, due to spoilers.


This series ends with one of my least favourite tropes: characters having to leave the place in which they found home and a sense of family and community, and separating from that family and community. This series, to me, is about a group of misfits, refugees, migrants, and dispossessed people finding themselves and each other in a city which is built on migrants, refugees, misfits and the dispossessed. Very few people who live there were actually born there originally, and although it can be a cruel place to them, it's the place where they achieve the closest thing to home that's going to be possible.

And thus, it is deeply irritating to me that Bardugo seems to think the only happy ending for her messed up band of dispossessed misfits is to split them all up and send most of them back where they came from. I'm probably projecting way too much here, but I really, really dislike stories where immigrants never feel at home in the places to which they migrate, and who will only ever be happy 'back where they came from'. I don't like stories that tell hurt, damaged people that the only way they can heal from that damage is to return to the place they lived before the damage happened.

As you can probably imagine, therefore, my headcanon for this group of characters is firstly that none of the dies (I'm still bitter about that character's death) and secondly that they all remain in Ketterdam, realising that their home is each other, and Ketterdam. I generally only write and read fic that handwaves Bardugo's ending, or at least has the characters admitting (after they've gone their separate ways), that they need to go back to Ketterdam and be with each other.


U: Three favorite characters from three different fandoms, and why they’re your favorites.

V: Which character do you relate to most?

W: A trope which you are virtually certain to hate in any fandom.

X: A trope which you are almost certain to love in any fandom.

Y: What are your secondhand fandoms (i.e., fandoms you aren’t in personally but are tangentially familiar with because your friends/people on your dash are in them)?

Z: Just ramble about something fan-related, go go go!

Comments

[evewithanapple]

The ending to Crooked Kingdom made me so mad! Especially poor Nina, who's in shock and grieving after uxpectedly losing her lover, and the solution Bardugo came up with for her is packing her off on a boat, away from her friends and support network? LEIGH, WHY. (I mean, I know it's because she had plans for Nina's arc in King of Scars that didn't include the rest of the gang, but I'm still mad.)

[dolorosa_12]

I think I'll always be furious about this!

I think part of the problem for me is that the Ravkan politics side of things has always really bored me, and I never found it convincing that Nina remained so devoted to the cause during all the time she spent exiled in Ketterdam — the whole point was that she built a life and support network for herself outside Ravka. And killing Matthias and then depriving her of that support network seemed to undermine all that completely.

[naye]

Having just finished a re-read (well, audiobook read) of the Six of Crows duology as a good "safe" distraction, I remembered you mentioning hating the ending and I went "Hm, I wonder if it's the splitting up..." and I totally get it. I immediately processed it as a brief parting of ways until they join up again - it's pretty clear Inej is going to be based in Ketterdam, and so are Jesper and Wyland. Kaz isn't going anywhere, and I feel like Nina will be back? But yeah, she really does leave and talks about Ravka...and I am also not okay with the death but that's kind of my baseline about character deaths just in general.

I REALLY want a sequel where they're all back in Ketterdam and back together with each other in a group and not all just doing their own things alone.

[dolorosa_12]

You are absolutely spot on — I think one of my least favourite tropes is the idea that characters (especially misfit/damaged/traumatised characters who have found a home and a family in each other) spend an entire story building connections, saving themselves, the world and each other ... and then their 'reward' is to separate from one another forever and leave the world/city/home they've built so painstakingly.

Your 'temporary parting of the ways' is basically my headcanon for the series. I am in no doubt that Inej uses Ketterdam as a base, and that Kaz, Jesper and Wylan will stay there. Nina ... is more doubtful. It feels to me that Bardugo is emphatic that Nina's home is in Ravka, and her role is as someone supporting Ravka's political aims and helping the Ravkan leadership achieve them. Whereas I left the Six of Crows duology with the opposite impression: that the duology represented Nina's long, slow realisation that Ravka was behind her, and that she was done with hitching her considerable powers to the Ravkan cause. So in my head Matthias doesn't die, and he and Nina also stay in Ketterdam.

[rachelmanija]

I also hate that sort of ending! (Very similar to the Obernewtyn ending thematically, it sounds like.)

[dolorosa_12]

Yes, I think I'm sensing a bit of a pattern here. I hate stories where characters save the world, their community, or themselves and each other, and yet their 'reward' is to be immediately and forever separated from everyone they've ever loved and come to rely on over the course of their adventures.