Luckily, the bigotry isn’t the point it’s just the poisonous background noise of an already impossible task. (Zoya was always going to be a problem - the original line is “you stink of Keramzin” - but it does seem weird that she had two episodes of mostly normal behavior before abruptly commencing her reign of terror.) She uses the maid’s remark as an opportunity to banish them all, and when Alina softly, heartbreakingly, begs her not to change her eyes, she replies, “I don’t care that you’re part Shu I care that you look terrible.” The warm welcome she gets from Genya and the rest of the Grisha after she and Kirigan demonstrate her power for the King is immediately dampened by Zoya Nazyalenski, whose mean-girl snobbery now comes with a sprinkling of racism, too: “You stink of the orphanage, half-breed,” she whispers in her ear as she makes a show of hugging her. In Os Alta, the seat of power, it’s racists the whole way down, from the vainglorious queen who assumes from her appearance that she doesn’t speak Ravkan, despite being in the Ravkan army, to the maid who suggests Genya Safin tailor her eyes to look “less Shu.” A rare Corporalki specialist basically equivalent to a Grisha plastic surgeon, and “gifted” to the queen by Kirigan as a child (indenture comes in all flavors here!), Genya the Tailor is also a pragmatist. Pretending nobody in the Grishaverse is racist was a denial without rebuttal.Īll that said, it is crushing to watch Alina Starkov be spoken to like this. It doesn’t have to follow those rules - indeed, Bardugo explicitly cuts the development of chattel slavery and indigenous genocide from this universe, opting instead to envision Novya Zem (a stand-in for the Americas) as a peaceful frontier for Black and white farmers alike - but it can’t just ignore them altogether. For the same reason that color-blind casting is a disservice to actors of color forced to play characters that deny their lived experience, fantasy based on the past needs to acknowledge the forces that shaped it. Netflix’s adaptation, meanwhile, dives right into the muck, and weirdly enough, it feels a lot like righting a wrong. And despite a number of nationalities and cultures being fleshed out, we never really see any sort of bigotry on those bases. Otkazat’sya certainly hate and fear Grisha, and vice versa, but author Leigh Bardugo has never really gone the X-Men route and explicitly tied the oppression of powered people to white supremacy. Despite being modeled after 19th-century history, the Grishaverse novels contain little, if any, racism.
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