Take On The World | Kanej

Can we please stop making people feel awful for shipping a problematic ship or for liking a problematic character? I've seen people accuse others for encouraging pedophilic behaviour simply because they ship an immortal with a mortal, and for encouraging abusive behaviour simply because they ship an enemies to lovers ship.

Certain self-righteous people tend to forget this is fictional characters we're talking about, and you can't judge a person from that. The characters you love or the ships you ship don't make you a bad person or a good one. If you like a perfectly healthy relationship, or are in love with the kind, cinnamon roll character, good for you. If you like that borderline abusive, slightly problematic ship, it doesn't make you a bad person, no matter what anyone says.

Additionally, this blog supports shipping "problematic" shipping, because fiction and fanfiction is not reality.

Whoever or whatever you like in characters and ships doesn't define your personality. Fandoms are treated as an escape from reality for most people, and that sort of behaviour makes our fandoms toxic which helps no one and nothing.

Kaz is such a fucking SOFTIE deep down, it cracks me up every time. “My mother is the harbor, my father is greed” and then turns around to make sure the flowers they use in their escape are Inej’s favorites. Gets Jesper’s guns back for him even though he doesn’t have to. Allows and in fact encourages Nina to embrace her new powers. Goes out of his way to mentor Wylan. Asks Matthias to keep Mrs. Van Eck calm and comfortable even though it would’ve been easier to torture her. Essentially said he *missed* Jesper. Like??? What a soft little murderous gangster.

I think one of my favorite things about how Kaz is written is that his limp was caused by something so mundane. He fell. He broke his leg. It healed wrong. That’s it.

There’s no special cause, and we’re not meant to care about how it happened. It’s not written as a tragedy or some sort of marker of being a chosen or anything like that.

I’m not saying that it’s bad to have a tragic backstory for a character’s disability, but too often that veers into bitterness and demonizing a disability. We also just don’t get boring causes very often. And it’s almost always: something terrible happened to this pure and good chara, usually done to them by someone horrible and evil, because our baby hero is too good and cool and perfect to have been injured otherwise.

Kaz fucked up and fell off a fucking roof. And it’s certainly not his fault he has a bad leg now, but it does show that he wasn’t *always perfect,* the way some protags are written.

And he’s not perfect or portrayed as perfect at all. He’s a jerk. He is absolutely an awful person, but he’s not *just awful.* He has a very strong sense of honor and fairness, even if it’s been twisted by Ketterdam. Despite being described as ruthless and willing to do anything for the right price, we see him bluffing whenever innocents get dragged into things.

He constantly fights not to care about people because he thinks attachments are weaknesses, but very early on he ignores his phobia of touch to carry Inej at least thirty feet. That’s a lot even with his gloves on. He is definitely calculating, but he’s not heartless.

Even with Matthias, despite Kaz’s irreverence, he reassures Matthias about the sacred ash. He tells Matthias that it was only a metaphor, and that depite its significance, he shouldnt feel guilty in having brought it down. It’s somewhat cold, which I don’t really fault him for, because Kaz is not a soft character.

And Kaz is not a fuckboy. Because fuckboys are a very particular kind of gross. They’re womanizing, arrogant, entitled, and sexist. Most of Kaz’s behavior is tied to his trauma - he has severe PTSD and understandable trust issues, and he shouldn’t be demonized for holding people at arms length.

He’s not beingnstand-offish and secretive to be an ass. Kaz genuinely believes that he has to act that way to survive, and nothing about Ketterdam has proven otherwise. He still maintains a deeply trusting relationship with Inej - he keeps very few secrets from her and consistently allows himself to be vulnerable in her presence.

Kaz’s entire moral scale is balanced on what Inej will forgive him for. Theft, violence, scheming: all of this is fine. But killing an innocent woman? Exploiting sex workers? Burying Pekka Rollins’s son? Absolutely not.

He never pressures Inej into staying with him, though he does ask once. When she tells him she plans to leave Ketterdam, he works to make that possible, because her wants are more important to him than keeping her close.

When Kaz has a chance to bargain with Nikolai Lantsov, to ask for literally anything, he asks Niko to find Inej’s parents. He does things for her and does not ask for thanks. When it comes to Inej and the rest of the Crows, Kaz never thinks in terms of debt - none of the Crows owe him anything. He only makes bargains with them twice - once with Matthias, and once with Nina, and in both cases he is bargainng for their help. He pays Inej’s contract - pays, not buys - because he can and that’s what she deserves. He ruins the Menagerie for the same reason.

And when shit hits the fan, and everything looks like it’s going to come down on their heads, he doesn’t try to save himself. He offers to turn himself over to the mob to let the others go free.

I hear you and I raise it.

Kaz: If any Razorgulls encroach on fifth harbor again show them no mercy

The Dregs:…. yes sir

Kaz: can I help you

The Dregs staring at Inej and Kaz wearing matching sweaters: nope

Inej and Kaz are definitely not big on public displays of affection, but just think for a moment about how hilarious it would be if they were. Like can you imagine if your boss (who is like 20 max) has this super tiny super sweet gf who leans on him all the time and you just have to take orders from this chronically angry guy who is constantly hanging onto his girl like

Kaz, as serious as ever: if you see any Blacktips take them down. We don’t want them talking

The Dregs: … okay

Kaz: what

The Dregs, staring at Inej, who’s got her arms wrapped around Kaz’s stomach and her head leaning on his arm: nothing

“Is Inej Ghafa your real name?”

A strange sound escaped Inej’s throat, part sob, part laugh, a weak, embarrassing sound, but it had been months since she’d heard her own name, her family name. “Yes,” she managed.

“Is that what you prefer to be called?”

“Of course,” she said, then added, “Is Kaz Brekker your real name?”

“Real enough.”

This is the scene that says Kaz has officically adopted Wylan.😂😂😂

This is Kaz being a dad.

I would LOVE to see him as a dad though one day. He would either be showering his kids in Kruge or reading to them Suli bed time stories. Or idk what. My imagination is running kinda wild at the moment.

I think one of my favorite aspects of the Six of Crows duology is the fact that Kaz and Inej do not end up together.

And that’s not because I don’t ship them.

It’s because Inej, unlike so many YA heroines, isn’t what “heals” Kaz. Her love doesn’t magically fix him or make him a better person. He wants to change for her– he wants to get over his phobia of human touch. He wants her to love him. But it isn’t some overnight happening. He doesn’t suddenly overcome his affliction because of his love for her.

In the end, Kaz is still morally ambiguous, sometimes outright corrupt, and still has severe PTSD trauma.

And while Inej might love Kaz despite those things, she is not willing to lower her worth to accept them in a relationship. “I will have you without your armor, Kaz Brekker. Or I will not have you at all.”

That was one of the most powerful YA heroine lines to her love interest that I’ve ever read. So many fictional girls (and real girls, for that matter) stay in the hopes of fixing a man, of healing his brokenness. Inej wants to heal him, but she understands that she cannot. Only Kaz can heal himself. Only he can want it enough to change. And it won’t be some overnight affair. Wanting to change and actually changing are two entirely different things. Kaz will have to go through agonizing changes if he ever wants to grow.

So far, he has accepted that he is the “demon of the barrel”. He still wants to burn the world down. He is still angry and hurting. He talks about wondering why over the years, with every violent turn his life takes, why his phobia has only gotten worse. It’s because he’s let himself rot in it. He’s stripped any and all goodness in the world down to the barest threads.

That’s why he is not ready for Inej. Inej, who might have her own issues and flaws, but who still has hope for a better world. Who is still willing to fight for it.

It’s not Kaz’s inability to touch her that she wants him to work on. It’s his mindset. His finality in the evil in his heart and his acceptance of it. He will never get over his phobia until he can understand goodness, the goodness of touch, the goodness of man.

And Inej will not accept him while he still holds on to that armor of hatred. And I think that is beautiful. It is healthy. It shows a level of self-respect that is often sadly absent from our fiction today.

ook so what counts as infantilizing wylan? could u give examples please lol. Like is referring to wylan as “my baby” infantilism be cause I literally refer to all characters as my babies 💀

I’m very suspicious of people who call Wylan their baby or their son because, in my experience, those tend to be the people babying him. It’s really weird because he’s the only character that is consistently treated like a child in the fandom.

Mostly in that post I was talking about people treating Wylan like their “innocent uwu gay baby.” Acting like he is unflawed, acting like he is innocent and pure despite the fact that his actual personality in the books is much different. (Yes, at the beginning of Six of Crows, a lot of what we see comes off as very childish. But even by the end of that book we learn more about his personality and capabilities.) Wylan isn’t like that at all, he’s intelligent, he’s insecure about himself, he’s filled with a lot of righteous anger, and he’s even a bit chaotic or violent at times. Not only does making him this innocent childish character not sit right with me, it throws away all of his character development in canon.

In short: Just follow his canon personality.

I recently reread Cruel Prince/read the B&N short story, and I had THOUGHTS:

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