It happened out of the blue… I’m neither the first nor the last to be on the receiving end of the algorithms, for no particular reason.
Since when do you need a smartphone to access social media? And how does that prove you're not a bot anyway? As far as I know, ‘bot farms’ mainly operate on social zoos using SIM cards, don’t they?
After digging around on Reddit, I discovered that the so-called verification process via the X app requires a facial scan or a fingerprint scan, which, incidentally, still fails to unlock the accounts of thousands of people around the world.
As far as I’m concerned, going along with these demands is out of the question. They make social media virtually essential for content creators to gain visibility, and then they hold you to ransom over your biometric data. It’s the well-honed ‘foot-in-the-door’ technique.
And as you need to be able to access your account in order to delete it, I had to invoke Article 17 (on the right to be forgotten) and Article 12 (on the transparency of information and communications and the procedures for exercising data subjects’ rights) of the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) to request the complete deletion of my account and my data on X.
Ultimately, it may well be a blessing in disguise, given the high level of toxicity on X, where everyone twists and takes facts out of context to make them fit their ideology (or propaganda) rather than reality, which is usually much more nuanced and rarely black and white. That, in fact, is the whole art of decontextualisation: justifying extremes in order to generate as much friction as possible and maximise loosh production.
And it’s not as if it made much difference to the visibility of my work. Whether here or elsewhere.
Nowadays, on major platforms such as Facebook, the organic (unpaid) reach of a post is less than 5%. In other words, if you have 100 followers, the algorithm will only show it to 4 or 5 people.
This explains why quantity and pre-packaged thinking prevail over quality and authenticity. Most social media users are unwilling to make the mental effort needed to engage in deconstruction and analysis whilst scrolling through their feed. Whereas artificial emotional triggers that flatter cognitive biases drive clicks and thus more ‘available brain time’ to serve ads. Put simply, on social media, it’s only quantity that brings in the money. Not quality.
That said, I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember. Long before personal computers and the internet even existed. As a university student, I would publish an international music fanzine—the paper-based precursor to blogs—produced with a simple typewriter, a pair of scissors and some glue. My printing and postage costs were covered by subscriptions, and any remaining copies were sold through independent record shops and by word of mouth. All the money was reinvested in producing my fanzine, and on top of that, I was able to meet my readers in real life.
In other words, seeing the numbers of my imaginary followers and ‘friends’ rack up more and more zeros is absolutely not what I’m after. They don’t know me from Adam and, let’s be honest, most are only looking to boost their own visibility rather than read what I write. I'm happy to leave this false sense of glory and recognition to all the great thinkers by proxy and I'm so pleased to have a few but genuine readers who read my articles by choice, rather than because an algorithm or an influencer has suggested they do so. A huge thank you to this handful of ‘explorers’ of the lesser-travelled paths for spreading the word and supporting my work.
Popularity is as fleeting as the wave it rides. Authenticity, on the other hand, is rooted in the depths, where the noise from the surface can no longer be heard.
AI: everyone knows what this acronym stands for by now. Since the introduction of ‘chatbots’, artificial intelligence has permeated our daily lives and become an integral part of them in just a few years. So much so that many are questioning the implications—and even expressing alarm about the future of humanity—in the face of the rapid, uncontrolled deployment of cutting-edge technology that remains largely misunderstood.
Artificial intelligence is going to change everything in the world, except
how men think and behave.
Warren Buffett
Meanwhile, our attention is deliberately diverted by other forms of invasion—more immediate and more vociferous, yet just as anxiety-inducing. The good old trick of distracting us from one thing by drawing our attention to another. The Matrix saturates our mental and physical space for one purpose alone: to prevent any breakthrough of the Spirit (flash of insight).
You’ve all seen at least one sci-fi movie in your life, or read dystopian
classics such as
Nineteen Eighty-Four,
Brave New World,
This Perfect Day and a couple of
Asimov’s stories—the list is by no means exhaustive. So there’s no need to explain
how technological advances serve human slaves just as much as their masters,
albeit to vastly different degrees.
Ghost in the Machine
Too much information running through my brain Too much information driving me insane
Today, this dangerous trend is no longer merely theoretical: it is creeping into classrooms where laziness has replaced effort, into our ears through a deluge of artificial music, and into our numbed minds, which no longer read but demand summaries of everything—just like that Gen Z influencer who publicly complained about books containing ‘too many words’.
The findings of the latest OECD PISA survey1 are unequivocal: we are facing a historic decline in young people’s reading comprehension and reasoning skills. Teachers see this on a daily basis: critical thinking is being delegated to algorithms, attention spans are dwindling, and cognitive laziness is taking hold.
This intellectual atrophy is by no means accidental; it goes hand in hand with the systematic destruction of what elevates us as human beings: art and nature. Both are essential to our mental balance.
But it's the same ‘logic’ everywhere: forests are cleared to make way for rows of solar panels or data centres; trees are replaced by surveillance camera poles; and centuries of human creativity are plundered to feed algorithms. The living world is destroyed and replaced with concrete, silicon and control.
And it is but a short step from the disfigurement of our natural environment to that of our cultural landscape: the machine is now striking at the heart of our entire creative ecosystem. In just a few years, platforms and social networks have been overwhelmed by a synthetic tidal wave: music churned out in vast quantities by plundering the voices and works of artists, whether signed to record labels or working independently; videos mass-produced ad nauseam with haphazard dubbing; images generated in two clicks… cultural theft is now global and unabashed.
Ghostwriters in the Shadows
On this moonlit night, my friend GPT
Lend me your quill to churn out an essay2
The publishing world is where the decline is most noticeable.
Every aspect is affected: algorithm-generated covers, shoddy machine translations, audiobooks read by bots... Publishers who still value the human touch now feel compelled to label their products as ‘human interpretation’. How long before we see ‘written (or translated) by a real person’ labels on books in our bookshops?
But there's worse to come: this ease of production gives rise to a host of ‘fake authors’ who, after typing in a few prompts, mistake the ability to generate text for a genuine calling to write books or poetry.
This system not only further reduces their tolerance for frustration by offering the illusion of immediate results (without the months or years of hard work that go into creating a genuine work), but also inflates their egos. Buoyed by the applause of a gullible audience, they delude themselves into thinking they are creators, when in fact all they do is operate a machine that they could not do without. Some are so trapped by their own pretence that they are unable to hold a live conversation or answer questions about their own books without outsourcing their thoughts to an algorithm first.
Intellectual Onanism and Hacked Prose
Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book? It took me years to write, will you take a look? It's based on a novel by a man named Lear And I need a job, so I want to be a paperback writer
The price of this collective delusion is the systematic flooding of the self-publishing market. On Amazon, in particular, this ceaseless stream of soulless texts, published for prestige, profit, or both, stifles authentic creativity and drowns out emerging authors amid a cacophony of empty words.
In response to this invasion, the industry's safeguards are proving to be nothing but a farce: their so-called ‘AI detectors’ are just blind algorithms, incapable of distinguishing between synthetic prose and human-written text—to the point of classifying the US Constitution of 1787 as a machine-generated text3!
For aspiring writers, the consequences are twofold. Not only is their work lost in the mix, but overwhelmed publishing houses may also reject it after turning to these ‘detectors’ as a stopgap measure, lacking the time and resources to review every submission.
Playing Along or Being Played by ‘I’?
Can't you see anything on the horizon? Stranded souls who dropped anchor with their pens here And stopped writing...
Algorithms never doubt. They know neither the anxiety of a blank page nor the exhaustion of having bled to extract every word from the depths of our wounds. They merely calculate the most probable sequence, polishing the sentences with a veneer of unsettling perfection.
But is it really perfect? What is perfection? Don’t they say that ‘better is the enemy of good’?
What AI regurgitates after siphoning off our writers (and our artists) is nothing but a slick, soulless pastiche. After all, it's our imperfections, our rough edges, our wounds put into words and our words made flesh that contribute to our inimitable signature (what some, like Stephen King, call the ‘author’s voice’, and others the ‘vibrational signature’). The famous crack in everything through which the light gets in, as Leonard Cohen put it.
Writing is not simply a matter of recycling one’s cluttered thoughts by dumping them into a machine in the hope of giving them form, but rather a—often therapeutic—wrestling match with language. By outsourcing this effort, we abandon our most precious asset: critical thinking.
Whispering Isn't Playing
Anyway, I’d like to tell you That everything I’ve ever written I’ve drawn from the ink of your eyes
It is precisely this intimate connection that Stephen King describes in On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. For him, writing is a form of telepathy that enables the same scene to be conjured up in the reader’s mind without direct communication. Whilst algorithms can certainly reproduce (rather than create) the form of a text, their lack of lived experience prevents them from capturing its essence.
Because AI feels nothing. And it is precisely in order to feel that people read. And write, too.
What about humour, puns, those double or triple meanings and other semantic twists—which, for me, have almost become a hallmark? I don’t think AI is capable of that. At any rate, not of genuine humour—the sort that enchants the mind, releases endorphins and neutralises negative energy, thereby lifting our spirits and freeing us from what weighs us down.
For genuine humour is a form of creative intelligence. It elevates us and brings us closer to our Spirit. After all, don't we say of those endowed with such humour that they are ‘witty’ or that they ‘have a sharp wit’?
For that to happen, AI would need to become capable of self-awareness, as Christelle Dabos, author of The Mirror Visitor, recently pointed out: “Perhaps it will have this capacity for spiritual awakening that we have failed to achieve, and perhaps it will transform itself into a great Buddha?”
I wouldn’t be that optimistic, but I wouldn’t dismiss the tool altogether. When I entrust it with the task of untangling the knots in my inconsistencies, it leaves me free to comb through the details and pick out the nits.
I love a challenge, and there’s no better fuel for dispelling the prevailing gloom than showing the machine what we’re made of.
Whispering isn't playing. We only get the upper hand by crowning our pieces. The machine will not replace humans… at least, not those who remain sovereign. The others? They will replace the machine. Look around you: it’s already happening.
As the late French comedian Coluche used to say, “You can’t make people blind without breaking their eyes”. Personally, I prefer omelettes—shells and all! Because, in the long run,
spending your life watching every word you say, polishing every sentence, and
strategically placing every comma with the right emojis, so as not to unleash
a tsunami among fragile egos, is exhausting.
You know, the ‘self-centred’ individuals who feel ‘under attack’ by the
slightest nuance of analysis, which they interpret as a full-scale assault on
their little egos. You see, they’re obviously important enough in your
‘no-life’ for you to devote all your energy and attention to targeting
them—you, the ‘agents of the Matrix’, the ‘know-it-alls’ or ‘whatever’, to
keep it short.
The very same people who, incidentally, have absolutely no qualms about
hammering their ‘truths’ home with all the delicacy of a 40-tonne lorry. It’s
actually the big trend these days on social media:
selective victimisation. The rule is simple: “I’ve got the right to criticise and trample all over your convictions, but
you don’t.” The reasoning is straight out of the school playground. What about
reciprocity? Never heard of it.
What a circus! And then there's the ringmaster. He runs the arena, makes the
announcements, preaches kindness and listening, but as soon as a performance
goes beyond compulsive ‘liking’, he wastes no time unleashing his beasts—his
armies of closed minds.
French singer Jacques Dutronc had it right: “Life is full of cacti. I pride myself on knowing it. Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!”
I hope you enjoy this deceptively light-hearted little song with its tangy
bite and the accompanying music video. I put my heart and soul into it without
any help from AI (apart from the music, of course).
Les Armées Psychorigides
Spending your life walking on eggshells Tiptoeing on self-righteous
egos Fragile Fragile
Beating about the bush Tying yourself up in knots Agile Agile
Out there on the web of social media On my feed, I come crashing down To
the muffled echoes of the void Of the armies of closed minds
Out there on the web of social media Viral posts scroll by, The
unwavering mantras Of the armies of closed minds
And on my tightrope Suspended above these bubbles Fragile Fragile
Always playing the acrobat Between humans and bots Hostile Hostile
Out there on the web of social media On my feed, I endure the
onslaught, The insidious ravings Of the armies of closed minds
Out there on the web of social media I watch the dance of egos From
free-thinkers to guides Of the armies of closed minds
Out there on the web of social media On my feed, I come crashing down To
the muffled echoes of the void Of the armies of closed minds
Out there on the web of social media Viral posts scroll by, The
unwavering mantras Of the armies of closed minds
As mentioned in my previous review, this new two-part series by Leigh Bardugo, also set in the Grishaverse, more than fulfils all the promises that the Grisha trilogy failed to fully deliver. Somewhat more than that, even. I absolutely love it!
The Six of Crows duology—whose title both refers to card games and the Crow Club, the gambling house run by Kaz Brekker—takes place two years after the events of the Grisha trilogy (unlike the Netflix TV series, which set them at the same time, whilst deviating significantly from the original storyline) and focuses primarily on Ketterdam, the capital of Kerch, an island nation inspired by the 19th-century Dutch Republic and, to a lesser extent, by New York (New Amsterdam), Las Vegas and Victorian London.
Leigh Bardugo, 2015 - Macmillan - 1059 pages
Welcome to the Crooked Kingdom
The underworld of Ketterdam is ruled by rival gangs. Kaz Brekker, the youngest and most ambitious player in the local mob, who combines intelligence, secrecy, charisma and danger, is best known for being a master thief. Willing to do anything for money, he is tasked by wealthy merchant Van Eck with rescuing a Shu scientist from the Ice Court, an unbreachable stronghold in Fjerda. The prisoner is the inventor of jurda parem, an extremely addictive and deadly drug that greatly enhances the abilities of Grishas. Should it fall into the wrong hands, it could have devastating consequences.
For this heist of a lifetime, in great Ocean’s Eleven style meets Game of Thrones (according to the author), Kaz aka Dirtyhands—quite an ironic nickname for someone who never takes his gloves off—starts recruiting his dream team: a spy who defies the laws of gravity, a runaway with a privileged past, a sharpshooter who can't walk away from a wager, a convict with a thirst for revenge, and a powerful Grisha.
The storytelling is structured around the different points of view of the Crows—a motley crew of battered teens who, at first glance, may have nothing in common, but are driven by a shared desire: taking revenge on life.
Crows remember human faces. They remember the people who feed them, who are kind to them. And the people who wrong them too.
Not only does such a narrative choice provide the essential psychological depth to understanding the characters and their interactions by allowing us to get inside their heads, it also enables the author to withhold certain details in order to preserve the element of surprise surrounding her many plot twists.
And despite these glimpses into their past and wounds, the story never loses momentum and maintains a brisk pace. For in Ketterdam, anything can be traded. Not just blows. People too.
When Everything and Everyone Has a Price
Ketterdam is, quite literally, a city built on trade, but one in which commercial logic ultimately comes to encompass even human beings.
Kerch had been built on trade, but how much of that trade had been the human kind?
Young Grishas, snatched from their families in their homeland by Kerch slave traders, are sold into brothels in Ketterdam; while others, fleeing the civil war in Ravka, get exploited in different ways, under the guise of contracts and unrepayable debts. And the more one pays, the more they believe they own the other person.
The Menagerie was one of the most expensive pleasure houses in the Barrel, but its customers were no kinder than those who frequented the dollar houses and alley girls. In some ways, Inej came to understand, they were worse. When a man spends that much coin, said the Kaelish girl, Caera, he thinks he’s earned the right to do whatever he wants.
A child unfit to take over the business empire? No problem: you get rid of them as if they were a faulty appliance and father a new one to replace them.
Sickening political correctness and corruption go hand in hand. Wealth breeds impunity. The Merchant Council governs in the name of prosperity, with the blessing of the gods. Any resemblance to our present-day society may not be entirely fortuitous.
A minister of Ghezen might stand at that altar and rail against slavery, but how much of this city had been built on taxes from the pleasure houses? How many members of his congregation employed boys and girls who could barely speak Kerch, who scrubbed floors and folded laundry for pennies as they worked to pay off a debt that never seemed to grow smaller?
In te, Domine
The gods in this series are not mere symbols. In the Grishaverse, every society has its own beliefs, and these can be used to justify behaviour that ultimately has little—if anything—sacred about it.
Thus, whilst in the Grisha trilogy Leigh Bardugo explored how faith could transform people into saints or monsters, in Six of Crows she pushes this much further by showing how beliefs can serve as a moral veneer for a deeply corrupt system.
Sacred is Ghezen and in commerce we see His hand.
Not only in Kerch, but also in Fjerda, where faith is used to breed and legitimise hatred.
What stands before you is the next generation of drüskelle, the holy order charged with protecting the sovereign nation of Fjerda by eradicating your kind.
In te, Domine. Who truly dominates? Djel through the Drüskelle, or the Drüskelle in the name of Djel to justify their savagery?
For hatred is a poison. A fiery blaze that consumes from within and requires constant nurturing, like an insatiable demon, forever demanding more offerings to keep it under control.
An illusory sense of control that traps you in a spiral of violence and pain until the vessel implodes. Hell is an inner prison that we hold within.
The Prisons We Hold Within
What wounds had his commanders exploited to put that look in his eyes?
Of all the things that hold us captive, hatred is rarely innate. It often stems from a wound that is exploited to fuel this dependence.
So as mentioned in my review of the Grisha Saga, behind the hatred for Grishas is envy, a sense of being deprived of something, and the need to destroy what one cannot possess: “What did it mean to aspire to serve Djel, only to see his power in the gifts of another, to know you could never possess those gifts yourself?”
And, of course, drugs as a literal poison—jurda parem, which alters perceptions and disrupts the body’s chemistry, ultimately destroying it.: “Once the drug has run its course, it leaves the Grisha’s body weakened and the craving is intense. It’s quite debilitating.”
But addiction does not arise solely from a poison, whether real or metaphorical, that enslaves the individual. One can also get hooked on something that momentarily gives them the impression of regaining control.
Thus, the characters spend their time trying to break free from something, whilst stuck in their own wounds, obsessions or needs, which they seek to numb or channel: violence for the gangs, gambling for Jesper, or revenge for Kaz. “Brekker, his Wraith queen, his rotten little court of thugs. A fearless breed, hard-eyed and feral, hungrier for vengeance than for gold.”
And, of course, the most powerful of them all: fear—particularly the fear of death.
Zoya used to say that fear is a phoenix. You can watch it burn a thousand times and still it will return.
No Mourners, No Funerals
The Crows' motto is a cynical reminder of their invisibility in the eyes of society. Outcasts who struggle to survive, against all odds, in the lawless grey areas of the underworld, and who, upon their death, are piled up like dregs onto a funeral barge.
We learn to hold our heads as if we wear crowns. We learn to wring magic from the ordinary. That was how you survived when you weren’t chosen, when there was no royal blood in your veins. When the world owed you nothing, you demanded something of it anyway.
“Stop treating your pain like it’s something you imagined”, Inej tells Jesper. “If you see the wound is real, then you can heal it.”
It is only by taking a clear look at the Real that we can free ourselves from the illusion.
Wounds and scars are not exclusive to the nobodies. Kings bear them too, as King of Scars—the title of the next instalment in the Grishaverse which I’ve only just started reading—already suggests.
New Age spirituality teaches us that we choose. That there's no such thing as
fate. That we are responsible for everything that happens to us. It calls this
‘empowerment’. A promise to reclaim our sovereignty, under which we are led to
believe that, since we are the cause of our own ‘misfortunes’, we also have
the power to ‘turn things around’.
In theory, it’s brilliant. But in practice, there’s a snag. A serious pitfall.
Indeed, assuming that we are living within a vast simulation—a structured
matrix rather than a cosmic accident—the idea that we are the architects of
our own programming is a futile illusion. A dead end that can only wear us
down in an endless loop. We are not the action; we are the reaction.
And whilst we struggle with guilt and discouragement, whilst we waste
considerable energy trying to ‘fix’ things, accepting our fate as ‘karma to be
paid off’—we are merely powering the dynamos of the system, like hamsters in
cages with invisible bars. In believing that we are working towards our
liberation, we are simply providing the emotional fuel—the famous
loosh—that keeps the simulation running.
On the one hand, some look for esoteric drama behind the slightest pain, in
order to peddle decoding and guilt. On the other hand, in reaction to this,
others prefer to reject all dogma, shifting to a cold, mechanical view in
which the body is nothing more than a vehicle needing an MOT, thereby denying
what science itself recognises about the links between mind, body and stress.
Moving from blind faith to the cynicism of a dehumanised engineer is by no
means a form of empowerment. Quite the contrary: it is simply swapping one
mask for another. Once again, extremes are nothing more than poles activated
to power the circuit. The Real lies elsewhere.
So what should we do?
Wrong question! Don’t wait for external solutions. Become aware and start
thinking for yourself. I know this is a worn-out cliché, but nothing is black
and white. So don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater on the pretext that
everything is corrupt.
Offering a turnkey method for flattering a spiritual ego or posing as a
spiritual guide would be a complete sham. In fact, I have no solutions to
offer you—only an observation. Providing you with set answers would mean
substituting myself for you and thereby fuelling the system. In the long run,
this could only be detrimental to both you and me.
Ultimately, trust yourself and let your own judgement sort things out.
This sorting doesn't involve your mind (which is itself a programme designed
to doubt and analyse), but your spirit. No need for meditation or lengthy
introspection. Mere fractions of a second of raw clarity that hit you like a
lightning strike and cut through the scene before the mind even has time to
step in and start decoding.
Dare to break out of your echo chambers to hear the silence of the Real.
In these troubled and uncertain times, most people are overwhelmed by
confusion and anxiety and no longer know who to turn to. This is a godsend for
self-proclaimed gurus of all kinds. Remember, there’s no shame in being
fooled. The key is to accept the times when we lose our way, and move on.
Move on, okay—but where to?
Moving from devoting ourselves to a spiritual figure or guru to relying on AI
to do the thinking for us, or rejecting New Age to embrace a new,
pseudo-scientific dogma, is by no means breaking free from control, but merely
changing the narrative or the master.
The question we need to ask ourselves is: have we really developed our own
discernment? Or have we simply swapped one crutch for another?
Also, when a dogma or an external tool begins to think for us, it always comes
with its own defence mechanism, labelling any criticism as ‘cognitive
dissonance’, ‘Matrix attack’, ‘egoic reaction’—or even 'animic'reaction'. And
ultimately, the individual refrains from examining the consistency of the
facts for fear of being ‘invalidated’.
But recognising a factual trap is neither a sign of victimhood nor of
cognitive dissonance: it is simply a matter of using common sense.
True autonomy does not lie in adopting complex jargon in order to create the
illusion of knowing, nor in redefining dictionary terms to suit one’s purpose.
It begins on the day when we no longer need any filter or third party—be it an
entity, an AI or a proprietary concept—to validate what we observe for
ourselves.
After suffering from a severe bout of literary indigestion caused by cheap, disposable domestic thrillers, immersing myself in Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse was truly delightful. This rich world, which I discovered through the Netflix series Shadow and Bone, comprises a trilogy and two duologies, along with a handful of short-story collections and a graphic novel. A fictional world largely inspired by early 1800s Europe—particularly Tsarist Russia as the model for Ravka, where most of the Grisha trilogy takes place.
Grisha are considered sorcerers, although they themselves refer to their gifts—which they call Small Science—as extensions of the natural world, since they cannot create anything, but only use and alter what already exists. Both feared and revered, they serve the war-ravaged kingdom, fighting in the Second Army under the command of the Darkling, a Shadow Summoner. Ravka is cursed. It is split in half from north to south by the Shadow Fold (or Unsea), a swath of malevolent darkness populated by monstrous creatures known as volcra, which feast on human flesh.
While crossing the Unsea with her First Army regiment to resupply the eastern part of the country—which has been cut off from its shipping ports—Alina, a young orphan and cartographer, discovers her power as a Sun Summoner while trying to save the life of her childhood friend, Mal. A discovery that will change her fate—and that of the entire nation—forever. For what do we do when faced with something we don’t understand? We either fear it, fight it… or turn it into an object of worship. And in the Grishaverse, these three different responses can sometimes overlap.
Leigh Bardugo, 2012 - Macmillan - 1248 pages
Otkazat'sya and Grisha
Alina goes from being an ordinary citizen to becoming a Grisha and discovers what goes on inside the Little Palace, where members of the Second Army—regarded as an elite force by the Ravkan masses—are trained and prepared.
One thing did stand out to me: the word the philosophers used to describe people born without Grisha gifts, otkazat’sya, “the abandoned.” It was another word for orphan.
Certainly, the term Otkazat’sya, used by Grisha to refer to the ‘ungifted’, speaks volumes about how this minority views the majority. But this distinction works both ways, thereby creating a grey area that allows for a better understanding of the motivations and stakes of both opposing forces. For while Grisha consider themselves a class apart, their difference also becomes, in the eyes of others, a source of mistrust and fear, even as defects to be eradicated: “When they were in their cups, some of the nobles made it clear they think all of the Grisha should be rounded up and executed.”
Except for Ravka (and for a very specific reason that I cannot reveal without spoiling the plot), reactions range from rejection to persecution, including exploitation, slavery, and human experimentation, but the underlying mechanism remains the same: the other becomes a thing simply because they are different—a difference that inspires both fear and envy.
Most rogue Grisha ended up in Novyi Zem. Aside from Ravka, it was the only place where they didn’t have to fear being experimented on by Shu doctors or burned by Fjerdan witchhunters. Even so, they had to be cautious about displaying their power. Grisha were valued slaves, and less scrupulous Kerch traders were known to round them up and sell them in secret auctions.
The Fjerdan Drüskelle take this logic to the point of absurdity by justifying their barbarism in the name of faith, even though their behavior contradicts the moral principles they claim to defend: “There are witchhunters who don’t eat animals, won’t wear leather shoes or kill a spider in their homes, but they’ll burn Grisha alive on the pyre.”
The Lives of Saints
But faith isn't just about targeting enemies. It can also produce saints. And when Alina herself becomes the object of a cult, the line between belief, devotion, and manipulation becomes much harder to define.
Peasants love their Saints. They hunger for the miraculous. And yet they do not love the Grisha.
Once again, the polarising clichés of good vs. evil and light vs. dark are brought to the fore. Alina becomes the chosen one, the object of a collective projection of hope, fear, faith, and a longing for miracles: “There is a fine line between fear and veneration.”
Ultimately, deifying a person is not so different from demonising them. In both cases, the human being disappears behind the symbol. This is illustrated by the account of the martyrdom of Sankt Ilya, who was drowned in the river by the villagers for bringing one of their own children back to life after a tragic accident while ploughing: “Maybe it was not just horror or righteousness that drove them, but anger as well.”
Likewise, this so-called devotion to Sankta Alina is also beginning to take on predatory overtones: “The bodies pressed tighter, pushing and shoving, shouting at each other, each wanting to get nearer. My feet lost contact with the ground. I cried out as a chunk of my hair was ripped from my scalp. They were going to tear me apart.”
Faith does not merely produce saints. It can also become a powerful means of mobilising crowds, for good or for ill, ultimately transforming sacrifice into a virtue and death into a reward. As the Apparat points out: “They will make war without fear and die rejoicing. There is no greater power than faith, and there will be no greater army than one driven by it.”
The Black Heretic
What is infinite? The universe and the greed of men.
The lust for power does not stem solely from those who lack it. Those who hold it may, too, come to crave more, as illustrated by the Darkling’s journey—a man whom injustice transformed into a blind avenger, to the point of committing acts from which there is no going back. At the outset, however, his intention was both honourable and legitimate: he wanted to protect the Grisha, who had long been persecuted and forced to live in fear: “We would be Ravkans, not just Grisha. That dream was the seed of the Second Army.”
But in his determination to protect his own, the line between defence and domination eventually became blurred. And when power over matter was no longer enough, the temptation was to draw upon what is forbidden: Merzost.
In Ravkan, the word for magic and abomination was the same. Basic Grisha theory stated that matter couldn’t just be created from nothing. But that was a tenet of the Small Science. Merzost was different, a corruption of the making at the heart of the world.
However, it would be too convenient to reduce the Darkling to the embodiment of darkness in direct contrast to the Sun Summoner. His journey is also that of a man shaped by persecution, fear and anger, who ultimately ends up replicating some of the very violence he sought to combat. And here, we can clearly see the extent to which fiction mirrors the reality of the Matrix. Suffering may explain actions, but it does not justify them.
Shadow and Bone
Behind its apparent contrast between light and darkness, the Grisha trilogy ultimately questions our relationship with power, difference and faith. It is, however, a pity that the romantasyelements and the heroine’s endless dithering all too often prevail over the rest of the plot, at the expense of its narrative flow.
The Darkling would also have benefited from deeper characterisation and a greater presence in the story. But my judgement is probably biased by Ben Barnes’s excellent performance in the TV adaptation, which, for once, does the story justice, even if it doesn’t always strictly follow it to the letter.
I also think that combining the Grisha trilogy with the Six of Crows duology was a brilliant idea, even though Netflix ultimately decided to cancel the series after two seasons. Fortunately, Six of Crows—which I’m currently reading—fulfils all the promises that the Grisha trilogy failed to fully deliver.
FR
