Written by Hannah Dang, with support from the DAC team
(The following image was found under the use of the Creative Commons license. It is a promotional poster of the Netflix adaptation of Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse book series “Shadow and Bone,” “King of Scars,” and “Six of Crows” featuring Jessie Mei Li as Alina Starkov, Ben Barnes as General Kirigan, Archie Renaux as Malyen Oretsev, Freddy Carter as Kaz Brekker, Kit Young as Jesper Fahey, and Amita Suman as Inej Ghafa. The poster depicts the characters against a stormy background, and in front, there is a collage of a castle, antlers, crows, and a pair of revolvers, foreshadowing the plot and motifs of the story).
DISCLAIMER: The following blog post contains spoilers for the “Shadow and Bone” Netflix series and the Six of Crows duology. If you prefer to not be spoiled, I highly recommend reading the series and watching the show for the full experience. Thank you.
| “Ketterdam: a bustling hub of international trade where anything can be had for the right price – and no one knows that better than criminal prodigy Kaz Brekker. Kaz is offered a chance at a deadly heist that could make him rich beyond his wildest dreams. But he can’t pull it off alone . . . A convict with a thirst for revenge.A sharpshooter who can’t walk away from a wager.A runaway with a privileged past.A spy known as the Wraith.A Heartrender using her magic to survive the slums. A thief with a gift for unlikely escapes. Kaz’s crew are the only ones who might stand between the world and destruction – if they don’t kill each other first.” — Leigh Bardugo, Six of Crows |
At the time of its publication in 2015, Leigh Bardugo’s Young Adult Six of Crows duology has swept the mainstream literary charts and the hearts of book-lovers across the globe. Entranced by its refreshing fantasy setting and criminal heist-storyline, fans have flocked to add the series to their bookshelves. Not long after, on April 23, 2021, the characters were brought to life, debuting in the hit Netflix original series Shadow and Bone as pivotal characters alongside the main characters in Bardugo’s Grishaverse trilogy and King of Scars duology, the other series in Bardugo’s Grishaverse. Following the show’s instantaneous success, a second season was greenlit and released on March 16, 2023.
I’d like to study a major attribute of the main series’ and the official show’s success and appeal, the immersive representation and realistic depiction of disabilities in the characters and in the setting, the Grishaverse. For the record, as a currently nondisabled person, I would like to state that my interpretations of disability representation in the original source material as well as its prevalence in the physical world don’t possess any authority nor do they fully represent the disability community’s stances. I only want to closely review a series deeply dear to my heart and having recently gained some working, collegial insights about the disability experience through my work on this blog in the last year
Raised by stories, I have become a writer (and a film-enthusiast) in the internet age. Subconsciously, I have developed an insatiable appetite for more stories to be absorbed by. Chronically online, I am exposed to, and as a result, have consumed a staggeringly large amount of mainstream media for my age, ranging from ancient mythological texts to Booktok. Within twenty years, I have experienced and lived past a golden age and evolution of literature and film. Because of that, my definition, my perception of proper representation in mainstream media, especially for people with disabilities, has shifted with the changing times.
Portraying openly disabled characters in literature and in film has transitioned from being socially-unacceptable to being more diversified and prevalent. Two of the earliest times I was introduced to a visibly disabled character was Disney’s Quasimodo in the animated film The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Captain Hook in the animated film Peter Pan. Later on, by the time I was learning to read, I met August Pullman, the protagonist of R.J. Palacio’s Wonder who was born with a facial deformity, and Finn and Violet from All the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven, who suffer from bipolar disorder and depression. The list goes on, but one thing’s for sure – their stories and their impact on the disability community shaped my perception of people who have disabilities.
Just as disabilities do, their representation in mainstream media have become grouped into a sort of spectrum. On one end, we have the standard disabled character who is only remembered for having a disability and has no other relevance to the plot as a character, a meager attempt at including disability representation. And on the other end, we have disabled characters whose roles are designated as the pitiful plot device to progress the plot or as the villain. If there’s one thing I’ve learned as a writer, it’s that if a character is reduced to shallow archetypes, it’s practically issuing a death sentence for the story. What I’ll explore today is an example of a healthy balance between having a disabled character who is more than their disability, and at the same time, not assigning a character to a harmful or biased stereotype.
As the fandom’s “gothic wine aunt,” Leigh Bardugo has paved roads as a writer and as a spokesperson for the disability community. In her acknowledgements in Six of Crows, Bardugo opens up to her readers: “I have a degenerative condition called osteonecrosis [a type of bone disease]. This basically translates to “bone death,” which sounds kind of gothy and romantic, but actually means that every step I take is painful and that I sometimes need to walk with a cane” (Bardugo, Six of Crows). Further on, she openly admits that her experiences as a cane-user is the primary inspiration for one of the book’s main characters, Kaz Brekker. Bardugo isn’t necessarily a representative for the disability community, but her books and her transparency about her own disability contributed to dampening the stigmatization of disabilities’ presence in the world.
Six of Crows is written in the alternating point of views of six main characters, excluding the first and last chapters. The series takes place in a fictional world, in which a civil unrest follows the end of a war between Grisha, practitioners of the Small Science, and the rest of the world. Aiming to profit off the war and the arrival of a dangerous drug called “jurda parem,” the six main characters are commissioned to pull off an impossible heist – to free the scientist responsible for manufacturing the drug from a hostile country, and survive.
Not only does a disabled character need to be engaging and realistic, their disability has to be “secondary” to their characterization (BBB The Social). The series’ Kaz Brekker, member of the Dregs gang, the co-owner of the Crow Club, a gambling hall, and the undisputed leader of the Crows, is a visibly-disabled character who, prior to the events in the main story, breaks one of his legs due to falling off a rooftop during a bank robbery. Due to his inability to afford treatment, his leg fails to heal properly, and he repeatedly experiences chronic pain throughout the series, causing Kaz to carry his signature cane with the head of a crow as a weapon and as a clutch.
Kaz’s disability isn’t a throwaway line, but it isn’t the centralized part of his story or his character either. The beauty of Kaz’s character is that his existence is a magic trick, a sleight of the hands. Because of his cutthroat and crafty personality, the readers, and the other characters in the story, fail to remember that Kaz, a disabled man, is a gang leader and the forerunner of the Crows. And Bardugo makes it clear that Kaz’s disability is a part of him, but he is more than his disability. His reputation as “Dirtyhands, the Bastard of the Barrel” precedes him – Kaz is brilliant, meticulous, merciless, but, he cares, fiercely. To me, Kaz is probably the most complex character in the books. Even if a chapter is written in his perspective, the readers can’t read Kaz’s true intentions. Amidst his metaphors, Kaz is transparent in his own way. It’s just as Kaz says to Inej: “The limp. The cane. No one’s ever smart enough to look for the real one” (Bardugo, Crooked Kingdom). The story doesn’t make Kaz out to be invincible or someone who defies human logic. Although his leg will never recover, Kaz is simply a fighter.
I’d like to note intentions, good or bad, don’t remove people’s interpretations of the producers’ creative liberties, predominantly in using certain stereotypes. The problem of a stereotype isn’t necessarily the stereotype itself but its prevalence across fiction, and it doesn’t help that “our media is shaped by extant tropes and harmful stereotypes” (Oakwyrm). In the mainstream, characters with “disabilities” tend to fall into overused stereotypes or tropes (ex. the portrayal of autism). There is a spectrum to every disability, but unfortunately, not everyone on the spectrum is represented (usually only one type) in film or books. Due to this misrepresentation, people with real disabilities are falsely accused of “faking their disability” because their disability isn’t the same as the ones portrayed in film (BBC Social). In Six of Crows, there’s the misconception that disabled people, and characters for that matter, aren’t as competent as able-bodied people. As seen with Kaz, arguably the most intelligent character in the series, some people believe Kaz is a proper representation of a disabled character because of his intelligence. This is far from the truth. In the books and show, Kaz grows up as a pickpocket and as a grunt for his gang, and at the same time, he develops a fascination with magic shows, puzzles, locks, and card tricks – it’s no wonder trickery became Kaz’s native tongue. It’s true, Kaz’s character falls under the “scheming” cane-user with a limp trope, but Kaz’s character design isn’t the sole causality to his motivations. Kaz wants power in the only way he knows, attempting the impossible and succeeding, which is why he accepted the prison break-in job.
I’d like to address another harmful trope – “the disabled villain,” a trope, which if not pulled off well, ends up “[treating] villainy as a logical outcome of disability” (Oakwyrm). The trope is used to make a character instill dread or uneasiness, twisted to appear “disturbing to an able-bodied audience.” There’s no beating around the bush – the trope practically writes itself, it intends to present disabled people as subhuman. The sole problem isn’t that only villains are given disabilities, it’s that their counterparts, the heroes, are written to have easily ignorable or admirable disabilities (ex. small scars or slashes on their faces), to uphold their conventionally attractive facets while the “villains” are disabled to the point of being unrecognizable.
To an extent, Kaz (and the rest of the Crows) fall under the “disabled villain” trope as he is perceived as a criminal, a con artist, and a ruthless businessman. Outside of protecting his people, none of his motivations nor actions are heroic, and are a means to an end to further his agenda. On more than one occasion, his cane is described as one of Kaz’s most threatening features, but Bardugo clarifies Kaz isn’t a villain because he has a disability, but because he craves revenge. A force to be reckoned with, Kaz has bided his time with Pekka Rollins, the perpetrator of Kaz’s lost inheritance and brother’s death. But if people read in-between the lines, Kaz, monstrous as he is, is humanized by his strict moral code – he’ll always uphold his end of the bargain. As Inej points out multiple times, Kaz makes investments, but he doesn’t sell or own people. He’s cold-hearted, but mess with his people, he’ll go to war. Bardugo’s Crows aren’t heroes, far from it. The Crows steal, they lie, they kill – but they’re people too.
A common problem with having a disabled character be the main lead is that shows give their able-bodied characters as much screen time, if not more screen time, than their disabled main leads. This is typical as producers have a tendency to use a character’s disability as a “plot driver.” On more than one occasion, the disabilities are not specified, and because it’s unnamed, it acts as a safety net for the producers who use a disability as a plot device rather than for characterization and representation. With that executive decision, comes the accusations that disabled people don’t have stories primarily about their community, but Bardugo has her community’s back by having multiple characters with disabilities in her stories and has explicitly stated their disabilities (Wylde).
In addition to Kaz’s character, Inej’s character also offers representation for non-visible disabilities. In their backstories, Kaz and Inej develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) – Kaz loses his brother to a plague. Mistaken for dead, Kaz and his brother’s body were thrown into a sea of other plague-infested bodies, and Kaz had to use his brother’s corpse to float to shore, and Inej was kidnapped by slavers and sold to a sex brothel, the Menagerie. To pile on, Kaz develops haphephobia or touch-aversion, and as a result, he succumbs to panic attacks every time he’s in close proximity with other people. By Crooked Kingdom, the sequel, Kaz acknowledges his romantic feelings for Inej, but his fear of touch causes Kaz to keep her at a distance, and in turn, Inej makes it clear she won’t settle for Kaz’s emotional detachment. Bardugo opens a discussion: Kaz is a character who is orphaned, swindled of his inheritance by a con artist, loses his brother to a plague, nearly drowned, and who becomes a Barrel Boss to survive and take revenge. Inej, on the other hand, is the heart of the Crows, but her experiences as a prostitute, and as the Wraith play a role in her aversion to initiating a relationship with Kaz. One of the major features of the books I love is that Bardugo never downplays, but cements Kaz and the rest of the characters’ trauma following the events of the main story. What makes her story all the more convincing, and compelling, is that none of her characters “get over” their disabilities by the end of the duology, but instead learn to accept themselves.
There’s a growing trend and notion that a person has to look and be exactly like the character (ethnically, orientation, age, and disability-wise) to play a role. In the Netflix series, Kaz Brekker (and the rest of the Crows) are aged up to suit the alternate timeline forged for the show’s adaptation, which caused an uproar on both sides of the fandom. One side believes it was necessary to fit and retain the Crows’ story in the new timeline while the other side believes the producers sacrificed the Crows’ development for the characters in Bardugo’s other works. Everyone has a stance on the matter, but I have my own. In my personal opinion, Freddy Carter is the perfect person to cast as Kaz, but not everyone agrees. By the time the cast was revealed, controversy sprung up because Freddy Carter, an able-bodied actor, was picked to portray a visibly-disabled character. To add on to picking actors who do not have the same disability as the character, similar situations have come up that are relevant to ethnicity, sexuality, and age in many shows (Knight).
Although it isn’t always necessary, picking a disabled actor or actress to portray their disability on screen has its merits. For example, Millicent Simmons, a deaf actress, receives critical acclaim for her role as deaf character Reagan Abbott in the A Quiet Place film franchise. According to Director John Krasinki, hiring a deaf actress heightened the visualization of his world through a deaf person’s eyes by tenfold (Burton). By bringing in actors who have disabilities, it enhances the immersive experience for viewers. In Six of Crows, which takes place in a fictional world, the viewers rely on the characters, each hailing from a different fictional country, to imagine their world and provide the viewers with context, politically and culturally. Able-bodied actors are “celebrated” for accurately portraying disabled characters. I don’t believe able-bodied actors shouldn’t have the right to play disabled characters, but I think people who have disabilities should be considered to be just as qualified to audition for able-bodied characters. By this point, it’s not only a matter of representation in the film industry, but a matter of work-equality (BBC The Social). Luckily for us, Leigh Bardugo serves as the executive producer of “Shadow and Bone.” By having a disabled person, the author of the novels herself, working behind the scenes, Freddy Carter’s role as Kaz Brekker works because the viewers don’t only see what the world has to offer through Kaz’s eyes, but in Leigh Bardugo’s eyes.
Because of disability stigmatization and ableism, disabilities are perceived as the ruination of a normal life for able-bodied audiences, but in actuality, it is not actually true (BBC The Social). Of course, a number of disabilities are terminal or lifelong, but not everyone in the community considers having a disability to be a burden. By upping the degree of hardships disabled people face, disabled people are caged by the label of “victim” instead of being a minority group that deserves representation. More often associated with people who have acquired a disability in contrast to people who were born with it (ex. Kaz is a tragic character, and his acquisition of a limp feeds into the stereotype that disabled people have tragic lives), producers paint “tragedy and pain” as the core of disabled people’s lives, but Bardugo spins the narrative on its head in the form of Jesper (Wylde).
In both the books and the show, Jesper is revealed to be a Durast (a type of Grisha who has the ability to manipulate solid matter on a molecular level). Around the time Jesper’s mother died saving a girl’s life with her Grisha abilities, Jesper’s inherited powers develop, but Colm Fahey, Jesper’s father, urges Jesper to hide his abilities. Stricken with grief at the loss of his wife, Colm believes their Grisha bloodline was cursed and using it would only condemn Jesper to eternal sorrow. Jesper’s childhood is a metaphor for people in the physical world who are raised to hide their disabilities for fear of prejudice. It was not until the second book, in which Colm, explains he only wishes to protect Jesper because the majority of the world hates the Grisha, but it doesn’t justify Colm’s shortcomings as a parent. Jesper’s self-loathing isn’t addressed until Jesper meets Nina, a Grisha Heartrender who is proud of her ability, and is representative for people who see “what makes them different” as something to take pride in. And later on, Wylan loves Jesper for who he is and wants Jesper to accept that his powers are a part of him. Yes, Jesper experiences hardships of his own, regarding his abilities and outside of it, but overall, Jesper’s character arc ends positively – Jesper realizes his abilities aren’t a curse, and he is “blessed” to be who he is.
A number of disabled stories follow the “exceptional disabled person narrative,” in which a person’s disability is commented to be the root problem for the individual to conquer themselves instead of highlighting the lack of accommodations for people with disabilities in a world built for able-bodied people. In this narrative, it implies that “disability is a them problem” (Wylde). At first, the introduction of Wylan Van Eck, the Crows’ demolitions expert and the runaway son of wealthy merchant Jan Van Eck sets up his narrative to be one of triumph, but Bardugo’s story arc for Wylan subverts it. Like several of the Crows, Wylan has a complex backstory of his own. He was born into a wealthy family, growing up sheltered and privileged, but his lucky draw at life ends as soon as Jan Van Eck discovers Wylan’s disability, his dyslexia. In comparison to Colm who loves Jesper in spite of his Grisha powers, as soon as Wylan fails to hide his disability, Jan Van Eck practically writes Wylan out of inheriting his fortunes. To make things worse, under the guise of sending Wylan to an international boarding school, Jan Van Eck “replaces” Wylan by remarrying and procuring a second heir, and then attempts to murder his son in secret, but Wylan escapes and becomes an invaluable member of the Crows.
It’s good to see an openly disabled person thrive in a non-accomodating world, but it implies that disabled people who do have disabilities in their lives simply haven’t worked as hard as everyone else, but not everyone has the option to “overcome” their disability, including Kaz and Wylan, who both have an incurable disability. At the heart of it, Wylan is a genius as per his reputation as a capable chemist, but he never miraculously cures his dyslexia. In the midst of the Crows’ crimes and shenanigans, it’s heartwarming to see Kaz, Jesper, and the rest of the Crows accommodate their plans for Wylan’s disability, no questions asked. And that’s really all it needs to be. Wylan’s disability is a part of him, and it was wrongly accused as being the crux of his pitfalls for too long, but truthfully, the only one at fault was Jan Van Eck and his ableism, both of which are Wylan’s true burdens, not his disability.
Six of Crows addresses the double-edged sword of ableism in Crow member Matthias, who was a former member of Fjerda’s drüskelle, holy soldiers trained to hunt and battle Grisha. The fictional country of Fjerda condemns Grisha to death for practicing witchcraft by using their all-mighty God Djel as an excuse to commit Grisha genocide, but in actuality, the Fjerdans manipulate their people into believing the Grisha are evil to prevent the Grisha from conquering the world. The political warfare in the books mirrors the persecution of disabled people in the physical world. Matthias is a character who encounters the people he was raised to hate, and then upon realizing the error of his thinking, he rejects the notion of hating Grisha for being themselves entirely. By the second book, he dedicates his heart to protecting the Grisha he’s come to care for. His relationship with Nina, and the rest of the Crows catalyze Matthias to become more open-minded. Out of all of the Crows, Matthias becomes the character who believes in redemption and change for Fjerda and the world.
Bardugo’s series and its show counterpart are only one example of disability representation executed well, but it isn’t enough. We need more stories about good disabled characters in the mainstream. Each of the Grishaverse series is fundamentally about characters taking back their own authority and committing revenge on the people who exploited them for their own personal gain, but Leigh Bardugo spells an indisputable truth. Just as Kaz, Inej, Jesper, Wylan, Nina, and Matthias’ experiences are their own, her experiences and our experiences as disabled and nondisabled people, are our own. It’s impossible to have one or two characters that fully represent an entire community. What truly matters in representation is that it acknowledges everyone’s experiences as theirs. Representation isn’t supposed to fit people to a standard of what a disability is supposed to be nor does it erase or disregard people’s experiences. It reinforces our existence as people.
WORKS CITED
Bardugo, Leigh. Six of Crows. Henry Holt and Company First Square Fish edition, 2018.
BBC The Social. “‘Make Sure You Get It Right’ | Disability Representation in TV and Film.” YouTube, 20 May 2019, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UX3r9gyZzCE&list=WL&index=12. Accessed 15 Aug. 2023.
Burton, Byron. “John Krasinski Pushed to Cast a Deaf Actress for ‘A Quiet Place.’” The Hollywood Reporter, 8 Apr. 2018, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/a-quiet-place-john-krasinski-pushed-cast-millicent-simmonds-1100644/.
“Home – Leigh Bardugo: Author.” Leigh Bardugo | Author, Leigh Bardugo , 27 Feb. 2023, http://www.leighbardugo.com/. Accessed 15 Aug. 2023.
Knight, Rosie. “Let’s Talk about Kaz Brekker, Assumptions, and Disability in ‘Shadow and Bone.’” Shadow And Bone Author Explains Kaz Brekker Casting, Vice Media Group, 22 Apr. 2021, http://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2021/04/10433029/shadow-and-bone-kaz-brekker-disability-leigh-bardugo-interview. Accessed 15 Aug. 2023.
Leary, Alaina. “Alive, Disabled, and Essential: How Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows Series Made Me Feel Real.” Brooklyn Magazine, 30 Nov. 2016, http://www.bkmag.com/2016/11/30/leigh-bardugo-six-crows-series/. Accessed 15 Aug. 2023.
Oakwyrm. “The Case Against Disabled Villains.” YouTube, 7 Sept. 2022, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OOGASbJxck&list=WL&index=13. Accessed 15 Aug. 2023. Wylde, Vera. “Problems and Patterns with Disability Representation in Popular Media.” YouTube, 19 Feb. 2022, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfjSQTq_5a8&list=WL&index=9. Accessed 15 Aug. 2023.
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