So, you know, this was not, again, something I thought of consciously.
They're old, you know, a wizened crone or an old geezer or a villain whose disability is supposed to indicate some kind of weird otherness. And when I wrote Six of Crows, I went out on tour, and I met a lot of readers who would say, "Oh, I don't know why, but I pictured Kaz as being an old man at first." And I thought, of course you did, because the only people we see with mobility aids in media and in culture are old. I have degenerative bone disease and I walk with a cane. On writing Kaz Brekker, a main character with a disability, in a world where magic makes anything seem possible We set out to tell a story authentically and honestly, and that that's what good storytelling is.Īuthor Interviews 'Farewell For Now:' Leigh Bardugo On 'Rule Of Wolves' I never want people to feel like fantasy and romance and magic and adventure belong to just one kind of person. So why should our fiction look that way? And, you know, as a fantasy writer, I want everyone to feel welcome in the Grishaverse. It is not all straight or white or able-bodied, or if it is, maybe you should make some new friends. Here's the thing, we talk about diversity in the media as if it's some weird artificial construct that we're putting onto these narratives. And to me, there was something incredibly poignant about somebody who is treated with prejudice and treated shabbily by her country and disrespected by her country, then being thrust into the role of savior and potentially having to sacrifice a great deal in order to save this nation that has treated her so poorly. So it made perfect sense for Alina to be half-Shu, and it meant that her outsider status was not something that could be hidden. People fall in love across them, and form partnerships across them and do business across them. And borders, despite the best efforts of some, are not walls.
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And we talked about how to build this into the story organically.Īnd it really made perfect sense for Alina to be half- Shu because in the books she comes from a border town and the border is constantly shifting, depending on who's winning the war. And I said to Eric, you know, you guys can do this better than I did. And that's something I've tried to improve on as I write, to write more authentically and reflect the people around me in the world, around me more realistically. Shadow and Bone was my first book, and I think I was unconsciously echoing a lot of the fantasy that I had grown up with, which sets a kind of default for straight white characters.
On the decision to cast Alina Starkov as half-Asian, or as she's described in the show half-Shu But what I didn't anticipate was how extraordinary it would be to see actors bring their own experience and their own physicality and their own spirit to these characters and alter them in such an exciting way. And so I'm grateful that more eyes may be turned to these, but I can't pretend that I didn't feel a certain amount of grief when I thought about the characters that I had in my head and that readers have been able to envision and create in fan art would essentially be replaced by actors. Books are in a constant battle for attention in a very crowded media scape. And there's a radical difference between who can be reached from the shelves of a bookstore and who can be reached through Netflix's subscribers. I've always wanted these stories to reach as many people as they could. On seeing her work adapted for television "I never want people to feel like fantasy and romance and magic and adventure belong to just one kind of person," Leigh Bardugo says.