Kelli: Shadow and Bone is the new(ish) and long-awaited Netflix adaptation of Leigh Bardugo’s bestselling Grishaverse novels. Technically, this show is based on both the original Grisha trilogy and the Six of Crows duology, though from what I understand, the events of this first season actually serve as a prequel to Six of Crows. Of course, I’ve never read any of the books, and it is very possible that Wikipedia is leading me astray.

Emily: Yeah, full disclaimer that neither of us have read these books.

(Some spoilers for Season 1 of Shadow and Bone ahead!)

Kelli: My first question for you is: what did you know about the Grishaverse prior to diving into Shadow and Bone, and what made you want to watch the show?

Emily: I knew nothing about the Grishaverse. I knew it was a fantasy world and that there were a lot of books, which was why I didn’t want to touch it, even though I have one of the books (King of Scars). Working in the book world, though, I’d heard the series was really good and there was a lot of buzz around the show, so I knew I wanted to check it out. I’ve read some of Leigh Bardugo’s other books so I knew enough to have faith that the world would be thoughtfully built. And I had the pleasure of meeting Bardugo and talking to her about the show back when it was in production, like, two years ago. So I was excited to see the finished product. What about you?

Kelli: I had about the same amount of familiarity — I had heard of the books and knew that they had a huge fanbase, but I am always intimidated by series, and I’m also not a huge YA reader in general. We did talk about Bardugo’s adult debut Ninth House on the podcast, and I enjoyed that book. I’m not going to lie: Ben Barnes was also a huge draw for me. 

The setting here, Ravka, is loosely based on Imperial Russia. I’m so used to watching fantasy films/series that are very Euro-centric in setting, so this was a welcome and refreshing change. I loved the production design and the costuming here, the way they worked in Russian aesthetics to create a fantasy world steeped in reality. Did you dig this as much as I did? I mean… so many fur hats.

Emily: I love a cold weather setting. And I don’t feel like I’ve seen any fantasy stories inspired by Russia before. I mean, I’m sure they exist, but it’s new to me, so I personally enjoyed it. I have heard from some Russian-speaking people that some of the Russian names for things are a little silly. But I’m just a dumb English-speaking person, so it didn’t bother me at all! 

Kelli: Of course, one thing the Russian Empire did not have was publicly-recognized magic (idk what was going on behind closed doors), but in Ravka and presumably beyond, there are “Grisha,” people born with the ability to harness the power of different elements. The Grisha basically slot into different types depending on what they can do with their power — Heartrenders can control the human heart, Tailors can change the appearance of things, etc. The Grisha were persecuted up until the point that one particularly powerful Grisha tried to take control of everything and “accidentally” created a giant “fold” of evil darkness across the center of Ravka, making it nearly impossible to cross without the help of other Grisha. Suddenly, the Grisha were valuable and accepted into society as members of the Second Army, leading expeditions through the fold and training with the hopes that they might one day be able to destroy it.  

How did you feel about the world-building on this show? 

Emily: It was really cool! It’s not, like, the most original thing to have different kinds of people who can do magic and different types of magic. And the whole “chosen one” thing. But also it’s fantasy. What else are you going to have them do? You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We definitely have an interesting conflict going here with complex characters and complex situations. And to me, that’s what really elevates this, even more than just the world-building. The Grisha and the Fold could be kind of silly in the wrong hands, but Bardugo makes it all feel so real. The dread surrounding the Fold feels valid. And I can understand why people in this world wouldn’t trust Grisha too. 

Kelli: Totally. I honestly appreciate the relative simplicity of the fantasy aspects of this — it’s sort of similar to something like Avatar: The Last Airbender. 

Emily: I definitely got Avatar vibes. Alina’s, like, the Airbender. The last one, even.

Kelli: You can focus a lot more on the characters when you don’t have to spend half of your time explaining how the world works. I also appreciate that we just sort of get dropped into the world at the beginning of the show, and there aren’t too many huge expository dumps—there are some here and there as you’d expect, but for the most part we learn about this world and how it works organically, through relationships and situations. I was impressed by how quickly it all felt real to me.

Emily: It definitely took me a little while to acclimate to the world in that way, and I could probably use a rewatch of the first few episodes to see what I missed while I was trying to catch up. But I appreciate that about this show. I don’t need hand holding. I can figure stuff out. I like that this show didn’t wait for me to catch up. And I’m sure book-readers REALLY appreciated that.

Kelli: Obviously we have to talk about the characters, because there are a lot of them, and they’re all pretty great. Our hero is Alina, a cartographer who discovers in the first episode that she is actually a Sun Summoner, an extremely rare type of Grisha previously thought to be mythical, and is likely the only person with the power to destroy the Fold. Mal is her best friend, a boxer and member of the First Army, and the two of them are absolutely in love, but Alina doesn’t want to admit it and Mal is too dumb to realize it.

How did you like these two and their relationship? And what do you think of Alina as a protagonist?

Emily: So I’ve decided I really love the friends-to-lovers romances. Maybe because my husband and I were friends for a long time before we started dating, so it’s #relatable. But I really enjoyed this relationship and I liked that we spent a long time establishing the friendship and that the romance is a slow burn. Even though I’m yelling at them to kiss already. I did hear that Mal and Alina are a little bit more unlikeable in the books, but again, I haven’t read them so I can’t say. They’re both pretty likable here! How did you feel about this romance? 

Kelli: I like this romance a lot. I love a friends-to-lovers plot, but especially a childhood-friends-to-lovers one. There is something very sweet about this idea of knowing a person better than anyone else and still wanting to be around them, even when you know their ugliest parts. And I think these two actors, Jessie Mei Li (Alina) and Archie Renaux (Mal) have great chemistry. Right away they establish the intense closeness of their friendship, but also the element of flirtation and repressed attraction. The way they look at each other when they know the other person isn’t looking back... It’s really well done.

Emily: I also wonder if Alina will continue to be the protagonist in future seasons or if we’ll start to branch out more now that the story is established? We do have a lot of subplots happening and there have been some comparisons to Game of Thrones, so in the vein of GoT, I do wonder if it’s going to start to feel like many, many protagonists all on their own journey.

Kelli: I agree — after a rudimentary Google search I see that Shadow and Bone is narrated by Alina, but the Six of Crows duology is told in third person from the perspective of various characters, like Game of Thrones. I think characters like Nina are probably going to become more important moving forward, because I don’t know why they would dedicate so much time to a side character who is fairly separate from the rest of the first season’s plot if she wasn’t going to become a more major player later.

Emily: What are your thoughts on the characters? Any favorites?

Kelli: I like Alina and Mal a lot, and I also really like all three crows, who manage to serve as comic relief half the time but also get to participate in some really fun action/heist set pieces. Inej in particular is really interesting to me, and the little bit of an arc she gets here actually made me pretty emotional. When she first sees Alina display her Sun Summoner powers, you can tell that Inej has been waiting her whole life for a moment like this, for her faith to finally give her something in return, and I thought it was a really lovely scene (it almost made me cry — am I broken? lol). Plus, she has made a religious vow never to kill, and we watch her break that vow, presumably for the first time. The dichotomy of her strengthening faith and the abandoning of certain ideals makes her pretty complex, and I feel really invested in her as a character.

Emily: It took me longer to get into the crows plot because it’s more complicated/less conventional YA than the Alina/Mal plot. But thank goodness it was there, and I ended up loving it once it got going. Obviously, my favorite relationship in the whole show was Jesper and Milo the goat. I really hope they end up together at the end. But for real. I did really love Jesper, and he was probably my favorite character. Or one of them, at least. 

Kelli: Also, we have to talk about ~The Darkling~ right? 

Emily: Okay, that was my other favorite character. I love a complicated villain. 

Kelli: It’s impossible to know how I would have felt about Aleksander if he was played by anyone else, but I came here for Ben Barnes, and good lord, did he deliver. I think this performance is fantastic, because even though I vaguely knew going in that he was playing a villain, I genuinely believed for the first couple of episodes that he was just a complicated dude. Even now, after all the shit he pulled in those last couple of episodes, I’m like… but what if it’s a Kylo Ren situation? Lol.

Emily: Right? Even in the last episode, I was like, sure, okay, so he made the Fold or whatever. But he didn’t have a choice, did he? PEOPLE WERE BEING MEAN TO HIM! 

Kelli: Barnes just does such a good job of being charming and vulnerable and then turning around and being an ice-cold monster without missing a beat. He makes me believe that both of those people can exist simultaneously within the same man. Aleksander is clearly a manipulative and abusive person, but there’s still something about him that makes you want to believe him, which is what makes him such a successful villain.

Emily: Yes, and Ben Barnes has played heroes and villains in the past, so even knowing what he was supposed to be (based on the trailer I watched 10 times before the show even aired), I was like… look, could go either way. He’s a chameleon. He was definitely a big draw for me when I started the show, and this character might be his best yet? 

Kelli: We love Ben Barnes, okay? Moving on: Shadow & Bone has a very diverse cast of actors, and while it has been lauded for casting so many people of color in leading roles, the show has also received fair criticism for some of its portrayals of racism. I don’t necessarily feel qualified to give a personal opinion on this — as always, we want to clarify that we are two white women — but it seems important to touch on it, because the show is not simply an exercise in colorblind casting, but does actually attempt to address race within the show’s structure. 

For Slate, Elyse Martin describes the show’s inconsistencies as being “part of a larger cultural issue… Netflix will diversely cast stories originally written by white authors with all-white characters without critically thinking about the lived experiences of people of color. Bridgerton and The Witcher had similar problems, where it seemed like sometimes the races of the characters mattered, sometimes they didn’t, and most often it seemed like the writers hadn’t thought through the implications of their choices.”

The Shu are seen as an enemy race, and we learn almost nothing about them, other than the stereotypes and slurs thrown at Alina and the fact that the Shu have been at war with Ravka for an unspecified amount of time. As Angeline Rodriguez points out in a piece for the Daily Dot, “The show’s heavy-handed fixation on Alina’s experience of anti-Shu discrimination via insults such as “rice-eater” and comments on her eye shape feels particularly short-sighted when the cast is full of other Asian and non-white actors who never see so much as a microaggression… We’re meant to believe that the world of Ravka is so rife with persecution that Alina would be sent empty-bellied from the mess hall, but that Black characters such as Jesper and Nadia would have no issue at all strolling through the capital, or that a girl like Inej would be merely an exotic curiosity, or that the onus of crossing the Fold [...] wouldn’t overwhelmingly fall on ethnic minorities.” Rodriguez goes on to describe how this becomes even more complicated when the story of the Grisha is already an allegory for the persecution of Jewish people, and how difficult it is to gel together something like the magical racism against Grisha and real-world racial dynamics.

It’s a complicated issue to parse, which is why—again—I don’t think either of us needs to throw our white lady opinions into the ring. I do think it’s an interesting conversation to have, though, and I hope that in crafting the next couple of seasons, the writers for the show will take these critiques into account and perhaps give us more Shu backstory, more information about the experiences of the other characters of color on the show, and in general a more nuanced and realistic take on racism within the fantasy realm. 

Emily: There’s also the stunt double issue. The show used a white stunt double for Inej, and they’re rightfully getting a lot of heat for it, especially because the stunt double used “brown face” to double for Inej. The cast and Leigh Bardugo have come out and apologized for this insensitivity. And they promise to do better in future seasons. Again, I’m white, so it’s not for me to forgive them. But I do hope they’ll do more and be more sensitive in future seasons. Because I would really hate to have to stop watching this show. 

Kelli: I do think it’s a good sign that they seem receptive to this type of criticism, and I’d like to give them the benefit of the doubt, especially since the cast has been really outspoken about how important these roles are to them and how they feel about representation in media, and in fantasy in particular. Also, not for nothing, Jessie Mei Li’s pronouns are she/they, which is cool and another win for diversity in casting. 

Emily: I agree! I’m really rooting for this show to continue to be good and even improve because the first season was just a lot of fun. 

We talked a little bit about genre earlier when we were discussing world building, but I want to circle back to that because this is a YA fantasy series, and that could turn some viewers away from trying the TV show out. I know Ben (my husband, not Ben Barnes lol) was hesitant to watch it at first because it looks like a YA show, and there are a lot of corny and badly-written YA fantasy shows out there. But he was quickly hooked just like we were. What do you think this show is doing that makes it a YA fantasy, and how is it good YA fantasy, rather than just another YA fantasy show of many? I’m asking a sort of leading question here because at this point it’s clear we both like the show. So I feel okay asking, “Why is this show good?”

Kelli: So, I think the answer to that question, for me anyway, is how richly drawn all of the characters are. Tropes are tropes, but they exist for a reason — because when employed correctly, they work really well! When you have this many well-developed characters with interesting backstories and you throw them into situations where, I don’t know, one of them has to heal the other’s wounds, or they need to share a bed for warmth, or whatever other corny YA romance trope we’re dealing with, the things about those tropes that tug at our heartstrings or get us invested in relationships function just as they’re supposed to. 

Emily: Yeah, I feel like there was one episode especially where the show was like “Let’s just dump ALL OF THE YA ROMANCE TROPES into this one episode.” And yet even as I saw it happening, I was vibing because I cared about these characters a lot, and I was like, yes, let’s have them all kiss already.

Kelli: There is a level of indulgence in the various romantic subplots here that I really appreciate. Like, it’s okay to be corny or overly sentimental sometimes, and it’s okay to revel in two people who are supposed to hate each other slowly growing to love each other, because all of that is just another part of the “fantasy” here. And it’s not just thrown in for fluff, because all of these relationships are also serving to move the story forward in some way, and to tell us more about the characters themselves.

I don’t even know if any of that makes sense, but I’m just gushing about it, because I really had so much fun with this in a way that I haven’t with a series in quite a while, and a huge part of my enjoyment came with those romances and the escape they provide from whatever the fuck is happening in the real world right now. 

Emily: No, it totally makes sense, and I agree. But it wasn’t just about romance. There was a lot going on here. And the romances are moving pretty slowly. It’s pretty common for YA fantasy to put romance at the forefront, but it’s often in a way that feels unnatural. Even when the romance was tropey, it still felt natural. 

Are we supposed to rate this show or something? How do we do this with TV shows? Is there anything specific you’re looking forward to seeing in future seasons?

Kelli: I rate this five out of five Ben Barnes in beautiful coats.

Emily: Ben Barnes really does look best in fantasy winter wear.

Kelli: It’s true. As for future seasons, I’m looking forward to seeing what direction his character goes in. Like, are we going to get a sort of redemption arc, or is he going to be full villain till the end?

I’m also, like I said, looking forward to seeing how Nina will factor into the main story now that she has reached land, lol. I also really like Genya, and I hope we get more of her, and I’d like to see more of Zoya and a possible redemptive arc for her, which has nothing to do with my massive crush on Sujaya Dasgupta.

You?

Emily: I’m looking forward to what winter coats Ben Barnes will wear next season.

JK. I mean, I am looking forward to that, but also I want to see more of this world-building as we get to explore more of the “Grishaverse” and its magic, its characters, and its settings. I also really liked Genya. I’m really intrigued by her magic, and I feel like that’s the kind of magic I would want to have. Very useful, but you’re not going to be expected to go to battle with Tailor magic. 

Also, obviously, I’m looking forward to seeing more of the goat.

Unfortunately, it looks like it might be a little while before we get another season. Kill me.

Kelli: No, because I need you around to discuss it when it eventually exists.

Emily: Okay, fine. Can’t wait!