Analyzing Aleksander's reaction to Alina's loss of her power
(I'm so sick and tired of seeing people use his "You are nothing now" words as a way to justify how he didn't love her that I decided to create a whole ass post about it.)
First of all, let's see what the powers of a Grisha mean to a Grisha, shall we?
For a Grisha her powers is the same thing as the oxygen is for all humans. The constant beat of a person's heart.
Indispensable.
And in a way it's implied that a Grisha cannot live without it. Just like birds can naturally fly, just like a fish can naturally swim. It's part of their nature, part of their body and soul.
Now let's see Aleksander's reaction to Alina's loss of her power.
The moment he saw Alina being unable to summon, he froze. At first he's in denial of what he sees.
How can a Grisha not being able to use her power? A power that is always there no matter what? A power that "feeds" them and keeps them healthy and alive.
We see Aleksander being in a state of shock as he tries to comprehend what is happening with her:
He had never seen anything like that. A Grisha losing her powers is unheard of. Impossible.
He tries again and again to summon her light and bring it to the surface. The fact that he can't feel it causes him panic and pain. In a way, he can't find her soul.
And the very fact that she also lost her collar and feter is impossible too. When a Grisha claims an amplifier, a connection is made that can't be broken.
Another fatal loss for Alina and a disastrous blow for Aleksander and his knowledge, since he knows more than anyone else how amplifiers work and how a Grisha's power work. All the hundreds of years he had spent watching and studying the ways of the Small Science and of power, have gone to waste right now as he tries to understand what is going on with the woman he loves.
His near immortality and rare powers always made him seek someone else to connect with. Someone to understand him and be on the same level as him.
People say that he never actually wanted Alina to be his equal. Well, based on his words and reaction here, I would say he wanted to.
Right now there's no pretense, no tricks or a façade. We see him "naked" and exposed showing us his terror of Alina's loss and despair for his fate. Of being alone forever.
"You were meant to be like me."
Aleksander wanted her strong and confident. Unafraid to rise above the others and to stand right beside him.
"You're nothing now."
I know it sounds cruel but it is true.
If a bird lost its ability to fly or a fish its ability to swim, would you call that normal? If a person stopped breathing or her heart stopped beating, would you call her alive and whole?
Alina lost the very essence of her being, her soul and identity. What happened to her was something completely unnatural and just wrong. Aleksander has lived for centuries and knows more about the Grisha than anyone else (except of course his mother) so he knows that what happened to her, has crippled her. She's not the Alina she was. And she's never gonna be.
It's not a statement of disgust, apathy or scorn. They're words of pain and mourning. Shock and anger.
It's a complete ruin for Alina.
A devastation and tragedy for the unfortunate Grisha that experiences it for the first time in their history. And an equal devastation and sorrow for the Grisha that watched it happen to the person he cared most about.
And it's actually funny how Aleksander seems to be the only person that was devastated for what happened to her.
Everyone else was:
"Alina lost her powers"
"Okay cool".
In a way you can say that it was proof of how he was the one that truly cared about her fate while the rest of her friends didn't seem to give two flying fucks.
The Darkling just gave up.
All he had fought for, all the patience he had mastered for years waiting for his equal to come, went to dust right in front of him.
In a way he committed suicide and just let Alina kill him.
Now if he didn't love her as some people say, why did he do these things after she lost her powers?:
1) Called her to his side and searched for her hand to hold it.
2) Smiled at her and stroked her tears.
3) Entrusted her with his last wish because he'd seen her kindness and believed in it.
4) Asked her to say his name one more time so he could hear it from her one last time. A name that he had probably never said to anyone else for centuries.
5) Begged her to not leave him alone while he died because loneliness frightened him.
I'm sorry but if I was dying, I wouldn't want anyone at my side but the people that I loved the most. And Aleksander wanted the same too.
There's no way he felt disgust or anger towards Alina even after she stabbed him. Whatever she did, he forgave. And whatever happened to her in the end didn't stop him from loving her and wanting her presence at his side until his own end.
(didn't really love her, my ass)
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I’m not sure if you’ve specifically answered this before, but how long did it take you to outline, research, and prepare the foundational meat of Lionheart since it’s such a sprawling saga with threads for so many characters? Did you have it all mapped out before you started writing? What about shorter pieces like The Climb and the latest, delightful The Death Eater Diaries?
The series outline for Lionheart I wrote on one bleary, rabbit-hole of a day in the summer of 2022 when I was definitely supposed to be doing something else, and after that, each book took me between 3 days and 2 weeks to outline completely. The later books have taken longer because of their length and the number of threads — the series has a way of getting wider as well as longer, and for the last two books, I sometimes got a bit grumbly about how many characters pop up in every novel. As for research, most of that will happen before or during the outlining process; I'll have a copy of the book on-hand to check plot details, but for the most part I try to work without flipping back to the text, to avoid copying beats or stylistic choices unless I have a thematic reason to. I also use HP Lexicon and fanwikis while I'm editing for content, though when I'm drafting I make a real effort not to switch out of the tab for any reason, because it breaks flow. I'm sure I have missed some details despite my references, but c'est la vie; JKR had to do continuity edits in subsequent edition releases for several books, so at least I'm not alone.
For The Climb, I wrote the first chapter in the raw, then went through and blocked out the second two in an outline at the bottom of the document. Very very broad strokes there — TC is different from Lionheart because it's a slice-of-life tone piece, so there's not as much plot to be done. It's a novella conceived for the sole purpose of exploring one particular relationship, so the plot came secondary to the things I wanted to highlight about how that dynamic worked. It's a character-forward piece, to borrow culinary terminology, and outlining for character is a lot easier than outlining for plot. (For me.)
The Death Eater Diaries emerged almost fully-formed from a Tumblr post I made joking about the sort of ludicrously awful decade Narcissa experiences. The hardest part of outlining was nailing down canonical dates. Stuff like how old Andromeda was when she got pregnant, when Bellatrix got married, when the members of the previous generation died, all that's unspecified — but it's also all functionally constrained to a narrow window of time, if you take in where the characters are at certain other parts of the story, so you can't just say anything. It was very fun to write, though. Doing so also stressed how hilariously short the timeline on the Black family collapse actually is. Between 1971 and 1981, they go from a two-branch family with an heir, a spare, and three healthy daughters -> completely extinct in the male line, two of its descendants disinherited, two imprisoned, one missing, presumed dead, and Draco Malfoy's mom.
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What crimes has the guqqie scientist variant committed
ARG!Guqqie has committed the following crimes:
Medical experimentation on a human
Cannibalism
Abduction
Aggravated assault
Uxoricide (murder of a partner) in multiple ways including the following:
Murder by drowning
Murder by suffocation
Murder by melting/burning a human body
Decapitating a person
Stabbing
Starving and dehydrating a person to death
Poisoning
Crushing a person to death
Use of explosives
Shooting
Use of radioactive material
Electrocution
Necromancy
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