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#this also applies to alina fyi
firelxdykatara · 3 years
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one of my biggest pet peeves in this fandom is when someone calls kaz (or, really, any of the crows, but especially kaz) ‘a child’, because like. no. he’s not lmfao. he’s very much not.
and like, ok, if you want to be ridiculously, overly literal and claim that anyone under the age of majority is A Child, then maybe (except there’s no real evidence that the AoM, if there even really is one, in Ketterdam is 18), but what’s really going on when people do this is they are either trying to make it seem like it’s morally OK for kaz to be a thief and a murderer and a gang leader/crime boss (bc he’s A Child and couldn’t be expected to know better uwu) which is completely ridiculous-
or they’re trying to make it seem like it’s weird for anyone who reads about these people acting like adults and doing adult things like murder and excessive violence to one another to find them attractive in whatever Mental Landscape they conjure while reading if they happen to be adults themselves, and that is it’s own brand of stupid (and also rooted in anti rhetoric, so these people must make it seem like these characters are Literal Children even though they really aren’t because they are fictional characters and any way you slice it all of them were robbed of their childhoods and forced to grow up too fast and a lot of people will have as their mental image the grown ass twenty-something actors portraying them in the show and a lot of us already had mental fancasts involving adult actors anyway so let it the fuck go my god)
and either way it’s just weird???? kaz isn’t a child. kaz does bad things, he knows they’re bad when he does them and he doesn’t care because they serve his goals. i wouldn’t even say that he believes the ends justify the means, he just never bothers to attempt any justification. he doesn’t care about right and wrong. that doesn’t mean he’s some sadistic monster who enjoys inflicting pain for the thrill of it--i think it’s very important that he carefully crafted a reputation around himself that ensures that because people believe he is a monster, he doesn’t have to do every monstrous thing in order for people to believe he will and act accordingly--but he’s still like. not interested in morals, and he probably never will be. he has lines he likely wouldn’t cross, he will respect people who respect him, he will (usually) keep his word unless there’s a good reason why he shouldn’t, but he’s not a good person. and that’s ok! that’s part of what i love about him!
but i think trying to excuse his behavior with ‘he’s a child’ (even if that isn’t necessarily the intention it’s absolutely how it comes across; ‘child’ implies a kind of innocence and naivety which simply doesn’t apply to kaz) is vastly missing the point of his character in the first place. 18 isn’t some magic number where you go from ‘child’ to ‘adult’ overnight. this is why we have terms like ‘teenager’ and ‘adolescence’, because there is a whole lot of development that happens between ‘child’ and ‘adult’ that is not implied by either term, and it’s why we also have ‘young adult’ for that late teens/early twenties transitory stage. and it really doesn’t matter how you conceptualize childhood development, kaz is no longer a child at the point where the books begin, and he hasn’t been for quite some time.
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