The women of Shadow and Bone deserved better

polygon.com:

So long as an adaptation keeps the spirit of the characters and story, changes and timeline shifts are not the end of the world. That’s been the creed that many fans of Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse books have carried into the Netflix adaptation Shadow and Bone, one that the showrunners also proudly proclaim. And yes, so long as the heart of the story is respected, changes can be good.

But when it comes to the second season of Shadow and Bone, it’s evident which characters the writers understand and which ones have been reconstructed to use as puzzle pieces in the larger framework. To include the ever-popular Six of Crows characters and to speedrun Alina’s quest to defeat the Darkling, two of the books’ most dynamic female characters, Genya Safin (Daisy Head) and Zoya Nazyalensky (Sujaya Dasgupta) became collateral damage, their storylines reduced to almost nothing. In the books, they both represent a deconstruction of what we typically expect from the YA stock character of the Beautiful Cool Girl. In the show, they’re the tropes, not the deconstruction, and any nuance that their arcs would have takes a backseat to the more traditionally exciting characters.

[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for Shadow and Bone season 2, as well as the Grishaverse books.]

When Leigh Bardugo introduces Genya and Zoya in the first Shadow and Bone books, she places much emphasis on their beauty. That isn’t a positive, however. In the first book, Alina emphasizes her own plain looks constantly, so anyone beautiful becomes someone she cannot relate to. Through Alina’s limited first-person perspective — not to mention Bardugo’s fledgling writing — Zoya in particular does suffer the most from reductive tropes initially. In her very first