Further Thoughts on Ruin and Rising

*Spoilers.*

As I said in my review, Ruin and Rising left me with a lot of thoughts that I’m still trying to reconcile. I’m letting loose with spoilers today to get into some of that, and while there are plenty of topics I could talk about, I want to focus particularly on the ending.

Ending a series is always tough, as I’ve noted, and often, the greater the stakes, the harder it is to bring it all to a satisfying close. With the Shadow and Bone trilogy, there are certainly high stakes: a teenage Chosen One who’s seemingly the only hope to save her country, a villain who’s growing ever more powerful and who’s wreaking increasingly-personal destruction in her life on those she cares about, a creepy wasteland full of shadow monsters, mythical creatures who grant untold power, and so on and so forth.Everything rises to a fever pitch as we ask, “How’s our heroine possibly going to beat all that?”

Alina is convinced that the only way to defeat the Darkling is to unite all three of Morozova’s legendary amplifiers, which is majorly forbidden in Grisha circles. They believe no one is meant to wield that much power, but Alina already has the stag and the sea whip, feeling their power coursing through her. At the same time, they make her long for even more, and so she studies lore and convinces Mal to help her chase what she supposed to be the third and final amplifier, the firebird.

She gets a rude awakening when she comes to realize that the third amplifier isn’t the firebird at all. It’s Mal, the boy she’s loved since childhood, and the only way she can claim that power for herself is to kill him. I knew there was something going on with Mal, even though I wasn’t expecting this and it very conveniently turns out he’s a descendant of Morozova. But the reveal sets up a classic dilemma for Alina. Her hunger for greater power has already driven her to do things she normally wouldn’t, and she worries that she’s being corrupted just like the Darkling was—killing the boy she loves would seem to be an obvious point of no return. At the same time, though, she still doesn’t truly think there’s a way she can beat the Darkling without the third amplifier, so in a sense, she’s facing the prospect of giving Ravka up to the Darkling so that Mal can live.

During the final big showdown in the Fold, we of course come to the moment where the choice has to be made, and Mal winds up begging Alina to sacrifice him so she can claim the power and fulfill her destiny (not gonna lie, the love story between Mal and Alina leaves a lot to be desired.) Her heart breaking, Alina does just that, but when his death doesn’t bring any amplification to her power, she’s immediately horrified at what she’s done and begs the Corporalki twins, Tolya and Tamar, to heal Mal and bring him back to her.

That’s when we see the true purpose of the final amplifier. When Mal is revived, Alina’s super-special Sun Summoner power flows into every non-Grisha in the nearby vicinity. Alina’s power alone, no matter how much she amplified it, wasn’t enough to defeat the Darkling and destroy the Fold, but all of them together can. It’s a little reminiscent of the series finale of Buffy, which rejects the whole Chosen One idea and divides one hero’s power among many previously-non-powered folks.

I’m not mad about that, and it jives with what we come to learn about Morozova. While a lot of people in Grisha society devalue non-powered people, he respected and revered them, defying the elitist/separatist notion that Grisha lives can’t mesh with those of ordinary humans. And it’s definitely more interesting to me than Chosen One Alina becoming The Most Powerful of Them All and vanquishing the darkness all by her lonesome.  However, I’m conflicted about the fallout from that: Alina losing her powers when they’re spread among the non-Grisha.

Alina begins the series not wanting to be Grisha, not wanting the weight of the Savior mantle and mostly just wanting to be ordinary. Over the course of the trilogy, as she learns to embrace her power, she realizes just how much of herself she was denying by suppressing her ability. She’s still overwhelmed at the thought of the whole Savior thing, but she recognizes that her powers are part of who she is and loves that about herself. The most difficult part for her is trying to figure out if Mal can fit into that equation. He still loves her, but he’s miserable in Siege and Storm as he backs her up in her Chosen One mission, and he gets heavily into his feelings about how there’s nothing he can offer her as a non-Grisha.

In light of that, Alina losing her powers is really hard for me to accept. You might say that it’s the price she pays for meddling too much with forces that Grisha aren’t supposed to touch, greedy for too much power. But it also kind of feels like a way for her and Mal to ride off into the sunset together, and I don’t like that she has to lose part of herself for that to happen. Alina grew up living a half-life, pushing down her abilities and denying her own sense of self, in large part because she was so afraid of anything that could take her away from Mal. To have her finally come into herself, only to be deprived of that, kind of sucks, and I’m definitely of the opinion that if Mal can’t handle Alina as she really is, it’s less of a satisfying conclusion for him to end up with her only after she’s brought back down to being “just” a human. There’s something uncomfortable in that. I was varying degrees of lukewarm about Alina/Mal throughout the trilogy anyway, and this was not the way I would’ve wanted to see them get together in the end.