A Few Thoughts on General Kirigan (Shadow and Bone)

*Spoilers for Shadow and Bone the TV show and the Grishaverse book series.*

What I’m going to say here applies equally to both the book series and the TV show, but I’m going to be speaking mainly from the perspective of the show because 1) Ben Barnes, natch, and 2) those memories are cemented a little more solidly in my head. As such, I’ll be using the name Kirigan instead of the title Darkling, and I’ll reference some show-specific backstory stuff.

In terms of YA fantasy villains, Kirigan/the Darkling ticks all the boxes for a good reader crush. He’s a hot goth with magical powers that the heroine finds herself drawn to, and there’s this whole “I’m the only one who can truly understand you” thing going on. Like Alina, he’s seemingly the only one around with his specific ability, Shadow Summoning to her Sun Summoning. (Side note: in the books, once he and Alina start having their little psychic sessions together, the Reylo parallels are everywhere.) He’s weary and long-lived, which gives him good fodder for implying to Alina how lonely he is, how he’s longed for a peer just like her. In the show, we see his tragic villain origin story, in which Grisha were hunted and killed and his wife(?) was murdered in front of him, fueling his desire to acquire forbidden merzost power and lay waste to everyone who would hurt his kind (shades of Killmonger’s brand of protect-our-own retribution.)

Throw in Ben Barnes’s nuanced, magnetic performance on the show (and obvious good looks,) and it’s a recipe for a villain people love to love. In actual fact, though, Kirigan is far from a misunderstood woobie. Instead, he’s a man who was terribly wronged/persecuted in the past, but who now lets those injustices make him hard, vicious, and tyrannical. Although he didn’t intend to create the Fold all those centuries ago, he now plans to harness Alina’s power so he can control it and use it as a weapon to threaten any and all who may harm the Grisha, and he doesn’t care who he kills to achieve this “safety.” In order to do this, he manipulates Alina, preying on her isolation at the Little Palace and her insecurities about whether she can be the savior everyone wants her to be, making her think Mal has abandoned her so that he, Kirigan, is the only one she can depend on. The dude is bad news.

But in both the show and the books, even as there were flashing neon signs that this character was going to be revealed as the Big Bad, I couldn’t help but think about how much more interesting it would be if he wasn’t. I don’t mean this in an apologist, “when you think about it, he’s not really a villain” way—I’m all about enjoying complex villains without downplaying or excusing their villainous actions. Rather, the way whole thing is set up is just so obvious. I mean, the guy with the super-rare powers of literal darkness, who dresses in all black and is equally respected by the other Grisha and feared for his abilities, who in the books isn’t referred to by a name but instead given the title “The Darkling”? Of course that dude is the villain. But I would’ve just loved it if the somber, seductive goth with the shadow powers, the one who’s blatantly set up to be evil, wasn’t. Kirigan didn’t choose his particular type of power any more than Alina chose hers, so what if he’s lived his whole life saddled with the fear and superstition that comes with Shadow Summoning and has spent centuries trying to prove that these “dark” powers can be used for good? What if it really was his ancestor who created the Fold and he’s struggled to get under from under his “evil” ancestor’s shadow, so to speak? Or, if it was still him who created the Fold, a tidal wave of merzost rippling out of him WandaVision-like in an outpouring of rage and grief, what if he’s been futilely trying to fix it ever since?

In Shadow and Bone, when we’re given the mid-book/season reveal that Kirigan is the bad guy, it’s not a twist or a shocker, because it’s like, “Well, yeah.” And maybe this is on me for looking for that kind of trope-subversion in a YA series, but I’d have loved to get a Kirigan whose moral fate wasn’t sealed seemingly before he was even born, where the “dark legacy” he inherited didn’t determine what kind of man he’d become.

Not that Ben Barnes doesn’t play the hell out of Kirigan as a villain, because he absolutely does. He has that gift for playing a baddie in such a why that I completely understand how Kirigan justifies his actions to himself but without any sense that Barnes is justifying/sanctioning them. It just would’ve been great to see what he could’ve done with a more unexpected version of Kirigan.