Mild spoilers for shadow and bone season 1 below.
Let’s get one thing straight: I don’t love fantasy. I usually find the worlds too full of details that I can’t follow, the names too long and confusing, and the fan bases so intense that they are intimidating. this is not meant to be a shade to any fantasy fan reading this, i really respect you! I just… never felt like one of you.
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the shadow and the bone changed all that for me. My love affair with this Netflix series and the Grishaverse has mostly to do with the fact that the heroine, Alina Starkov (Jessie Mei Li), is someone you immediately want to stand up for. she is a cartographer in the first army of the kingdom of ravka who discovers that she has magical powers; Alina is actually a Grisha, one of Ravka’s residents who can practice magic. I should pause here to quote Maggie Fremont from Vulture: “If you’re here calling people Grisha with ‘magical powers,’ you better get yourself checked out, okay? As the novels explain, the Grisha’s powers are not really ‘magical’ but rather a domain of ‘manipulating matter at its most fundamental levels.'” Fremont is correct, but the Netflix series definitely positions Grisha as “magical people.” because “manipulating matter” is a bit tiresome when you just want to kick back with a new series and pizza on a Friday night. magical works.
As any fantasy lover knows, these worlds aren’t usually created solely for the screen; they are often adapted from series that have a large following. Ditto for Shadow and Bone: Netflix’s newest fantasy offering is based on Leigh Bardugo’s books, but it’s more complicated than that.
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If you’re just discovering this series and have no idea what I’m talking about, here’s a breakdown of where the plot points and characters from the first season originated.
the tv show is actually based on two series of bardugo books.
The title of the series is taken from the first book in the author’s main grishaverse trilogy, also titled Shadow and Bone, published in 2011 (the other two books are Siege and Storm from 2013 and Ruin and Rising from 2014). These books focus solely on the story of Alina and Ravka.
But the show’s subplot, which begins in Ketterdam, follows the characters from Bardugo’s second Grishaverse installment, a book duology titled Six of Crows (2015) and its sequel, Crooked Kingdom (2016). The two books follow the scum, a gang of teenagers that includes Kaz Brekker (Freddy Carter on the show), Inej Ghafa (Amita Suman), and Jesper Fahey (Kit Young) as they plot a series of incredible heists in the capital city of kerch (another country in the grishaverse).
The six books of ravens take place in the years after the events of the shadow and bone trilogy, but the show actually folds (pun intended) the events of both book series into a single story, in which the scum is tasked with stealing. alina in a robbery. if she hasn’t read the books, she’ll have no idea they don’t take place during the same time period.
So, to recap: The Netflix series Shadow and Bone intertwines two different book series, all of which take place in the same universe (i.e. Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse), in the same time period. are you following so far?
the author agreed with this approach.
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“It was one of the first things that eric [heisserer, the showrunner] said, because eric had entered the grishaverse through six of crows, and he was really passionate about adapting them,” bardugo told elle.com. she explained how she was concerned about that approach, but she was sold on heisserer’s idea.
there’s a good reason the book worlds are combined.
As bardugo told the winter’s coming fantasy blog, “I wanted the world to feel big from the get-go, and we realized that if we were lucky enough to continue the story, we needed to introduce these characters from the beginning to achieve it”. that might happen.”
This strategy allows the world of television series to be “big” and gives the program more dimension. “Shadow and Bone is very much a chosen classic story, and Six of Crows is not,” Bardugo added. “Six of Crows is a story of heists, but it’s also a story about people who don’t have great destinies, royal blood, great magical power. it’s about those who are considered expendable, who get caught in the crossfire. For me, bringing those two perspectives together in that first moment was so much more powerful. It puts a lot more emphasis on alina’s journey and ravka’s status as this isolated country.”
You may like the series more than the books.
I know, I know. this is a bold statement to make. Usually, fans of book series never like movie or TV adaptations more than books, but Shadow and Bone might be an exception. i got acquainted with the series through the netflix vehicle, and i understand it might be easier for some to follow if you’re a person who has read the shadows and bones trilogy and the six crows books – there are plenty of characters to keep track of . but even if you don’t know which books the characters and plots come from, you might be very amused by the way the showrunners adapted the stories, without going to the source material first.
but what do I know? I am a recent fantasy convert. I don’t think I’m entirely wrong when I say something about the netflix version just… working.
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