I find Nikolai so much more interesting (not to mention realistic!) when he’s continually perched on that knife’s edge. He’s a largely good guy, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t take morally ambiguous actions. When do the ends justify the means, and at what point do you stop being “largely good” when your actions continue to get more and more morally dubious?
When your personal ambition is so deeply entwined with your desire to help your country, is it even possible to detangle the two? And what does it mean for a person if your most selfish desires are so tightly wound through your noblest intentions, and vice versa?
Nikolai is self-aware enough to know that he’s walking that fine line, and he’s a good enough guy to be bothered by it. Neither of these things will inherently stop him from crossing said line, though. It’s up to him to keep himself from sliding too far on that slippery slope of morally dubious actions. (And “too far,” of course, is deeply subjective.) To a lesser degree, it’s also up to the people around him, but that’s dependent on him listening to them—which is just another choice for him to make.
As you said, becoming ruler of a kingdom should only intensify your potential for making morally ambiguous decisions... as well as the magnitude of their consequences.
(As I think we may have discussed before, Nikolai abdicating the throne in ROW didn’t work for me—not for Nikolai and not for the story—but the worst part is that it could have if Bardugo had delved deeper into his character.)
Like Mal’s not-death, Nikolai being allowed to remain so untainted feels emotionally/intellectually dishonest. I get it, these are YA books, but Bardugo is the one who introduced these quandaries in the first place. And she even called the readers’ attention to them in that great scene between Alina and Nikolai in S&S that you mentioned!
*highlights and underlines these lines*
Exactly! The fun thing about Bardugo giving Nikolai narrative copout after copout is that we can explore the affect this would have on him. The Darkling kills Vasily for him. He’s conveniently able to privately exile his father. (Which has a lot more moral ambiguity packed into it than fandom typically acknowledges, IMO.) But what if it hadn’t worked out that way? He’ll never know what he’s really capable of, and if he lets himself think about it too much, it could easily eat him alive from the inside out. Just how much a “monster” is he? And how much more of a monster is being King making him?
I wish Bardugo had engaged more deeply with the monstrous aspects present in Nikolai as a person—his internality and interiority, the choices he makes and the costs he considers acceptable—as opposed to him having a literal monster in him thanks to the Darkling. (Or, you know, both. Which is what I think she was trying to go for, but the metaphor didn’t work for me, since the monster seemed so disconnected from Nikolai himself.)
ANYWAY! Thank you so much! I always love reading your thoughts.
One of the fun (and tricky!) parts of this fic is trying to get Nikolai’s headspace through while writing solely in Alina’s POV. Because Nikolai does open up to her—canonically, he opens up to her quite a bit—but that doesn’t mean he talks about everything. Or that he’s always aware of everything going on in his head. The same is true of Alina, of course, but we have the benefit of actually being inside her head.