Hey! I love your soc analysis and i would love to see an analysis on the "kind steel" scene!

Hi, thanks so much! I had a few people ask me this same question, so I’m just going to reply to this one and tag the other people who asked, but thank you all! :) - @acheloisstuff @honestlyimportanttheorist

So incase anyone doesn’t know, when I say the “kind steel” scene I mean the moment after the Black Tips and Razor Gulls attack the crew in the Ketterdam harbour before they set off for the Ice Court job and Inej is badly injured by Oomen. She knows they intend to take her alive and torture her to give up the secrets she has gathered, both about the city and about Kaz and the Dregs, so she intends to stab herself in the chest before they reach her with a blade she refers to as “kind steel”. She actually seems to hint that it’s a common thing amongst the gangs in the Barrel, since the blade wasn’t named by her but is a colloquial term referring to “a blade this sharp”, which could link in with the idea that there are “plenty of people in the Barrel without much to live for”.

Inej raises that blade because she doesn’t want to be tortured by the Black Tips, doesn’t want to spill Kaz’s secrets, doesn’t want them to use her against him. But HE HAS TO WRESTLE THE KNIFE FROM HER HANDS to stop her. It’s a truly heartbreaking moment, it’s so early on in the book that I don’t think we initially notice it for everything that it is: a concession to Inej’s pain, to the severity of her PTSD at a time when we know little about what she went through, it’s a concession to how strong her feelings for Kaz are, not only romantic but in fierce protection borne either of that romance or of the “life debt” they both seem to feel they owe each other, but more than that it is simply this painful, terrible acknowledgment that she feels she has to give in, that she feels she has failed by letting the world do this to her. She intended her last words to be apologising to her father for giving up, for failing him, for not trying as hard as she thinks he would want her to. It breaks my heart a little bit more every time I read it.