by Theodore R. Boronkay
What is “representation?” Is it simply depicting a character from a community outside the mainstream? Must a character’s background be acknowledged, or is it better to mention it and move on? Would being Black in a world of alien races remain relevant? These questions are only some of the concerns YA authors must confront when introducing their young audience to diverse characters. The most important one, however, in my opinion, is, “How do I make my characters embody the marginalized group they represent instead of just wearing it?”
Groundbreaking author Leigh Bardugo answers this question in her YA fantasy novel, Six of Crows (2015), set in the Grishaverse, where beings known as Grisha supernaturally alter matter. In the book, teen career criminal Kaz Brekker and his Dregs, a team of similarly-aged ruffians, must rescue a scientist from an impenetrable, inescapable fortress called the Ice Court (the Hogwarts-version of the Ocean’s 11 vault). Bardugo has been praised for her novel’s diverse cast of characters, ranging from racial and sexual diversity to diversity of ability.
However, she didn’t just include characters from marginalized groups who act the same way they would if they were members of the mainstream, something called literary blackface by author Kekla Magoon. Bardugo managed to avoid “White Writer Talking Through Non-White Character Syndrome (WWTTNWCS),” by making the characters’ backgrounds inseparable from their identities for proper representation.
For example, Inej, a Dreg known as the “Wraith” due to her skillful acrobatics during heists, is constantly affiliated with her Suli heritage. Her background as a Suli, the Grishaverse’s nomadic Romani, isn’t just incidental but foundational to her character and relationships. In Chapter 22, while struggling to stay conscious due to his haphephobia (fear of being touched), Kaz recalls a conversation with Inej:
Inej had once offered to teach him how to fall. “The trick is not getting knocked down,” he’d told her with a laugh. “No, Kaz,” she’d said, “the trick is in getting back up.” More Suli platitudes, but somehow even the memory of her voice helped.… He kept her voice in his head, repeating those words… as he stripped off his boots, his clothes, and finally his gloves.
Inej’s Suli heritage provides her with wisdom that she imparts to Kaz, which drives him and allows him to focus on his goals despite his doubts. Later, in Chapter 25, “the Wraith” tries climbing through a chimney while the incinerator heats up, causing her painful exhaustion. This forces her to reconsider her own identity and the utility of her “Wraith” persona because apparently you can’t have an identity crisis in a YA fantasy book unless you’re in a life-and-death scenario: “She’d become the dangerous girl he’d sensed lurking inside her. But she’d made the mistake of continuing to trust him. That myth had brought her here to this sweltering darkness, balanced between life and death… In the end, Kaz Brekker was just a boy, and she’d let him lead her to this fate.”
Inej’s personal identity and relationships fail to give her the strength to reach the chimney top. However, her faith in the Saints, Grisha worshipped by her Suli parents, drives her to ascend when she associates the rain with a blessing from the Saints: “Then she heard… a soft patter. She felt it on her cheeks and face. She heard the hiss as it struck the coals below… It felt like a blessing… She forced her muscles to flex, her fingers to seek, and pulled herself up one foot, then another… murmuring prayers of gratitude to her Saints. Here was the rhythm… buried in the whispered cadence of their names.” In this miracle, she re-discovers her true identity, one that frees her in a way that her life with Kaz simply could not: “She was not… the Wraith. She was Inej Ghafa, and her future was waiting above.” By remembering her surname and roots, Inej gains power beyond being a skilled acrobat and thief, which allows her to complete her mission.
Some worry that highlighting characters’ backgrounds “reduces” the characters to customs and values rather than making them wholly individual. However, there’s no such thing as “wholly individual” since our identities are combinations of the groups we belong to alongside our characteristics. You can’t understand someone without a frame of reference to a collective of humans. (“No man is an island.”) According to Kekla Magoon in her article, “Our Modern Minstrelsy,” people aren’t interchangeable despite our equality, and one’s cultural upbringing significantly influences them. With Black Americans, she explains there “are myriad experiences of life in America that are specific to Blackness; experiences of trauma, exclusion, and prejudice that feed a unique existence steeped in sorrow and struggle and… joy.” In other words, you might not “see race or ethnicity,” but you can’t truly see anyone without them; you and everyone else are the product of your environment and your community.
Another major theme in Six of Crows is the effect of being part of a diaspora. For Inej, Nina, a Ravkan Grisha, and Matthias, a former drükselle (Grisha hunter, and yes he and Nina are lovers), the Kerch city of Ketterdam isn’t only horrible because it sucks, but also because of its distance from their cultural centers. For Matthias, being a drüskelle again means living a life of honor but also means returning home:
The others pulled him onto the stone of the drükselle roof, and… he was struck by a wave of vertigo. More than… any place in the world, this felt like home to him… Peering into the dark, he saw the massive pyramid skylights that marked the roof. He had the disconcerting sense that if he looked through the glass he would see himself running drills in the training rooms, seated at the long table in the dining hall.
After Grisha destroyed his home and ended the lives of his family, all he had left was his place as a thinly-veiled Spanish Inquisition metaphor… I mean drükselle within Fjerda, more specifically the very Ice Court he’s infiltrating. Even his growing distance from his bigoted culture and growth into a more open-minded individual is only as impactful as it is because of his cultural background: “On the northern ice, his choices had seemed clear. But now his thoughts were muddled with these thugs and thieves, with Inej’s courage and Jesper’s daring, and with Nina, always Nina. No, he would not look through those skylights. He could afford no more weakness… It was time to move forward.”
In Kaz’s case, he is enhanced due to being disabled. Along with his haphephobia, Kaz needs to use a cane due to a serious injury, a reference to Bardugo’s osteonecrosis (death of bone tissue), and he isn’t himself without that cane. Kaz has ensured his disability isn’t some incidental aspect of his character, but a fundamental component of it; he isn’t who he is despite his disability but because of it:
Kaz had put together a crew to rob the bank… His crew got away… but he’d broken his leg dropping down from the roof top. The bone didn’t set right, and he’d limped ever after. So he’d found himself a Fabrikator [a materials-related Grisha] and had his cane made. It became a declaration. There was no part of him that was not broken, that had not healed wrong, and there was no part of him that was not stronger for [it].
Older works have often overlooked characters’ disabled status or treated it as a surmountable obstacle for the characters who “at heart” are able-bodied people. After all, who wouldn’t want an intrinsic aspect of themself to be treated as something to be ashamed of? However, by making Kaz’s cane a key identity trait while giving him traits besides it (such as thirsting for vengeance), Bardugo ensured that Kaz can best represent the community of which they both are members.
Returning to the most important question, to make marginalized characters embody, not wear, their identities, authors should do as Bardugo did and put those identities front and center. The novel’s representation didn’t inherently improve the characters so much as how Bardugo approached representation. Characters from different communities shouldn’t be able to switch each other’s lives with no change in their personalities or behavior, like they’re entangled in a quantum field. That method only enables mainstream readers to impose themselves onto non-mainstream characters while giving readers from such represented communities an empty, unrecognizable shell. Bardugo wants readers to know that not only are her characters from communities treated as second-class, but that they are also inextricable from such communities. In this way, diverse representation can make her characters more endearing, distinct, and inspiring for younger readers.
Author Bio
T. R. Boronkay is an Emerson graduate student from Lawrenceville, NJ who’s working toward his MFA in Popular Fiction Writing and Publishing. He currently works as a Feature Writer for Page Turner Magazine, producing articles related to observations on the nuanced world of fiction writing. He plans on getting his epic YA science fantasy title, Ki: The Noble Lords published after graduating in May 2025 while keeping a sharp eye on job prospects from the publishing industry. In his spare time, he researches everything he can related to physics, chemistry, history, and mathematics. You can find him on Twitter, Instagram, and Substack @trboronkay.
