I got cancelled by stan twitter and I only had one follower
So I have a burner Twitter account that I use to tweet about shows I’m watching. I initially made it because my sister and I are both pretty big fans of the Six of Crows book series, so when Shadow and Bone came out on Netflix, my sister and I made accounts to tweet at each other about the show. Nowadays I use it to tweet about any show I know my sister also watches, and she uses her account to do the same. The account has one follower (my sister) and follows one person (my sister), so basically all of my tweets exist just for her. The things I say, jokes I make, and the way I say them are all done in ways that she’ll understand. When I made the account though, I never made mine private, because, on some level, I enjoyed the idea that some random person might come across my dumb tweets and just privately go, “Huh, this is dumb”, or maybe chuckle or something like that. Unfortunately, I forgot that most people on Twitter don’t often do things privately.
To provide some context on the controversy I apparently started, in the Six of Crows series, two of the main characters, Kaz Brekker and Inej Ghafa, have some pretty deep feelings for each other, but for various reasons, they never start “dating”. Most of the issues though, do center around Kaz. Namely, he has deep trust issues, is completely emotionally closed off, and seems concerned with little more than getting revenge on his rival gang leader, Pekka Rollins. He also is completely repulsed by the idea of physical human contact, to the point that he literally passes out when he touches another person’s skin, a detail that certainly prevents him from getting close to Inej in any sense of the word.
Now in the books, the pair never start dating because it simply doesn’t make sense for them to. Kaz, to repeat, literally only cares about getting revenge on Pekka Rollins and routinely fails to give Inej the emotional support she needs, but Inej also has her sights set on buying a ship and hunting down slave traders, a revenge plot of her own (she was taken from her family by slave traders before the plot of the books). Ultimately, the pair part ways at the end of the series because, in order to stay together, either one of them would have had to abandon their own personal purpose for the other person. Kaz would have had to give up on Pekka Rollins or Inej would have had to give up fighting the slave trade. Either way, their relationship would have been entirely unhealthy because one person would have lost their sense of self in service to the other. Now, of course they could have worked out some kind of deal, tried to find a compromise, but they didn’t. The books make a very intentional point to show a relationship between two people that doesn’t work out, simply because the two people grew onto different paths. It’s strangely empowering to read and see something so healthy happen (as healthy as anything involving Kaz can be).
I made this tweet because on Tumblr, among other social media platforms, a lot of people seem very invested in shipping Kaz and Inej, which always felt weird to me. It seems strange to actively ship two characters the books make a point to split up. I think that it irks me particularly because I like Kaz and Inej’s arc and enjoy how subversive it is. It has all the makings of a Twilight-esque romance, but then it shows a deep level of self-awareness and acknowledges that these two characters aren’t good for each other. They can be friends, work together, whatever, but they simply cannot offer the other person what they need out of a deeper relationship. It’s a really cool arc to see in a YA novel, and shipping the two characters feels like it completely misses the point.
Now this tweet doesn’t really explain any of this, partially because I don’t feel like it needs explaining (even though apparently it does), but mostly because I wrote this tweet for my sister, who already knows my opinion on this. I didn’t need to explain my rationale because my audience (my sister) already knew it. Unfortunately though, Shadow and Bone Stan Twitter did not know my reasoning.
It started out pretty simply when one person quote-tweeted my tweet and simply said “UMM ARE YOU ALRIGHT”. While they clearly didn’t agree with my take, I didn’t think too much about it. One person made a pretty clearly joking tweet to my similarly joking tweet. I put my phone down to go take a shower and when I got out I checked my phone to see I had about ten other notifications of people quote-tweeting, replying, and engaging with my tweet. None of them seemed particularly pleased with it. “did you not read soc and ck or something [Loudly crying face emoji]” (I don’t know how to quote emojis), “im…”, and “… huh” were among the quote-tweets I got in my initial tweet.
At this point I was reeling. I was home alone, lying on my floor, cackling to myself. The idea that my dumb tweet got so much attention from stan twitter absolutely sent me. It was, in a sense, what I hoped would happen with this account; someone saw my tweets and went, “Wow, that’s dumb”. Only, I didn’t really expect people active on stan twitter to do so publicly, so this was certainly a bit of a shock to me still. Unfortunately, people then started sifting through the rest of my tweets to see if I had any other dumb takes about this YA novel.
Okay, I’ll be honest: I did not read this article before I tweeted this. Having now read the article I can confidently state that the article is actually really good. It uses Kaz and Inej’s characters as a jumping off point to discuss how we define intimacy and asexuality in the world and in media. It’s genuinely a super interesting read. (you can read it yourself here). I can acknowledge now that my tweet has basically nothing to do with the article because the article actually doesn’t necessarily ship them as much as it simply talks about the show’s depiction of Kaz and Inej’s very real feelings for each other. I recognize that this article, because it only talks about the show, is pretty different from the normal “Kanej” shippers I complain about and I didn’t need to call out the article like this. Luckily for me though, stan twitter made the same mistakes I did and, in the end, the discussion I sparked really had nothing to do with the article at all.
See, the responses to this tweet generally fall into two categories: debating whether or not Kaz and Inej are actually asexual and attempts to prove that Kaz and Inej are actually, definitely in love. The first category we can basically write off immediately because I don’t have any particular stake in the argument at all. While I do find the discussion very interesting, I am not asexual, and my tweet wasn’t about that, so don’t really have anything to add to the conversation. To the people who disagree with labelling Kaz and/or Inej as asexual, I would engourage you to read the article though, it’s quite interesting.
The other category also feels pretty inconsequential to me. Attempts to prove that Kaz and Inej are definitely in love were common for both of my tweets, but, like, here’s the thing: at no point, in the expansive two tweets, did I ever imply that Kaz and Inej are not in love. I know they are. That’s not my point. Again, my point is simply that I appreciate the idea the books present that two people are allowed to have feelings for each other but not get involved romantically out of their own best interests. Specifically on this last tweet, a lot of people tried to explain to me that “asexual” and “aromantic” mean two different things, and that while the pair might be asexual, they are still romantic, which, again, completely misses both my point and the point of the books. A quote tweet I remember seeing but couldn’t find again said something along the lines of “they are canonically in love”, a sentiment expressed by many users in some form or another, but I would challenge the people thinking this to also remember that they are canonically, not in a relationship. They work together, and I suppose could be friends (though most of the time they act more like work acquaintances), but they are, at least in the scope of Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom, not dating.
I think that, somewhat ironically, reading the article about Kaz being asexual helped me understand why “Kanej” shippers weird me out so much. At one point, the writer of the article says that “Kaz Brekker is asexual because I say he is”. To be clear, in case anyone needs to hear this. this does not mean that the writer of the article wants to assert their interpretation as canonical fact, but instead they choose to view Kaz as asexual because the way he shows love and intimacy resembles their own, and they appreciate seeing some aspect of themselves represented in a Netflix show. In the same way as them, I like the reading of Kaz and Inej as in love (or at least deeply caring for each other) but not together because I have personal experience with that kind of relationship, and seeing it depicted with the complexity the books give it is really meaningful to me.
So often in the media, love and romance get the Twilight treatment; love is bold, grand and dramatic. It’s extreme and ends in either despair or death. Till death do us part. Media tells us that love consumes and digests, dissolving us to nothing. In Twilight, Bella literally abandons her humanity for the sake of love. Nothing has importance in the face of love. Yet, in the Six of Crows duology, the romance between the books’ Edward and Bella takes a backseat to the rest of the plot. Kaz and Inej both have goals outside of each other, and don’t want to abandon their entire selves just to be with each other. It’s rather telling that the other romances in the books go considerably better. Nina and Matthias get the till death treatment, and Jesper and Wylan get their happily ever after together. Kaz and Inej get something else though. The books establish them both as powerful, independent people with big goals. It simply wouldn’t make sense for them to be together (Not to mention Kaz, as he is in the duology, is completely incapable of meeting Inej’s emotional needs.), and seeing this kind of relationship depicted so well in a book is really cathartic to me. I suppose the Kanej shippers out there can keep on as they are, but I find quite a bit of value in reading them the way that I do.
All told, these two tweets had a combined one hundred and fifty-nine quote tweets as of writing this. That doesn’t even include the replies to those tweets and the replies to my tweets. That might not sound like a lot, but let’s not forget that my account has exactly one, singular follower (and will remain that way as I have now made the account private). Given my utter irrelevance, I can hardly believe how many people thought to pile their opinions onto me. I got called illiterate in all different manners, completely befuddled some people, got called a troll, had Kanej fancams posted at me (which I think is the funniest response I got), and received at least one request to die. Again, I, a Twitter user with one follower, was told to die because of a take I had about a Young Adult novel. While that was almost definitely a joke, or hyperbolic in some way, it still feels a little extreme. I did get a couple of people decrying the somewhat aggressive opposition to my tweets, but those were few and far between.
I initially planned on making most of this article about getting “cancelled” (though I don’t know if you can get cancelled when no one follows you to begin with), and how, while I think the idea of “cancel culture” exists mostly so right-wing comedians can complain about people not liking them, there is something to say about how readily certain communities will jump on people, but I don’t really want to do that anymore. Instead, while thinking about this and writing this, I feel like the more interesting thing is my take on Six of Crows. I didn’t want to write too much about the books because I thought getting “cancelled” was really funny (and it still is two months later), but writing that section about how the media depicts love so aggressively felt far more personally important. I suppose if you take anything away from this article I challenge you to think more critically about how we talk about love, and what love can be. To echo the sentiments of the Observer article, we so often only ever see love as explicit, deep, all-important, and sexual, but love (romantic or not) so rarely comes like that, and even more rarely stays like that.
