To begin, I don't necessarily think it was a choice in response to twitter fans, especially since this was back in 2015 before twitter became what it is now. I think she's just prone to killing off characters for cheap pathos. It's especially noticeable in this case because you can see how she picked which character to kill - can't kill off Wylan or Jesper because that's bury your gays, can't kill Kaz or Inej because they're (arguably) the leads, can't kill Nina because she's needed for future books, so . . . womp. And while I'm not opposed to character death in principle, I think the way she does it really weakens the whole narrative for the sake of shock value, because it doesn't have anything to do with the broader themes of the book. It just comes out of nowhere, swipes the reader's feet out from under them, and then doesn't get dealt with at all because there's thirty pages left in the book and there's other plots to be wrapped up. So in that regard, just as a choice in isolation, I think it's a bad one, and the reason I don't plan to read any of her future books. I'm not interested in an author who values gut punches over thematic coherency.
But on a more macro level, I feel like it reveals a lot about how she views the fictional world she's set up. Ravka and Fjerda are at war for Reasons (what reasons? God knows) but also Fjerda/the druskelle are the bad guys. Why? Well, because the Grisha are a persecuted minority . . . who are also an elite unit in the Ravkan army. So the whole concept of anti-Grisha racism makes no sense, and that's even before you get into the fact that they canonically commit war crimes against Fjerdan civilians, burninating their thatched roofed cottages and whatnot. ("Wars happen. People die," Nina thinks in response to this, like an absolute sociopath.) We, the reader, are supposed to view Ravka - and her army - as the good guys, even though there's no real reason for it beyond "a lot of our characters are Ravkan and they have cool magic powers and aren't boring prudes like the Fjerdans."
But even then that doesn't track with what Bardugo actually wrote, because both Nina and Matthias's arcs seem to be about them moving away from the nationalistic brainwashing they received at the hands of their respective armies and recognizing that they have value beyond being bodies on the battlefield. Except . . . not, because then Nina goes back to Ravka! This is what I mean when I say that Matthias's death yanked the rug out from every thematic beat that his storyline had hit before that: because if it had carried on to its natural conclusion of "both our countries are bad because nationalism is bad," then Nina wouldn't have gone back to Ravka, at least not in the way that she did. But Bardugo needed her there in order to support future book plots and so that she could avoid complicating the fantasy of Ravkan glory (side note: is Ravka going to have a revolution anytime soon, because it's based on turn-of-the-century Russia, and . . .) so Matthias had to die and Nina had to return to fight for a country that took her from her parents as a small child, raised her to die for leaders she had no part in electing, and then gave her up for dead when she was kidnapped by the druskelle. It's horrifying! But I don't think it's meant to be!
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To begin, I don't necessarily think it was a choice in response to twitter fans, especially since this was back in 2015 before twitter became what it is now. I think she's just prone to killing off characters for cheap pathos. It's especially noticeable in this case because you can see how she picked which character to kill - can't kill off Wylan or Jesper because that's bury your gays, can't kill Kaz or Inej because they're (arguably) the leads, can't kill Nina because she's needed for future books, so . . . womp. And while I'm not opposed to character death in principle, I think the way she does it really weakens the whole narrative for the sake of shock value, because it doesn't have anything to do with the broader themes of the book. It just comes out of nowhere, swipes the reader's feet out from under them, and then doesn't get dealt with at all because there's thirty pages left in the book and there's other plots to be wrapped up. So in that regard, just as a choice in isolation, I think it's a bad one, and the reason I don't plan to read any of her future books. I'm not interested in an author who values gut punches over thematic coherency.
But on a more macro level, I feel like it reveals a lot about how she views the fictional world she's set up. Ravka and Fjerda are at war for Reasons (what reasons? God knows) but also Fjerda/the druskelle are the bad guys. Why? Well, because the Grisha are a persecuted minority . . . who are also an elite unit in the Ravkan army. So the whole concept of anti-Grisha racism makes no sense, and that's even before you get into the fact that they canonically commit war crimes against Fjerdan civilians, burninating their thatched roofed cottages and whatnot. ("Wars happen. People die," Nina thinks in response to this, like an absolute sociopath.) We, the reader, are supposed to view Ravka - and her army - as the good guys, even though there's no real reason for it beyond "a lot of our characters are Ravkan and they have cool magic powers and aren't boring prudes like the Fjerdans."
But even then that doesn't track with what Bardugo actually wrote, because both Nina and Matthias's arcs seem to be about them moving away from the nationalistic brainwashing they received at the hands of their respective armies and recognizing that they have value beyond being bodies on the battlefield. Except . . . not, because then Nina goes back to Ravka! This is what I mean when I say that Matthias's death yanked the rug out from every thematic beat that his storyline had hit before that: because if it had carried on to its natural conclusion of "both our countries are bad because nationalism is bad," then Nina wouldn't have gone back to Ravka, at least not in the way that she did. But Bardugo needed her there in order to support future book plots and so that she could avoid complicating the fantasy of Ravkan glory (side note: is Ravka going to have a revolution anytime soon, because it's based on turn-of-the-century Russia, and . . .) so Matthias had to die and Nina had to return to fight for a country that took her from her parents as a small child, raised her to die for leaders she had no part in electing, and then gave her up for dead when she was kidnapped by the druskelle. It's horrifying! But I don't think it's meant to be!