Opinion
Netflix’s
Shadow and Bone includes all the classic touchpoints of a new juggernaut fantasy series: a coming-of-age narrator, an ominous place full of darkness and monsters, period costumes, and British accents. But the series also added a new ingredient it wants to make sure we’re aware of from the jump: racism!
“I live in East Ravka, but I’ve never been welcome here,” Alina (Jessie Mei Li) narrates barely thirty seconds into the first episode, “because I look like my mother, and she looked like the enemy.”
Adapted from the massively bestselling YA fantasy series by Leigh Bardugo,
The women of Netflix's Shadow and Bone are the kind that you wish you'd see more often on screen and we're glad to have every single one of them in our lives!
Stars: 5/5
We are welcomed into the Grishaverse, a world based on the New York Times Bestselling series that shares the same title, âShadow and Bone.â Iâve been waiting for this series since the cast was announced in 2019. Having read both Leigh Bardugoâs âShadow and Boneâ and âSix of Crowsâ series, I was worried whether Netflix would prioritize this show. Netflix is now either giving us the pinnacle of television and cancels after one season or the garbage we all love to laugh at while groaning at when Netflix renews for a million seasons.
With a nation divided and at war, Alina Starkov (played by Jessie Mei Li) becomes a hero overnight after learning she could end the Fold, a dark mass with monstrous creatures, known as volcras. Within one episode, Alina is a simple cartographer to being the Sun Summoner living in the Little Palace with other Grisha, humans who practice Small Science.