Inej Ghafa Character Traits

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Inej Ghafa is my favorite character from Leigh Bardugo’s duology Six of Crows for a myriad of reasons. She was a sex slave turned assassin who not only managed to reconcile her job with her religion, which heavily emphasizes peace and kindness, but became the voice reason for the most notoriously unreasonable and overly violent gang boss in Ketterdam, Kaz Brekker. Inej toed the line between morality and survival, two things that were mutually exclusive in Ketterdam, and managed to stay true to herself and her religion despite the number of people she had murdered rather brutally for the sake of information and money. Bardugo also challenged gender-specific societal roles and stereotypes with Inej’s character. This nonconformity was also somewhat …show more content…

There, she was sold to Tante Heleen, the owner of a so-called pleasure house called the Menagerie. She spent two years there as a sex slave, but then she caught Kaz’s attention when he was talking to Heleen for information and Inej snuck up on him. He bought her contract from Heleen and turned Inej into a spy and assassin, putting her almost unnatural ability to be silent to good use for his gang, the Dregs. Once, Matthias commented that Inej “walked with soft feet like she’d drifted in from the next world and no one had the good sense to send her back” (Bardugo 113). Although this was directly after he called her and Kaz demons, in a way, he was right. Inej sort of had drifted in from another world – she had been raised in peaceful, quiet environment and then dropped head-first into a world full of violence and …show more content…

Although Kaz bought her “contract” from Heleen and taught her to kill, she never once begins to rely solely on him to help her out of any situation, unlike many female protagonists end up doing. She never idolizes him, never deludes herself into thinking that Kaz can single-handedly “save” her just because he gave her a way to get herself out of the Menagerie. She recognizes that he helped, yes, but she never claims to believe that he is some sort of angelic creature sent but her Saints to save her. Quite the opposite, actually – she regularly calls him out on his shit and gets angry at him countless times for being obnoxious and needlessly apathetic. I have seen too many strong female characters be “rescued” by a manipulative and often abusive male character and then become completely dependent on him for every little thing. Harley Quinn and the Joker, for example. Harley began as a self-sufficient woman, but her heavily abusive and unhealthy relationship with the Joker stripped her of her ability to think for herself. She practically became his pet – not that he treated her as well as a pet. He even had her wear a collar-like choker with her pet name for him on it. The Joker turned a respected, well-meaning woman into a killer with such a twisted view of the world that if he was not present she could barely function. Harley and Joker’s relationship is also highly sexual – the sex is really the only reason he keeps her around, and because

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