Status Updates From The Witch and the Tsar

Vlad...A character in this book gets called Vlad...That's not how you make a diminutive of Vladimir

Anyway I am halfway through this book and there has STILL been no mention of Fyodor Basmanov. Where is he.

Malyuta mentionnnn omg hi Malyuta!! *twirls hair*

I assumed Koshey and Morozko had better things to do than to follow a fifteen-year-old boy, even if he was the tsarevich.

......Koshey has been getting involved in court politics this whole book.......

The riders' hair streams like water down their backs.

Mongol men shaved part of their hair and braided the rest and put it up in a style called a pojiao, which makes sense. Wearing your hair long in a battle is a little impractical. Why did the author suddenly become incapable of using google halfway through the book.

LEAVE VANYA ALOOONE what did he even do besides give water to the man his wife was starving in the basement. From his perspective in the fairy tale, anyway, obviously Maria Morevna had good reasons for doing that and I would support her even if she didn't lmao. Anyway why is Koschey the one who's feminist here when he fucking kidnapped her in the fairy tale???

Still, it wasn't just grief that pushed the tsar toward murder. He had a gift for blame and hatred, Aleksey had said.

Ivan is not born evil and has not been portrayed as having been born evil up to this point. Why are we regressing in complexity. Oh, I guess he's just like that naturally! Shut up. Where are my social forces.

I don't know, I feel like the tsarevitch is having a very normal reaction for a 16th century man whose dad/tsar just got insulted even if his dad/tsar is evil. Idk why your blood's running cold or whatever. I did just sit through Nikita Serebrenni's vaguely unhinged (affectionate) reactions to Ivan though so I may have a high tolerance for this sort of thing

I know that the author knows that people didn't call the tsar Grozny because he was a really bad person. It basically means fearsome, which is what terrible used to mean back in the day before it started meaning a bad person. Why are we pretending to be stupider than we are? What is the point of anything?

Considering that no one has any historically accurate bigotry unless they're evil in this book, is the tsarevitch micro-aggressing Maria Temryukovna behind her back for being Circassian something that I'm supposed to just accept? I really hope not.

It's not like I haven't read and enjoyed things that were more ridiculous on a historical level, but I would like to know how the tsarevitch can 'slip out' while Baba Yaga's every movement was tracked inside the palace.

Is there a single peasant in this group of freedom fighters?

"Surely, he doesn't consider his own people an enemy..."

Girl have you not, I don't know, LOOKED AT HIM?

I flipped ahead to the author's note and now my eye is twitching. I am not at all surprised to see that the author cited a fucking Llewellyn book (although to be fair she did also cite two academic sources on folk magic as well). It was, shall we say, noticeable.

Baba Yaga is asking why the boyars didn't just let Ivan abdicate and Morozko is giving us some lecture on how Russia can't imagine itself without the Rurik dynasty. Yaga did you forget what you said literally earlier in the book about the chaos before Ivan took the throne? These people weren't stupid, they were weighing bad options.

"People believe in the spirits less than ever, Yaga, less even than they believe in the old gods."

In 16th century Russia???