Book Characters for Gen Z: From Dreamers to Rebels - Sykalo Evgen 2025
The Messy Psychology of Alina Starkov: Power, Shame, and the Girl Who Split Herself in Two
(An impulsive literary takedown love letter)
She’s just a girl, standing in front of an orphanage, asking the universe not to make her important. That’s the heart of Alina Starkov, and it's honestly where a lot of fantasy protagonists go to die—drowned in the Chosen One Industrial Complex, speechifying under the weight of metaphorical crowns. But Bardugo’s Alina? She flinches. She burns. She pouts. And then she obliterates.
Let’s not pretend this is a flawless character arc. Let’s also not pretend we care.
Alina Starkov is not your clean-cut messiah. She’s not even your reluctant hero, not really. She’s the girl who can’t run a mile without vomiting and still ends up shouldering the weight of a fractured nation because—surprise!—her bones literally glow with power. (No pressure.) And yet the most fascinating thing about her is how allergic she is to belief—hers, yours, the Darkling’s. Especially the Darkling’s.
There’s a psychological term I keep circling when I think about Alina: cognitive dissonance. That electric whiplash between who she thinks she is and who the world insists she be. It's the cracked mirror she stares into for most of the trilogy, and she does not like what she sees. The orphan who becomes a soldier who becomes a saint who—plot twist—ends up craving the simplicity of girlhood again. Her evolution is less a rise than a spiral. Her growth is an un-peeling. And yeah, that’s messy. That’s why it works.
We love our girlies broken, right? But smart broken. Self-aware enough to be both self-loathing and dangerously competent. Alina walks that razor line with the jittery tension of someone trying not to scream during church. She’s the product of a hundred emotional contradictions—devotion and resentment, longing and recoil, ego and annihilation. She wants power until she gets it. She wants love until it touches her. She wants to matter until she does.
I mean—can we talk about the Saint Alina thing? The weaponization of myth? The cult of personality built around a woman who, for most of the first book, would rather sleep in than train? The way Bardugo flirts with religious iconography, then swerves—hard—into a kind of bleak cultural satire? There’s something chilling about watching a protagonist become a symbol before she becomes a person. And Alina’s not an idiot; she knows what it means to be turned into an idea. You can’t win with purity. You either die a martyr or live long enough to get merchandised.
And the thing is—Alina knows exactly how the story should go. She’s read the script. She’s aware she should be noble, self-sacrificing, all white-gowned and sun-soaked. But she’s not. She’s prickly and jealous and devastatingly tired. She looks at the pedestal and says: “Why should I climb up there just to burn alive?”
Saints don’t get a lunch break. Alina wants lunch.
//
Here’s where things get chaotic: the way trauma refracts through desire in this story. And yes, I’m dragging Mal into this. Not because I care about their romance (I don’t, not really—it’s giving sad Soviet Katniss x Gale fanfic), but because he represents something vital in her psychological makeup: safety through familiarity. He is the personification of “before.” The warm blanket of pre-trauma identity. And yet, by the time Alina realizes how far she’s drifted from who she was, Mal is the only thing anchoring her—and that anchor gets heavy.
Mal sees her power as distance. The more powerful she becomes, the more he winces. And Alina sees that. She internalizes it. So here’s where we dig into something a little spicy: female ambition under surveillance.
Alina’s journey is laced with the tension of a woman who has finally—finally—been given a voice, a skill, a weapon, and is immediately met with: “But don’t get carried away.” It’s a slow poisoning. And it’s not just Mal. It’s the Apparat. It’s Genya. It’s Baghra. It’s the entire freaking palace. Everyone is deeply invested in Alina containing herself. Dimming. Making herself palatable. And in that way, Bardugo’s Grishaverse is less about fantasy than it is about the emotional choreography of being looked at.
The male gaze doesn’t disappear just because your bones light up.
//
Let’s pause for a second and talk about the Darkling, aka daddy issues in eyeliner. The whole predator-prince dynamic is tired, yes, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t riveted by the emotional sludge he stirs in Alina. He’s not a villain in the mustache-twirling way. He’s the fantasy of someone who gets you, in that deeply manipulative, trauma-bond kind of way. He looks at Alina and sees not the awkward orphan or the unsure girl—but the weapon. The power. The legend.
And Alina, starved for belonging, for understanding, wants that. Even as she recoils.
This isn’t your typical good-vs-evil framework. It’s codependence. It’s emotional blackmail dipped in silk. The Darkling’s brand of intimacy is parasitic but intoxicating: “You and I are the same.” Which, psychologically, is both true and totally horrific. Because it means Alina isn’t just resisting him—she’s resisting who she could become if she stopped pretending to care what anyone thinks.
Imagine the scariest thing about yourself isn’t what you can destroy, but that you might like it.
//
I keep coming back to this one sentence she thinks: I’m not a symbol. I’m a soldier. It’s a lie, but it’s a useful one. It’s what she tells herself when she’s drowning in public expectation, when the cult of her sainthood starts building shrines in her name. But it’s also heartbreaking, because—spoiler—she’s not really a soldier either. She’s not trained. She’s not emotionally hardened. She’s a sensitive, wounded, smart-ass girl in a world where softness gets you gutted.
The more Alina tries to reject her symbolic weight, the more it sticks. Like glitter. Or grief.
So she copes the way a lot of girls do when the world won't let them belong to themselves: she fragments. She compartmentalizes. She pretends she’s not scared. She builds a steelier self and wears it like armor, but that self has cracks, and the cracks have feelings, and the feelings don’t go away just because she finally learns to summon the sun on command.
She never becomes comfortable in power. And that’s the point.
//
Now, let’s talk aesthetics. Because this series lives on Tumblr moodboards and TikTok fancams, but the emotional color palette is actually way grimmer than the fan edits make it seem. Yes, the gowns are sumptuous. Yes, the palaces gleam. But Alina’s psychological arc isn’t shimmering—it’s ashen. And that’s what makes her kind of radical as a YA protagonist. She doesn’t become the queen. She doesn’t become the goddess. She becomes... a survivor. A teacher. A shadow of her own myth.
The end of her story isn’t a triumph. It’s an exit wound.
Which is brave, actually. To let a protagonist dissolve her own narrative instead of conquer it. There’s a kind of literary courage in watching a heroine choose ordinariness. Peace, even if it tastes like loss.
//
So if we’re really doing this—really dissecting the psychology of Alina Starkov—we have to admit: she’s not built to thrive in the story she’s been given. She doesn’t want glory. She wants rest. She wants to stop being read like scripture. She wants to be a person again.
That’s not weakness. That’s humanity.
She is a reluctant symbol of how feminine power is always too much and never enough. She is the girl who glows, and hates it. The girl who saves the world, and loses herself. The girl who, even after everything, would still rather hold a friend’s hand than a scepter.
And that’s what sticks with me, long after the last page. Not the plot. Not the palace politics or amplifiers or even the Darkling’s brooding, mascara-stained intensity. It’s Alina’s voice—tired, sharp, alive—that echoes.
Because here’s the secret: power doesn’t change you. It just amplifies what was already there.
And Alina Starkov? She never wanted to be a saint. She just wanted to matter. On her own terms.
Too bad nobody asked.