They're planning a Six of Crows spinoff which is based on the author's Crows duology (these are the books Kaz's gang are actually from) and while still YA, avoids a lot of the annoying tropes you see in the genre and is - in most people's opinion - far better than the main trilogy the show is adapting. You even see it teased at the end of S2 when Kaz mentions >!a drug that enhances Grisha abilities!<.

Pretty sure the main reason the Crows are even in the show (since their duology isn't set until after the events of the trilogy) is because they're much better characters from a more praised set of books - IIRC the showrunner even said he wouldn't make the show unless they could be in it.

>felt like they tried to cram 3 books’ worth of material into 8 episodes

They basically did that with 2.5 books - they combined the final 2 books of the Grisha trilogy into this season with 4 eps each, and sprinkled some significant subplots and character interactions from the second Crows duology books in there too.

It was still better than The Witcher S2 at least since it still stays true to the characters and doesn't wildly change anything, but they definitely had to skip or rush some great things from the trilogy, and I'm very curious to see how they adapt the Crows duology with how they've moved some stuff from there into this season.

"Who ordered the white rice?"

I absolutely lost my shit when they show a photo of him with the rest of the board, then it slowly zooms out and you realise he's actually squatting on the table throwing a hand sign

>really obvious parallels that jump out are the four established cliques/houses

This has been a thing in some schools for decades, my high school had 4 houses named after different birds of prey with corresponding red, blue, yellow and green colours.

Yeah I could never get back into Dark because of how completely and utterly lost I was when I tried watching S2. I can usually still remember character and basic plot points between seasons pretty well (I was alright between seasons of Westworld actually) but that show was a whole other level of convoluted.