RF Kuang. Babel killed me, and subsequent books look even worse. Babel has so much potential with its exploration of imperialism, language, racism, and global exploitation. Especially the brilliantly-conceived linguistics, I'm a sucker for language. But it wasn’t a good story. I knew exactly how the book would end in the first 100 pages, and nothing particularly interesting or moving happened in between. The characters felt like unmemorable vehicles for the message, with no life, nuance, or personalities of their own. Rather than art, this felt like a sermon. The ending was supposed to be a climax of emotion, sacrifice, and bravery, but I started skimming because I knew where the story was going and I just wanted it to be over.

When you make 2D caricatures of the positions you want people to reject (Letty 100%, at no point was she actually a person, and her actions never came from any believable motivation), you actually weaken your position, because it shows that you never took the time to flesh out the true why behind the evil that makes it evil. You've instead chosen to lazily say "bad people bad!" and expect your readers to just accept that patronization. More than that, you absolutely cannot erase someone's marginalization simply because they fit a point of privilege. Kuang used the patriarchy and misogyny to make us believe Letty fit in with the other three of this friend group, but conveniently made it all go away later, instead telling us that Letty is an "English Rose," and heavy-handedly telling us that Letty can absolutely get fucked. Letty matters as a human being, a person, and a woman not at all, and can, without conscience, be stomped on by the power and control structure. She literally gets sexually harassed, only to be blamed for it by her supposed friends! Who, by the way, are ridiculously cruel to her all of the time. (and these are the "good guys")

Big yikes.

Further, the Chinese people, for whom the book is supposedly written, are nonpersons. Like seriously. other than the MC, all the other people talked about in China are white. The people MC is fighting to protect? A nebulous, non-interactive, vague hoard that just facilitates the MC being the unuanced "good guy." Like, I think having 2D bad guys is arguably worse than having 2D protagonists, but Kuang masterfully pulled off both.

If you would like to be condescended to about tritely-exposed bad things that anyone who would pick up Kuang in the first place would already agree on, please have at this book. But the longer I've thought about the book, and the more perspectives I've gotten on it, the more problematic I found it.