Rf Kuang - Blog Posts
went into the discord talking about not understanding why everyone was so devastated by this book at chapter 20.
i was immediately and violently checked.
i'm finally tackling the poppy war trilogy and i cannot sing praises for rf kuang's writing enough
the way she refuses to shy away from describing the gore and torment of war is so impactful and shows such a mind blowing skill
Man, Dark Academia as a literary subgenre is something that I have struggled with.
On paper, it ticks all the boxes. A heavy focus on academic life, learning for the sake of learning, a love of history, linguistics and myth, the cutthroat nature of elitism, the hollow feeling of disillusionment. Just everything that should make me absolutely love it. Seriously, compiling all of those things together into a book should make that my favorite book.
AND YET.....every dark academia book I've read as been absolute garbage. Books so bad they made me forget why I love reading.
Donna Tartt, Alex Michaelides....it's on sight with these fuckers. I get genuinely angry thinking about these books. I was not even able to write actual reviews of them because I got so fucking angry whenever I tried.
Other DA books I've read have been mostly just meh. So forgettable that I couldn't even give a synopsis of them.
It's a subgenre that I want to love, but all of my attempts have failed so miserably.
I'm currently reading The Cloisters and Babel right now and if these are bad too, I'm just giving up.
I've heard a lot of praise for Babel so I'm hoping it's going to be a light in the darkness for me. But I also heard people praise The Secret History to the moon and back and that book's so horrible in every way that I literally want to burn it.
Please let there actually be good Dark Academia books out there. I can't take anymore disappointment
you don't even understand the first 15 pages tore me up SO BAD
in shock hearing people say that babel only takes a turn and becomes heart-wrenching at the end because that experience is so incomprehensible to my chinese diaspora ass that felt like their heart was being torn from their chest in the very first chapter likeeeee babel is underscored by such immense amounts of tragedy and loss and horror around colonialism and imperialism from the very beginning it's so crazy that white people can just read the first half of babel and not feel like every bone in their body was being dissolved in acid by the centuries of unspoken grief written in robin's experience SORRYYYYYYYY. average poc reading babel vs average white person reading babel truly LMFAOOOO
You know the funny thing about Afghanistan?’ Griffin’s voice was very soft. ‘The British aren’t going to invade with English troops. They’re going to invade with troops from Bengal and Bombay. They’re going to have sepoys fight the Afghans, just like they had sepoys fight and die for them at Irrawaddy, because those Indian troops have the same logic you do, which is that it’s better to be a servant of the Empire, brutal coercion and all, than to resist. Because it’s safe. Because it’s stable, because it lets them survive. And that’s how they win, brother. They pit us against each other. They tear us apart.
R.F. Kuang, Babel
the poppy war trilogy is literally the great war by taylor swift DONT GET ME STARTED ON RINKITAY-
thinking about that time when rin's hand was being literally demolished and she's like it hurts and kitay is like i know. Crying screaming throwing up. The fact that they got BONDED in such a way makes my heart HURT so bad
Rebecca Kuang is a saint i would eat up every single word she writes, matter of fact, she can write an instruction manual and i'd still rate it five stars
Babel by Rebecca F. Kuang: English and Indonesian translation
I would read a book about Griffin, Anthony, Sterling Jones and Evie Brooke
I will think about Ramiz Rafi Mirza every second, every minute, every hour, every day, every week, every month, every year of my life.
the yins being such a happy family
bonus saikharas cause i missed ms paint
the Surens
this is my way of retaliating for the sampan scene.
Based on this picture
she’s the only devine thing he’s ever believed in
Our Lady Saikhara of sorrows and man of sorrows Nezha
English did not just borrow words from other languages; it was stuffed to the brim with foreign influences, a Frankenstein vernacular. And Robin found it incredible, how this country, whose citizens prided themselves so much on being better than the rest of the world, could not make it through an afternoon tea without borrowed goods.
R.F. Kuang (Babel, or the Necessity of Violence, 2022)
rf kuang always has two characters who are like orbiting each other, twin planets, can’t live without each other can’t live with each other, she loves tragic death of complicated friendships. ramy and robin, rin and kitay, even june and athena. everyone dies. but what i like about her tragedies is there’s always a third. always another component, important and surviving. nezha and victoire. not a happy ending, but one that leaves you with an ache in your chest and a hope for the future, that the sacrifice and death did in the end have a point.
STOP making me think about rinezha. i can't do it anymore. enemies to enemies slow burn. enemies to begrudging allies to friends to *almost* lovers. then betrayal, and then they're just enemies who used to be in love. and they both *know* that they were in love, and maybe they are still in love, but they stand on opposite sides of a war because they've both made their decisions and cannot come back from them. there can never be reconciliation for the things they've done to each other, but god, they're still in love. i am literally eating drywall over them
the way victorie and robin and ramy all loose their birth languages has me in shambles. victorie never really spoke hatian creole, she moved to france at a very young age, and when she tried to bring it into babel, she was dismissed. ramy, who’s from kolkata, who’s bengali, only speaks bengali once in the book and his speech has become rudimentary because the british saw urdu and sanskrit and arabic as more valuable. robin has forgotten cantonese by the time he goes back home for the same reason. it’s utterly tragic it comes with a deep pain that’s hard to describe the pain of loosing your mother tongue.
when hozier said "the only heaven i'll be sent to is when i'm alone with you" and when halsey said "i know i've only felt religion when i've lied with you" and when sappho said "in the crooks of your body i find my religion" and then when rf kuang said "she's the only divine thing he ever believed in"
not enough people talk about how rf kuang immediately writes a book shitting on anything she decides is bad no matter her connection to it and how iconic it is. lived in the us? fuck you, here’s tpw. graduated oxford? babel. harper collins published her book?? here, publish this one thats directly a call out about you.
A moment of peace and quiet before everything went looney tunes