⚠️ spoilers for The Poppy War ⚠️
I just finished reading R.F Kuang’s The Poppy War and I am disappointed.
The first half of the book, before the aftermath of the siege on Sinegard, was an excellent peasant girl through force of will gets a place at the elite school where she has to struggle to succeed, but from there it goes downhill.
There are a few aspects I take issue with (Rin’s lack of character development, abandoned plot lines with Venca, Rin’s crush on Altan…) but what absolutely ruined it for me was Rin literally murdering all of the people on “Mugen” aka Japan. Literally tens of millions of people, if you consult Japan’s population during the Second Sino-Japanese War. I looked at the summaries for the sequels, expecting to see a protagonist shift, where we now follow along as a new protagonist has to take down Rin, who’s morphed into an unrecognizable villain (which would be so cool), but instead we’re supposed to root for this genocidal maniac? I know it’s art, and it’s an exploration of dark themes, but it just makes for un engaging material if you’re not invested in the protagonist’s success.
The second issue, that was troubling me from the first page, is the choice to change all the historical names. The Poppy War is obviously set in China, revolving around the aftermath of the Opium Wars and the progress of the Second Sino-Japanese war. However, instead of making this into a really cool historical fiction/ fantasy story, Kuang decides to change all the names. For example, the “Poppy Wars” are the Opium Wars, the “Nikara Empire” is China, ext. Unfortunately, this goes from an annoying trope, to seriously disturbing with the events of “Golyn Niis.”
In the second half of the book, our protagonists discover that the “Mugen” (Japanese) army had attacked the southern war time capitol, “Golyn Niis” (Nanjing). Then, the book goes into gruesome detail into the events that transpired there. The only issue is, this was a real tragedy, the Nanjing Massacre.
⚠️ Content Warning: mention of sexual violence ⚠️
This massacre, also knows as the Rape of Nanjing, was a horrible infliction of war crimes on the civilian population, something that Japan still minimizes to this day. An estimated 200,000 people lost their lives and at least 20,000 were raped over the course of 6 weeks.
In my opinion, it does not sit well to fictionalize this real life tragedy, to give it another name, and still go into such gruesome detail of the atrocities committed by the Japanese army. I am incredibly concerned that readers would assume something this horrible could not have historical background. Instead of respecting the thousands of lost or ruined lives, The Poppy War benefits from the shock-factor and does nothing else.
In addition to the Nanjing Massacre, the Poppy War also touches on Unit 731.
⚠️Content warning: mention of torture ⚠️
Another real war crime commited against the Chinese people by the Japanese army, Unit 731 was a unit of the Japanese army that experimented on Chinese civilians to develop biological and chemical warfare. The unit killed an estimated 250,000 people.
———————end of content warnings
In all, I think that in trying to explore dark themes and the psychology of the antihero, the Poppy War unknowingly profits of real atrocities committed against the Chinese people, without even naming the events.
