Spoilers for 3 body problem and the dark forest.
I've read 3 body problem and the dark forest now, and I have been provided, yet again, more evidence that I believe in women's wrongs:
I am presented with a woman who is constantly seeking trouble with conviction in her morals and she's having a terrible time and no one respects her and treats her like a real full person, and I just want to steal her away and give her a hug and help her feel loved and safe and all that. Ye Wenjie, I love you darling, come in out of the cold, I know you'll find more trouble soon but come home after.
We are then presented with a woman who is clearly some sort of sinister techno-priestess who has a quiet house husband and says spooky and ominous shit all the time
Ye Wenjie kills her boss, and accidentally but not guiltily, her husband and baby daddy to keep other people from finding out Red Coast worked. Oh, and in an episode of prolonged cold rage, she dooms all of humanity.
The techno-priestess tries to kill her husband, which reveals that he enthusiastically let her domesticate him to do mathematics for her. And it's also revealed that she is a part of a doomsday (factually correct) cult and is part of the archive recruiting to subvert the freedom of all earthly peoples.
There's another woman who's even wilder, but she only has like 2 scenes and ends up nuking herself or something.
Then I start the dark forest, and I enjoy watching the misadventures of Luo Ji and Da Shi, don't get me wrong, but the points were just hammered home further because:
The entire way through the dark forest, there I sat at every event, pining. "I miss Ye Wenjie. I wish Ye Wenjie was back. I wonder what Ye Wenjie would think about this. I'm really enjoyng this, but I wish Ye Wenjie were here."
I am granted at least a small reprieve when Yamasugi-san is revealed to be a foil to one of the Wallfacers before we return to our scheduled viewing of "Men vs Apocalypse"
Oh, and I was really entranced with the awesome snarky Captain of the space society and her weird parasocial paternal relationship with a man she met, at most, a week or two ago and her subsequent moral erosion. Like sister, I too have had the knwoledge that I was capable of deep dark horrible things, and that a random man said he was proud of me awakening some dark storage locker in my soul which flickered with the halogen bulb whisper of "dad?" (These happened seperately, just to clarify)
I just want to live in a weird sitcom with these women and make really terrible life decisions together. Like, I don't like to get parasocial, but I'll allow myself this small dream to tuck away into a corner of my head (although I think I'm fine without the bomb lady)
P.S. I could try talk about the men other than Da Shi (I know that's a nickname, but I too ended up feeling like it suited him too much to think of him as Shi Qiang) and Luo Ji, but all the rest are kinda just plot devices, even the mc of 3 body.
There was the domesticated house husband that I enjoyed, but I think I mainly enjoyed him because our techno-priestess just decides she was going to take him home with her. And I suppose there's the navy guy, but I don't think I really started enjoying him outside of his wallfacer esque plans till I saw him through the captain's eyes and he was like, "I've adopted some kids, so I guess I'm going to retire and support them from behind, like a good grandpa should."
The rest of the men are paper thin in 3 body and cardboard thick in the dark forest (they get some characterisation outside of their plight, but they're kinda archetypical to me), I don't really feel like getting into how they're interesting as plot devises, because I'm not really getting into plot here.
