I read the book everyone's calling a "colonizer romance" | To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods review

if you have to choose between the revolution or the man who's colonizing your people it should be an easy Choice that's that's all I'm going to say hi I'm Katherine you can call me cat I do cozy book and sustainable fashion content on YouTube Instagram and Tik Tok check it out if you want but I know what you're here for so let's get into it I did it I read to gaze upon with get Gods by Molly X Chang and that is three days of my life I will never get back I'm just going to be up friend that this is an extremely critical review so if you like the book and you don't want to hear criticism of it please scroll away this is your warning don't say I didn't tell you if you've heard of to gaze upon Wicked Gods you probably know about all of the controversy surrounding it to give a very brief overview because I don't intend for this to be like a book Drama video I first heard about it when the Kate kraine review bombing situation happened that was a few months ago and at the end of 2023 I think basically this white debut author was review bombing other debut authors from the same publisher and to gaze upon Wicked Gods happen to be one of the books all of the authors who were review bombed were authors of color which made it a very icky situation there was a general sentiment or a push to support these authors because of how they had been unfairly targeted so that was how I first heard about it and I began to hear about the book again this year as it got closer to the publication date I began to see reviews calling it a colonizer romance this kind of blew up on Twitter there's another situation with a reviewer it was unclear what had happened but I think I think Molly got accused of doxing uh a reviewer but then she says that she didn't I think that situation is resolved but I'm not really sure what happened I'm not going to touch that because that's a pretty hefty accusation to make at some point this book got posted into like an Asian inel forum and Molly started getting like hate and like death threats it was like definitely a very awful situation for her to be in exchang in her attempts to defend herself from these claims spoiled the title of her second book I won't put it here um in case you don't want that spoiled basically to say like look this is not going to end up being a colonizer romance no matter how it is written in the first book that is a very brief overview of all of the controversy surrounding this book another thing I will add is that one of the reasons why this book has been so heavily criticized as being a colonizer romance is because the author herself has been marketing it as a zutara inspired book as like a dark romance she has been marketing the colonizer love interest as like a villain love interest so there is that aspect of it where it is being marketed as a romance knowing all of that I kind of had an idea of what the book would be about I thought that it would have a kind of clear anti- colonial message that the villain love interest would be kind of like a darkling figure in Shadow and Bone where it becomes pretty evident that he is a bad guy that the main character is being manipulated and that towards the end of the book we will see like pretty clear anti-colonial messaging I figured that the criticism might derive from the book being not as well written as it could have been or there being confusion around the author's marketing of it as a romance around these two specific characters in particular one of whom is the colonizer one of whom is the colonizer I thought it was maybe like a marketing issue I wanted to read the book myself because I wanted to be able to have an opinion because I love having an opinion you know I have to say that however bad I thought it could be it was worse I'm going to do a bit of a summary without spoilers and then a short review without spoilers before diving into my full review which will have spoilers and I will put like a warning when I get into the spoiler section according to the author's note in the beginning of the novel to gaze upon Wicked Gods is a fantasy based on the Russian and Japanese Occupation of manua and China she also mentions Unit 731 in the author's notes so keep this in mind if you don't know what Unit 731 is I encourage you to look it up but please know that it is one of the most horrific atrocities in human history to give a very short summary of what it was it happened during the Japanese Occupation of China the Japanese are basically running human experiments on prisoners and the reason why a lot of people don't know about it to this day is because after after World War II the US basically had this deal with Japan that if they handed over their scientific findings that it would kind of be swept under the rug so no one faced accountability like no one was tried for their crimes this really one of the darkest parts of history that a lot of people unfortunately really don't know about keep that in mind because the author does mention that in the author's note in the very beginning of the novel before we get into anything and that really colors how I viewed the novel and how other readers view the nov novel so moving forward in this fictional world the people of pangu which seems to be based on China have been under the brutal occupation of the Romans who are the colonizers I'm not sure why they're the Romans but they are are depicted as white so they've been under occupation for two decades the Romans came through this portal in the sky I don't know why it's not really explained why there's a portal in the sky but there's like a rift between the worlds the Romans came through and they conquered pangu with their Advanced military technology pangu which has always Rel on Magic has never developed science the way the Romans have yeah so everything in punu relies on Magic so they just like have never developed they apparently have never developed science or technology which you know there's there's a lot of holes in this world building but we'll we'll keep going the Romans have also subjugated pongu by getting people addicted to opian which seems to be a pretty obvious standin for opium in this book the main character is y ruin a girl blessed with the power of death which means she can kill people without even touching them but using this power shortens her life and this is like a main worldbuilding aspect in this world where using magic can shorten your lifespan or if you use too much magic you can die there are also other magical panging which is I don't know how you say p pangul Lings that's the name of like the people of this world there are other magical pangul Lings um they're called Shan Lings but death is an extremely rare power so ruing lives with her sister Maya who is an opian addict and her grandmother and she would do anything to protect these two people in her life cuz they're her only family so that is kind of the main character trait that we know about ruing she relies on her former childhood friend her traitor to the country by who to obtain the opian her sister needs to survive so it's very clear that she thinks Bahu is a really awful person for being a traitor to his country which is something interesting to note for later without giving too much away the Romans basically find out about Ring's power of death and she's put in a position where she has to choose between her life and her family's lives and having to serve the colonizers with these death Powers the person who puts her in this position is the Roman Prince Anthony and he is also the person that she develops feelings for so that is the basic premise of the novel all of this is like on the cover flap so did I think to gaze upon Wicked Gods was a colonizer romance the short answer is yes the long answer let's buckle up whatever the author was trying to accomplish with this novel I don't think she succeeded if it was supposed to be a dark romance like she's been advertising it only succeeded in making me extremely uncomfortable because of the colonized colonizer Dynamic to the point where I had to skim passages like I couldn't I couldn't read them fully because it made me so so uncomfortable and this is coming from someone who does read dark romance and has enjoyed dark romance on the other hand if it was supposed to be this hard-hitting critique on the horrors of colonialism it is completely overshadowed by the fact that most of the book centers around this developing romance between ruing and Anthony and not only that that was the central plot of the book but also in the way that this romance was written the book does a thing where ruing will be like grappling with the morality of her actions questioning if she's betraying her country and then immediately afterwards like two sentences down on the same page she'll notice like anon's green eyes or like oh my God they're so close to each other she'll look at his lips and wonder if he'll kiss her it just feels wildly inappropriate it doesn't really make sense either it feels almost like two different books like one is about how colonialism is awful the other is just like a romance and they're kind of like overlaid on top of each other and so you'll get like one sentence where she's like oh my God like my people are oppressed and then next sentence will be like but my heartbeat quickened and the next sentence would be like am I a bad person for working for the colonizer and then the next sentence would be like but his eyes lingered on my lips it's just a very weird and confusing way to write this Dynamic where it gets to the point that you're not actually sure what the author is trying to say I will say that in the beginning of the book it seems pretty clear that it is anti-colonial from the very beginning we are subject to info dumps about how awful the Romans are and all of the horrors that ruding has witnessed at their hands the personal impact it has to her family and her community even when she first meets Anthony she like she very clearly Associates him with the Empire that is doing all of these awful things so to me it was very clear that okay like if any romance were to develop it could be like ring being manipulated it could be like an abusive relationship and it could showcase how awful colonization is on this deeper level I'll say that the more I read it the more uncomfortable I became because of how the romance was written and I will get more into that in the spoiler filled review but without spoilers I think that's like the most I can say because the author does say Direct that all of this is inspired by the Russian Japanese Occupation she mentions Unit 731 in the very beginning of the novel when you're reading it with that lens that she gave you herself she like told you to read it with this lens basically it just makes the Romantic interactions very very uncomfortable to read which I think even if you didn't have that lens it would be uncomfortable to read but knowing that it is based in real life oppression and this is something that like as a Chinese American when I found out about Unit 731 for the first time and I actually did to find out through a piece of fiction I found out through one of Ken Lou's short stories and I will say that his short story did an incredible job of talking this topic with care and gravity the care and gravity that it really merits that destroyed me for weeks like I really it was so it was such a difficult thing to learn about to like wrap my head around it being like something that actually happened in history to real people and to have this book that is inspired by that to have it be a romance between this main character who is part of the colonized people and this person who is not just part of the colonizers but is a person in a position of extreme power like someone who is actively enabling the colonization to me just feels extremely disrespectful I know the author says that this happened to her own family so it's very personal for her but it also happened to other people's families and it's also very personal for them I feel like no matter what her intentions were the execution of it felt extremely irresponsible and inappropriate I think that the backlash that it got for it being colonizer romance was welld deserved I don't think obviously she should have gone to harassment and hate for it that she got but I think criticism of the book itself as a colonizer romance is merited in terms of the writing there's a lot of telling and not showing which in particular for this book I think does it a great disservice because we get told a lot how ruine feels and what her motivations are but we don't actually see a lot of it demonstrated on the page and so for a main character who makes a lot of decisions that the reader may not agree with it makes her actions and motivations less believable and it also makes her less sympathetic of a character and you can't really understand why she's doing what she's doing in terms of the World building it is pretty thin and underdeveloped the magic system is actually quite interesting but it's kind of just there the author doesn't really do much with it and I think this is because she spent all of her energy developing the romance that never should have been also something that I found like random and weird was that a lot of the pengulian will have like colored eyes like blue eyes or something they're very clearly based on like Asian people so I wasn't we'll just leave that there because there's a lot of other stuff to unpack in terms of the characters and I will definitely get into this more in my longer review Ying is just an incredibly frustrating main character to read she's not really giving a lot in terms of Personality because again of the telling and not showing you know what her motivations are but it's hard to believe that all you really get is that she cares about her sister and her grandmother but it's not really clear that her actions are really helping them I think morally gray characters have to have a lot more depth to them for you to not only understand their actions but to be able to sympathize with them and with ruing we didn't really get that she was a very one-dimensional underdeveloped character which is really unfortunate because I thought the idea of like a coward main character is such an interesting one it is something that very relatable something that we don't often see in fantasy stories especially female main characters I will say that there was one chapter of backstory that I really enjoyed about ring but there wasn't really enough there that wasn't really built upon very much because again I think that the author was putting all of her energy into the romance Arc that should have never been I also didn't find the colonizer prince a morally gray love interest either I think there are some things that you don't really need to explore moral ambiguity with I think like the colonization the subjugation and the land left of an entire group of people is not really a situation that calls for moral grayness you you haven't read the book I'm just going to tell you what happens because I just need someone there with me I need someone on this journey with me so remember how I said that ruing gets captured by the Romans and she's put in this position where she has to either work for them or die she gets captured and imprisoned she's like in the Dungeons and then she's let out they want her to like showcase her powers whatever they want her to kill a person she like kills them like 99% of the way there which is like a thing that she does like she will like kill people but not all the way cuz she feels bad about taking a life which I guess is the author trying to show that like she does have morals but it's extremely inconsistent and you'll see you'll see when it you'll see as the rest of the book progresses that it like doesn't entirely make sense and then she makes a run for it and then as she's making a run for it she gets tackled by these guards the eldest Roman Prince Valentine tries to stab her with an opium needle to make her an addict so that she will be totally within their power but Anthony comes and he's like you can't play with my toys and then he like saves her and she's like okay great but at this point she still hates him and sees him as like the colonizer prince which is you know that's good um that is what he is so she's not completely dulu yet but we will get there don't you worry so at this point she belongs to Anthony he tries to make a deal with her but she doesn't really have any leverage because she is still like a prisoner and a hostage of this colonizing occupying power so he tries to make a deal with her he's like I want you to kill people for me he wants her to be his assassin and she's like I don't really want to do that but I also don't really want to die which you know is understandable but then she is like well I only really want to do this to protect my sister and my grandmother keep in mind however that her sister is part of their resistance her sister has said she would rather die than live under the heel of the oppressors so her sister is like the last person who actually wants this type of protection and her grandmother has has also said that she never wants ruing to use her powers of death to kill anyone so her grandmother also doesn't want this so if either of them knew they would definitely be like ring don't do it for us but you know moving on Ring's like yeah I'll only do it to protect my family Anthony's like all right I'll protect them and then he takes her and like forces her to kill someone she won't do it so then he kills them with a gun and then he takes her to her family's house so they're in the car in her family's house she takes his gun holds it to his head which is like her one act of insubordination and he's like shoot me like you have to shoot me if you don't shoot me you don't want to know what I'm going to do to your family so he starts counting down like 3 2 he's like you don't want to know what happens when I get to one so she pulls a trigger but the gun is empty you know she's she's been had basically and then he takes the gun from her he loads it and then he holds it to her head and he's like if you ever pull anything like that again I will kill you so that is their meat cute after that he takes her back to the Roman compound or whatever and then he makes her kill this fellow pangu panging dude um who has magic he's like oh he's a really bad guy um so she kills him and then he Comforts her while she cries about all her guilt about killing this man that he forced her to kill so already you can see like okay like maybe he's manipulating her you know she doesn't really have a choice like these are things that I get I think this is where the book goes from what could have been a pretty uncontroversial if not spectacular book to one that becomes so confusing in its messaging that people genuinely believe that it is a colonizer romance after this point Anthony reveals that he is adopted and he's like that's why I understand people like you that's why I care about people like you because I guess like being adopted and coming from the streets means he can empathize with the people that he's colonizing and then it's also revealed that he knows her language or the language of her people and she's like oh so impressed because like none of the other colonizers ever bothered to learn their language and then he tries to tell her that he's actually the lesser of two evils because like his brother and his grandfather who is in charge of Rome they want to annihilate the people of pangu and then he shows her like their military Arsenal they have like missiles and bombs and all this stuff that the pangul the panging could never hope to compete with because all all they have is magic so his redeeming quality which makes her like a good guy in her eyes is that he would rather not commit genocide against her people he's down with the occupation but he's just not going to commit genocide or he would just rather not so she sees him as like on the side of Peace as we know the colonizer peace is no peace at all but she sees him on the side of peace and that is what convinces her to keep working for him there's a Time skip of about 6 months where she's just killing people for him she like she just becomes his assassin and does everything he tells her to do part is extremely confusing because it tells you that she's killing a lot of people and you can see that oh she feels guilty but then she also believes it's for the greater good which is very difficult to buy we don't see anything that Anthony really does to gain her trust in these 6 months we don't really see her developing feelings until like suddenly she's like I'm into this guy we don't see how he's manipulating her for those 6 months how she's been isolated she's too afraid to go back to her family because she doesn't want to put them in danger and she's also extremely ashamed of what she's doing so she's isolated uh she's alone and she's extremely susceptible to this manipulation by this guy who is basically in charge of her entire life can kill her at any moment if she doesn't do what he tells her to do we know these things but we don't see it on the page and so it's hard to know how she suddenly goes from I hate this guy I hate the colonizers to staring at his lips when they're talking it is very very confusing another thing that I could just not get with was Ring's motivations and how she's like only doing this for my family I would do anything for my family she basically says like it doesn't matter how many people die she's going to keep doing it to keep her family safe but it's not really clear that what she's doing is actually for the good of her family like like I mentioned before her family would rather die than live under oppression even if Anthony didn't want to protect my people I would be here forsaking my country and kin for a more selfish need to survive to protect those I loved for my family I would gladly forsake the world I hated this I hated this so much I hate that it's positioned as like oh her problem is that she loves her family too much when her problem is actually like she's really selfish and she's down to kill people as long as like she's okay and at the same time she's trying to justify that this is actually for the good of her country because Anthony is the only person who would keep the peace and not genocide everyone so she has these like two very conflicting core beliefs that she keeps repeating to herself over and over in this book she keeps saying I would do anything for my family everything is Justified for my family doesn't matter how many people I kill and on the other side she's saying but actually I'm doing this for the good of my country it doesn't really make sense it makes her sound like completely delusional she's very inconsistent and just seems to be a character who is not so much morally gray as morally bankrupt like it seems like she doesn't have any morals or red lines at all I think the thing with morally gray characters which makes them really interesting is when you do discover like oh their red lines are here and this is why you also understand their actions and why they're taking those actions with ruing you don't really get either you don't really know why she thinks it's okay to kill a father in his bed on Lunar New Year while he's celebrating with his family you don't know why she thinks that's okay as long as she's doing it to protect her own family who doesn't even want her to do this for them and she also doesn't seem to care about her country or her people as a whole throughout the book so when she does turn around and say well actually I'm doing this for the good of my people it sounds very disingenuous sounds fake and she's very clearly lying to herself so it just makes her extremely unlikable which on top of all of the evil things that she's doing makes it really hard to root for her I am all for flawed main characters I love flawed main characters but there's a difference between like someone who's figuring it out and someone who's literally murdering dozens of innocent people and betraying her country and furthering the colonization of her people because she's figuring it out I think the author also clearly wanted raring to be kind of like a girl boss character there is this passage that I just have to read to you I wanted to throw the book across cross the room but I also had to laugh so this is while she's thinking about all the awful things she's done and how she's betrayed her country if father Could See Me Now would he be proud or ashamed he'd probably see it as an accomplishment if I were a boy and an act of treason because I was a girl this was how things had always worked like girl no he would see you as a traitor either way you are murdering your own people you are cutting off their your country's only resistance their only hope of free off at the knees in no circumstance would anyone see this as heroic there's also a part where she throws a punch at a guy she takes him unawares and she's like oh my God like there's he definitely didn't see that coming because there's no way he would expect a girl like me to be able to fight but the guy literally saw her like sword fight like a few months ago in this book so I was like he saw you fighting so back to this being a colonizer romance I think ruing has a lot of internalized ization she's colonized in the mind but the book doesn't really distinguish very clearly between like oh this is Ring's inner dialogue because she's colonized in the mind and like this is what the book is espousing so the book comes off as very anti-resistance ring is constantly dismissive of the resistance at one point she refers to her sister's involvement in the resistance as hate and Revolution she views the resistance as Martyrs who die for nothing and her reasoning is that she would rather be a coward and live than a hero and die and like that's totally fine I think that's like a valid line of reasoning and an interesting one for the main character of a fantasy series to have However the fact that she respected Anthony's apparent desire to keep the peace and thought he was a good person because like he didn't want to genocide them like he's okay with occupation remember that but he just doesn't want to genocide them but he's okay with occupation and she respects that more than the resistance that is literally trying to fight for your people's freedom this girl is so colonized in the mind we don't really get as satisfied character growth Arc for how she unlearns that is not actually clear that that's something that she needs to unlearn or that this is an attitude that is holding her back so yes this book does feel very anti-resistance and I think that's another a layer to why it feels like a colonizer romance but speaking of the colonizer romance again I wanted to talk a bit more about the love interest Anthony he is the younger Prince of the Romans he's not The Heir Apparent but he is scheming to be but his redeeming quality as I said is that he is less genocidal than his brother and his grandfather other redeeming qualities I guess um he says he will protect Ring's family as long as she stays loyal to him but obviously if she doesn't their lives are forfeit apparently he never yells at her he's very nice something that I found really really hilarious is that ring hates his personal guard right she like his guard is always like torturing her like finding ways to be cruel to her and she's like I hate him but anony is never mean to me he never raises his voice he would never do that girl who is employing the guard who is giving him his orders that part was mindboggling to me so he speaks pengulian um and studi their culture but then he uses this information to further his colonization and to diminish their culture basically he's an orientalist and the fact that he knows about her culture is not it's not good and any and all of the redeeming qualities that Anthony has none of it changes the fact that he is holding her hostage he has control over whether she lives or dies he has control over whether her family lives or dies he has arbitrary control over whether anyone in her country lives or dies he's holding ruing and her family at gunpoint metaphorical and literal so that ruing would do his bidding there is no way that that Dynamic can be a good foundation for any kind of relationship which brings us to the relationship itself I found the development of this relationship EX extremely uncomfortable we don't really get anything for why they even like each other the only reason that they seem to be drawn together is that they're both bad people who've done bad things but the reason why ring has done anything bad is because Anthony literally forced her to I'm just going to read you a passage from when she's starting to develop more feelings for him but the more time we spent together the Kinder he was to me the more comfortable I grew around him the more I believe that I could hurt him just as he could hurt me if not worse I could break his heart could he break mine we were allies not friends and certainly not anything more despite his Beauty despite all the ways my heart raised whenever his whenever his skin kissed mine in the faintest of grazes we could not be anything more we were of two different worlds two different statuses we had no future to believe otherwise was foolish though he made promises of us being equals and allies we both knew and Anon had a power to break my heart worse than I could ever break his yes because he's literally holding you hostage and he is literally the prince of the Empire that is occupying and colonizing your nation sorry to do this to you but I'm going to read you another passage and this is of them flirting and you will see why I was extremely uncomfortable we are not equals I teased I can kill someone without touching them can you and then Anthony says I can command armies and wipe out cities if I wish can you they're flirting over his ability to commit genocide at will I thought like the bar was on the floor you know when it came to men but after reading this I I Now understand the bar is in Hell the bar is in hell I do want to address what happens later in the book which is that she does realize what she's doing is wrong and she does realize that Anthony is not a good guy my problem with her character Arc is that there basically really isn't any from the beginning of the novel she is extremely critical already she hates the colonizing power so it actually doesn't make any sense at all how she goes from there to working for them and trying to justify that they're doing the right thing to her again realizing that oh yeah they were the baddies all along I basically had to read 350 Pages for her to reach the conclusion that she should have always had from page one it takes her so long to realize that what she's doing is wrong and once she does realize that she's still dickmatized by Anthony so she would do anything to protect his life even though he is the prince of the colonizer even though he is the one forcing her to do all these awful things to me her like lowest low she gets too low I just don't really have sympathy for her when she realizes what she should have realized all along to me it did not feel like a good growing moment it just felt like really like finally it felt like too little too late so if you think of her journey as like page one she's here she believes that you know the colonizers are bad blah blah and then she goes down here when she's at her lowest point killing all these people and then she gets back up here when she figures out that oh she has been doing the wrong thing all along if you think of her journey as this I don't understand how she gets down here in the first place because there isn't really much given to us about like how she went from oh yeah like the colonizers are awful they've done all these awful things to my people to get down here to the point where she's like well actually this Prince he's he's a good guy the thing is like she doesn't just hate the colonizers in the beginning she also hates Anthony she is repulsed by him you know she fully Associates him with the colonizers and everything they're doing like as she should we don't really get to see how she goes from there to defending him and saying oh he's actually a good person that his actions are Justified you just don't see her journey and I think that is the main problem with this kind of character Arc is that when all of it is happening up here and you don't actually see it happening it just doesn't make any sense so again when we get to the point where she realizes what she's doing is wrong it feels like the book wants you to like you know it's like saying like clap clap you don't deserve a cookie for finally realizing that murdering a bunch of innocent people and betraying your country is Wrong the big reveal at the end is that Anthony is actually practicing like human experiment on her people and he's keeping Labs underneath the uh Palace or whatever he's keeping labs and like running tests on her friends and stuff and it's not until this that she realizes he's the bad guy up until the point that she discovers the human experimentation she is still defending him with her life and that is like 90% of the way through the book actually this twist to me did not come as a surprise because halfway through the book Anthony does casually mention that like his people have done experiments on her people so I was kind of like what did you expect there's also so much foreshadowing about like people being like stolen from their homes it was like pretty obvious what was happening in my opinion this is where the Unit 731 stuff comes in yeah having that thrown in at the end where it's like he's been experimenting on her people all along and seeing them just as test subjects is really really despicable so we've spent the entire book having to endure her like justifying his actions kind of developing feelings for him like looking into his green eyes and then we get to the end and we find out like he has like a DIY Unit 731 in in his basement so that I found in extremely poor taste even at the end like right before we find out about that there's like a chapter from Anthony's perspective where all it talks about is how much he cares about her and how his feelings for her are real if anything happened to her Anthony would burn this whole world to the ground he would start to keep her safe and unfortunately it feels like to me that the author wanted that chapter to be like romantic like it felt like she wanted to play into the whole like I would rather have a villain than a hero kind of Trope in Romance which you know it doesn't really work here CU he is literally colonizing her people like it doesn't work here it just doesn't work and also the fact that he that this whole situation is based on real life genocide and war crimes just does not sit right with me I don't really see how this can in any way not be romanticizing that and you know no matter what happens at the end and how ruing arrives at her final conclusion at the end of the book we're forced to endure all of this all of this like romanticization of this relationship between them and his feelings for her and romanticizing the fact that he would start wars for her whatever anti-colonial messaging it may have is not strong enough to contend with the fact that it has pass messages like that and all the ones that I've read any anti-colonial messaging is completely overshadowed by the fact that it is romanticizing feelings that this colonizer has for one of the people he's colonized he trying to humanize him because he has feelings for her another thing about the lab plot twist is that when she sees the dungeons where the prisoners are held before they're experimented upon screams tore through the air sharp and piercing a sound that made my bones tremble I remembered the screams a memory that felt like a lifetime ago after the kindness Anthony had shown me I had almost forgotten everything the Romans did in those initial days after I was kidnapped so she was in these exact dungeons remember how I told you that she had been imprisoned by the Romans and then Anthony forced her to be an assassin so remember that apparently she had completely forgotten about being imprisoned for like 7 days just because Anthony was nice to her I don't I don't really know what like like she hasn't been drugged she hasn't the only thing that's happened is that she caught feelings for this guy she is presented multiple times with the opportunity to fight for their resistance and instead she chooses to protect her colonizer prince if you have to choose between the revolution or the man who's colonizing your people you know it should be an easy Choice that's that's all I'm gonna say she doesn't really seem to have a sense of self she doesn't really have morals or principles that's guiding what she's doing even the reasons that she's justifying saying like oh I'm actually doing this for my family or I'm actually doing this for the good of my country it rings false because of how inconsistent and contradictory they are so the only conclusion that you can really come to is that she's doing this because she has a crush on this dude who's colonizing her people she's doing this because she's like stigmatized and I think that's a result of the romance being the most fully developed part of the story at the cost of the World building Ring's character and her motivations all lacking depth because the romance takes up so much of the story so what could have been better well I think plot-wise if she was trying to make Anthony more of a darkling character to show how abusive and manipulative he was then I think we needed to see those 6 months where ruing would would have been isolated and just taken advantage of and manipulated instead there's a Time skip during what I think is probably the most important part of the book I don't really understand the choice here to skip over that part because to me that would be the Crux of showing why this is not a romance so for example if we take the darkling in Shadow and bone in the beginning he seems like a really great guy from Alina's perspective he seems great he takes her in he introduces her to like her powers that she never knew about she joins this new community of people who are like her to her it seems like an oasis because this is like the first home she's had where she finally understands and belongs and so of course she really wants to gain the darklings approval because you know he's the person who introduced her to all this and all of his attempts to cultivate those romantic feelings that she has for him can be seen as manipulation tactics to groom and control her however into to gaze upon Wicked Gods we see from the very beginning that Anthony is violent and cruel and ruthless he you know from the very beginning he imprisons her holds a gun to her head is like if you don't do this I'm going to kill you and your family so the red flags are bright red in front of her face and it doesn't really make sense how she could ever believe that he actually is a good guy that one POV chapter of his all that chapter really does is try to humanize and gain sympathy for Anthony because like he might be a colonizer he might be evil but he really loves this girl we don't really get that that he's manipulating her with these feelings instead we get oh his feelings are real romance is written very traditionally longing gazes the heartbeat quickening like all of this is like very standard romance stuff none of it is really showing that he is manipulating and abusing her plot-wise it is written like a romance it hits the romance beats it is written as enemies to lovers so of course people are going to read it as enemies lovers colonizer romance if myly Chang wanted to really show that this is not really a romance she should have shown how Anthony was actually manipulating ruing and abusing her and instead we get these like very odd passages where she's like my God I'm betraying my people and in the same breath is like but he stepped closer and I glanced down at his lips would he come closer very very oddly placed romantic moments that that did not make sense and felt extremely uncomfortable frankly how could this have been better marketing wise wi this book is marketed as a romance even on the cover flap it does make it seem like the central conflict is the romance and her developing feelings for this guy that she shouldn't have feelings for the author herself has been still to the same marketing it as a romance marketing it as zutara inspired saying that love interest is like a villain and morally gray so if you pick it up based on any of the marketing you're going to go into it expecting a romance and when you read the book and parts of it do read like a romance but but the love interest is the prince of the people that is colonizing the main character's people you're going to perceive it as a colonizer romance like it's not surprising to me that people would be upset if it's marketed that way and the book is written this way the marketing of the book speaks to a problem with the messaging of the book itself overall it seems like it didn't really know what it wanted to do it could either be a romance or it could be this anti-colonial book it couldn't be both at the same time because of what the romance was and how it was written and so because the messaging in the marketing is super confusing the messaging in the book itself is super confusing it makes a lot of sense why readers were turned off by it why readers were really upset about it and I think all the criticisms of it as a colonizer romance are extremely valid I actually went into this book like even though I had read a bunch of reviews I went into it with an open mind cuz I was really hoping that you know maybe it was just a book that explored very dark topics and that was why it made people uncomfortable or that the plot twist in a character's growth would be worth it in the end for me to be able to endure like the colonizer romance aspect but personally this book gave me nothing to me primarily this book is a colonizer romance that was mostly what I got out of it it doesn't really matter what the conclusion at the end of the book is it doesn't really matter what the second book is going to be because there was so much in here that did the work of romanticizing this relationship of trying to humanize the colonizer that any anti Colonial messaging is completely overshadowed it's not even clear if there is any anti-colonial messaging because of how much real estate in this book is taken up by the romance moral of the story not every situation needs moral ambiguity not every situation is an opportunity to have morally gray characters or morally gray love interests colonization is one of those things that has pretty hard lines on what's morally right or wrong so to me this just wasn't the right situation to tell this kind of story especially when you take into account that it is inspired by the Japanese Occupation it is inspired by Unit 731 which is still a very very painful history that people are still very personally affected by if you have also read this book please let me know what you thought would love to know if you haven't read it I mean you could read it I always feel like I want to read things myself just because I want to form my own opinion just know that I personally found it very uncomfortable because of everything that I talked about so Tred carefully hopefully my review gave you an idea of what to expect thanks so much for watching and I'll see you next time hopefully we'll talk about book that I actually really love and not one that made me want to Chuck it across the room

Channel: catherineannechiang

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Id: C2i24wL9WWA

Length: 41min 47sec (2507 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 19 2024