cantpickastruggle

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Yay!!! Desi Miku!!!

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yall fuck with butchverine

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everyone needs that one friend they can say just absolutely deranged horny shit too. this is like crucial for your sanity

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Babel by RF Kuang has devastated me in a way few medias have in a long time, i want to discuss it but i am left speechless cause what can i say about this book RF Kuang herself hasn't already very much so explicitly said in the book !? I feel like i am too stupid to even discuss anything about this book, and honestly everything has been already said and in much better ways.

Its just such an extraordinary book ,i won't stop recommending and I hope more and more people read and praise it.

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cannot stop thinking about how babel starts and ends with moments of translation, except the first one is lovell using the translation magic of empire to take robin away from canton, and the last one is victoire teaching anthony something in creole that is contextualised around her hope for the revolution and for liberation. and how that perfectly exemplifies the themes of the book

like i find it rly interesting that the “an act of translation is an act of betrayal” has become the most well-known/popular quote from the book because i think the book itself disagrees and questions that concept many times. i mean i GET it it’s a raw ass quote and marketing campaign's gotta market but to me it's so deliberate that that quote comes from playfair's perspective. when used in the service of empire, of course you can only conceptualise translation as violence. but robin and ramy and victoire use translation for love and connection and understanding, which is what it always was. robin spends his final moments rejecting playfair's premise; translation has always been about love and connection and understanding. babel falls to the hope for a better future; to translation itself. this act of betrayal is ALSO an act of love. of course the book's final moments are with victoire, translating something for anthony entirely out of love. god

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i get why ppl say that babel was too 'telling not showing' with the cohorts' friendship; robin's internal monologue says his cohort were all in love with each other, but we mostly get dialogue of them fighting *cough* and letty being racist *cough*. i just think that that was kind of the point!

robin is a great flawed protagonist and most importantly an unreliable narrator, and the disparity between what he tells you and the dialogue scenes we actually get feels intentional to me, because you can feel the disconnect between what robin wanted and his reality. when he was still in love with babel, he wanted their cohort to be a perfect romantic ideal, wanted to think their fights were overcomeable, that ramy and victoire felt the same that he did. but the cracks were there from the beginning; their relationships were always fucked up. the effects of colonialism/imperialism robin wanted so badly to ignore had doomed them from the beginning. babel in ramy or victoire's perspective would be wildly wildly different because it's clear they did not have robin's privilege

i just love that robin is like truly such a damn liberal for half the book, never truly committing to hermes, holding onto his whiteness and desire to belong, and that this flaw is what dooms his relationship with ramy. people celebrate babel for its scathing critique of white feminism, and they should, but it's also so damning of liberal activism too imo. robin as a protagonist exemplifies the way fellow poc will often uphold racist structures for their own benefit and to avoid complicating themselves--and that this will always be a futile selfish endeavour. robin must, like all of us, come to the conclusion that he will never belong while this system remains intact, that his privilege isn't worth the suffering of those alike him, and that resisting it however he can is the only moral and just thing to do. wow i got sidetracked but robin swift wasian character of all time fr

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Finished reading Babel in like 4 days. Mentally unwell. Many thoughts and no words to articulate them, especially not in English

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saying Babel lacks nuance is absolutely ABSURD. there are strong anti-colonial themes in the book but that's not its primary message, believe it or not.

the title is literally "Babel: or the necessity of violence" THAT IS THE MAIN THEME OF THE BOOK. THE NECESSITY OF VIOLENCE

the story centers on Robin, who grapples with complex internal struggles as a person of color, essentially kidnapped by the British to study and serve the British Empire, despite being originally from China. it's about his ongoing internal moral debate on whether to continue serving the empire or to oppose it.

the book doesn't ask, "Is colonialism bad?" because the answer is obvious: OF COURSE IT IS. That's why R.F. Kuang doesn't give it nuance—it doesn't deserve it.

it seems that those who dislike the book are just offended by its blatant anti-colonial stance and if that's the case, you need to seriously reevaluate your perspectives.

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I love the title "Babel, or the necessity of violence" because the novel shows how violence is necessary to fight against empire/colonialism, but it also shows how empire/colonialism are inherently, necessarily violent.

And that's so important because, as Robin notes in the novel, it's so easy to say that revolutionary actions are too destructive, while ignoring the inherent violence of the status quo.

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more authors should spend page time dunking on european languages

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I can't get letty's chapter out of my head. I can't forget all her struggles as a girl and woman in a misogynistic society. How she is discriminated against in a way that robin and ramy would never understand. Because despite coming from races white people find inferior, at the end of the day, they are still men, and are therefore afforded the level of respect and recognition they would never be willing to give letty. And I understand and empathize and resonate with all of these.

But my first thought after reading letty's chapter is she did not mention victoire, not even once. After everything she learned, after everything victoire told her, she still failed to realize that everything she experienced, victoire also did—even worse. Victoire, the friend that she spent the most time with, was not only discriminated against because she's a woman, she was also discriminated against because she's not white. After everything, letty only sees the advantages robin and ramy had for being men, refusing to see all the ways society was shunning victoire. this isn't the oppression olympics ofc, but how can she not see victoire's pain? how can she only see robin's and ramy's privelege. how can she fail to acknowledge victoire's struggles and pain until the very end. how can letty, despite being victoire's friend, refuse to see her pain just because she refuses to acknowledge her own privelege.

she is so convinced that her struggles are unique that she can't wrap her head around the fact other people, people she considered friends, have suffered as much, or even more. she can't see that her struggles were caused by a system that is so interwoven with the systems hermes were fighting against that they might as well be the same thing—because frankly, they are. she only sees her own pain and how she's come so far to overcome everything. she thinks she's alone in her battle that she just can't see how so many others have been fighting similar battles against the same opponents. she can't see how hermes is not sabotaging her fight for freedom and respect, but are fighting the enemy letty does not even realize she also has to fight to truly and meaningfully gain the respect and freedom she wants.

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"This is how colonialism works. It convinces us that the fallout from resistance is entirely our fault, that the immoral choice is resistance itself rather than the circumstances which demanded it."

- R.F Kuang, "Babel, or the Necessity of Violence"

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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

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I don’t think I’ve seen anyone mention this but rf kuang’s naming of Victorie in Babel is just genius??? Victorie is derived from the Latin word for ‘victory’, and at the end of the novel, she was the only one to survive the rebellion out of the three of them. Her name alone carries the implication that the revolution was successful despite her and Robin’s worries, as she rides out in ‘victory’. This is such a smooth and unnoticeable reassurance that the novel did not end on a cliff-hanger, but rather and strong and positive reaffirmation.

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