#the way my most recent posts are abt babel i'm so sorry

[archiveofliterature]

i see a lot of criticism about the friendships between the babel characters and how we were told a lot of things about their positive dynamic, yet shown barely any of it (but are instead mostly presented with the negative aspects). i don’t know if other people clocked this but i feel like it was intentional

rf kuang was commenting on friendships made through trauma-bonding: they were doomed from the start

tldr; the characterisation is (one of) the subtly(ies) people were looking for in the colonial theme. they criticise the latter but i love the fact colonialism is more of an upfront theme because lord knows i am tired of it being subtle so people can ignore it

robin says from the very beginning after they formed their little friend group:

“why had they been so quick, so carelessly eager to trust one another? why had they refused to see the myriad of ways they could hurt each other? why had they not paused to interrogate their differences in birth, in raising, that meant they were not and could never be on the same side?”

the next small paragraph goes into a raft metaphor about how they saw themselves in each other and that’s why they stuck together. they shared one thing they could not ignore – their otherness. their friendship was purely built on the fact they were discriminated against and that they had to spent the next 4 years with each other. their first pleasant conversation is them discussing how they were treated at oxford. of course, the characters didn’t see this because they had never really befriended people their age before. this feeling of belonging felt like love to them (considering their upbringings, ramy’s i will discuss in a bit)

it makes perfect sense why robin would repeatedly imply that they loved and cared about each other. in his eyes, they did. what was it they had if not love? robin, who has ignored so many problems in the past before babel as he knew it would cause him issues, wouldn’t address their friendship dynamic or how strong the arguments and animosity were. he, an abused child, would rather have this than nothing at all

in actuality (demonstrated, i think, through the photograph they took at the end of chapter 9), they were together because of academia’s and discrimination’s forced proximity. robin feels specific emotions about them that feel strong to him because he’s never experienced it before, but that doesn’t mean they are strong enough to keep them together, which is why when they see the photo, they feel weird about it because why isn’t it portraying their dynamic ‘correctly’?

it’s true that perhaps to get robin’s perspective across, it would’ve been good to see the positive aspects more but i think that would’ve made it harder for us to see how weak their friendship was. people wanted more positive to show that they loved each other, which isn’t the point rf kuang is trying to make

rf kuang chooses to show the negative aspects more because they show where their friendship will end up. when letty did what she did, i didn’t see it as a plot twist, i saw it as an inevitability. this was going to happen. honestly, i feel this with most of the ‘plot twists’ of babel except the end of book iii (i really didn’t see that coming). it was easy for letty to do what she does in book iv because their friendship had such unstable foundations. when they no longer benefitted her, she turned her back on them

the only dynamic i feel was actually strong was robin and ramy. i’m not just saying this because i think they’re queer lol. they were close not just because they were both men of colour and had similar upbringings – they actually liked each other. they admired each other and adored each other’s personalities, they bounced off each other and knew what the other meant when they spoke. when they argued, it was over something that actually considered each other’s beliefs and goals and desires, not over their differences.

(unlike letty and ramy, letty and victoire and maybe even robin and victoire, though i think they lean more to ramy/robin than they do to letty/anyone lol. ramy and victoire have a dynamic that i personally feel like robin didn’t really see because ramy understood victoire in a way robin couldn’t. you kind of see it when robin is the one who letty complains about ramy/victoire to, but that’s it i think?)

speaking of ramy, linking it back to their perspectives of love, it makes a lot of sense why he caused the most disruption in the friend group. he’s the only one with an actual family that he stays in touch with. he knows what love feels like. so of course he’s the one that is strongly anti-empire, compared to robin and victoire who have been emotionally manipulated in their childhood by said empire, the one who argues with letty the most. he still feels what robin and victoire feel, of course, but to a lesser extent

honestly i don’t know how to end this analysis, i just think rf kuang is a genius lmao but i may add more onto this as i continue to reread the book we shall see