R.F Kuang is a very talented writer, that feels simplistic to say but she paints such vivid, graphic imagery about what it means to be caught in this kind of war. She does not shy away from how life is affected in every instance by what war touches. The famine, the poverty, the crime, the scarcity in general feels very heavy in this book. I loved that she does not shy away from the aspects of colonialism here too! I like that she got to spend some time discussing the lore of some of these characters - The Trifecta is a whole other kettle of fish but for the most part hearing about the ultimate betrayal of Speer was welcome alongside more of their backstory in general. She knew that this was not going to end well and stuck to her guns, there is no happy ending here- at best there is a vaguely peaceful ending.
I liked seeing Jiang again, seeing their relationships was interesting too. But why the fixation on waking Riga??? Literally everyone and their sister was saying "hey uh... don't do that" and then he wakes up, immediately is the biggest dickhead one-dimensional villain before the all-powerful Trifecta are killed with bombs. I just??? Also the new Cike plotline came way too late and only opened up a weird plothole for me. If it took a long time to get the new Shamans to open themselves to the pantheon, why was it that it only took Opium once to force Petra during that powerwank execution scene?
Generally I just got very tired of Rin in this book. It's frustrating because I understand why she had become like this, we follow her journey through hell and back to get to where she is today but she turned into quite the little edgelord, huh? Also wasn't strategy her best subject once? I don't know if this was mean tot be indictive that the power was making her more likely to just ignore strategy for violence but it felt way too much like a heel turn. All I'm saying it that Kitay deserved better. Constantly. Fantastic character literally shackled to her. It's the worst kind of situation of falling out of love with a character because I can't tell how much of it is intended and how much of it is just annoying characterization.
VENKA? HOW ARE WE JUST GOING TO IGNORE VENKA DYING LIKE THAT. I'M STILL NOT OVER IT. I'm still angry about how Souji died. So many of these characters were so good and I'll argue part of the building blocks of what make this series so good - so many of them got done dirty in this.
There's always a slight wariness that comes from reading these books against their inspiration - I really think that it's best to just enjoy them adjacent to it, otherwise that ending really does have some rough connotations even if it was the best possible outcome. I don't wanna get into the genderbent Mao Zendong thing too much but I feel mentioning it is enough.
Smaller nitpick, it felt like there was a LOT more slang/teen speak in this one. Maybe I'm misremembering the others in the series but it felt at least more egregious this time around- this isn't that big of a deal but I just really hate historical/fantasy books that have a lot of modern day slang. Generally the writing was great otherwise. It's a thick book for sure but I didn't find myself bored at all.
I'm mostly just kinda glad to be done with the series now- I really liked the first Poppy War book, I think the second might be my favourite of the three. I MAY read the novella about Nezha this week just because I enjoy him as a character but I'm happy to put this series to rest now. Still probably like a 3.75/4 star read but there's a lot of things that annoyed me.
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