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my dream tonight will be that every american military base on foreign soil implodes and collapses and never returns again

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bedtime stories (ft. a spy that hasn’t slept in days)

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queen i know you said u wanna keep endgame anonymous but lowkey … give that boy suna and her a chance to really make it work AHHHHH I CAN’T DO IT i love atsumu too but like the yearning and the longing and history she has with suna is crazy and i do NOT BELIEVE IN RIGHT PERSON WRONG TIME IF THEY WANT TO THEY CAN MAKE IT WORK (but please can i get more jealous grovelling suna bc he realised way too late 🔥)

PREACH 🗣️‼️

right person wrong time is a sham

fret not, you can expect more tension between tsum y/n and suna in future updates 🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️

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pachinko ripped my heart out and spat on it while also making me feel like i was offered a plate of freshly steamed rice and tea by my grandma on a breezy sunny day near the ocean

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HUY PILIPPINESSSS

Ok as a Filipino I HAVE to give it up to Kuang on this very interesting detail on the Tagalog Grammatica. As far as I know, in my very limited history, Japan, China, and Korea weren’t as influenced by the West prior the 20th Century due to their distrust with Westerners/outsiders to the point their borders had to be forcibly opened by either Western forces or by one another (a gross oversimplification—forgive me or educate me where you can).

However, the Philippines was colonized in the 1500s by the Spanish—the country’s own name is derived from Philip II of Spain—and they didn’t leave until 1898, when they sold us to the US. So Spanish influence is deeply ingrained in our art, music, food, and most evidently, language.

However, unlike English, the Spanish language didn’t exterminate native languages as well as it could’ve. My great-grandparents would’ve spoken Spanish AND Tagalog, and a couple of other native dialects besides. Yes, the Spaniards taught (usually wealthy, usually mixed) Filipinos their language, but Spanish friars utilized our language to their own advantage to better spread the word of God to us “savages”… and also because it was unfeasible to teach so many people who spoke so many languages Spanish. So, they learned one of our most spoken languages to better win us over, to colonize us, to “enlighten” us with their civility.

It would make complete and total devastating sense that these Spanish/European scholars can translate so much of our native canon and oral or written myth and commit it to their own languages. And it makes so much sense Kuang flecks that detail there, in a book that mentions time and time again the silent but sinister undercurrent of imperialism and colonialism in everyday British life in the 19th Century and academia today. I am frothing in the mouth. I am banging my head against the wall. So much history behind one tiny fucking detail.

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I'm once again thinking about how alone Victoire must have felt living with Letty, outside the bubble of best friendship that Robin and Ramy shared, conveniently paired with the other girl in their cohort.

Robin and Ramy got each other and Letty was always unwilling and unable to get Victoires experience. It breaks my heart that Letty could rely on Victoire for emotional support but not the other way around. No doubt she delved into all her childhood issues and the loss of her brother and Victoire did nothing but listen and be understanding while knowing she'd never be able to count on Letty for the same.

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it's hilarious that a few days after i finished babel, i went to history class and our topic visited colonization, and my (white) professor said that teaching history within education is politicized and his example was how slavery and colonization are taught in most history classes as europe's invasion of other continents and enslavement of the native peoples there, thus racializing the issue of the slave trade. he asked why don't history classes focus on the fact slavery was a practice found in many cultures other than europe and that europeans also enslaved other europeans, which is a fair point... however he commented that "the version of history that's taught is a way for [european nations] to pay reparations i suppose" and it's an example how education distorts historical events through the lens of "modern politics".

and i'm sitting there like... colonization will always be tied to race. whether we like it or not, that period of history had forcibly tied race to colony, and we feel those effects to this day. that is why it's still important to talk about it. we breathe the consequences, live the consequences, and see the consequences of colony. we are products of a bloody, inequal, and unfair history that still poisons our lives today.

along the lecture, i interjected that any and all forms of colonization was bad and he claimed he could think of pax romana as one good form of colonization. the roman empire's golden age was only golden if you were roman, sir.

as an asian in academia studying outside her home country, i have to cosplay babel every day and i am already so tired. I've been missing my professors back home because they spoke against colony and oppression with fire and brimstone and passion and here they turn away from the blood empire or they see little wrong with it.

dark academia is aptly named because by god is it fucking dark here.

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wow ok letty being angry about babel’s cruelty towards women and assuming almost that the others, by fighting against racism, are ignoring sexism is just,,,baffling. they’re intertwined, babe. oppression feeds oppression. colonialism is a snake that consumes itself— that’s the point of the book!! fighting for an end to the imperial domination would work in tandem with bringing down the gendered domination AS WELL. because it’s CIRCULAR.

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I don't know if I'm partial to the idea of Ramy and Robin being in love in Babel

What I do know is that, even in this, R. F. Kuang speaks of privilege because, at its core, loving freely is a privilege, and you can feel it in the way Robin expresses the night at the -much discussed- ball:

'Their eyes met. Robin felt a prickle at the back of his neck. The space between them felt very charged, like the moment between lightning and thunder, and Robin has no idea what was going on or what would happen next, only that it felt very strange and terryfying, like teetering over the edge of a windy, roaring cliff'

And this is horrible, because sometimes, when you're already in a position of vulnerability, wherther being for the color of your skin, your place of birth, your sex, gender, mother tongue and so many others, you just can't give the system more ways to vulnerate you.

(I'm not saying everyone does it, sometimes people are brave and courageous, and they persist and change things)

The possibility of them being in love or even considering it is something Babel also takes from them. From my point of view, they feel it and immediately resign to the oportunity, as they had with so many others things

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⚠️ spoilers for babel by r.f. kuang ⚠️

i think what was rlly devastating abt the end was that in robin’s pov he seemed to put a lot of weight on drawing the difference between him and victoire in terms of bringing justice in their oppression. when in actuality they were on the exact same track and the slight difference only lied in their ability to move on. them parting in the end may have added to the rift between their standpoints, but it’s so much more than that. victoire didn’t run because of her reluctance to destroy the tower, she ran because she wanted to survive. but robin’s chapters towards the end kept suggesting that victoire was discontented with his increasingly destructive decisions. that’s not it exactly. she was merely worried that robin was doing it all for personal reasons rather than the collective cause. and i know this was compounded in her telling him things like “it’s not revenge” and “it’s coming from grief” but i NEED to emphasise further on this

yes she argued against pulling out many resonance rods at once, but she was still for pulling them out. yes she was distraught at letting westminster bridge fall, but she still stood by when she could’ve left like chakravarti did. she wasn’t some helpless damsel only being led by her grief-stricken friend, she knew exactly the gravity of these actions and was an active participant. robin had already wanted to die so he dedicated his last moments to dying with the cause. he couldn’t even find it in himself to feel scared. when ibrahim said he didn’t want to die and the rest were feeling that same fear, none of them hesitated in their choice. it’s because they made peace with their martyrdom, in that this was purely for showing resistance. victoire was all for that without the dying part. she hated the thought of her death being used as a cheap display of poetic tragedy. so she survived in spite. she continued living in spite. because she was just as spiteful as robin in fighting for their rights. maybe even more

the similarities between victoire and anthony stopped at them being reasoning for their friends (victoire for robin and anthony for griffin) and nothing more. anthony was convinced an all out peaceful exchange was the way. victoire knew violence in this sense could only be countered with their own violence. she revealed so herself in that epilogue. i was so surprised by this because again, robin’s narration made it sound like she was more placid than that

victoire wasn’t as soft or lenient as she seemed. in a sense, she’s what robin could’ve been, would’ve been, if he hadn’t lost ramy and griffin. i would like to think he would’ve been just as intense as the version of him that brought down babel, only more rational. does that make him weak? no. but it did make him blind to seeing that him and victoire were so much more alike than he let himself think while he was drowning in his loneliness

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reading any novel of rfk’s has to count as a form of self harm

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heavily agree

A common complaint I see for stories like Babel or Yellowface or Chain-Gang All-Stars is that these books are too on the nose, they're too obvious, they're too cartoonishly 'hit you over the head with it' evil. Obviously colonialism is bad! Obviously racism is bad! Obviously institutionalized racism and abuse of prisoners is bad! But you gotta understand, people have been writing the subtle story for years, and people didn't get it. "Wait, The Boys is satire?" "Omg I want to be in Squid Game." "Keep your wokeness out of X-Men." Like, can you really blame people for wanting to write a story that you cannot look away from? That you cannot deflect from, say its not political, claim its fiction and not about anything in the real world? Can you really blame people for making it obvious when people don't listen when its not obvious?

Just my thoughts

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Babel Spoilers!!!

Been thinking a lot about Letty Price and her inability to comprehend how the act of Robin, Victoire and Ramy standing up and joining a resistance against Babel was so integral to their identities and experiences as POC and scholars in Britain.

How could they hate and do this to a nation that gave them so much? That gave them literature and translation, education and funding and the ability to expand their minds. How could they turn their backs on that?

She could not conceive that they had been given these opportunities, but at every turn they were disrespected and mistreated for who they were. Given rewards and treats and opportunities with the consolation that yes “you are lesser than” but don’t worry we can beat the ethnic out of you. And to hang that over you, it is only natural to form a twisted sense of self-worth contingent on the whily and abusive whims of their oppressor. The constant need to prove that they were worthy of acknowledgment, of this position. The anger and twisted gratuity for the opportunity, but injustice in being used for their minds and their abilities by an empire refusing to acknowledge them as humans, let alone equals. Stolen bodies and stolen lands.

And Letty, her only framework of suffering was the coddling of a girl in an upperclass white family and the restrictions of conservative social constructs. That while hindering and discouraging, were not a question of life and death or of humanity, but of simple opportunity and intelligence. And looking through these eyes, how could she comprehend such a thing?

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how do i read babel for the first time again