#me: venka will probably die.

[rivolted]

i  always  die  first  in  the  hunger  games  generator  thing  so  venka... . .baby .. . . it’s  not  looking  great  for  u

[ NATASHA LIU BORDIZZO, CIS FEMALE, SHE/HER. ]    introducing venka zhou, TRIBUTE of the 74th hunger games, representing district seven. my sources say that they are twenty four years old, & that they’re pretty handy with axe-wielding. wonder if that will do them any good in the arena ? anyways, caesar says you can’t miss them, because they remind everyone of the endless dark between the trees, a grin that would rival a wolf’s & the rush of adrenaline from doing what you’re not supposed to.

CHARACTER INSPO    :    jiang ziya  (  poppy war  ),   sokka  (  atla  ),   nikolai lantsov  (  grishaverse  ),   foxface  (  hunger games. what do u mean this isn’t allowed. Be Quiet  )

       we’re    all    going    to    die    ,    all      of      us      ━━       𝖜𝖍𝖆𝖙      𝖆      𝖈𝖎𝖗𝖈𝖚𝖘      !     we    are   TERRORIZED   and   FLATTENED   by   trivialities   ,   𝘄𝗲     𝗮𝗿𝗲     𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗻     𝘂𝗽     𝗯𝘆     𝙉𝙊𝙏𝙃𝙄𝙉𝙂      .

name   :   venka zhou.

age   :   twenty four.

gender & pronouns   :   cis female & she / her.

district   :   seven.

occupation   :   she used to sell wood carvings before Um... Well.

moral alignment   :   chaotic neutral.

wcs at the end  !!

venka’s life has always been so monotonous. filled with constants. a constant: lumber. a constant: an empty home. a constant: her father’s distance. a constant: the lack of a mother. surely she exists, somewhere, but she’s always been less of a person and more of a myth to her daughter. 

her father, too, is something that’s not quite a person. he’s there, but is he really ? she’s practically had to raise herself. and that’s fine; it’s taught her a lot of important lessons. how to be independent. how to treat a wound by yourself. how to cook. what to eat. what not to eat.

venka is... eccentric to say the least. i like to call her Annoying Foxface, in that she’s very clever, very smart & can pick up on skills quickly, but she’s also...... . . .incredibly annoying. loves cracking jokes at the wrong time, being loud ( n-not in the arena, hopefully ) & overall being a nuisance. the lack of attention has made her into a creature that craves it. if there’s one positive to her being in the games, it’s that finally, for once in her life, people will be watching.

she’s very skilled with axes & slightly skilled in survival ( she knows forests, at least ). super independent. lots of people in district seven might even place their bets on her if they could. none of this matters to venka, though; she’s here for a good time, not a long time. 

that said.... she doesn’t see herself making it out. she won’t give up instantly, she’ll still try to make it as far as she can - but when she returns, she’ll have no one waiting for her. a lot of the other tributes do. and she’s not sure she can handle doing that to those families, to look someone’s grieving mother in the eye and say, i’m here and alone and i broke your family.

tiny but mighty. rumor has it she can devour an entire plate of rolls in ten seconds. rumor also has it if you annoy her enough she’ll bite you. 

venka’s face is scarred from an incident with an axe when she was young. it’s a long, thin, pale scar running from her nose to the corner of her mouth. Do Not Mention The Scar.

wcs  !

first of all ALLIANCES, especially an unlikely alliance. i think once she actually gets into the arena, assuming she’s not killed off quickly, she could show a certain prowess for Somehow Not Dying Through The Oddest But Impressively Clever Means (  once again, think foxface  ). i can see her making an unlikely alliance w someone who maybe makes up for her weaknesses and vice versa. 

i think,,, it would be neat if she managed to piss off a tribute enough, maybe a career, that in the arena they have a big vendetta for her. definitely a ‘it’s on sight’ type thing.

someone she gets close to once she reaches the capitol. a mentor, a friend, ANYTHING. she thinks there’ll be no one waiting for her to return if she wins, but this person is, & if she dies then u know... Angst !

[alectology-archive]

Omg yes a fellow tbg anti!! Every single time I remember that mountain bullshit and venkas death I’m boiling w rage

Lmao I didn't realise my frustrations with the last book technically made me a tbg anti. I do agree with the general concept of the book but you can tell it was incredibly rushed (the series probably needed another book or 2 tbh) and while the concepts she was trying to explore are super interesting and very important to tackle in fantasy which... continues to be pretty white generally speaking... they weren't planned out fully or given the care that they needed. I always blame rfk for taking too much onto her plate trying to tackle 20 different loaded concepts that needed to be handled carefully and ending up succeeding at none. Venka's death did nothing to reinforce the thematic elements of the story (which are again up in the air because it really felt like she picked up a couple of threads and never committed to any of them) and while su daji's was always inevitable, it was premature and badly handled.

This is also fully going off on a tangent but as an asian girl myself I take SO much offense at rin being stuck in a cycle of swearing her loyalty to objectively horrible and abusive men and the narrative never fully tackling it since that concept needs to be handled with a lot of sensitivity. Plus I also kind of disagree with people who think it sucked to make rin a very angry woman just because she's dark skinned - the common online crit about avoiding certain harmful tropes is very shallow and doesn't acknowledge that representation is not a one-fits-all and what works for a person of one ethnicity doesn't necessarily work for a person of another ethnicity just because they have a bunch of similarities. I don't think nearly enough asian women are allowed to be angry and passionate - the problem moreso tends to be with dark-skinned asian men being portrayed as violent and animalistic (which again - they're allowed to be angry!! It all lies in a writer's skill and I think rfk was fine there with altan because his anger is fully justified & he obviously struggles a lot with his addiction). I'm just incredibly frustrated that none of the rape survivors got to play an important role in the story and everybody ended up being killed off by the end of the series. I really can't say whether rfk intentionally chose to make rin's inability to extricate herself from toxic relationships with powerful men something that always going to end up hurting her - some of the sequences with altan and nezha certainly suggest so - but all of her female allies who were practically willing to die for her were distrusted for nonsensical reasons and once again, rfk didn't seem to commit to the idea and basically chose to make her toxic relationship with men and duty exclusive to altan.

[st-just]

Semi-coherent Thoughts on the Poppy War Series

(Because I really need to start forcing myself to write semi-consistently again)

So I’ll say outright that I actually liked the series quite a bit, which does mean I actually got engaged and invested enough to start turning it over and picking it apart in my head after I finished it. So, like, this is probably going to come across as more negative overall than my actual opinions of the books.

Anyway, first off I really do adore Rin as a protagonist (I’d say ‘heroine’, but, well, no). Now partially this is because I always love even minimally sympathetic morally grey (..grey like coal soot, in this case) protagonists. But she’s just also such a complete garbage fire of a person, it’s kind of endearing. Well, that’s a bit callous – her entire personality is more or less a conflict between different kinds of unhealthy responses to powerlessness and trauma. Be she’s also just such a mess, and when she really starts leaning into delusions of grandeur you can’t help but root for her and hope things do actually turn out okay, regardless of how many fivers of blood she’s currently fantasizing about creating.

A big part of that is just how thoroughly awful the entire setting is, and how terrible everyone in it are, of course. Like, there are basically exactly three developed character in the entire trilogy who are unambiguously at least mostly good people (Chen, probably Venka, specifically the amnesiac and semi-delusional version of Jiang, but that’s being generous), and the fact that they stick around with Rin right to the end kind of puts that into doubt, honestly. Beyond that – almost every family has negligent or abusive parents, and literally every political figure is a bloody-handed tyrant ruling through violence and fear. The Hesperians are racist imperialists convinced they have a divine mandate to conquer the world, the Mugenese are every horror story from the IJA during WW2 translated to a pre-industrial fantasy setting, the ruling elite of Nikara are so many racist, scheming, power-hungry snakes with no concerns except their own position....

And, part and parcel with how terrible the setting is, Kuang does an incredible job of making all the worst things Rin does (until the final act, anyway) incredibly cathartic and badass and fun-in-a-fucked-up-way to read. There’s a terrible sort of awe while she turns the main islands of not!Japan into a pyroclastic hellscape. And whenever she gets a chance to enact any of her numerous revenges on some of the many people who abused and betrayed her it’s always poetic, in a Count-of-Monte-Cristo sort of way, and so kind of sickly compelling, even beyond it being some of the only times Rin’s really hopeful and happy. (Also, there are fun villainous monologues and quippy post-murder one-liners!)

Also, all forms of love are a terrible idea 100% of the time and is only going to end in at least one of the parties dead, abused, or (more or less literally) killing themselves in order to keep up with the other/earn their approval/try to keep them together. (I mean, Rin mostly had horrible taste in men, but Chen wasn’t able to stay mad at her for longer than a few months even after the whole ‘genocide’ thing, which he’s just about the only person to react to with any horror whatsoever. And look at how that ended up working out for him, so-)

I’m sure comparing grimdark fantasy to A Song of Ice And Fire is thoroughly out of fashion by now, but the overall perspective really did strike me as incredibly similar to Martin’s, a lot of the time. ‘Legitimate’ power and ‘lawful’ authority are ultimately nothing but polite fictions maintained by violence, terror and brutal oppression. War is a hell suffered most keenly by civilians with the misfortune to live and die in the middle of it, and least of all by the people with the power who actually start and end them. A flawed and unequal peace is very often preferable to dragging everything to hell with you as you die for the sake of freedom. And so on.

Now, to start the nitpicking – this is entirely personal and aesthetic, but it was kind of annoying how each of the first two books ended in moments of megalomaniac grandeur and terrifying empowerment, and then the next book started with a timeskip of things having gone to shit and her back under someone else’s thumb, and then a solid majority of the text is spent getting manipulated, betrayed, and finally crawling and clawing her way back out to the same point (both emotionally and in terms of independence/vision) that she had been at the previous book’s climax.

This isn’t anything even close to unique to TPW, of course – everything going to shit between the end of one story and the start of the sequel is kind of endemic to a lot of genres, really. And it is frankly incredibly in character for Rin to go through cycles flipping between resentment at being manipulated and used, and desperately craving authority figures to tell her what she should do and give her validation as valuable or useful. Still a bit annoying to read, though.

I’m sure it’s more me than the books – not like they didn’t put in the effort – but I could just never get really invested in the whole enemies-to-almost-lovers-to-enemies-again-to-? Thing with Nezha. Like, he’s interesting in that you can do a 180 perspective flip and he’d clearly be just as suitable a protagonist as Rin is, and his life’s very sad and everything. But, like, we get a front row seat to Rin’s internal monologue, and she gets thirsty for plenty of terrible men (and one awful woman), the only thing that makes Nezha special is that he’s not at least twice her age. So I never really got nearly as emotionally invested in them as the books seemed to expect me to. Which does kind of hurt the whole final act of book three.

Speaking of – okay, the ending isn’t awful or anything, but it is kind of disappointing in being exactly what you would expect it to be, as far as Rin’s character arc goes? Which might be just because I was already primed to compare this to ASOIF and she just literally pulls a Daenerys (fire-aligned vengeance/justice character with revolutionary impulses and an autocratic sensibility is willing to burn down the world in the process of freeing it, goes mad with power and paranoia, needs to be put down for the good of the country), but still. Her reading Venka throwing her to the ground to avoid an assassination attempt as a betrayal and burning her to death before she realized what was happening was just really heavy handed, you know? Same with turning on Kitay, who at this point is her actual literal soulmate. (Also sad in a broader sense, because those two are like literally two of the only characters in the entire series I’d actually peg as worthy of/capable of being trusted with political power.)

The specifics aside, I’m a miserable enough person to appreciate how unsatisfying the actual resolution at the end of the book is – imperialism wins! Literally no choice but to sign those unequal treaties and hope you’re eventually able to grow strong enough to force them out! Everything is the same as before this forty-year cycle of wars except much, much worse! - but yeah, I really just don’t actually care about Nezha enough as a character for it to really land. Also Kitay and Venka deserved better, even if literally no one else did.

Anyway, yeah, good series. Would recommend if you like the genre and can stomach all the, well, everything.

[loscrlovcr]

poppy war!!!

HNGGGG blorbo: KITAY. he's my boy. there's not a thing i don't love about him. no brainer. scrunkly: honestly? RIN. i could fix her. i'll hug this war criminal until she's fine again. scrimblo bimblo: VENKA. even tho she's a main character i think she's def underrated and i love her development glup shitto: CHAGHAN. i was obsessed with him for a second there his powers are so interesting. qara's are, too, but he has more depth. poor little meow meow: NEZHA. i know he's terrible. i do . and he's draco malfoy 2.0. BUT... hear me out... he's hot. (and the drowning faith made me soft.) horse plinko: SISTER PETRA. i'd probably die for it but nothing would give me as much pleasure as tormenting her eeby deeby: RIGA. he scares the shit out of me send me a fandom!

[emoyuuta]

kajdjdjsj i’m sorry i keep sending so many asks lmao but you have such interesting analyses of tpw. i seriously cannot see rin surviving the series, so maybe as she’s dying, she releases kitay from the bond so that he’ll figure some way to defeat the republic? i feel like nezha’s gonna either end up with/somehow becoming the dragon in the grotto... or maybe nezha dies and rin gets put in the mountain? i mean, she’d still be alive so she wouldn’t even have to release kitay from the bond, right?

oh don't worry, i rarely have people that want to talk with me, lol! it's a pleasure receiving your asks!

honestly i think kitay is the only one who will remain alive (along with venka bc she is a bad bivenka he is the only one with a bit of conscience here, and he is smart, he'll probably be less of a disaster than the rest of the options we have.

i'm more prone to believe that rin dies, rather than being imprisoned in the mountain. either way, there's no chance that she'll have a happy ending, or that she'll rule for a lot of time.

as for nezha...him becoming the dragon in the grotto makes sense but still i'm more convinced that he's gonna die anyway.

[alectology-archive]

What are your thoughts on daji and jiang from tpw?

Tpw!jiang is batshit wild and kind of fun to read about although he's often seen straddling the line between helping rin and enabling her bad habits. I didn't care for the other two sequels and paid very little attention to them so I honestly have no idea what I think of him but I recall really disliking him for some reason idk. He's supposed to generally be a good guy but he annoyed me for reasons i can't explain. It probably stems from the books' refusal to really devote attention to the hinterlanders after giving them such crucial plot points in the past and present.

Su daji... I love her cunning and ruthlessness. And also i just love her. I have nothing really else to say since there's very little of her in the books anyway and I don't remember the last two very well - but she was done the dirtiest along with venka lmao. So much of tdr/tbg's plot revolves around purposeful miscommunication for the sake of ~plot~ that the books ended up feeling like really badly written tpw fanfic. There was no reason for all the weird drama between rin and su daji in tdr only to later reveal she was Good all along. None of the women seemed to be able to communicate with each other or trust their female friends which really didn't sit well with me since Rin spent all of the series trusting and fighting for horrible men and being thrown aside every single time they'd managed to accomplish their goals.

The thing is, I actually kind of agree with the idea of the trifecta needing to die so the 'trifecta' of rin/kitay/nezha can take centre stage - something something the cyclic nature of tragedy and violence that hurts the children the most, I guess. But it was badly done and there was no resolution to their personal conflicts after spending all that time with flashbacks and they were simply offed after rin used su daji as a plot device for a short while. Again, a lot of my annoyance stems from rin's corruption arc being done very badly - I still can't honestly answer why rfk thought of applying a real-life dictator's misdeeds to the last survivor of a genocide who's dark-skinned and doesn't want to bow down to invading forces who treat the people of her nation like literal animals. Tragedy in the context of the inevitability of empire can be done but this sure wasn't it and the azula fanfic really jumped out in the last book.

[alectology-archive]

su daji and rin and VENKA and...pretty much every female character honestly

The dragon republic & the burning god spoilers//

Help dhdgsfhaj literally I was literally thinking about that all these days - the burning god especially reads soooo much like it doesn't really like women. I take issue with Rin being the only female character who's capable of achieving things on page while pushing su daji to the sidelines when the plot twist is literally that she's been misunderstood and has always done her best to protect the people of nikaan and how rfk ignores that venka was a victim of horrible circumstances and did her best to break free of sexist limitations placed on her (with added nuance as a survivor of sexual assault who chose to undergo an abortion) but refused to give her any opportunity to shine on page (and idk focused on nezha of people? I like him but venka is so much more compelling tbh and he just really annoyed me in the third book). There's also something else to be said about how 5 out of 8 major female characters (roughly) are victims of sexual abuse and how literally no female character except moag survives in the end but ugh I'm going to stop there.

But mostly I'm just really angry about how Venka was treated (her death literally felt like something pulled out of nowhere for shock value and while it did emphasise how Rin was beginning to get really paranoid to the point where she was turning on her own allies I stand by the fact that Venka didn't need to die for it) and how Rin's goal to get rid of the people who literally view her and her people as animals and treat them like it is treated as an ~extremist~ view with very little time being dedicated for her 'downward spiral' to parallel Azula and Mao Zedong only to claim that nezha was the right person for having a more ~moderate~ view about collaboration, peace etc etc (with the evil colonialists...). Idk if I'm explaining it right (and I know that the ending we got was probably more realistic) but for a book giving serious commentary on how horrible and dehumanising colonialist rule is I think tbg failed somewhere and I blame it all on rfk trying to give commentary on way too many topics (colorism, genocide, sexual assault, sexism, classism, abuse, drug abuse, misogyny, racism, colonialism, experimentation on people of color by white people, the way the northern people treat the southerners, religious assimilation to name a few) and either doing a mediocre job or failing at all of them.