#robinramy

[paper-ish]

the moment between lightning and thunder

happy belated birthday to my stupid babel sons robin and ramy :’)

[kindlespark]

BABEL SPOILERS // i am such a firm believer of robin being sooo much more wilfully ignorant than even he himself realised, lest it topple his shaky determination to enjoy oxford’s luxuries. and my favourite example is that in the Don’t You Know Why Scene, robin only pushes ramy about letty after ramy calls him handsome 😭😭

because he does know why!! he all but rattles off a giant list why in the scene where he’s comforting her!!!

like yes you can read robin as simply being an idiot wrt ramy’s sexuality but frankly its so much more interesting and also hilarious to think that robin, in his intoxication and frustration, is pushing ramy to say what he can’t, to articulate the Thing between them that he refuses to articulate himself. and i think ramy is aware of that, and flips it back on him. he knows robin doesn’t want to look at it directly, because confronting their Thing means he’s going to have to confront much more than that, and robin is so so determined Not to do that. he doesn’t want to think about what else he’s ignoring in order to bask in oxford’s luxuries, and he doesn’t want to wonder if upholding the status quo is worth losing all that potential freedom and love.

like robinramy’s tragedy is kind of intrinsically tied to their conflicting approaches to empire for me. robin at first always wanted to fit in, but ramy has always wanted to tear it down. idk i think they were doomed by each other and their circumstances long before letty tbh

[spittinwatches]

what if it was us against the world. and we were both boys.

[lgbtkanda]

robin and ramy did not have enough time in this world together. there was so much unsaid. they should’ve had a LIFETIME together.. GOD .

[ephemeralzenith]

the way ramy would do taylor swifts vigilante shit chair performance as a JOKE and robin would be absolutely smitten with heart eyes

[based-and-rinpilled]

[hideinplanesight]

It's been days since I finished babel and it still hurts so much to think about

[formlesscorporeal]

Come and cry with me

[archiveofrasa]

self-indulgent robinramy fanfic where i get ramy to talk abt bengali things with robin in 1st year 👀

[kindlespark]

im in hell

[kindlespark]

early rowing mornings

[kindlespark]

AHHH I've just finished reading Babel and I've been scrolling tumblr because I can't get over this book lol and I came across your blog! I LOVE your posts!! But I have a question, do you think Letty knew about Robin and Ramy? As in, their feelings for each other? Because I did see multiple posts mentioning it, but I don't see where it was implied in the book.

Is it the line 'a truth they'd only been starting to wake up to'? Because it's still unclear to me who 'they' is referring to. Or is it the reason Letty killed Ramy in the first place, and that was what Robin was trying to get her to admit when she came to the tower to negotiate with them? Something else entirely? I'm so confused HELP

HELLO! omg im glad you enjoy my ramblings lmao!!

honestly i think it's left up to interpretation on purpose! i personally interpret it as like, regardless of if letty knew specifically about ramy and robin's feelings for each other, she definitely knew that ramy had chosen robin over her. ramy choosing robin was him devoting himself to the liberation of his people and community, over letty's whiteness and complicity. letty's love for ramy was possessive and egocentric; the moment ramy stepped away from what she wanted him to be, from what she thought of him as as an enlightened brown person; the moment she knew he would never reciprocate, that love turned violent.

and i do think ramy and robin growing closer post-canton was part of that awakening of like, oh, ramy has devoted himself to something that isn't me and will never be me, and that directly opposes her existence (it doesn't, of course, but she won't see that). hence the 'only beginning to wake up to' line, because i do believe had robin not gone through his bridge scene realisation in canton, ramy would never have allowed himself to follow his feelings (he refuses to date a liberal god bless him)

but the extent of how much letty suspected is never confirmed, nor if she really did aim to kill ramy. robin never knew for sure, so we as readers never get to either! it's so juicy it's so tragic i miss them every day <3

[kindlespark]

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

[kindlespark]

godddddd rereading the canton scene is so fucked up like robin is finally apologising to ramy about hermes with genuine understanding and regret. before that moment he couldn't reconcile babel's bloody foundations with his own enjoyment of it; couldn't grasp how everything he'd worked for had always been this death and exploitation until he saw it with his own eyes. how ramy knows that he's finally opening his eyes to something ramy had known his whole life; that he and robin are tragically, horrifically connected by that web of exploitation, not just through babel but through their own countries that are being forced to serve empire and destroy each other in the process!!! their countries and their lives are irreversibly undeniably caught up in the other's downfall, thrust together by no choice of their own, but by the systems of exploitation that ensure only the british can win. LIKE IS ROBINRAMY NOT THE MOST DOOMED TRAGIC FUCKED UP RELATIONSHIP IN EXISTENCE IM GOING TO THROW UP i just can't get over it i can't get over how robin and ramy as people and as cogs in the imperialist system were given no other choice but to cling to each other in britain, to help each other as the only other boys of colour around, but then to ultimately doom and work against each other and their countries for the crown. im srsly going to pass out and die

[kindlespark]

I CANT ANSWER THIS ON THE COOKBOOK ACCOUNT BUT HELPSKEJSKFHEKBSFEKSG FUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WHOEVER THIS IS UR A LIFESAVER AND ALSO HELP ME GOD I CANT BELIEVE REBLOGGED ROBINRAMY YAOI ON THE OFFICIAL COOKBOOK ACCT RTHIS IS SO EMBARRASSING

[kindlespark]

this is gonna be SO long and rambly sorry anyway i saw a post abt how babel does queer characters and it got me thinking abt why the tropes it uses would usually turn me off other stories but didn’t here

MAJOR BABEL SPOILERS //

i feel like i’d be more mad abt how robinramy ended up in babel if it marketed itself as queer lit at all or if its fans were going “WOW AMAZING QUEER REP” abt it. but no one told me any of that, so finding out they were gay was just a fun little bonus surprise to me. i get why ppl are eh abt robinramy not getting together/technically still being subtext (which i dont think is really true btw like the book literally says “robin was falling in love” but idk i guess if you were stupid you might’ve assumed that it was falling in love with oxford given how romantic some of the other language is (WHICH IS ALSO THE POINT bc i think robin’s friendship with ramy blurring into romance is why he romanticised like all his friendships/experiences in oxford BUT IM GETTING OFF-TOPIC)). i just think robin’s repression abt being gay was intrinsically tied to his attitudes on imperialism (wrt refusing to acknowledge anything that complicated his life until it was too late) and i don’t consider it a cop out or queerbait. like i genuinely don’t think robinramy could ever have gotten together without drastic alterations being made in terms of plot and character. plus i think it’s clear that kuang didn’t want to write a story with any kind of focus on romance at all, because it’s not that kind of book. there’s no successful het romance either, so it grates a lot less. the only reason romance is included at all is to show the ways in which white entitlement manifests. so the tragic way robinramy played out just made sense to me.

and i speak as someone who accidentally spoiled myself on You Know What in the middle of reading and i was like ugghh boooo dreading it the whole time expecting to roll my eyes when it happened but then when it did i was like. wow im actually not that mad LMFAO 😭😭😭 actually thematically the book sets it up so well that i believed that this was unfortunately the only way it could’ve gone. babel is about the loss and tragedy and grief that colonised people experience. it’s about the lengths people will go to to uphold empire and the lengths ppl will go to to tear it down like idk 😭 i guess it is bury your gays but it didnt bother me this time because i thought it fit thematically ❤️ i enjoy tragedy as a genre a lot and i would’ve made it gay anyway you know. thanks rf kuang for doing it for me so i didnt have to.

WHICH IS ALL TO SAY that i guess if you’re going into babel for the queer rep without appreciating that the story is fundamentally a tragedy it would feel like it’s just reusing tired tropes….. but i think the choices kuang made were rly deliberate and not in a way that feels like trauma porn or shock value. the book is fundamentally about the struggles of poc so the layer of queerness that was introduced felt like a subtle extension of the experiences of characters of colour in the book, and i enjoyed and related to it as a queer chinese person who kind of realised they had to prioritise their fight for the liberation of poc over queerness mainly because the idea of western queer liberation cannot be dissociated from imperialism and many aspects of homophobia as we know it was an export of christian european empire into our colonised countries in the first place and FUCK THIS IS A WHOLE OTHER TANGENT ABOUT HOW I THINK RAMY AS A CHARACTER IS EMBLEMATIC OF THE TENSION AND STRUGGLE THAT QUEER POC DIASPORA HAVE BETWEEN OUR IDENTITIES GODDAMNIT OK FORGET IT POST CANCELLED i just rly think babel’s handling of queer characters is fine and makes sense and i like it personally and maybe i will make a coherent analysis about it one day but that day is not today byeeeeeee