The Dragon Republic, R.F. Kuang. The second in a trilogy that began with The Poppy War, which I talked about here. You shouldn't read this one without having read the first one, and if you've read the first one you know what kind of content these books deal with, so I'm not even going to try to do a thorough content note for this one. War, rape, genocide, gore, etc. I had a hard time gearing myself up to read this book - just SO not in the mood for fictional violence right now - but I'm glad I pushed through. More behind the cut, super spoilery.


So, okay, damn, holy shit. Kuang is juggling so much here - the fantasy elements, the factional intrigue, the parallels to real Chinese history - and it's all fit together so intricately. I love the craft of this kind of thing so much. As expected, this is the Nationalists, and the last book will be the Communists, only all on a slant, and compressed - Kuang has said that Rin has been a Mao analogue the whole time, which I didn't realize in the first book while she was also busy being the atomic bomb, but is very clear by the end of this one. It looks like the third book may in fact also be the North Vietnamese fighting the US, now that the Hesperians have emerged as the biggest bad, and it might sound like that's too many things, but it's working so far. The complexity and rock-solid motivations of all the different factions is so good - the way the personal fits in with the political, the betrayals. And, man, the elemental battles! Air vs fire showdown! Fire vs water foreshadowed! If you loved Avatar but were like "what if it was for adults and didn't dodge any of the brutality of war", here we go. We're getting zeppelin battles in the third book, you know that's going to be something.

God I hope it doesn't end with Rin launching the Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. I mean, if she's Mao, how else. (But maybe she gets to be a Mao who's saved by being a girl, or by her fascinating new soulbond, and who... manages to *stop* being Mao?)

Re the soulbond, I'm really enjoying the complexity of the relationships that never reduces to straightforward shipping. Was Rin attracted to Altan, or want to be his little sister, or be him, or hate him? Yes, all of the above! Her relationship with Nezha is like... rivals to friends to is-there-something-romantic-there? to enemies again to... who can even guess but I'm sure eager to know. And now the soulbond. I don't think anyone in these books has time (or, like, respite from the relentless horrors of war) to actually have sex or romance, but if they did the soulbond would sure be an interesting complication!

Also can I just say that I squeed so much over Rin using her firebending to write with fire to signal to the army. That's my fic! My popular ATLA fic, I mean! Very different context, but it was like seeing one of my plot babies make the big time! I know Kuang almost certainly came up with it independently, it's not that hard to get from fire to signaling, but, look, in my heart, I can't help but believe that it is *possible* that Kuang read my story (she's on-record as liking Avatar, she's written about Azula being an important character to her) and thought "you know what, that was cool" and tucked it into the corner of her brain to use later. And I just love the idea that something I wrote could be out there in the big fiction ecosystem getting metabolized into new stories. Maybe I was one drop in the ocean of inspiration here. That would be pretty fucking cool.)