Brain Looping "Guilty Pleasures"

[raven_cromwell]

So I've lately become obsessed with R. F. Kuang's Poppy War

It came across my radar cause I wanted something...I suppose you'd say grimdark, but I tend to categorize it as Shakespearian--something where the tragedy's inherent from the beginning, and you know this coaster's going nowhere but fuckin' down. So like. obvs tw for genocide/torture/rape/the brutality of warAnd the Poppy War is so intensely that, scratched an itch so profoundly it's left me breathless and obsessed for days.

What would happen if an ambitious girl had burned herself--quite literally in this case sacrificed bits of herself--to reach the most prestigious academy in the world, only to find it's a shit-hole of prejudice where she's required to burn away even more of herself to succeed? And once she starts burning, the need to burn, to burn as first and last and only resort: herself. others. everything. becomes second nature cause well. why the fuck not it's worked so well before. All against the backdrop of magic and destiny/free will, with the massacre of Nanking as inspiration, so that tells you how dark this shit goes.

And...I want to buy the sequel, can easily buy the sequel, but apparently my brain's absorbed too much of woke culture cause it can't shut up with the guilt-train. The protag is psychopathic, and the narrative doesn't especially call it out. But it in no way glorifies it either: Kuang starts from the base assumption that we know! what Rin's doing is so far outside the bounds of ordinary behavior it doesn't need to be called out. This's a dissecting of how people go from ordinary with a hard streak to committing mass magical genocide, and the lessons are left to be subtle, played out in the descriptions of the horror she and her friends leave in their wake. (This scratched for me an itch I'd had since reading HP as a kid: a person driven to evil not cause of some fundamental nature but because...it seemed the easier path at the time and morality. well. who gives a shit?)

Still, my brain loops back to the old saws of purity culture: if the author refuses to outright denounce, then maybe they don't understand the full horror of what they're portraying, maybe they're handling it too lightly. This's too dark, too soap-operaishly grim, and I should give money to more literary. incisive fiction.

I'd always thought of myself as someone for whom purity culture kinda rolled off--understood that sometimes you just. needed a bit of media that scratched the damn id without examining every element for problematicness. I hadn't realized how insidious the discourse was, or how pervasive. But yeah, when we talk about overblown purity culture devoid of nuance crushing story's potential, we apparently also meant week-long brain arguments about the media you consume. And honestly? it's both a tragedy and exhausting.

Comments

[delphi]

I'm so sorry you find yourself feeling this way and grappling with this kind of guilt. I don't know if it helps at all, but putting entirely aside the question of whether media creators or consumers have any responsibility to limit themselves to didactic and morally improving material, my philosophy is this: reading a variety of books and encountering challenging ideas or troubling concepts that aren't explicitly denounced in the text is a valuable way for us to exercise our moral muscles. When an author just tells us how to feel or what to think about something troubling, it might reinforce our worldview a little but it doesn't actually require us to go through the mental process of evaluating for ourselves what exactly is repellent about the idea, what's secretly appealing, what we might do differently, and so on. Critical thinking requires practice, and I personally think reading about complicated, morally ambiguous and murky situations is one of the best ways to keep those skills sharp so that we can better rely on them in real life situations.