Babel - Blog Posts
Ant-egoitistical
Unlike people, I don't have ego. I don't feel evil when I do things. Only people who have good lives feel fear of losing these lives, i had everything of pride stolen from me long ago. That's why I've always been objective and never egoitstical. Because I long have lost. I was always loser when it came to winning anything, the bottom of the barrel. That's why we losers tend to objectify things, atlhough I never lie to myself so I can never really cope. We like science so much because we can't win in usual environment. I don't know if you believe this is blessing in disguise, but I already lost to you.
genuinely going insane about how "we're scholars, not soldiers" (Babel, RF Kuang) fits in with Arcane. something something Jinx and Ekko are both brilliant prodigies born in an environment that forced them to be fighters something something Jayce and Viktor, for all their involvement in the conflict, were still inventors at heart something something
you don't even understand the first 15 pages tore me up SO BAD
in shock hearing people say that babel only takes a turn and becomes heart-wrenching at the end because that experience is so incomprehensible to my chinese diaspora ass that felt like their heart was being torn from their chest in the very first chapter likeeeee babel is underscored by such immense amounts of tragedy and loss and horror around colonialism and imperialism from the very beginning it's so crazy that white people can just read the first half of babel and not feel like every bone in their body was being dissolved in acid by the centuries of unspoken grief written in robin's experience SORRYYYYYYYY. average poc reading babel vs average white person reading babel truly LMFAOOOO
i will forever cry over how robin lost ramy and griffin after both of them saved him. only for him not to be able to continue life. because the grief was greater than he could bear. the pain was too much for him to think of the life after the strike. after all he did in the spirit of his late brother and dearest friend.
i will forever cry over robin letting victoire go. i simply couldn't find the words to describe the bond that they had. it was meant to be. victoire was the voice of reason between the two and robin just couldn't get through all of it, not without griffin and ramy. she made up her mind and so did he and it was hurtful to witness this two souls make peace with their choices. im going insane over this.
rf kuang really looked at the whole "main characters cant die and mostly everyone has to get a happy ending" thing and said you know what? fuck that
“Babel” by Cildo Meireles (2001)
You know the funny thing about Afghanistan?’ Griffin’s voice was very soft. ‘The British aren’t going to invade with English troops. They’re going to invade with troops from Bengal and Bombay. They’re going to have sepoys fight the Afghans, just like they had sepoys fight and die for them at Irrawaddy, because those Indian troops have the same logic you do, which is that it’s better to be a servant of the Empire, brutal coercion and all, than to resist. Because it’s safe. Because it’s stable, because it lets them survive. And that’s how they win, brother. They pit us against each other. They tear us apart.
R.F. Kuang, Babel
Babel by Rebecca F. Kuang: English and Indonesian translation
I will think about Ramiz Rafi Mirza every second, every minute, every hour, every day, every week, every month, every year of my life.
so anyway
rf kuang always has two characters who are like orbiting each other, twin planets, can’t live without each other can’t live with each other, she loves tragic death of complicated friendships. ramy and robin, rin and kitay, even june and athena. everyone dies. but what i like about her tragedies is there’s always a third. always another component, important and surviving. nezha and victoire. not a happy ending, but one that leaves you with an ache in your chest and a hope for the future, that the sacrifice and death did in the end have a point.
the way victorie and robin and ramy all loose their birth languages has me in shambles. victorie never really spoke hatian creole, she moved to france at a very young age, and when she tried to bring it into babel, she was dismissed. ramy, who’s from kolkata, who’s bengali, only speaks bengali once in the book and his speech has become rudimentary because the british saw urdu and sanskrit and arabic as more valuable. robin has forgotten cantonese by the time he goes back home for the same reason. it’s utterly tragic it comes with a deep pain that’s hard to describe the pain of loosing your mother tongue.
The fact that there's an actually functional website for the library of Babel is one of those things that fucks me up more and more the more I think about the implications.
Tower of Babel by Wayne Pinkston Via Flickr: Website Instagram Facebook Tower of Babel, Arches National Park, Utah. Nikon D810A Camera, 14-24 mm lens, 24 mm, f 2.8, 20 sec., ISO 8000. Lighting with Low Level Lighting (LLL). For more about this technique please see lowlevellighting.org For more images like this please take a look at Wayne Pinkston Photography . Thanks for all the kind support! Hope you enjoy! A big thank you to the wonderful Flickr family. It's a pleasure to post here. Cheers, Wayne
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
in shock hearing people say that babel only takes a turn and becomes heart-wrenching at the end because that experience is so incomprehensible to my chinese diaspora ass that felt like their heart was being torn from their chest in the very first chapter likeeeee babel is underscored by such immense amounts of tragedy and loss and horror around colonialism and imperialism from the very beginning it's so crazy that white people can just read the first half of babel and not feel like every bone in their body was being dissolved in acid by the centuries of unspoken grief written in robin's experience SORRYYYYYYYY. average poc reading babel vs average white person reading babel truly LMFAOOOO
fuck my friend who recommended babel by rf kuang to me im literally always going to have these 4 (yes even the blonde bitch but for different reasons) babblers in my head forever. i feel like a drowned bee floating in an above ground pool. fucked up
+ some initial sketches of me just finding their faces and notes. might do a transcript, but truly the notes are just for me
