Sex, Power and Violence in the Poppy War trilogy by R. F. Kuang
if everything is sex, except sex, which is power...
Grimdark fantasy has a bad reputation when it comes to its depiction of sexual abuse, which is often criticized as gratuitous and misogynistic. Two well-known examples are the Song of Ice and Fire and Witcher books, both series having lots of sex-based trauma inflicted upon the female characters. While I love both series, the way that they handle this topic is not always the best, which is why I was pleasantly surprised by the way that sex, and by extension sexual violence, was handled in R.F. Kuang’s grimdark trilogy, The Poppy War.
The Poppy War trilogy is dark, arguably darker than both ASOIAF and Witcher, and that’s because the Poppy War is incredibly realistic. The events of the trilogy are heavily inspired in real-life atrocities committed in the Opium Wars, amplified by the fantastical powers available to the characters, and this results in disgusting and horrifying displays of violence. This violence, like in any armed conflict, often includes sexual abuse. However, I think that the way that Kuang utilizes rape in her work is more nuanced than other authors, and she also explores the ways that sexual desire and power dynamics intersect in very subtle ways.
Here I’m going to analyze how sex is handled in the Poppy War trilogy, because I think this theme deserves more attention when talking about the series. I’m going to discuss some spoilers, and of course, I’ll be talking about sensitive topics, so read at your own risk.
Rin’s Relationship with Sex.
The main character of the trilogy, Rin Fang, is a young orphan girl, and she’s primarily motivated by her desire to be free. This freedom is inseparable from power and sex, the three are linked in Rin’s mind from the beginning of the story until the end.
The event that kickstarts the plot is Rin’s adoptive family arranging her marriage to an older man, which makes Rin determined to pass the entrance exams to military school. Rin’s “aunt” tells her that marriage is essentially a contract where women give up sex and children in favor of sustenance, and this idea takes hold in Rin’s subconscious, where having sex becomes synonymous with being dependent and subservient to someone else. Having sex makes you lose power—if you are a woman.
Upon entering Sinegard, we become aware of the fragile position of women in the Nikara empire. While they are allowed in military academies, they are given differential treatment, and they are the minority. The Empress, a woman that fought first-hand in the previous war and that is famous for her martial prowess, can’t overturn a historically patriarchal society in just a couple generations.
The beginning of Rin’s life at Sinegard is tumultuous. This is the place that Rin thinks can grant her freedom, but staying in Sinegard is extremely hard, and it makes perfect sense that Rin gets her first menstruation during this time. It reminds Rin of what made her go to Sinegard, the threat of becoming a bride, and the pain it puts her through puts Rin’s training in jeopardy. Rin takes the only logical choice in her position: She sterilizes herself, chemically destroying her womb. This asserts her presence at Sinegard by further distancing Rin from childbirth, bringing her closer to the freedom she desires. The medical staff at Sinegard even complain that more female students don’t do the same; the idea that Sinegard should accommodate women’s health needs is never an option.
“I’ve been trying to convince the girls here to do this for years,” he said. “None of them listen. Small wonder so few of you make it past your first year. They should make this mandatory.”
[…]
She wondered if she should feel anything. This was significant, wasn’t it? There would be no children for her. No one would agree to marry her after this. Shouldn’t that matter?
No. No, of course not. If she’d wanted to grow fat with squealing brats, she would have stayed in Tikany. She had come to Sinegard to escape that future. Why hesitate now?
The Poppy War.
Rin’s decision becomes even more meaningful once it’s revealed that she’s the last Speerly woman. Her choice to become barren means that her people are gone with her, and it would make sense for Rin to regret her choice. However, while she does think about this a few times, Rin does not regret it nor does she ever wish to have children, and her main focus is the way that being sterile affects her position within the army. The army, similarly to Sinegard, is a place where women are accepted but only to a certain extent. Rin recognizes that the soldiers around her are a threat, and she can’t afford to be seen as weak. Her sterility makes her stand out, and she knows the men around her are intrigued by it, which puts her in danger if she ever gives in to desire—being free of childbirth doesn't grant her true freedom.
This wasn’t about lust, this was about power. This was about possession. He wanted to dominate her just so that later he could crow that he had.
And Rin, admittedly, was tempted. […]
But she’d be stupid to go to bed with him. Once the word spread, no one would look at her the same way again. She’d been around soldiers long enough to know how this worked. The man got bragging rights. The woman, already likely the only female soldier in her squadron, became the camp whore.
[…]
He just scoffed. His eyes roved up and down her body, as if evaluating how much force it would take to pin her to the ground.
The Burning God.
The threat of rape hangs over Rin’s head the entire trilogy, even if she never gets assaulted. Rin’s understanding of the precarious position of women in male-dominated spaces leads her to constantly distance herself from womanhood and specifically from sex, even if she does feel sexual desire at several points in the story. I think it’s extremely relevant that Rin dies a virgin, for reasons that I will further explore below, but most of all for what it says about Rin’s hopeless situation. There wasn’t a point in her life where Rin could explore her own desires safely, just like there was never a moment where she was truly free.
The Empress—Sex as a tool, and its limitations.
Su Daji, the Empress of Nikara, is initially presented as the typical seductress that uses her sex appeal to gain power. We are told of her military exploits that allowed her to rise from a commoner to the sole ruler of the Empire, but her unnatural beauty is what defines her character at the beginning. She’s called the Vipress, and the goddess that she draws power from is a snake, an obvious symbol for female sexuality.
This is a common archetype in fantasy, that of the dangerously enticing sorceress whose power is inextricable from her looks, but Kuang develops Su Daji beyond this initial mold. Like Rin, Su Daji is deeply aware of the position of women in a patriarchal society, and she understands that basing her power on her desirability is a double edged-sword. She’s unable to hold the country together simply because she’s a woman surrounded by men that want her but don’t respect her, and because of that she has to resort to drastic measures to keep herself in power. Once the Empire starts to fracture, Su Daji has to stop relying on her beauty and dons military garb, in order to remind her vassals of how she achieved power in the first place. Beauty alone can’t empower women.
The Empress’s relationship with sex is developed further once we find out more about her backstory, including the fact that she was a victim of rape. This event shapes Su Daji’s worldview and adds nuance to her relationship with men, in particular with Yin Riga, the Dragon Emperor. They used to be equals, and their relationship was clearly romantic, but over time Riga became physically abusive towards Daji and their other partner, Jiang. Riga’s treatment of Daji reinforces the idea that being desired (or even loved) is not enough to protect women from abuse.
Rape in War Time.
“I’m not the worst,” Venka said. “I fought back. I was trouble. So they saved me for last. They wanted to break me first. They made me watch. I saw women disemboweled. I saw the soldiers slice off their breasts. I saw them nail women alive to walls. I saw them mutilate young girls, when they had tired of their mothers. If their vaginas were too small, they cut them open to make it easier to rape them.”
The Poppy War.
Venka’s description of what she experienced in Golyn Niis is even more horrifying because we know this is a real event. It’s specifically based on the Rape of Nanjing (also known as the Nanjing Massacre), when Japanese soldiers committed mass murder, rape and torture of Chinese civilians in the Second Sino-Japanese war, one of the worst war crimes in history. The atrocities that Kuang describes in her book are lifted straight from the testimonies of what Japanese soldiers did to thousands of Chinese women.
There are a couple of reasons why I think the depiction of wartime rape in the Poppy War is better than how it’s commonly used in fantasy. The first is the focus in the victims and not the perpetrators, which is a direct result of the main character being a woman. The sexual assault is never romanticized or brushed over, and we deeply feel the psychological consequences of these rapes. Another reason why the Poppy War is better when it comes to this topic is that the act itself is talked about but rarely shown, and when there’s a scene involving rape, it’s done in a distinctly horrifying way that leaves no room for voyeurism and fantasy. Again, this goes back to the fact that we are seeing things from a female POV.
Finally, the biggest thing that separates the Poppy War from other series is that rape is never normalized. While rape is an undeniable part of war, some authors fall into the trap of trivializing rape and including it into their story excessively under the excuse that it was “normal”, and they reduce this inhumane act to part of the scenery, as if the reader needed to see women being submitted to abuse just to set the stage of their “gritty, realistic fantasy”. Kuang never diminishes the horror of sexual abuse, and it’s never used for shock value. It’s part of reality, but that doesn’t mean it should be accepted by either the characters nor the reader.
“Would you prefer I were a lifeless corpse?” Venka screamed. “Would you prefer my spine were broken, my body crushed, just so long as nothing had gone between my legs?”
The Dragon Republic.
It’s also important that the female victims don’t lose their agency because of their trauma. Venka is a secondary character that I was ambivalent on while reading, and while I think that her relationship with Rin could have been better developed, I think the way that Kuang handles Venka’s response to her trauma was very interesting, because she focuses both on the psychological and social consequences of rape. Venka’s abuse doesn’t end the moment her rapists are gone, she’s further traumatized by a misogynistic society that blames the victim and doesn’t empathize with them if they don’t live up to certain standards of conduct. Still, Venka doesn’t become an object of pity, instead she remains an active character that makes her own decisions, which includes getting an abortion despite the social disgrace it causes her.
Doomed Women.
On Rin’s section, I mentioned that Rin dying a virgin was a significant detail, and here I’m going to explain why I think that was such a brilliant decision on Kuang’s part.
“I thought he was in love with Tearza,” Rin said.
“He loved her and feared her,” Nezha said. “They’re not mutually exclusive.”
The Dragon Republic.
Rin’s romantic feelings towards Nezha are compared with two other couples that came before them. The first is Tearza and the Red Emperor, the second is Hanelai and Jiang. In all three cases, there’s a Speerly woman and a Nikara man, and the woman ends up dying after being betrayed by her lover.
Love and desire are often portrayed as forces of nature, things that are beyond politics and that exist on a separate level from other earthly concerns, but in the Poppy War, we see a different approach. Here, romantic feelings and sexual attraction can’t be separated from the power dynamics inherent to any relationship between two people. The key similarity between Rin and Nezha, Tearza and the Red Emperor, and Hanelai and Jiang, is that in all cases the woman is from a minority group that has been historically oppressed by the man’s people. This power imbalance is what doomed all these couples, because love can’t exist in isolation from the wider social context that they live in.
Going back to Rin’s virginity, I think the fact that Rin and Nezha never consummated their feelings for each other is what sets them apart from the other couples. Rin’s final decision to commit suicide grants her power over Nezha, it’s the final rejection of his desire, and it’s the only way that she can break the cycle. The women before her were betrayed and killed by their love, but Rin makes the choice of not giving Nezha the satisfaction of winning. It’s an empowering yet tragic take on “the one that got away” trope.
Grimdark fantasy’s use of rape for shock value is insulting and uninspired, and it reveals the limited views of male authors. The Poppy War, however, is unique in its depiction of sexual violence, thanks to the author’s understanding of the larger societal reasons behind abuse and the underlying power dynamics of sexual desire. The problem, therefore, is not that grimdark fantasy (and fantasy at large) includes depictions of rape, but that there’s no interest in exploring rape beyond its traumatic effect on the victim.
Further Reading:
Speculative World-Building as a Refracting Prism: An Interview With Rebecca F. Kuang
INTERSECTIONALITY AND OPPRESSION IN R. F. KUANG’S THE POPPY WAR NOVEL
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I've only read the first book so far, and I nearly threw up when I read that scene where Venka talks about what happened to her. That is the kind of tone stories should have when they talk about rape, because it's horrifying and disgusting. There's way too many books where it's lowkey sexualized.
Very well written essay, it sounds like a fascinating series (though horrifying).
I think a few points referenced here (specifically that love is not enough, and social context cannot be escaped) are particularly interesting because they're so rarely encountered in fiction - you simply don't (or almost never) see stories of this kind, because it's not marketable, and people would rather read the Romeo and Juliet happy sex-positive romance, which can be trusted to sell well and won't be too upsetting. Kuang is kind of saying something very unmarketable, unfashionable, and untherapeutic (that love doesn't conquer all), and that's commendable.