YMMV / Babel, or the Necessity of Violence

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Letitia Price is made of this trope. From one perspective (which the book favors), she's a spoiled, entitled child who's totally blind to the privilege she enjoys as the cohort's only white member, betrays the Hermes Society because she desperately wanted to return to a life of luxury, and murders Ramy because he rejected her advances. From another perspective, she spent her whole childhood in the shadow of her obviously inferior brother and continued to face discrimination at Oxford, with even her three best friends in the world barely tolerating her most of the time. She's horrified at their seeming callousness after Robin kills a faculty member, frustrated that they refuse to explain anything to her, and though she did tell the police about the Old Library hideout, she didn't expect them to just run in and start shooting everybody. Although killing Ramy is the one unambiguously evil thing Letty does, she herself points out that it was a crime of passion identical to Robin's murder of Lovell.
  • Did Professor Richard Lovell ever actually care for Robin OR his mother, or were they all just part of his long game to place more Mandarin translators at Babel?
  • Is Jerome Playfair an Affably Evil doofus who's so excited about devising new match pairs that he doesn't understand the harm they cause? Or a Faux Affably Evil monster who loves finding new ways to cause pain?
  • How did Sterling Jones get so warped? He, Anthony, Evie, and Griffin were once close — was he a psychopath then, too, or did Evie's death serve as his Start of Darkness?
• Anvilicious: If Babel makes two things clear, it’s that colonization and Britain’s exploitation of non-white countries were (and still are) detrimental forces that destroyed countless lives, and that nonviolent rebellion will not work if the people in power don’t care about the suffering of the oppressed. You will be informed of both these things over and over and over and over again.
• Author Tract: R.F. Kuang really, really, really, REALLY thinks you should stop romanticizing Victorian English academia.
• Award Snub:
  • While Babel was labeled one of the Top 10 Books of 2022 by Barnes and Noble and is considered one of the best fantasy novels of the year, it still lost the Goodreads Awards to a novel in Sarah J. Maas’s Crescent City series, whose author has faced criticism for mediocrity and romanticizing unhealthy relationships.
  • The book was also conspicuously disqualified from the 2023 Hugo Awards, with the awards team refusing to explain why; that the 2023 Hugos took place in Kuang's former home China is generally assumed to be a factor.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: Richard Lovell is Robin's father. Lampshaded when Ramy figures it out immediately.
• Common Knowledge: The book is often marketed as a response to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell and The Secret History, though anybody who has read all three books knows they have very little in common with each other. The Secret History is set at a college and is a critique of academia, and Jonathan Strange is a long book with footnotes, but that's about it, although the description in stores does call it "a thematic response to The Secret History".
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • Robin killing his abusive father in a moment of pure rage, only to immediately regret it, with him and his friends scrambling to cover it up, terrified out of their minds? Heartwrenching. Robin searching for a way to weigh Lovell's corpse down so they can toss it overboard, and exasperatedly wondering why everything on a boat has to be made to float? Funny.
  • The scene where Robin tells the others they have to destroy the tower, and whoever stays to denotate the silver will definitely be killed, is tense and heartbreaking, as is Prof. Craft declaring that she'll stay. Her reason for doing so, however, is worth a chuckle.
    Prof. Craft: It's not as though I was going to get tenure after this.
• Designated Hero: To people who take the more moderate perspective endorsed by characters like Anthony Ribben, Robin Swift firmly enters this territory by the end. While he has the excuse of being broken and traumatized, his clear excitement at the civilian deaths caused by the translators' strike starts to upset even his last remaining friend.
• Designated Monkey: Letty's friends constantly deride her for not understanding concepts like systemic oppression and white privilege — which they refuse to explain to her on the grounds that she wouldn't understand them. Keep in mind that Letty is a young woman in Victorian England, and doesn't exactly have access to a wealth of intersectional activist literature she can use to educate herself.
• Did Not Do The Research: While an amazing amount of research went into the work, there are a few mistakes. Robin says Oderint dum metuant (let them hate, so long as they fear) and he is called out on quoting Caligula, but Caligula himself was quoting that line from Lucius Accius, which a room full of Latin scholars should know.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Griffin, a side character, quickly became a fan favorite.
• Fanfic Fuel: A footnote states that Griffin, Anthony, Sterling, and Evie once considered themselves as the main cohort, before fighting over Evie and a Noodle Incident in Burma caused a dramatic splinter. There's plenty of room to speculate as to what they got up to in the past.
• Friendly Fandoms: Obviously, the Babel fandom overlaps heavily with the The Poppy War fandom because of their shared author, and many parallels have been drawn between the characters of each respective book.
• Funny Moments: During exams, Letty has a stress-induced breakdown and starts talking about how she's an impostor who doesn't belong at Oxford and she doesn't speak a word of German—in absolutely perfect German.
• Hate Sink: Letty has moments of humanity and sympathy and is a very complex villain. Lovell is universally loathed by the audience, due to his abuse of both his sons, and his overt racism (even by the standards of the novel).
• He's Just Hiding: Only one of the bodies — that of Ramy — is identified after the massacre at the Old Library. Any of the rest of the Mauve Shirt Army could have escaped, and fans have run with this idea.
• Informed Wrongness: We're meant to believe that Robin is upset about being shot by Babel's security system because he's a soft scholar who can't handle the true hardships of rebellion. Except that he's absolutely right — Griffin IS sloppy, and his carelessness nearly blows the whole operation more than once.
• Jerkass Woobie: Letty, as detailed above in Alternative Character Interpretation.
  • Griffin too. While he has a sympathetic backstory and is on the anti-imperialist side, he's also abrasive, unreliable, and shows a callous disregard when his bungling causes Robin to be injured.
• Lighter and Softer: Downplayed: Babel is still extremely dark and depressing, but considerably less graphic thanThe Poppy War.
• Memetic Mutation: In-universe: Where are the pears, Victoire!?
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • While Letty always came across as ignorant and dismissive of her friends’ struggles as non-white people in Britain, many readers only considered her beyond redemption after she betrayed the Hermes Society and killed Ramy.
  • When Robin finally confronts him about not using a silver bar to cure his mother of cholera, Professor Lovell vaults across the MEH by coldly denying that a Chinese woman who couldn't speak English would be worth saving.
• One-Scene Wonder: Sterling Jones only shows up in two chapters, but leaves quite an impression.
• One True Threesome: Robin/Ramy/Letty would have solved a lot of problems.
• Realism-Induced Horror:
  • Much of the racism depicted is entrenched in colonialism and the politics of the Victorian era. However, certain scenes, such as Ramy and Robin being harassed on the street by a bunch of drunk white men at night, or Victoire and Ramy knowing they could well hang for a crime they had nothing to do with, simply for being people of color who happened to be nearby at the time, ring all too true for modern readers.
  • Expulsion from Babel is terrifying in a way that's bound to make any academic sweat. We see how profoundly this traumatizes the student who failed his exam, his whole life completely blown up because he failed to measure up to the university's standards, and his failure is aired out in front of everybody. He's then completely cut off from his friends and all he knows.
• Ship Tease: While the biggest hints of romantic tension are between Robin and Ramy, there is a bit of this between Robin and Victoire, such as Robin making note of her “enormous and very pretty doe-like eyes”, the two waltzing in Chapter 14, and most notably, her becoming his closest ally during the occupation of Babel. However, these interactions could still be interpreted as platonic, and whether they are or not is left ambiguous.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: The first half of the book largely consists of vignettes about Robin's upbringing and time at Oxford. It takes almost 300 pages before the plot actually kicks off with Robin unwittingly kickstarting the Opium Wars.
• Squick: We get a lot of loving descriptions of the aftermath of Robin's attack on Lovell, which fills a ship cabin with the latter's blood and bones.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Victoire Desgraves. She's Out of Focus for most of the book, serving as a somewhat bland peacekeeper between Letty and Ramy. At the very end, when we finally get a chapter from her point of view, she's become a hardened badass fleeing Oxford with a massive amount of silver she vows she'll use to resurrect the Hermes Society. She's all set to start Walking the Earth, destroying the British Empire with Letty in pursuit as her Inspector Javert nemesis......and then the book abruptly ends before putting any of this potential to use. It could be a Sequel Hook, but a sequel seems unlikely.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Despite the book stating that the magical properties of silver have been known for over a thousand years, there's very little Alternate History to the book — aside from the silver-enhanced machines and buildings, history seems to have proceeded exactly the same way.