I read the book everyone's calling a "colonizer romance" | To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods review

What is it with modern day authors thinking that "enemies to lovers" means oppressor x oppressed 😭

Yes this is exactly like zutara… if Zuko was Ozai.

I feel like the marketing and forward really make this book stomach turning for me. If you know the gravity of unit 731, of what happened to your family, how could you instead turn around and use it for clout and a bulwark when people question you for reducing the gravity of colonization to mere set dressing for your poorly written romance? It feels exploitative of family tragedy. Even in the forward where she describes the chinese army as fighting with bows and arrows against superior technology makes me think that the author desperately needs to do some internal decolonization because how are you really going to say that when the Qing army had guns too! Any colonized people has their own history of development and science, including China! It's reflected in her infantilization of Pangu as not having "science" and only having "magic"--the same orientalist mysticism she's applying to her own image of China.

Honestly, the only way i could think of this story line being saved is if she had the intention of murdering him and his family the whole time. But that would require her to have dignity, moral values and common sense.

he’s making her use a power that diminishes her life?? and she’s in love??

So, i'm Malaysian Chinese. My grandparents suffered the Japanese occupation during WW2, and that piece of dark history is well-known to us. For this author to reference it and write a book like this is well, beyond "uncomfortable" to me. I really wanted to enjoy this novel, but I DNF real quick.

Why would she try to kill him with a gun if she has magic that can kill people? 😂😂😂 Girlie lost a golden opportunity to kill the main culprits behind the invasion and war.

I cannot imagine using something like unit 731 as a plot point in a fantasy novel without taking the time, care and sensitivity to explore the horror and gravity of that situation.

Okay, so I've now watched the entire video, spoilers and all. From the sound of it, this book encounters the same pitfalls that a lot of TikTok-popular 'dark romance' books do. Most are heavily marketed based on tropes and specific scenes from the book that sound good when taken out of context. I'm not one to knock common book tropes, but I feel like there are certain topics that cannot be squeezed in to fit these tropes. In my opinion, the word 'enemies' in enemies to lovers applies to two people who are more or less equally matched in skill or power but dislike each other for other reasons. A bully and the person being bullied are closer to an abuser vs. victim dynamic. The same applies to a colonizer and a person from the land his people have colonized. Topics like colonialism and imperialism are serious and complex. They need to be discussed keeping that complexity in mind, or you end up writing a selfish main character who doesn’t care for the people her love interest is involved in brutalizing until it directly affects her in some way.

I think the story would've had been much better if the main character had just been pretending to like the prince, like she tricked him to get leverage so she could then save her people. It would've made more sense.

You either fully commit to an evil colonizer love interest and all the moral implications that entails- or you write a conflicted love interest that goes through a redemption arc and rights their wrongs (which is what I thought it would be like because of the Zutara inspiration)- you really shouldn’t have an objectively evil guy but then treat him and the romance like everything is fine

Everytime you say pagulin, I think of the anteater, pangolin. My mind has irreversibly replaced all the humans with anteaters in this story.

What annoys me is how people are like “listen to poc voices” but then with this book, they’re calling the VALID, WELL written 1-2 star reviews from asian and other poc review bombing or saying they’re white…

a little part of me died when you were reading the passage of them "'''flirting"''' wtf omg

From everything I've heard, I think this book would be much better served if it had committed to the bit and gone full villain protagonist dark romance. Trying to paint Ruying as a mostly good person who'd just pushed to do bad things makes the fact that she genuinely fell for Antony look really bad. A good person wouldn't fall for the person holding her family hostage and subjugating her people. Ruying comes off as either deliberately ignorant or extremely callous.

Also don't tie it to real-life atrocities. Kinda takes the fun out of the fantasy

Writer clearly doesn’t understand Zuko or Katara if this is their attempt to emulate anything about either of them….

Zuko got like kicked the fuck out/ran/excommunicated/whatever and WAS NOT RUNNING A 731 UNIT. Antony and Zuko are NOT the same.

As a Singaporean Chinese who had a grandmother telling me stories about the Japanese Occupation, this book’s subject is horrifying. And to make references to Unit 731? And make this a romance? I cannot even.

Great video! In Molly X. Chang's words, Antony/Ruying was never going to be endgame, while the marketing (done both by the publisher and by her) and the framing of their relationship within the narrative suggest otherwise. A lot of those problems stem from the time skip. We meet Ruying, who is afraid to use her powers and skip to the point where she's grown completely desensitized to murdering people. But why is she suddenly okay with that? The author skipped that over, probably because she was to scared to make Ruying too unlikeable and that's a shame. I think it could've tied nicely to Ruying's relationship to Antony as well, if Molly X. Chang committed to the bit and made him a manipulative abuser. We know that Ruying's home life is far from peaceful and Antony is the only person who treats her nicely. In order to not lose his regard, Ruying kills people Antony orders her to kill. A lot of abuse victims do things that they're uncomfortable with, because they're conditioned to think that if they do their abuser will love them more. Usually, the victim's action is rewarded by the abuser, and that's what makes this cycle hard to break from. Molly X. Chang could've written how after each kill Antony gives Ruying gifts or praises her. The kicker is that the reader sees right through the manipulation, even if Ruying doesn't. So all the reader has left is to wait in suspense till Ruying realizes that she'd been manipulated.

Also, I've seen a lot of people comparing To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods to the Grisha Trilogy, and I can see where the comparison comes from. Antony experimenting on Ruying's people was, apparently, supposed to be this big reveal. But the thing is, making Antony a twist villain a-la Darkling doesn't work, simply because of who he is (a colonizer) and who Ruying is (a colonizee). Alina and Darkling at the beginning were on the same side, he was considered a Ravkan hero and even then the reader was given enough clues to piece together that he was not that good of a person.

Sorry for the long comment, haha!

As an Indonesian, I heard things from my late grandma (she was born in the 1922, lived through both Dutch and Japanese occupations). She's had privileges, like for example went to school with Dutch kids, something most other indigenous kids can't do at the time, because my great grandfather was one of the local officials. But even with those privileges, she's still had traumatic stories. Imagine what happened with those without privileges in their everyday lives. So to see someone like this author using her grandparents' traumatic experiences as an aesthetic for her "romantasy" made me sick. To be real honest with you all, after knowing this book from Cait Corrain drama, I added this book to my TBR right away without thinking twice. And then ARC reviews with valid criticism started to appear, I was still want to give this book a chance. Until the reviewers doxxing drama. A disclaimer that I'm still not sure who's right here, but lets say for the sake of the argument that it wasn't true, that Molly wasn't doxxing anyone, but her way of handling the issue was just not it. I didn't expect her to bow to all criticism because trolls and bullies do exist. But when she chose the defensive way, refusing to at least listen to valid ones, and just gaslighted us like "haters gonna hate lol", that's when I decided to bye Felicia-ed her, never to touch her books if she doesn't have any plans to do better and be more respectful when handling things based on tragic historical events.

P.S.: And LOL to those who accuse valid critics of being a hater on interracial couples. DUH, the valid criticism exists because Antony actually experimenting on Ruying's people, FFS. People's opinions including mine would be different if he's someone who questions his nations actions towards Pangu and other nations they colonized.