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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Every once in a while, a book comes out that makes people go "Why?"

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.

The Poppy War is another fantasy book that uses allegories for unit 731 as well as comfort women, but those books aren’t romance and are fully focused on war and its atrocities which is why I feel like in TPW it works

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

Having recently listened to a deep dive into Unit 731 I simply cannot imagine someone understanding the events of that and thinking “yeah that’s a good thing to use as a point of comparison for my dark romance novel”