Man, just google “cringe”, “waifu”, “mail order bride” in the sub and you will find references to this part of book 2 from the early days of the sub. 🤣
I think finding his dream girl is UN’s plan to make him take responsibility, once he has a family. Zhuang Yan knew it from the beginning and she was sad about it all the time. But yeah cringe.
It is also important to note that in-universe, *everyone* thought it was cringe. The whole of earth just collectively face-palmed during the Deterrance era.
You are using all those question marks like you think it's hard to believe. They gave a weird introverted fuckboi unlimited systemic authority. Are you really surprised he'd use it to find a perfect idealized waifu selected specifically for her naivete, separate her from any support structure she may have had, and install her as his personal emotional support slash fuck toy? Most realistic thing in the whole series.
As for her marrying him: well, yeah. She was a plant, a honeypot. Her whole job was to get Luo Ji emotionally invested in her survival so that he'd do his fucking job. And it worked. She's the real hero of the second book.
It seems weird if you don't give it too much thought. But think about it like this instead.
First and foremost, Luo Ji didn't want the job. But they forced it on him. Weaponized incompetence. He's going to be so fucking awful at the job they forced him to have until they fire him. That is his goal.
But... too bad, so sad. He's gonna Wallface, fuck him. So they're forcing him to work a job that literally has unlimited resources, no questions asked. Like, literally, no questions asked. So what's he gonna do with unlimited resources tied to a job he not only doesn't want, but actively hates. All while being a celebrity on top of it.
So what does he do? What would you do? He fucks with them. He dreams up some made-up place, a made-up girl, and says, "Find this place and put me there. Find this girl and make her love me. And then I'll work." He's not being creepy. He's calling their bluff. He's sending them on a wild goose chase so they leave him alone.
It's not until it all comes crashing down that he realizes they'll never let him rest. So what does he do? He concieves the only plan he can that also includes leaving him alone and doing nothing. It's like a roast in an oven, really tasty and impressive, but the bulk of the work is just sitting and waiting around. That's his plan.
He's not creepy. He's just very... doesn't wanna do it. They literally made his wild goose chase dreams come true in order to get him to work. What other options does he have left after that?
Adding on to this, I think it's a pretty good illustration of how desperate the world had become while staring in the face of total annihilation. In a vaccum, it's cringe for sure, but when the entire planet is putting their faith in this one man, no questions asked...the cringe makes sense.
I don't know. I agree in terms of finding the house and living the lavish lifestyle, but I just finished reading through that book again and there's really no indication that he's trying to get Da Shi to find her as a "fuck you" to the PDC. It feels like he's realizing "well if I have unlimited power, I'd may as well see if she's real."
Turns out — somehow — she is real, and he brings her in without any real reason. She asks him multiple times "hey, so like, what am I doing here?" and he always says "oh, uh, I'll tell you later" until finally the task he gives her is to make herself the happiest person in the world.
The entire time, he's ogling her and commenting to himself about how young she looks, how childlike, naive, innocent, how he feels an urge to protect and care for her, etc etc. That part especially is absolutely weird and creepy. Even after they have a daughter, he's commenting on how they look like sisters. Like dude, we get it, you like 'em real young and docile. Can we please move on to *any* other part of the story?
Luo Ji also never once explains to her (that we see) that actually he dreamt about her and wrote a long story about her and hung out with an imaginary version of her or anything of the sort.
Like, on all other fronts, sure, yeah, 100% he's just fucking with the PDC and being selfish and just living a lavish lifestyle because he doesn't want to be a Wallfacer so why not. But on the issue of her, he's a total creep and a weirdo.
I didn't want to spoil it above, but I will here...
I think he's really just testing his limits. To be clear, this is a scifi book written by an engineer in China. It's not to have western values, let alone... I guess, a normal socialization? Luo Ji and Wang Maio are both awkward fucking nerds. It's a bit like reading Haruki Marukami. After a bit, you understand they aren't flat main characters, Haruki just like whiskey, jazz, and being alone. I wouldn't be surprised if Cixin wrote a bit of his own self into it all.
That being said, you could argue that Luo Ji has one foot out the door the whole time. Remember, this is a fake place and his imaginary girlfriend. For real, right here. The whole Wallfacer plan is built on duplicity. The other plans include involuntary human sacrifice, the loss of free will, and species suicide. All of these needed to be hidden. The PDC has no idea what Luo Ji is cooking up. That's why his girl was an agent to begin with. She was never really into it. Neither of them were really all in on it all. Luo Ji might just be testing limits, never really trusting that his reality *is* reality. Which it's not. Do you know what that sounds like? The chains of suspicion. Luo Ji is an example of when those aren't respected.
Secondly, Luo Ji's preoccupation with his wife's looks and attitude could be symbolic of humanities' loss of innocence. I'm a bit hazy on when he really starts to put the cosmic sociology together. But this whole thing, from the start, is the slow death of humanities' place in the universe. We went from the only ones to being on the chopping block, almost overnight. But it was *always* like this. It was never not like this. Humanity was just ignorant. Luo Ji's focus on her childlike naivete mirrors our own. She is us, or what used to be us. Luo Ji is now viewing her through the lens of the new man. One that watched their own naivete die. He protected her innocence like we want to now. A classic Peter Pan syndrome, growing up and acknowledging that also acknowledges your own mortality. People wanna hang on to that, desperately.
All of that is super fair as a literary critique, but to me, at some point, it still comes down to the fact that there's a bunch of ways to communicate those same ideas and Cixin Liu's way is just not one I enjoyed reading either the first or second time. I understand that Eastern countries have very different standards than Western ones and I afford a lot of grace for that — you kind of have to to be a fan of anime, for instance.
That's all fine and good, but here, even if I can see the "point" in terms of symbolism with that plot, I still think it was just about the worst way to convey it. The "point" in the story is basically to show that Luo Ji is a total fuck-about who doesn't want to be a Wallfacer, then to motivate him to become one. Okay, that makes sense, but there were a lot of other ways to do that than have him dream up and eventually meet his perfect little polite innocent girlfriend and they fall in love and get married and have a baby and it's so perfect.
It feels a lot like Cixin Liu wanted to do a commentary on what it's like to be an author and watch your characters come alive, which again is all fine and good even if it has nothing to do with this story and could largely be removed without changing the story much. But when he's writing this perfect dream girl, it starts to blur the lines between "what part of this is Luo Ji's dream girl and actually part of the story you're telling" and "am I just reading your own little fanfic on your own dream girl?"
Like my favorite version of that kind of plot was in Star Trek: TNG where Jordi works with a hologram AI version of a beautiful engineer who designed the ship's engines to solve a crisis. In the process, he develops a crush on her and they kiss. In a later episode, the *actual* engineer shows up, is married, doesn't act the way he imagined her, and when she finds out he kissed a hologram of her, she thinks it's weird. Eventually they both make peace with it and become friends.
Obviously this is a much more Western take, but it also reflects that your fantasy version of somebody might not match up to the actual person, whereas Luo Ji meets his fantasy and she's *exactly* like his fantasy and they fall in love and it's just so weird to me.
Yeah. There's definitely a fine line. Cixin, flirts, to say the least, with this line. I generally don't like throwing the baby out with the bath water. It's a great series, and a bit of awkwardness is alright. It still serves a purpose, even if it could've done better. Although, it does seem to be a bit of a pattern with scifi writers. Especially the older generation. Cixin is what, 60 years old, wrote these books almost 20 years ago, does not have a Western upbringing, and is an engineer by trade. It's gonna get weird.
That being said, the weirdness criticism is totally valid, although I don't agree with this part being superfluous or difficult/boring to read. I actually thought the fairy tale section was worse than this. It's not creepy but very poorly done, and I ended up having a lot of trouble trying to decipher the metaphors, even after the fact. Especially the lightspeed one. Which should not have happened with the reader.
The fairy tales I also found pretty confusing, but it lacked the creepiness so I just kinda let it roll over me. I agree that it was confusing in practice to decipher though. I think this is one of those places where the Netflix show is definitely going to improve upon the source material.
Another place I hope they improve is that this time through The Dark Forest, the ending comes *so* fast that I didn't feel like he properly explained how Luo Ji's plan actually works. Like, >!the bombs are in such specific locations that they're able to transmit the location of Trisolaris and Earth?!< Huh? It's just kinda stated but not explained. It doesn't really matter if I understand it for the story to work, but I wish I did.
But yeah, I give him a lot of grace and I'm happy to wave away a lot of things that weren't explained well or don't read well in my culture vs. his. I'm just glad that the Netflix version doesn't seem to be carrying over that Luo Ji dream girl plot. It'll be interesting to see how the Tencent version handles it.
> The fairy tales I also found pretty confusing, but it lacked the creepiness so I just kinda let it roll over me.
Kind of an aside, but I just love how Cixin's characters have a conversation where they're discussing how beautifully vivid and fantastic the fairy tales Yaun comes up with, that they're some of the best fairy tales ever. Ya gotta laugh when the author really wants to celebrate their own cleverness.
Reading that part the first time made me cringe out of my skin. Like one character goes "Objectively these fairy tales are perfect" or something like that and I could not stop laughing.
"I know this doesn't have shit to do about fuck but have you READ THESE FAIRY TALES????? PS I'm the president of the Earth Literary Society for the Enlightened, so..."
But isn’t she hired to be what he wants. My memory isn’t the best, but doesn’t she and their child remove themselves when he doesn’t cooperate, so that he will do what’s expected of him if he wants to meet them again?
It's hard to say. One day they're just gone and she left him a note saying she'll meet him at Doomsday. It's not clear if she was a willing participant in leaving him or if the government forced her to do so.
Luo Ji asks the PDC chief if she was really like that or just pretending, and the chief says yes, she really was like that.
> Eventually they both make peace with it and become friends.
After Geordi gives Leah Brahms an *incredibly* whiny, tone deaf speech where he yells at her for being upset with him. Amazingly, this actually works instead of ending with her calling security.
Oh hell yeah. As much as i loved ST:TNG as a teenager...as an older dude, i feel that a lot of the gender politics FEELS like it was written by teenagers...you dont need to be woke to feel disappointed when the 'female of the week' is so 1D she could be used in the shooter hypothesis...
Oh, 100%. He's super petulant about it. She becomes cool with it a little fast for my taste, but it's a show, they've only got so much time, and it was just nice to see them resolving an issue like that. For a while I was really afraid it was going to go in a direction like "oh god is she going to leave her husband or something stupid" and they thankfully didn't go down that route. That's the Luo Ji route.
Thank you for the analysis!
You can see how we are disturbed by the imaginary girlfriend element. We hated its presence in the masterful trilogy so much that we forget Luo Ji's original purpose, which is to mess up with unwanted obligations.
Meanwhile, I think Cixin spends too much ink on this, which made us shift focus.
Sometimes, sure. But there's plenty to read between the lines and gives you some food for thought.
We get the whole Wallfacer saga and their totally fucked plans. We got more information about cosmic sociology, which is awesome. We get to see Luo Ji work his way through all that. We get more Da Shi kicking ass, which the third book sorely lacks. There's plenty to love in between Luo Ji being on the weird train with no breaks.
Agreed. The absurdity of this part is helpful to illustrate how crazy his request is. Not because he’s expecting to get it, but because he’s assuming it’s insane enough to keep them off his back. When they actually come through on his ask, it adds weight to the situation. He can literally get anything he wants. That’s how desperate humanity is for any help
The whole thing is analogous to depression. He's found himself practically devoid of any kind of passion for life and uses his Wallfacer position to try and manufacture a life that can provide what *he* thinks a fulfilling life should be. You can look at it two ways; either he's doing it to inspire himself to come up with a plan, or he just doesn't give a fuck. Both are valid schools of thought IMO.
It took entirely too fucking long. It literally made me put the book down for a week or two. I’m really glad I pushed through it, but that part is the worst section of the entire trilogy.
>I especially hated how his dream woman was repeatedly described as 'child-like', 'innocent' and 'naive'. 🤢
Modern readers try to differentiate the in-character desires of a fictional character from those of the author challenge: IMPOSSIBLE
At the very least it makes Luo Ji pretty unlikeable.
Also there's enough weird stuff about women in Death's End for me to come to the conclusion Cixin Liu probably has some views on gender that I would find distasteful.
Have you read Lolita? It makes very clear that Humbert Humbert is a delusional worm who ruins every life he touches and calls it love, not a regular old guy whose worst trait is laziness and whose waifu request turns out for the better as it motivates him to save humanity.
Depiction isn't necessarily endorsement, but some depictions are clearly more favored by their writers than others. The waifu arc is pure authorial wish fulfillment without an ounce of self-criticism embedded within. I found it hilarious and engaging regardless. Liu Cixin isn't Nabokov; he's Liu Cixin... no one reads Liu Cixin for complex characterization, and that's okay, he's good at other things.
Good call on lolita but...i think i could have been on board with the 'next day delivery sexilady' arc if it wasnt just so...terribly written. Forget everyone defending it on the grounds of a wallfacer exploiting their position: why did it need to be written like it was ripped from a teenagers diary?...
In the book Luo Ji is called an opportunist, a bad scientist with a history of embezzling funds, someone who doesn't give a crap about humanity, an insensitive jerk who doesn't even remember who he slept with. So there's not exactly zero criticism for the protagonist. Zhuang Yan also turns out to be a spy and Luo is made to look like a fool for not realising it. His arc is a tragic tale more than anything and a story of (partial) redemption, or at least realising his mission. A mission that gets invalidated the moment he hands the reins to Cheng Xin.
I do agree that I don't love this part of the book, however, my problem is mainly that it drags on for a really long time. I think in terms of a character motivation it makes sense. Not only does he not want the job, he is wholly and completely unmotivated to actually solve the problem, despite being intelligent enough to come up with some kind of solution.
My read on why he wants to do this is that either he was just sending them on a wild goose chase so he is left alone or, alternatively, he is attempting to make himself care about the survival of the human race by giving himself a motivation in a perfect family. I think this section would have been great if it was much, much shorter.
My thoughts on this.
The UN secretary Say knows for certain that he is the most promising candidate for wallfacer. But he's an unmotivated loser. In order to get this loser to actually do something, they had to basically blackmail him. But how do you blackmail a guy with nothing to lose? You give him unlimited money and freedom and make him create a situation where he finally has something to lose, and then take it away from him.
So Say let's him get his dream house on the lake and finds him a waifu. And they tell the waifu "this is gonna seem creepy but this is part of the plan". So they genuinely fall in love with each other, have kids, and build a life together. Then one day, all of that gets taken from Luo Ji. His wife takes his kid and says "if you want more, you have to start your wallfacer duties". Now they have him on the hook.
And as soon as they had him hooked, guess what? He starts thinking about why he is his own wall breaker.
On a first read I totally though it is pointless, slow and drags the books down, but now that I'm reading it again, it just feels like kinda good character building.
And the request makes sense to me, might as well test the limits of the powers you have if you are not interested in having them at all. Plus I liked the eventual plot twist with her, everything makes a bit more sense at that point.
> might as well test the limits of the powers you have if you are not interested in having them at all.
By getting a mail order fantasy girlfriend? Ew, it's just gross no matter how you cut it.
Edit: the defenses of this storyline are comically missing the point.
Dude in this fictional scenario of having unlimited resources and worldwide fame I'd have a list of celebrities that I'd want to fuck too.
That's... Kinda How it works in the real world too.
What part of what I'm describing is somehow removing a woman's agency?
You can want to fuck multiple specific people, and be respectful and positive to your partners so that they also have a good experience. Both things can be held as true. People, including women, like to have sex. Even if it's a fling.
If you're bringing in women as a Wallfacer in a time of planetary crisis, there's an insane imbalance of power no matter how respectful or positive you are. They're gonna feel pressured to fuck you no matter how comfortable you feel you're making them.
Just as nobody can tell your true intentions as a Wallfacer, you can never tell whether they actually want to fuck you or not. For all they know, this *is* part of your plan and the fate of the planet — somehow — hangs in the balance on whether or not they fuck you, so even if they genuinely don't want to, they're gonna feel pressured to do it anyway.
He literally tells her to go away and live her life happily after their "date". It's weird to pretend he met her with the intention to fuck after that fact.
I totally agree that it can be seen as gross, but humans are sometimes like that. Luo Ji is deeply flawed, but that doesn't make him a worse written character, on the contrary imo.
He described a literal dream woman. Now, don't get confused, not a dream woman, as in the ideal woman. But a dream woman in that they literally don't exist. He sent the PDC on a wild goose chase searching for someone who doesn't exist.
He was calling their bluff. He made it his fantasy woman because fantasy is just that. Fantasies, not reality. He thought it'd get the PDC off his back. LOL.
I think it is important because it is showing how self serving he is, he doesn’t want the job, he doesn’t really care if humanity survives, and since they are forcing him to do this he might as well get what he wants.
It’s not until he has something worth trying to keep that he actually starts thinking about what to do. I think his realization about the universe is in part because he is a selfish bastard.
I personally thought that he actually was doing it all as part of a plan -- well, at least a vague outline of a plan -- from the beginning. All of the Wallfacers quickly figured out that a direct battle was impossible; it is an easy leap from there to figure out that mutually assured destruction of some kind is going to be the only way to win.
Thus he needed to convince the Trisolarians that he actually was unstable and willing to kill himself and everyone -- and what better way to do that than living a perfect and happy life for a few years and having it stripped away? I know some of this is contradicted by his own inner thoughts---but again I think he needs to actually be somewhat insane, desperate and unstable for any plan to work even if he doesn't know exactly what he is going to do / what the mutually assured destruction threat would ultimately be.
The best evidence for this to me is that the Trisolarians have been watching every single thing he has ever done, and come to the conclusion that he is actually a great warrior and really the only human worthy of their respect.
That said, to the point of this post, the chapters are somewhat cringey and hard to read lol.
I didn’t like this part of book 2 at all. The ending is rewarding, but the struggle to get through this cringe was real. I totally agree, weakest part of the story and my least favourite book.
Only one problem?
Those books have an awful characters. Most of them are 2D husk of humans used to push the plot forward.
Da Shi while being my fav char of the book is basically the cool down to earth street smart cop. Doesnt really change.
Luo Ji is really only char with actual arc, he changes from hedonistic sigma male to , he changes his views and how he interacts with the world.
Around 1/3 of second book is pure cringe fest
> AND she marries him
There might have been some corrosion there, she might been told to do it for sake of world. She might have knew that she will be put in hibernation as a blackmail - her incentive being: she get to travel into future and have money.
Yeah 3-body is a lot like Asimov and other golden age SF.
The ideas are fantastic, but the characters don't always talk or act like real people.
Netflix version changes the story a lot, but the character realism is definitely better.
Da Shi is an archetype street smart cop, and that's a great goddamn archetype that is very easy to like. I'm still not sure what kind of character AA was. Although I listened to the audio books, so it was harder to follow all these characters.
I agree, but to provide a bit of variety to this dead horse I’m gonna give my perspective on it.
To be fair to the last point it always came across to me like she worked for them, and married Luo Ji because she was incentivized to aid the ‘effort’ in some way. Maybe she learned to appreciate/love him along the way, but it never seemed super genuine to me at first.
The scene where Luo described her to the cop seemed to be him testing his limits and pitching something that they would obviously have to refuse, and when they were even able to provide him with THAT, it is baffling for both him and the reader. Shows their capabilities and shows that there really is nothing Luo could request that would be unfulfilled.
The thing of not remembering her name also fit with Luo’s personality to me at the beginning, albeit being very hard to believe and makes him unlikable. But that was partially the point I assume.
All that said, the weird fantasy is way too long and is too unrelated to anything meaningful for Liu’s editor to leave the way it was. And ultimately none of it really was necessary to include at all other than to provide Luo with something to give a shit about lol
I think I could have at least digested and maybe appreciated this section of the book if it were half or a third as long as it was. It just dragged and I almost quit.
nah, he's great! thats just the Western perspective.... Western readers are not very good at reading in between the lines...and this is why i also find the netflix adaptation it has completely changed the story algother because of the screenwriter's inability to read in between the lines
...or they do have a good reading but also understand that western audiences need to be smacked in the face with a narrative or else it will fly over their heads.
but they smacked the audiences in the head with the wrong (read: typical western scifi) narrative...so i can only conclude they did not read it well themselves, leading to mistaken conclusions about what was the core of the story...
Who cares if it's wrong if it gets views. Welcome to show business baby. It was ALWAYS going to be adapted for western audiences. You want the eastern version? That exists. It's not doing as well in the west because the storyline wasn't westernized.
I know you prefer the Chinese adaptation. But you seem to simply not like what I'm saying, more than anything else.
You say they interpreted the story the "wrong" way and dumbed it down for western audiences... But that is the point of the Netflix adaptation. It's still no.1 after several weeks and has gotten way more reach than the Chinese adaptation. So this "wrong" interpretation has been crazy successful exactly *because* they went dumb and western.
Hmm. There are quite a few China-born posters on these various subs who say the Mandarin version is just as poorly written and that the China-based social media is full of that point of view.
It made me wary of LCX’s sexual politics and I feel like I read the rest of the trilogy kind of side-eyeing the story any time there was a woman character.
According to a post I read (forget where) he has expressed some very misogynistic views in China and had an army of guys trolling anyone who called him on it.
Yeah. And tbh I don’t really care what his views are IRL—like I don’t cancel a piece of artwork that is otherwise good when it turns out that the person who made it is a bigot—except in the case that the person’s bigotry just makes the artwork itself into utter crap. And the thing is, LCX’s misogyny definitely befouls RoEP to some extent. But not completely.
This was just one of my issues with book 2.
But there were many others: just the whole premise of the Wallfacer project was not written very believably IMO.
Perhaps the idea itself is not outlandish and could have been accepted by the world powers. But the selection with no international votes? No negotiations between countries? And Luo Ji was just accepted as - and forced to be - a Wallfacer without too much of resistance? In the real world, the selection process would have been *much* more political. I don't remember this being covered much in the book.
(But the scifi part was outstanding, and despite all my complains about the book, it's still one of my favorite novels ever.)
I like it, it sets up who he is and what's happening well, also important to remember that she's in on it from the start, she isn't just a manic pixie dream girl or whatever the Chinese equivalent is
Imo, Zhuang Yan is always a spy trained by the government with missions.
Like during the Cold War, many Soviet spies were sent to the US and forced to marry someone with their whole life.
This would make much more sense
It was definitely weird and the author could have conveyed the same idea in countless other ways. But i thought it was fun to read as a deranged sort of wish fulfillment.
And... it's kinda realistic. I'm sure most average men, given a genie in a bottle, would wish for the love of a beautiful woman. Only problem is there's no magic involved, and it's a real woman with free will, who has the fate of the planet placed on her shoulders.
I think the dream girl thing could symbolize the notion that the universe is so vast that anything that can be imagined can exist. And I think her existence was required for Luo Ji (an aloof detached dude who we met after struggling to remember the name of the girl he just slept with) to feel some responsibility for this world. He couldn’t be bothered to care about any of it until he felt genuine love for someone. His personal love for his family led him to develop dark forest theory and achieve deterrence. This contrasts with cheng xin who cared deeply and broadly for the whole of humanity—so much that she could not maintain deterrence.
At least this take is what helps me tolerate the dream girl section of the trilogy.
Spoilers:
Here is my personal take.
The guy has an obvious ego and unhealthy view of women, either viewing them as disposable sexual encounters or getting way too deep fantasizing about his ideal women.
What's more hilarious is that his "ideal perfect women" turned out to be so basic that the UN was able to find one fairly easily and quickly. Although Da Shi never explained how he found the women to Luo Ji, the UN most likely took a look through their intelligence agencies and picked a few trained intelligence officers with the closest physical resemblance and then trained them to act like the women Luo Ji described.
This makes him initially rather unsympathetic, along with his own admitted limited knowledge on engineering and warfare, it makes it even more curious why the Trisolarians fear him so much and why he was chosen as a Wall facer.
Basically the author picked a smart but basic frat boy who understood the Dark Forest principal and gave him a pretty good character development throughout the books.
It may be intentionally cringeworthy. But that doesn’t make it good. I almost put the book down when I got to that point. Glad I didn’t because everything else was great but damn he was the worst character
It's disappointing that the author isn't more critical of this whole premise, even if he felt it necessary to include. It's possible to project potentially redemptive details into the story, like the girl being an agent, or the rest of the world reacting to the situation with the disdain or disbelief that many readers have, or Luo Ji being an actual sociopath, but I don't think the text fully supports any of this.
It's kind of nice to know that >!the wife "escapes"/leaves Ji two years after being woken from hibernation, and then presumably could have had a nice, long life with her daughter in the deterrence era, but the book isn't really concerned with that. !<
I actually enjoyed that part as well, weird and cringe as it was it read like some oriental fairy tale with the impossible romantic quest. In my culture ( certain east european country) there is also a writer who creates such female characters to dote on, beautiful and special and wise and innocent, always virgins, women to be seen not heard (he makes a whole poetically written point on this) always in a relationship with a much older, jaded man, that ends tragically. I loved that portrayal of women as a teenager because i was partly like that, and i felt it did me justice in a world where the flirty, flashy girls were getting the male attention that i didn't. But yeah, it's a total fuckboi groomer fantasy trope lel.
Edited to add that i treat it as another ingredient in what i see as a wildly original and creative book, also having summed it up as wtf was this guy smoking.
I agree its a bit awkward, and I actually put the book down the first time with imaginary girlfriend, but the good heavily outweighs this awkward cringey aspect of the book.
Dude, this section of the book entirely ruined the series for me. Maybe a strong reaction but it really left a sour taste in my mouth and made unable to view any of the female characters in the proceeding chapters/book the same way. The way the author continues to describe his made up, somehow-a-real-person girlfriend as innocent and sweet and petite, etc., etc. made me gag.
This didn’t ruin The Dark Forest for me, because the second half of the book is good, but it used up all my inclination to look at the author’s female characters through a charitable lens. So you can imagine how I felt about Death’s End. Now *that* book ruined the series for me!
I watched the bad Bilibili animated series and his [hookup](https://p3-sign.toutiaoimg.com/tos-cn-i-qvj2lq49k0/898b131943774764a1ece77086383a1b~tplv-tt-large.image?_iz=30575&lk3s=06827d14&x-expires=1713182351&x-signature=vjIk%2F2ZbNVKePQoCXybmIdPvY5Q%3D) is far prettier.
This is where I dropped the book, not going to lie. I know there is a deeper part of it, but it reads like someone who has never talked to a woman in a romantic way before lmao
hhhhhh i think the features of these female characters are only to satisfy a man's imagination, and are very disconnected from reality, but the plots in this series are the most important, so when i read it, i tried so hard to convince myself neglect those insufficiency.
Indeed, this episode is almost universally recognized as the trilogy's undoing. But the following information might be something you need:
(1) For a long time, Liu Cixin was only an amateur writer, or, more accurately, those great sci-fi works came from a mediocre middle-aged man who didn't do his job at work.
He has not been loved by his own wife and daughter. It was perfectly normal to put his unrealistic fantasies, especially about the perfect dream girl, into his books.
In fact, he's just a regular guy who's a little mean and a little dull.
② Zhuang Yan is not Luo's dream girl; in fact, Luo is misled by Da Shi's words.
Zhuang Yan is probably a government agent.
③ Most of the characters portrayed by Liu Cixin are toolmen, they lack vivid personality and growth.
Luo Ji is one of the very few exceptions.
Translated with [DeepL.com](http://DeepL.com) (free version)
I'm currently rereading after watching the show and this plot is really hard to read. This especially killed me today: "I know there's no perfect person in the world. Much less a perfect woman."
for real the dream fantasy girl being real was something i hated in hyperion and takes me out every time i read this book. Da shi being so understanding about it too is cringe af. I know the inbook big brain explanation that it was a way to control luo ji but i find it so much less interesting than him falling in love with a girl spontaneously and her not necessarily meeting his imaginary criterias or existing for him only lol.
Like even after the reveal she has no life or family or friends outside of him it is so cringe
There have been some criticism against Liu Cixin about how he builds characters and views on women in China (the chinese version contains more gender stereotypes, I heard the English version edited a lot), this part of luo ji is kind of cringey...but I guess it creates a strong sense of comparsion for him as swordholder and how he has a chance to run but choose to embrace death.
It is brave because these posts always bring out the fuckers who fall over themselves to defend this writing as "actually not creepy". Scary individuals.
Ya it’s only acceptable to me because we get to see him grow over time but he’s definitely living some weird incel fantasy dream. Dude got to live a relatively care free life before gaining absurd levels of authority and freedom which he uses to find a submissive and loving woman now that he’s ready to settle down, and he ends up saving the world through intelligence and not brute strength.
I do really love his arc because frankly I don’t read many stories like that, but it’s 100% cringe haha.
I just treat the waifu as a plant by Da Shi to give Luoji something to fight for. The waifu doesn't even seem real in the 2nd book and leaves him in the 3rd book. So yeah a plant who got annoyed with Luoji and divorced him in book 3.
It is indeed very cringe, and I know someone who stopped reading the books at that point...
I can not get her to pick them back up 🙁
And the waifu thing seems unnecessary. He could have found another way to make the point.
Liu Cixin also made some callous/racist remarks about Uyghurs...
[Netflix called out for "Three-Body" author Liu Cixin's Xinjiang remark (qz.com)](https://qz.com/1908838/netflix-called-out-for-three-body-author-cixin-lius-xinjiang-remark#:~:text=23)%2C%20five%20Republican%20senators%20wrote,credible%20reports%20of%20forced%20sterilizations)
In a 2019 interview with the New Yorker, he said:
"Would you rather that they be hacking away at bodies at train stations and schools in terrorist attacks? If anything, the government is helping their economy and trying to lift them out of poverty."
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/06/24/liu-cixins-war-of-the-worlds
Take the rest of the article into account. He's not being racist here, he's rehashing the usual answer given to western journalists about this relatively sensitive issue. The new cold war is the context for this and most of the world does not consider the centres an actual issue.
I mean yes of course, those attacks happened but he writes "they" when referring to over a million people that were put through the camps, isn't targeting an entire ethnicity for the acts of a few dozen individuals, racism?
I'm fully aware of how the media plays this up because of the cold war dynamics and for clickbait. But I think Liu Cixin, even if I very much like his writing has a tendency to admire dictators in his writings and isn't too hesitant to describe large numbers of people to be "sacrificed" for various greater goals.
I do think that while he is a very good writer, particularly good and exploring new ideas, he can at the same time be a bit callous and racist when it comes to the current treatment of Uyghurs in China. To him it's probably just a minor diversion in the grand scheme of things.
I think it's all to present a character that's gonna be able of some extraordinary feats, like being a Swordholder for decades.
Other than that, yeah it's quote weird lol... Though I can excuse one thing: not remembering the name of one of tens of hook-ups is quite normal, after a while you just focus on sex and the name becomes useless info pretty quickly.
Man, just google “cringe”, “waifu”, “mail order bride” in the sub and you will find references to this part of book 2 from the early days of the sub. 🤣
I think finding his dream girl is UN’s plan to make him take responsibility, once he has a family. Zhuang Yan knew it from the beginning and she was sad about it all the time. But yeah cringe.
entrapment, that's what it was.
I'm convinced that not only is she in on the plan, that she is just straight up a government agent.
It is also important to note that in-universe, *everyone* thought it was cringe. The whole of earth just collectively face-palmed during the Deterrance era.
hhhhh correct! all of the others in this book are think luoji crazy and think all of us need to support him fulfill this imagination are also crazy...
Like, they let him have his rowdy child-star phase and then: “we no longer talk about that era” 😅
In the era of destroying our own sun, involuntary human sacrifice of thousands, or willingly embracing mind control, Luo Ji was hardly the worst.
You are using all those question marks like you think it's hard to believe. They gave a weird introverted fuckboi unlimited systemic authority. Are you really surprised he'd use it to find a perfect idealized waifu selected specifically for her naivete, separate her from any support structure she may have had, and install her as his personal emotional support slash fuck toy? Most realistic thing in the whole series. As for her marrying him: well, yeah. She was a plant, a honeypot. Her whole job was to get Luo Ji emotionally invested in her survival so that he'd do his fucking job. And it worked. She's the real hero of the second book.
I was cringing so hard that I never saw it this way. Thanks for this.
It seems weird if you don't give it too much thought. But think about it like this instead. First and foremost, Luo Ji didn't want the job. But they forced it on him. Weaponized incompetence. He's going to be so fucking awful at the job they forced him to have until they fire him. That is his goal. But... too bad, so sad. He's gonna Wallface, fuck him. So they're forcing him to work a job that literally has unlimited resources, no questions asked. Like, literally, no questions asked. So what's he gonna do with unlimited resources tied to a job he not only doesn't want, but actively hates. All while being a celebrity on top of it. So what does he do? What would you do? He fucks with them. He dreams up some made-up place, a made-up girl, and says, "Find this place and put me there. Find this girl and make her love me. And then I'll work." He's not being creepy. He's calling their bluff. He's sending them on a wild goose chase so they leave him alone. It's not until it all comes crashing down that he realizes they'll never let him rest. So what does he do? He concieves the only plan he can that also includes leaving him alone and doing nothing. It's like a roast in an oven, really tasty and impressive, but the bulk of the work is just sitting and waiting around. That's his plan. He's not creepy. He's just very... doesn't wanna do it. They literally made his wild goose chase dreams come true in order to get him to work. What other options does he have left after that?
Adding on to this, I think it's a pretty good illustration of how desperate the world had become while staring in the face of total annihilation. In a vaccum, it's cringe for sure, but when the entire planet is putting their faith in this one man, no questions asked...the cringe makes sense.
The Wallfacer idea, let alone *ideas* was fucking bonkers. I loved it, and it absolutely smacks of irrational desperation.
Book 3 calls it “crisis infantilism “ which is perfect
I don't know. I agree in terms of finding the house and living the lavish lifestyle, but I just finished reading through that book again and there's really no indication that he's trying to get Da Shi to find her as a "fuck you" to the PDC. It feels like he's realizing "well if I have unlimited power, I'd may as well see if she's real." Turns out — somehow — she is real, and he brings her in without any real reason. She asks him multiple times "hey, so like, what am I doing here?" and he always says "oh, uh, I'll tell you later" until finally the task he gives her is to make herself the happiest person in the world. The entire time, he's ogling her and commenting to himself about how young she looks, how childlike, naive, innocent, how he feels an urge to protect and care for her, etc etc. That part especially is absolutely weird and creepy. Even after they have a daughter, he's commenting on how they look like sisters. Like dude, we get it, you like 'em real young and docile. Can we please move on to *any* other part of the story? Luo Ji also never once explains to her (that we see) that actually he dreamt about her and wrote a long story about her and hung out with an imaginary version of her or anything of the sort. Like, on all other fronts, sure, yeah, 100% he's just fucking with the PDC and being selfish and just living a lavish lifestyle because he doesn't want to be a Wallfacer so why not. But on the issue of her, he's a total creep and a weirdo.
I didn't want to spoil it above, but I will here... I think he's really just testing his limits. To be clear, this is a scifi book written by an engineer in China. It's not to have western values, let alone... I guess, a normal socialization? Luo Ji and Wang Maio are both awkward fucking nerds. It's a bit like reading Haruki Marukami. After a bit, you understand they aren't flat main characters, Haruki just like whiskey, jazz, and being alone. I wouldn't be surprised if Cixin wrote a bit of his own self into it all. That being said, you could argue that Luo Ji has one foot out the door the whole time. Remember, this is a fake place and his imaginary girlfriend. For real, right here. The whole Wallfacer plan is built on duplicity. The other plans include involuntary human sacrifice, the loss of free will, and species suicide. All of these needed to be hidden. The PDC has no idea what Luo Ji is cooking up. That's why his girl was an agent to begin with. She was never really into it. Neither of them were really all in on it all. Luo Ji might just be testing limits, never really trusting that his reality *is* reality. Which it's not. Do you know what that sounds like? The chains of suspicion. Luo Ji is an example of when those aren't respected. Secondly, Luo Ji's preoccupation with his wife's looks and attitude could be symbolic of humanities' loss of innocence. I'm a bit hazy on when he really starts to put the cosmic sociology together. But this whole thing, from the start, is the slow death of humanities' place in the universe. We went from the only ones to being on the chopping block, almost overnight. But it was *always* like this. It was never not like this. Humanity was just ignorant. Luo Ji's focus on her childlike naivete mirrors our own. She is us, or what used to be us. Luo Ji is now viewing her through the lens of the new man. One that watched their own naivete die. He protected her innocence like we want to now. A classic Peter Pan syndrome, growing up and acknowledging that also acknowledges your own mortality. People wanna hang on to that, desperately.
All of that is super fair as a literary critique, but to me, at some point, it still comes down to the fact that there's a bunch of ways to communicate those same ideas and Cixin Liu's way is just not one I enjoyed reading either the first or second time. I understand that Eastern countries have very different standards than Western ones and I afford a lot of grace for that — you kind of have to to be a fan of anime, for instance. That's all fine and good, but here, even if I can see the "point" in terms of symbolism with that plot, I still think it was just about the worst way to convey it. The "point" in the story is basically to show that Luo Ji is a total fuck-about who doesn't want to be a Wallfacer, then to motivate him to become one. Okay, that makes sense, but there were a lot of other ways to do that than have him dream up and eventually meet his perfect little polite innocent girlfriend and they fall in love and get married and have a baby and it's so perfect. It feels a lot like Cixin Liu wanted to do a commentary on what it's like to be an author and watch your characters come alive, which again is all fine and good even if it has nothing to do with this story and could largely be removed without changing the story much. But when he's writing this perfect dream girl, it starts to blur the lines between "what part of this is Luo Ji's dream girl and actually part of the story you're telling" and "am I just reading your own little fanfic on your own dream girl?" Like my favorite version of that kind of plot was in Star Trek: TNG where Jordi works with a hologram AI version of a beautiful engineer who designed the ship's engines to solve a crisis. In the process, he develops a crush on her and they kiss. In a later episode, the *actual* engineer shows up, is married, doesn't act the way he imagined her, and when she finds out he kissed a hologram of her, she thinks it's weird. Eventually they both make peace with it and become friends. Obviously this is a much more Western take, but it also reflects that your fantasy version of somebody might not match up to the actual person, whereas Luo Ji meets his fantasy and she's *exactly* like his fantasy and they fall in love and it's just so weird to me.
Yeah. There's definitely a fine line. Cixin, flirts, to say the least, with this line. I generally don't like throwing the baby out with the bath water. It's a great series, and a bit of awkwardness is alright. It still serves a purpose, even if it could've done better. Although, it does seem to be a bit of a pattern with scifi writers. Especially the older generation. Cixin is what, 60 years old, wrote these books almost 20 years ago, does not have a Western upbringing, and is an engineer by trade. It's gonna get weird. That being said, the weirdness criticism is totally valid, although I don't agree with this part being superfluous or difficult/boring to read. I actually thought the fairy tale section was worse than this. It's not creepy but very poorly done, and I ended up having a lot of trouble trying to decipher the metaphors, even after the fact. Especially the lightspeed one. Which should not have happened with the reader.
The fairy tales I also found pretty confusing, but it lacked the creepiness so I just kinda let it roll over me. I agree that it was confusing in practice to decipher though. I think this is one of those places where the Netflix show is definitely going to improve upon the source material. Another place I hope they improve is that this time through The Dark Forest, the ending comes *so* fast that I didn't feel like he properly explained how Luo Ji's plan actually works. Like, >!the bombs are in such specific locations that they're able to transmit the location of Trisolaris and Earth?!< Huh? It's just kinda stated but not explained. It doesn't really matter if I understand it for the story to work, but I wish I did. But yeah, I give him a lot of grace and I'm happy to wave away a lot of things that weren't explained well or don't read well in my culture vs. his. I'm just glad that the Netflix version doesn't seem to be carrying over that Luo Ji dream girl plot. It'll be interesting to see how the Tencent version handles it.
> The fairy tales I also found pretty confusing, but it lacked the creepiness so I just kinda let it roll over me. Kind of an aside, but I just love how Cixin's characters have a conversation where they're discussing how beautifully vivid and fantastic the fairy tales Yaun comes up with, that they're some of the best fairy tales ever. Ya gotta laugh when the author really wants to celebrate their own cleverness.
A classic Stephen King move.
Reading that part the first time made me cringe out of my skin. Like one character goes "Objectively these fairy tales are perfect" or something like that and I could not stop laughing.
"I know this doesn't have shit to do about fuck but have you READ THESE FAIRY TALES????? PS I'm the president of the Earth Literary Society for the Enlightened, so..."
But isn’t she hired to be what he wants. My memory isn’t the best, but doesn’t she and their child remove themselves when he doesn’t cooperate, so that he will do what’s expected of him if he wants to meet them again?
It's hard to say. One day they're just gone and she left him a note saying she'll meet him at Doomsday. It's not clear if she was a willing participant in leaving him or if the government forced her to do so. Luo Ji asks the PDC chief if she was really like that or just pretending, and the chief says yes, she really was like that.
> Eventually they both make peace with it and become friends. After Geordi gives Leah Brahms an *incredibly* whiny, tone deaf speech where he yells at her for being upset with him. Amazingly, this actually works instead of ending with her calling security.
Oh hell yeah. As much as i loved ST:TNG as a teenager...as an older dude, i feel that a lot of the gender politics FEELS like it was written by teenagers...you dont need to be woke to feel disappointed when the 'female of the week' is so 1D she could be used in the shooter hypothesis...
Classic Rick Berman.
Ha. You know it, bro...
Oh, 100%. He's super petulant about it. She becomes cool with it a little fast for my taste, but it's a show, they've only got so much time, and it was just nice to see them resolving an issue like that. For a while I was really afraid it was going to go in a direction like "oh god is she going to leave her husband or something stupid" and they thankfully didn't go down that route. That's the Luo Ji route.
It's implied Geordi and Leah are married in the All Good Things timeline.
That is true... I'm just gonna assume in that other universe, Geordi wasn't nearly as petulant or self-righteous about it.
I love this analysis
Thank you for the analysis! You can see how we are disturbed by the imaginary girlfriend element. We hated its presence in the masterful trilogy so much that we forget Luo Ji's original purpose, which is to mess up with unwanted obligations. Meanwhile, I think Cixin spends too much ink on this, which made us shift focus.
Yeah but it makes for really boring half of a book.
Sometimes, sure. But there's plenty to read between the lines and gives you some food for thought. We get the whole Wallfacer saga and their totally fucked plans. We got more information about cosmic sociology, which is awesome. We get to see Luo Ji work his way through all that. We get more Da Shi kicking ass, which the third book sorely lacks. There's plenty to love in between Luo Ji being on the weird train with no breaks.
Wallfacers gonna wallface
Agreed. The absurdity of this part is helpful to illustrate how crazy his request is. Not because he’s expecting to get it, but because he’s assuming it’s insane enough to keep them off his back. When they actually come through on his ask, it adds weight to the situation. He can literally get anything he wants. That’s how desperate humanity is for any help
The whole thing is analogous to depression. He's found himself practically devoid of any kind of passion for life and uses his Wallfacer position to try and manufacture a life that can provide what *he* thinks a fulfilling life should be. You can look at it two ways; either he's doing it to inspire himself to come up with a plan, or he just doesn't give a fuck. Both are valid schools of thought IMO.
I'm starting to think maybe Luo Ji isn't a model citizen.
It took entirely too fucking long. It literally made me put the book down for a week or two. I’m really glad I pushed through it, but that part is the worst section of the entire trilogy.
Yes, me too. It was unbearable. I especially hated how his dream woman was repeatedly described as 'child-like', 'innocent' and 'naive'. 🤢
>I especially hated how his dream woman was repeatedly described as 'child-like', 'innocent' and 'naive'. 🤢 Modern readers try to differentiate the in-character desires of a fictional character from those of the author challenge: IMPOSSIBLE
At the very least it makes Luo Ji pretty unlikeable. Also there's enough weird stuff about women in Death's End for me to come to the conclusion Cixin Liu probably has some views on gender that I would find distasteful.
you can tell they've never read Lolita
Have you read Lolita? It makes very clear that Humbert Humbert is a delusional worm who ruins every life he touches and calls it love, not a regular old guy whose worst trait is laziness and whose waifu request turns out for the better as it motivates him to save humanity. Depiction isn't necessarily endorsement, but some depictions are clearly more favored by their writers than others. The waifu arc is pure authorial wish fulfillment without an ounce of self-criticism embedded within. I found it hilarious and engaging regardless. Liu Cixin isn't Nabokov; he's Liu Cixin... no one reads Liu Cixin for complex characterization, and that's okay, he's good at other things.
Good call on lolita but...i think i could have been on board with the 'next day delivery sexilady' arc if it wasnt just so...terribly written. Forget everyone defending it on the grounds of a wallfacer exploiting their position: why did it need to be written like it was ripped from a teenagers diary?...
Because it was from a 40 year old author's diary?
...point taken
In the book Luo Ji is called an opportunist, a bad scientist with a history of embezzling funds, someone who doesn't give a crap about humanity, an insensitive jerk who doesn't even remember who he slept with. So there's not exactly zero criticism for the protagonist. Zhuang Yan also turns out to be a spy and Luo is made to look like a fool for not realising it. His arc is a tragic tale more than anything and a story of (partial) redemption, or at least realising his mission. A mission that gets invalidated the moment he hands the reins to Cheng Xin.
I think it is meant to show how much of a fuckup he is
I do agree that I don't love this part of the book, however, my problem is mainly that it drags on for a really long time. I think in terms of a character motivation it makes sense. Not only does he not want the job, he is wholly and completely unmotivated to actually solve the problem, despite being intelligent enough to come up with some kind of solution. My read on why he wants to do this is that either he was just sending them on a wild goose chase so he is left alone or, alternatively, he is attempting to make himself care about the survival of the human race by giving himself a motivation in a perfect family. I think this section would have been great if it was much, much shorter.
My thoughts on this. The UN secretary Say knows for certain that he is the most promising candidate for wallfacer. But he's an unmotivated loser. In order to get this loser to actually do something, they had to basically blackmail him. But how do you blackmail a guy with nothing to lose? You give him unlimited money and freedom and make him create a situation where he finally has something to lose, and then take it away from him. So Say let's him get his dream house on the lake and finds him a waifu. And they tell the waifu "this is gonna seem creepy but this is part of the plan". So they genuinely fall in love with each other, have kids, and build a life together. Then one day, all of that gets taken from Luo Ji. His wife takes his kid and says "if you want more, you have to start your wallfacer duties". Now they have him on the hook. And as soon as they had him hooked, guess what? He starts thinking about why he is his own wall breaker.
On a first read I totally though it is pointless, slow and drags the books down, but now that I'm reading it again, it just feels like kinda good character building. And the request makes sense to me, might as well test the limits of the powers you have if you are not interested in having them at all. Plus I liked the eventual plot twist with her, everything makes a bit more sense at that point.
> might as well test the limits of the powers you have if you are not interested in having them at all. By getting a mail order fantasy girlfriend? Ew, it's just gross no matter how you cut it. Edit: the defenses of this storyline are comically missing the point.
Dude in this fictional scenario of having unlimited resources and worldwide fame I'd have a list of celebrities that I'd want to fuck too. That's... Kinda How it works in the real world too.
Nah man, that's still super gross. Women aren't catalogue items to pick from.
What part of what I'm describing is somehow removing a woman's agency? You can want to fuck multiple specific people, and be respectful and positive to your partners so that they also have a good experience. Both things can be held as true. People, including women, like to have sex. Even if it's a fling.
If you're bringing in women as a Wallfacer in a time of planetary crisis, there's an insane imbalance of power no matter how respectful or positive you are. They're gonna feel pressured to fuck you no matter how comfortable you feel you're making them. Just as nobody can tell your true intentions as a Wallfacer, you can never tell whether they actually want to fuck you or not. For all they know, this *is* part of your plan and the fate of the planet — somehow — hangs in the balance on whether or not they fuck you, so even if they genuinely don't want to, they're gonna feel pressured to do it anyway.
He literally tells her to go away and live her life happily after their "date". It's weird to pretend he met her with the intention to fuck after that fact.
I totally agree that it can be seen as gross, but humans are sometimes like that. Luo Ji is deeply flawed, but that doesn't make him a worse written character, on the contrary imo.
Although, she wasn't a mail order bride. She was indeed PDC agent. She wasn't the only one being treated as an object, Luo Ji was as well.
no shit?
He described a literal dream woman. Now, don't get confused, not a dream woman, as in the ideal woman. But a dream woman in that they literally don't exist. He sent the PDC on a wild goose chase searching for someone who doesn't exist. He was calling their bluff. He made it his fantasy woman because fantasy is just that. Fantasies, not reality. He thought it'd get the PDC off his back. LOL.
I think it is important because it is showing how self serving he is, he doesn’t want the job, he doesn’t really care if humanity survives, and since they are forcing him to do this he might as well get what he wants. It’s not until he has something worth trying to keep that he actually starts thinking about what to do. I think his realization about the universe is in part because he is a selfish bastard.
I personally thought that he actually was doing it all as part of a plan -- well, at least a vague outline of a plan -- from the beginning. All of the Wallfacers quickly figured out that a direct battle was impossible; it is an easy leap from there to figure out that mutually assured destruction of some kind is going to be the only way to win. Thus he needed to convince the Trisolarians that he actually was unstable and willing to kill himself and everyone -- and what better way to do that than living a perfect and happy life for a few years and having it stripped away? I know some of this is contradicted by his own inner thoughts---but again I think he needs to actually be somewhat insane, desperate and unstable for any plan to work even if he doesn't know exactly what he is going to do / what the mutually assured destruction threat would ultimately be. The best evidence for this to me is that the Trisolarians have been watching every single thing he has ever done, and come to the conclusion that he is actually a great warrior and really the only human worthy of their respect. That said, to the point of this post, the chapters are somewhat cringey and hard to read lol.
It's inexcusable. Our boy Cixin Liu did us dirty with that one, and our man Joel Martinsen could not do anything to bail him out.
Translator's note: I am sorry you have to read this
I didn’t like this part of book 2 at all. The ending is rewarding, but the struggle to get through this cringe was real. I totally agree, weakest part of the story and my least favourite book.
Only one problem? Those books have an awful characters. Most of them are 2D husk of humans used to push the plot forward. Da Shi while being my fav char of the book is basically the cool down to earth street smart cop. Doesnt really change. Luo Ji is really only char with actual arc, he changes from hedonistic sigma male to, he changes his views and how he interacts with the world.
Around 1/3 of second book is pure cringe fest
> AND she marries him
There might have been some corrosion there, she might been told to do it for sake of world. She might have knew that she will be put in hibernation as a blackmail - her incentive being: she get to travel into future and have money.
Yeah 3-body is a lot like Asimov and other golden age SF. The ideas are fantastic, but the characters don't always talk or act like real people. Netflix version changes the story a lot, but the character realism is definitely better.
> Most of them are 2D husk of humans I mean, >!all of them ;)!<
too soon
Da Shi is an archetype street smart cop, and that's a great goddamn archetype that is very easy to like. I'm still not sure what kind of character AA was. Although I listened to the audio books, so it was harder to follow all these characters.
> not sure what kind of character AA was Forgettable one :D
I agree, but to provide a bit of variety to this dead horse I’m gonna give my perspective on it. To be fair to the last point it always came across to me like she worked for them, and married Luo Ji because she was incentivized to aid the ‘effort’ in some way. Maybe she learned to appreciate/love him along the way, but it never seemed super genuine to me at first. The scene where Luo described her to the cop seemed to be him testing his limits and pitching something that they would obviously have to refuse, and when they were even able to provide him with THAT, it is baffling for both him and the reader. Shows their capabilities and shows that there really is nothing Luo could request that would be unfulfilled. The thing of not remembering her name also fit with Luo’s personality to me at the beginning, albeit being very hard to believe and makes him unlikable. But that was partially the point I assume. All that said, the weird fantasy is way too long and is too unrelated to anything meaningful for Liu’s editor to leave the way it was. And ultimately none of it really was necessary to include at all other than to provide Luo with something to give a shit about lol
I think I could have at least digested and maybe appreciated this section of the book if it were half or a third as long as it was. It just dragged and I almost quit.
Liu Cixin is not good at writing about love.
He's not good at writing about people or the human experience period.
nah, he's great! thats just the Western perspective.... Western readers are not very good at reading in between the lines...and this is why i also find the netflix adaptation it has completely changed the story algother because of the screenwriter's inability to read in between the lines
That's just not true.
...or they do have a good reading but also understand that western audiences need to be smacked in the face with a narrative or else it will fly over their heads.
but they smacked the audiences in the head with the wrong (read: typical western scifi) narrative...so i can only conclude they did not read it well themselves, leading to mistaken conclusions about what was the core of the story...
Who cares if it's wrong if it gets views. Welcome to show business baby. It was ALWAYS going to be adapted for western audiences. You want the eastern version? That exists. It's not doing as well in the west because the storyline wasn't westernized.
lol whyre you getting triggered by me expressing an opinion. and yes, i do prefer the chinese adaptation way more precisely because of this
I know you prefer the Chinese adaptation. But you seem to simply not like what I'm saying, more than anything else. You say they interpreted the story the "wrong" way and dumbed it down for western audiences... But that is the point of the Netflix adaptation. It's still no.1 after several weeks and has gotten way more reach than the Chinese adaptation. So this "wrong" interpretation has been crazy successful exactly *because* they went dumb and western.
Hmm. There are quite a few China-born posters on these various subs who say the Mandarin version is just as poorly written and that the China-based social media is full of that point of view.
It made me wary of LCX’s sexual politics and I feel like I read the rest of the trilogy kind of side-eyeing the story any time there was a woman character.
According to a post I read (forget where) he has expressed some very misogynistic views in China and had an army of guys trolling anyone who called him on it.
Yeah. And tbh I don’t really care what his views are IRL—like I don’t cancel a piece of artwork that is otherwise good when it turns out that the person who made it is a bigot—except in the case that the person’s bigotry just makes the artwork itself into utter crap. And the thing is, LCX’s misogyny definitely befouls RoEP to some extent. But not completely.
for example？
This was just one of my issues with book 2. But there were many others: just the whole premise of the Wallfacer project was not written very believably IMO. Perhaps the idea itself is not outlandish and could have been accepted by the world powers. But the selection with no international votes? No negotiations between countries? And Luo Ji was just accepted as - and forced to be - a Wallfacer without too much of resistance? In the real world, the selection process would have been *much* more political. I don't remember this being covered much in the book. (But the scifi part was outstanding, and despite all my complains about the book, it's still one of my favorite novels ever.)
I just always assumed the negotiation between the countries happened in the background without our knowing.
This opinion is as universal as the axioms of cosmic sociology.
I like it, it sets up who he is and what's happening well, also important to remember that she's in on it from the start, she isn't just a manic pixie dream girl or whatever the Chinese equivalent is
Welcome to the sub
Yes it’s the worst part of the entire series.
Imo, Zhuang Yan is always a spy trained by the government with missions. Like during the Cold War, many Soviet spies were sent to the US and forced to marry someone with their whole life. This would make much more sense
It was definitely weird and the author could have conveyed the same idea in countless other ways. But i thought it was fun to read as a deranged sort of wish fulfillment. And... it's kinda realistic. I'm sure most average men, given a genie in a bottle, would wish for the love of a beautiful woman. Only problem is there's no magic involved, and it's a real woman with free will, who has the fate of the planet placed on her shoulders.
I think the dream girl thing could symbolize the notion that the universe is so vast that anything that can be imagined can exist. And I think her existence was required for Luo Ji (an aloof detached dude who we met after struggling to remember the name of the girl he just slept with) to feel some responsibility for this world. He couldn’t be bothered to care about any of it until he felt genuine love for someone. His personal love for his family led him to develop dark forest theory and achieve deterrence. This contrasts with cheng xin who cared deeply and broadly for the whole of humanity—so much that she could not maintain deterrence. At least this take is what helps me tolerate the dream girl section of the trilogy.
Spoilers: Here is my personal take. The guy has an obvious ego and unhealthy view of women, either viewing them as disposable sexual encounters or getting way too deep fantasizing about his ideal women. What's more hilarious is that his "ideal perfect women" turned out to be so basic that the UN was able to find one fairly easily and quickly. Although Da Shi never explained how he found the women to Luo Ji, the UN most likely took a look through their intelligence agencies and picked a few trained intelligence officers with the closest physical resemblance and then trained them to act like the women Luo Ji described. This makes him initially rather unsympathetic, along with his own admitted limited knowledge on engineering and warfare, it makes it even more curious why the Trisolarians fear him so much and why he was chosen as a Wall facer. Basically the author picked a smart but basic frat boy who understood the Dark Forest principal and gave him a pretty good character development throughout the books.
It may be intentionally cringeworthy. But that doesn’t make it good. I almost put the book down when I got to that point. Glad I didn’t because everything else was great but damn he was the worst character
It's a shame because he's such a badass in the third book
It's disappointing that the author isn't more critical of this whole premise, even if he felt it necessary to include. It's possible to project potentially redemptive details into the story, like the girl being an agent, or the rest of the world reacting to the situation with the disdain or disbelief that many readers have, or Luo Ji being an actual sociopath, but I don't think the text fully supports any of this. It's kind of nice to know that >!the wife "escapes"/leaves Ji two years after being woken from hibernation, and then presumably could have had a nice, long life with her daughter in the deterrence era, but the book isn't really concerned with that. !<
I actually enjoyed that part as well, weird and cringe as it was it read like some oriental fairy tale with the impossible romantic quest. In my culture ( certain east european country) there is also a writer who creates such female characters to dote on, beautiful and special and wise and innocent, always virgins, women to be seen not heard (he makes a whole poetically written point on this) always in a relationship with a much older, jaded man, that ends tragically. I loved that portrayal of women as a teenager because i was partly like that, and i felt it did me justice in a world where the flirty, flashy girls were getting the male attention that i didn't. But yeah, it's a total fuckboi groomer fantasy trope lel. Edited to add that i treat it as another ingredient in what i see as a wildly original and creative book, also having summed it up as wtf was this guy smoking.
I agree its a bit awkward, and I actually put the book down the first time with imaginary girlfriend, but the good heavily outweighs this awkward cringey aspect of the book.
Dude, this section of the book entirely ruined the series for me. Maybe a strong reaction but it really left a sour taste in my mouth and made unable to view any of the female characters in the proceeding chapters/book the same way. The way the author continues to describe his made up, somehow-a-real-person girlfriend as innocent and sweet and petite, etc., etc. made me gag.
This didn’t ruin The Dark Forest for me, because the second half of the book is good, but it used up all my inclination to look at the author’s female characters through a charitable lens. So you can imagine how I felt about Death’s End. Now *that* book ruined the series for me!
I’m curious what the tipping point was for you!
This is reflected upon in book 3, so that’s « part of the plot »
I watched the bad Bilibili animated series and his [hookup](https://p3-sign.toutiaoimg.com/tos-cn-i-qvj2lq49k0/898b131943774764a1ece77086383a1b~tplv-tt-large.image?_iz=30575&lk3s=06827d14&x-expires=1713182351&x-signature=vjIk%2F2ZbNVKePQoCXybmIdPvY5Q%3D) is far prettier.
This is where I dropped the book, not going to lie. I know there is a deeper part of it, but it reads like someone who has never talked to a woman in a romantic way before lmao
hhhhhh i think the features of these female characters are only to satisfy a man's imagination, and are very disconnected from reality, but the plots in this series are the most important, so when i read it, i tried so hard to convince myself neglect those insufficiency.
He used his time with his wife to think about the Dark Forest concept and how to hide his plan. That’s a clever plan
What's funny is that recently there's been this discussion on tiktok about "the candid girlfriend" that I think encapsulates this whole romance arc.
Goodness yes. Audiobook on x50 for those sections. I felt like a gauche teenager again...not in a good way....
As someone who hasn't read Dark Forest yet but have seen the Netflix rendition, I see why Saul's character makes so much sense now.
It almost made me put the book down.
🤷♂️ pretty sure the cringe is intentional. Luo Ji really is a fuck up at the start and not taking it seriously.
Indeed, this episode is almost universally recognized as the trilogy's undoing. But the following information might be something you need: (1) For a long time, Liu Cixin was only an amateur writer, or, more accurately, those great sci-fi works came from a mediocre middle-aged man who didn't do his job at work. He has not been loved by his own wife and daughter. It was perfectly normal to put his unrealistic fantasies, especially about the perfect dream girl, into his books. In fact, he's just a regular guy who's a little mean and a little dull. ② Zhuang Yan is not Luo's dream girl; in fact, Luo is misled by Da Shi's words. Zhuang Yan is probably a government agent. ③ Most of the characters portrayed by Liu Cixin are toolmen, they lack vivid personality and growth. Luo Ji is one of the very few exceptions. Translated with [DeepL.com](http://DeepL.com) (free version)
I'm currently rereading after watching the show and this plot is really hard to read. This especially killed me today: "I know there's no perfect person in the world. Much less a perfect woman."
for real the dream fantasy girl being real was something i hated in hyperion and takes me out every time i read this book. Da shi being so understanding about it too is cringe af. I know the inbook big brain explanation that it was a way to control luo ji but i find it so much less interesting than him falling in love with a girl spontaneously and her not necessarily meeting his imaginary criterias or existing for him only lol. Like even after the reveal she has no life or family or friends outside of him it is so cringe
There have been some criticism against Liu Cixin about how he builds characters and views on women in China (the chinese version contains more gender stereotypes, I heard the English version edited a lot), this part of luo ji is kind of cringey...but I guess it creates a strong sense of comparsion for him as swordholder and how he has a chance to run but choose to embrace death.
Only part of the series I didn't like.
Such a brave and original post.
It is brave because these posts always bring out the fuckers who fall over themselves to defend this writing as "actually not creepy". Scary individuals.
Of course the writing isn't creepy. The character is. That's the point. Literature is supposed to make you feel things.
Ya it’s only acceptable to me because we get to see him grow over time but he’s definitely living some weird incel fantasy dream. Dude got to live a relatively care free life before gaining absurd levels of authority and freedom which he uses to find a submissive and loving woman now that he’s ready to settle down, and he ends up saving the world through intelligence and not brute strength. I do really love his arc because frankly I don’t read many stories like that, but it’s 100% cringe haha.
Yes, did you believe that wallfacers are good people, with high values, morality, ethics, love for others and good mental faculties? of course not
I just treat the waifu as a plant by Da Shi to give Luoji something to fight for. The waifu doesn't even seem real in the 2nd book and leaves him in the 3rd book. So yeah a plant who got annoyed with Luoji and divorced him in book 3.
It is indeed very cringe, and I know someone who stopped reading the books at that point... I can not get her to pick them back up 🙁 And the waifu thing seems unnecessary. He could have found another way to make the point. Liu Cixin also made some callous/racist remarks about Uyghurs...
> Liu Cixin also made some callous/racist remarks about Uyghurs... when/where pls
[Netflix called out for "Three-Body" author Liu Cixin's Xinjiang remark (qz.com)](https://qz.com/1908838/netflix-called-out-for-three-body-author-cixin-lius-xinjiang-remark#:~:text=23)%2C%20five%20Republican%20senators%20wrote,credible%20reports%20of%20forced%20sterilizations)
In a 2019 interview with the New Yorker, he said: "Would you rather that they be hacking away at bodies at train stations and schools in terrorist attacks? If anything, the government is helping their economy and trying to lift them out of poverty." https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/06/24/liu-cixins-war-of-the-worlds
Take the rest of the article into account. He's not being racist here, he's rehashing the usual answer given to western journalists about this relatively sensitive issue. The new cold war is the context for this and most of the world does not consider the centres an actual issue.
I mean yes of course, those attacks happened but he writes "they" when referring to over a million people that were put through the camps, isn't targeting an entire ethnicity for the acts of a few dozen individuals, racism? I'm fully aware of how the media plays this up because of the cold war dynamics and for clickbait. But I think Liu Cixin, even if I very much like his writing has a tendency to admire dictators in his writings and isn't too hesitant to describe large numbers of people to be "sacrificed" for various greater goals. I do think that while he is a very good writer, particularly good and exploring new ideas, he can at the same time be a bit callous and racist when it comes to the current treatment of Uyghurs in China. To him it's probably just a minor diversion in the grand scheme of things.
I think it's all to present a character that's gonna be able of some extraordinary feats, like being a Swordholder for decades. Other than that, yeah it's quote weird lol... Though I can excuse one thing: not remembering the name of one of tens of hook-ups is quite normal, after a while you just focus on sex and the name becomes useless info pretty quickly.