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He went back to his first morning in Oxford: climbing a sunny hill with Ramy, picnic basket in hand. Elderflower cordial. Warm brioche, sharp cheese, a chocolate tart for dessert. The air that day smelled like a promise, all of Oxford shone like an illumination, and he was falling in love.
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“…That they were all four of them drowning in the unfamiliar, and they saw in each other a raft, and clinging to one another was the only way to stay afloat.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel: An Arcane History
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Girls when translation is always an act of violence, but it can also be an act of love
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Can I mention the brilliance the RF Kuang did with Robin Swift’s name? No, not “Robin Swift,” but his original one.
We’ll never know what his original name was. I was waiting, all 500+ pages, and on the last one with Robin’s POV, we get nothing.
But he gets his name back. After all his suffering, I’m inclined to believe that he deserves it.
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"The days had not yet come when Ramy wore Victoire's sloppily knitted scarves with pride, when Robin learned exactly how long Ramy liked his tea steeped so he could have it ready when he inevitably came to the Buttery late from his Arabic tutorial"
Ramy has my whole heart I love him sm🥹🫶
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the only time griffin and lovell showed affection to robin was when they gifted him a book and if that isn’t the most chinese ass family thing
#babel#babel an arcane history#babel rf kuang#robin swift#griffin lovell#gift giving bc words are Hard
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Okay 100 pages into Babel now and I'm trying to put my finger on why the whole setup of Oxford feels anachronistic, and I think it comes down to how secular everything is?
Like c'mon the novel is set a few months after the first publication of a Tract For Our Time, this is a period of ever-increasing devotion and piety among the lettered classes. Why does no one sound like they're actually a Christian? Magic is literally done through the manipulation of words and meanings, and the professor introduces it with an anecdote from Herodotus but not a single mention of scripture?
C'mon now. The book keeps mentioning missionaries without ever depicting a society that would ever bother to send them out.
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i see a lot of criticism about the friendships between the babel characters and how we were told a lot of things about their positive dynamic, yet shown barely any of it (but are instead mostly presented with the negative aspects). i don’t know if other people clocked this but i feel like it was intentional
rf kuang was commenting on friendships made through trauma-bonding: they were doomed from the start
tldr; the characterisation is (one of) the subtly(ies) people were looking for in the colonial theme. they criticise the latter but i love the fact colonialism is more of an upfront theme because lord knows i am tired of it being subtle so people can ignore it
robin says from the very beginning after they formed their little friend group:
“why had they been so quick, so carelessly eager to trust one another? why had they refused to see the myriad of ways they could hurt each other? why had they not paused to interrogate their differences in birth, in raising, that meant they were not and could never be on the same side?”
the next small paragraph goes into a raft metaphor about how they saw themselves in each other and that’s why they stuck together. they shared one thing they could not ignore – their otherness. their friendship was purely built on the fact they were discriminated against and that they had to spent the next 4 years with each other. their first pleasant conversation is them discussing how they were treated at oxford. of course, the characters didn’t see this because they had never really befriended people their age before. this feeling of belonging felt like love to them (considering their upbringings, ramy’s i will discuss in a bit)
it makes perfect sense why robin would repeatedly imply that they loved and cared about each other. in his eyes, they did. what was it they had if not love? robin, who has ignored so many problems in the past before babel as he knew it would cause him issues, wouldn’t address their friendship dynamic or how strong the arguments and animosity were. he, an abused child, would rather have this than nothing at all
in actuality (demonstrated, i think, through the photograph they took at the end of chapter 9), they were together because of academia’s and discrimination’s forced proximity. robin feels specific emotions about them that feel strong to him because he’s never experienced it before, but that doesn’t mean they are strong enough to keep them together, which is why when they see the photo, they feel weird about it because why isn’t it portraying their dynamic ‘correctly’?
it’s true that perhaps to get robin’s perspective across, it would’ve been good to see the positive aspects more but i think that would’ve made it harder for us to see how weak their friendship was. people wanted more positive to show that they loved each other, which isn’t the point rf kuang is trying to make
rf kuang chooses to show the negative aspects more because they show where their friendship will end up. when letty did what she did, i didn’t see it as a plot twist, i saw it as an inevitability. this was going to happen. honestly, i feel this with most of the ‘plot twists’ of babel except the end of book iii (i really didn’t see that coming). it was easy for letty to do what she does in book iv because their friendship had such unstable foundations. when they no longer benefitted her, she turned her back on them
the only dynamic i feel was actually strong was robin and ramy. i’m not just saying this because i think they’re queer lol. they were close not just because they were both men of colour and had similar upbringings – they actually liked each other. they admired each other and adored each other’s personalities, they bounced off each other and knew what the other meant when they spoke. when they argued, it was over something that actually considered each other’s beliefs and goals and desires, not over their differences.
(unlike letty and ramy, letty and victoire and maybe even robin and victoire, though i think they lean more to ramy/robin than they do to letty/anyone lol. ramy and victoire have a dynamic that i personally feel like robin didn’t really see because ramy understood victoire in a way robin couldn’t. you kind of see it when robin is the one who letty complains about ramy/victoire to, but that’s it i think?)
speaking of ramy, linking it back to their perspectives of love, it makes a lot of sense why he caused the most disruption in the friend group. he’s the only one with an actual family that he stays in touch with. he knows what love feels like. so of course he’s the one that is strongly anti-empire, compared to robin and victoire who have been emotionally manipulated in their childhood by said empire, the one who argues with letty the most. he still feels what robin and victoire feel, of course, but to a lesser extent
honestly i don’t know how to end this analysis, i just think rf kuang is a genius lmao but i may add more onto this as i continue to reread the book we shall see
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“…That they were all four of them drowning in the unfamiliar, and they saw in each other a raft, and clinging to one another was the only way to stay afloat.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel: An Arcane History
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R. F. Kuang. (2022). ‘Babel’, 108 | Mcelroy, Justin. (2022) ‘My Brother, My Brother and Me’ episode 624
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Beyond The Beauty of Carmen Berzatto
The fact that you’re all trying to guess the feelings of a grown man who literally asked his colleague, “WHAT IS A GIRLFRIEND?”(208) is beyond me.
You’re so blinded by the main character’s sex appeal that you forget that Carmen has been an awkward/nerdy/neurodivergent man all his life who never made decisions for himself except when he decided to hire Sydney and keep her without anyone’s influence.
Carmen’s lack of experience means he probably doesn’t know the difference between a platonic relationship versus a romantic relationship with a woman.
That’s why he was baffled when Sydney tried to introduce Claire as his girlfriend.
That’s why Claire pursued him, not the other way around.
That’s why, at this stage, he can’t even describe the nature of his feelings for Sydney.
It’s also why, the day after his panic attack, he hasn’t said a word to his sister, even though he’s been confiding in her since season one.
Because he’s confused himself, and doesn’t understand why Sydney’s vision reassured him more than Claire’s did. It’s also interesting that he chose not to remember when she called him a piece of shit.
Everything happens on an UNCONSCIOUS level for him, which explains all these confusing montages showing Claire and Sydney at the same time.
That’s also why he made his declaration to Sydney UNDER the table where CLAIRE ATE. Because everything HIDDEN is unconscious.
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