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gunkreads · 6 months

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Making a post for my full-series thoughts about The Expanse and how it wrapped up, good and bad.

Caveat lector (I looked up the latin word for "reader" just for this joke): when I have negative thoughts about something in a book, I force myself to pick them apart down to the most minute details. This generates massive walls of text. These text walls don't mean I truly loathe the thing; they mean I'm doing my absolute best to not be a Hater, but rather to analyze my feelings so that you can read something more constructive and interesting than "X was dumb and didn't work".

I want to break this down into six parts: one for each of the main characters (Holden, Naomi, Amos, and Alex), one for the plot, and one for the world (it'll make sense when I get to it, hopefully). This may not be as long as it sounds like it'll be, but it's still long as fuck.

Bear in mind that I read this series very slowly, over about three months, so some of the early-series details are hazy and my opinions on them should be taken with the assumption that I've forgotten some stuff.

On Holden, I can be brief:

His arc was almost a full 180. Call it a 173, give or take 5 degrees. Holden starts the series with the stalwart belief that "if you give everyone all the information available, they'll make the right choice". Eventually, during the Free Navy arc, he moves to "If you give everyone all the information available, they'll eventually make the right choice". During his Laconian imprisonment, he moves to "If you give the right person the right information, they'll make the right choice" (this is the biggest jump we see). That part was fun because he'd just almost turned into Miller. Fucking excellent.

He ends on "I have all the information and I have no idea what the right choice is, but I have to act." This is the very last thing he does: make a snap decision with all the information in the world, fully accepting that he might be wrong. The meat of this final decision is to take the stars away. Holden says "It doesn't matter if we deserve this, it doesn't matter if we'll earn it or conquer it eventually; we're dying now," and makes the decision for all of humanity that he's going to destroy the ring gates.

This could have felt cheap because of the way it completely absolves him of the responsibility for his decision, but it feels fully earned because this type of decision is his ENTIRE CHARACTER. The point of James Holden is that he takes hard choices away from people and makes them himself! He's already taken responsibility for dozens of these types of decisions before. He says there's no choice here; I'm going off to die. He survives this a hundred times, then finally dies from it. This makes it a beautiful ending for him. I loved it. He's such a profoundly simple character throughout a series with fairly complex characters, and that makes him feel truly special rather than lazy writing.

On Naomi... I have mixed feelings.

I feel that her lack of "epilogue" (not the literal epilogue, just a conclusive send-off for her character) made her ending less weighty than it could have been. If I had to point to a specific line that felt like her full-series character arc's climax, it would be Alex's "It would have worked beautifully" in reference to Naomi's program to monitor Ring gate traffic. Naomi's character is marked by decades of desperate cries for people to fucking listen to her, for them to believe her, that she wants everyone to live! She has the plan, she's objectively a logistical genius, and if you just tell her what's happening, she can save all of you fucking idiots! Alex's line there broke my heart clean in half. She won the wrong fight. She scored the season-winning goal the moment after the league was dismantled.

Naomi is a character about the frustration of having an answer but no voice with which to share it. This really comes to a head in Act 3, when she's coordinating the resistance (as well as anyone possibly could!) with the most janky, fucked-up communication system anyone could possibly design. If I consider that line of Alex's to be Naomi's legacy in the series, which I do, I'm very happy with her arc overall, but...

I don't really like the way she seemed to just drop off the map at the end of the last book. She has her little moment where she's pre-mourning Holden after he's revealed that he's injected himself with more protomolecule, but after that? She seems to just be... kind of moving forward. She's just working, nothing more--strategically, what she does in the series' climax is no more difficult than anything she's done before; it just has higher stakes and she's clearly drowning her grief in work. The thing that feels weird to me is that, while she gets the last line in the book (pre-epilogue), and her series-long arc closes out very neatly, it feels like her little mini-arc of the moment of that final climax never settles out properly. She gets cut off at the 80% mark and just... disappears.

I like to assume that she fully retired after getting back through to Sol. She deleted all those incoming messages and dropped herself fully off the map, feeling like it was finally time to give up after saving the entire universe. The simple act of her deleting the messages would've given me that closure, but as it was, there's just this little nag at the back of my mind that her arc in the book ended like five seconds too early.

It's a minor nitpick! I loved the way the climax wrapped around and had her basically leading humanity for a few beautiful moments, with all her hard work almost paying off before the game changed.

Amos? I fucking love Amos.

I loved him before, I loved him during, and I love him after. Everyone loves Amos. I'm not special. He really was the last man standing, after all. Fucking beautiful. Perfection. A simple arc, a simple conclusion, and a simple message for a simple character. His only real change in the series was during Persepolis Rising, when he had to deal with Clarissa's slow death, and while that was excellent, it was really more of an arc for Bobbie.

Alex... is the character whose ending I cared about the least.

I don't dislike it; it's fully above that margin, and on a surface level, I think ending his whole character arc on his answer to the family problem he's struggled with his whole life is a good choice.

It was interesting that they had his presence end before we'd confirmed he was safe, and with a slight hint that he might not make it to Nieuwestad. I didn't like that at first glance, but after further thought, I enjoy it as a way for the authors to say "the journey and destination don't matter; the conclusion of Alex's story was when he truly chose to step in this direction."

But overall, I don't know if I have much to say about Alex. He's a very sparse character who has less overt reason to be simple than Holden or Amos do; the latter two both have something deeply, deeply wrong with them that makes them really fucking wacko in a specific way, but Alex is just... kind of a regular deadbeat dad? He's just really into flying ships? That's kind of it. I know they explore that in Cibola Burn, but I didn't feel like Alex had that much presence in the whole story as a character, so I found the simple, vague ending they gave him satisfying enough through my general apathy.

For the plot!

The big stuff, the shape of the story. I still have a huge complaint about it: the Free Navy arc felt way too long and way too much of a sidetrack. It functioned as setup for Laconia, yes; it also had literally nothing to do with the overarching story. It felt like a side mission blown out of proportion, which is weirdly appropriate for a story that started out as a TTRPG setting.

On the above? I am one HUNDRED percent willing to be proven wrong. Please, please, please talk me out of my position here. I am currently at one end of the spectrum, where I actively see disconnections from the Free Navy arc and the main plot; I'd love to be pulled to the other end, where I can see how it all ties in. The problem is that I can see the cause-and-effect tie-ins: I get that Earth needed to be destroyed to truly push people through the gates, I get that the huge catastrophe needed to happen to distract from Laconia's growth, I get that it was an end to the concept of a unified Belt/OPA, and I get that it was an immensely well-done arc for Naomi's character, but... I feel like it's a puzzle piece that just fits in a little loosely.

Moving on. I think the wrapup of the whole protomolecule makers/dark gods lore discovery (via Elvi at the BFE) was quite well done, especially given that it was done in such a dispersed way. I felt like I never got a "sit down, here's the deal" exposition dump of like... generally what the nature of all this stuff was. I was just expected to read the "The Dreamer" chapters very carefully, remember the "The Investigator" chapters pretty well, pay attention to how the ring entities worked, and put together the cleanly laid-out pieces myself. I feel I succeeded at this, given that reading through the wiki pages for the ring builders and the smoke things doesn't really reveal anything new to me.

That said, I was... kind of too in-the-moment to process how insane the implication of the final reveal was: that this whole thing was a hidden metaphor for colonialism all along, and that these dark smoke entities are justifiably fighting back against a wound in (sub)reality that the protomolecule builders created. The road to heaven is paved in metaphysical blood, I guess? The protomolecule builders weren't willing to be as decisive as Holden, weren't willing to sacrifice all they'd built, and consequently left their problems for another generation of beings when they died; Holden managed to have the magical willpower to say "Fuck this, I'm shutting it down, even though it'll kill millions and change humanity forever." It was kind of cool that he got that send-off, performing a profound act of healing in this sub-universe by deleting the ring space. Maybe I'm leaning too heavily on my interpretation of this theme, but it feels fairly clear-cut to me, honestly, so I'd love to hear other interpretations.

Regarding the world.

This section is kind of a subsection of the plot, but I feel like "where does the series leave humanity?" is a question that falls more under "worldbuilding" than "story" in this specific series.

These books had so much fucking philosophy in them and it felt like none of it really mattered much. Most of that philosophy stopped at a very broad-spectrum level of analysis, which is the series' greatest... not weakness, necessarily, but missed potential: no philosophical conundrum is ever interrogated beyond the immediate scenario or vague hypotheticals. The authors clearly have a very specific set of ideas about human nature that all felt very generic to me when put into practice; I felt that humanity through their lens was a fairly predictable beast, which only sort of worked.

I understand that The Expanse is, at its core, a character series. More than anything, it's about the people in it; its plot is a vehicle for characters, not the other way around. In that sense, it ended in an overall great way, as discussed above. Because of that, when I judge the story on what it tried to achieve, I think it succeeded.

But when I broaden my approach a little and look at what the authors suggested to me that they could do, I feel like there's more to say. The end of the story, I need not remind you, is effectively a soft reset for humanity. There's no more interstellar travel until they figure it out for real this time, with no cheats--and per the epilogue, they do just that. The core message behind this is that humanity's tenacity will always push them in the same direction: outward. The problem with this, in my opinion, was that the authors chose to express this throughout the series in a very obtuse way: by making "everyone else" a character.

The following is specifically regarding Act 3 (Persepolis Rising on):

So the series is about its characters, and "everyone else" is a character. By having the scope of the story affect all of humanity, all of humanity must necessarily be involved. As far as Act 3 is concerned, this means that the gears of industry never stop turning, people never stop hating and loving, and all apocalyptic danger is effectively ignored to those ends. This made our perspective characters part of a small, exclusive group of people who were actually worried about the universe ending. Everyone else seemed to... not really care. They were scared, sure, but they didn't stop shipping stuff through the ring gates! It was fundamentally stupid, and as far as the authors seem to believe, fundamentally human.

My problem is that the story puts "all of humanity" into the same framework it puts its individual characters. As Act 3 hits, basically everyone not involved in direct on-page conflict is treated as one single character. This is fucking monumentally ironic, given the way the story ends and the whole hive-mind thing. I get how you might not see what I'm seeing here, but consider this: the story feeds us information about what "everyone else" is doing almost exclusively via Naomi. She's the traffic controller; that's her main job for the last two books. In her mind, the character named Everybody Else (Mx. Else, for brevity) is just... doing stuff she can't control. Mx. Else is upping traffic through the ring gates; Mx. Else is a threat to the underground's security; Mx. Else is blowing up the communications relays; Mx. Else is yadda yadda yadda.

It's not about whether Mx. Else is actually supposed to be a homogeneous entity (again, lol @ the irony); it's about the fact that we, the readers, only see Mx. Else as a single huge force. The way the authors write it through Naomi's eyes, "The UNN", "The MCRN", "The OPA", "The Free Navy", "Laconia", "Avasarala", "Saba", "Duarte", and most incongruously but importantly "humanity" are all the same type of entity. Groups and people get lumped together as characters, sure, and that works--but not when you expand the group to be everyone.

What would I have done? Simple. Shut the fuck up and write my own book, if I'm so smart Retain some semblance of different human groups in Act 3 besides "Laconia" and "the underground". Why don't Auberon or Bara Gaon have communities with specific interests? Why does Naomi not have to juggle the desires of different planets, all of whom are still doing shit the whole time, and OBVIOUSLY have interests beyond "just truckin' along"?

Here's my thesis: when there were 3 factions (UN, MCR, OPA) this worked fine. When the authors made some big "nature of humanity" statement, it tracked, because they were making that statement as a blanket over multiple opposing groups, which made it feel more potent--all these people who want to kill each other have this in common. Later in the series, when they're making the same type of statement, it doesn't track as well because most of humanity is all in one group; it's not a statement that unites any opposing groups, really, since Laconia and the underground aren't really included in it.

You know what? I kind of wish I could put all this under another, smaller cut, because it's really rambly and it's not reflective of my overall thoughts on the series.

To sum up, I feel that the series' philosophy and commentary on human nature was simplified more than it needed to be from a practical standpoint, and instead turned to a big old "oh well, nothing we can do about Mx. Else" that the characters could point to when it was appropriate.

To conclude (nine pages later and you're still here, so this one's for you):

#the expanse #leviathan falls

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