"They trained her for a war. She intends to end it."
Everything was good until the Fire Nation attacked. Wait. We are the Fire Nation. Where is drug man?
— Rebecca F. Kuang describing The Poppy War in less than 140 characters
Rin is a war orphan raised by a foster family of opium dealers and treated as a lowly servant. To escape an arranged marriage, she enters a competitive exam in the hope of being accepted to Sinegard Academy, the most prestigious military school in the empire. She will learn that an officially meritocratic exam cannot stop injustice and suffering.
The Poppy War is the first novel by Rebecca F. Kuang, and is announced as the first volume of a trilogy. It was followed by The Dragon Republic, released in August 2019, and subsequently The Burning God, released in November 2020.
This novel has examples of the following tropes:
- Abusive Parents: Rin's foster parents. They treat her as a slave and decide to marry her when it is convenient for them. They're not much nicer to Kesegi, their biological son, either - when he cries because Rin is leaving, his mother tells him to shut up and pinches his ear until he stops crying.
- The Ace: Altan Trengsin is famous among the students of Sinegard Academy for being the best at everything he does.Can you piss over the wall into town?
Altan can. - A Million Is a Statistic: When Rin destroys the entire Longbow Island by channeling the Phoenix to awaken the volcano beneath it, she finds herself psychologically incapable of feeling the horror of it, because she can't map the tragedy that is one person's death to that scale.
- Anti-Hero: Rin is fighting to protect her people. One of the ways she protects them is by murdering millions of noncombatants who have the misfortune to belong to the other side.
- Back-to-Back Badasses: Nezha and Rin in the midst of battle when Federation troops attack Sinegard.
- Beware the Nice Ones: Kitay, who snaps after dealing with annoying bureaucrats before the siege at Sinegard and smashes a pompous magistrate’s collection of teapots.
- Beware the Silly Ones: Jiang, who is not taken seriously by most of the school, is frightening in the rare moments he is serious. He uses his abilities as a shaman to call upon the guards and save Rin and Nezha when Sinegard was on the brink of capture by the Federation.
- Blood Knight: Rin comes to enjoy fighting, killing, and burning, due to the Phoenix's influence and wartime trauma.
- Blow You Away: Feylen, as the Wind God's permanent conduit, can control wind with terrifying power. He often uses this ability to wipe out whole fleets of ships.
- Break the Haughty: Venka. The sheer brutality of what the Mugen soldiers do, however, make this entirely tragic without a drop of satisfaction.
- To a lesser extent when Rin, a peasant from a poor village, defeats Venka and Nezha—high-ranking children of nobility—in the tournament at the end of her first year.
- Charm Person: The Empress Su Daji has this ability. Everyone who looks at her immediately adores her and would do anything for her. Legend says this is a god-given gift to her as the legendary Vipress, but most people consider this a story for children. (Considering that shamans do, in fact, exist, however...)
- Cloudcuckoolander: Jiang, the Lore master. He can walk into courses to do gardening singing bawdy songs and is considered a joke by the other masters. He also has a garden full of forbidden plants.
- The Cloudcuckoolander Was Right: Jiang accurately sums up Altan as being like a mad dog, taught to do nothing more than fight and hate until nothing is left, and his supposed patriotism is just hatred of the Mugenese for what they did to him as a child. He doesn't care about Nikan, so long as he can wipe out his enemy. Altan is stunned speechless by this and can only unconvincingly stammer that it's not true.
- Crystal Dragon Jesus: The Hesperians' worship of the Maker at first looks like a counterpart to Christianity, and has similar aesthetic elements (e.g, churches with stained glass’, but in the latter two books is revealed to be more like Deism (the Creator set the world up to work in orderly ways). Another difference in the tenets of this faith is that the Maker is the sole creator god, but he is not omnipotent, and must struggle continuously against the forces of Chaos. For its part, Chaos is described more as an entropic force than as a Satanic figure.
- Dark Fantasy: Being based on the Second Sino-Japanese War, things get very dark indeed.
- Dead Guy on Display: Taken to extremes by the Mugenese at Golyn Niis. They gruesomely torture and kill nearly every one of Golyn Niis' 500,000 residents, then leave the mangled remains strung up on walls and piled up in the streets for the arriving Militia to see.
- Deadly Gas: The Mugenese use a chemical weapon implied to be mustard gas or something like it.
- Deadpan Snarker: The Widow Maung, who lends Rin the pig to carry up the mountain, is the first to get to Master Jiang.
- Demolitions Expert: Ramsa, the youngest member of the Cike and one of the few non-shamans in the squad, is only there because of his prodigious skill at explosives.
- Divided We Fall: None of the Warlords are willing to cooperate with each other. During the war, they refuse to share intelligence or supplies with each other. Each Warlord is more focused on protecting their own territory, rather than coordinating with the other Warlords to protect their country.
- Downer Ending: The series ends with Rin, Kitay, and Venka all dead. Nezha survives, but is left alone to rebuild Nikan, and because of his immortality, will likely be alone forever.
- Drugs Are Bad: Opium traffic has been used to undermine the empire's stability. On the individual level, Aunt Fang explains to Rin how to get her husband addicted to control him. Even when shamans use drugs to let their mind commune with gods, too much can leave them addled for combat or addicted.
- The Empire: The expansionistic and warlike Federation of Mugen, a clear counterpart of Imperial Japan, is a straight example. Ironically, the Nikan Empire is not.
- Evil Is Not a Toy: Rin learns this one the hard way when She uses the Phoenix to commit mass genocide of the Federation of Mugen.
- Evil Versus Evil: The Nikara-Mugen wars. Both sides see the others as not human because of the atrocities they have committed and use it to justify their own atrocities. By the end of the first book Rin herself has committed genocide against the Mugen Federation and the rest of the Cike have condemned the Nikara civil population to famine and pestilence to get rid of enemies, something that Rin proposed in a strategy homework earlier.
- Fantastic Racism: Played with. The Hesperians' racist beliefs are essentially identical to the real world's 19th-century scientific racism, right down to the belief that the "white race" is superior to all others. However, the Hesperian racial ideology has one notable difference from its real-world counterpart that pulls it into fantastic territory: The Hesperians believe that as "lesser" races are "educated" into the superior Hesperian culture, they will physically evolve into white people.
- Fantasy Counterpart Culture: The Nikara Empire is obviously inspired by Imperial and later, Republican China. The Federation of Mugen is Imperial Japan and Hesperia has elements of the United Kingdom and the United States. Heightened by what the Mugeni and Nikarans do to each other during the war: the Federation invasion maps onto the Rape of Nanjing, while Rin's awakening of the volcano under the Longbow Island is basically the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
- Fantasy World Map: R.F. Kuang has a map showing
the Nikara Empire and the Federation of Mugen, the author has jokingly said that "Any resemblance to real-life countries is mere coincidence" - Functional Addict: Altan; he was addicted on purpose to control him.
- Foreshadowing: In the first chapter, Rin uses pain to help her focus and get what she wants. By the end of the book, pain causes the hatred which is the focus of her powers.
- Fostering for Profit: The Fangs try to marry Rin off to an official to gain leverage for their business. (It says something that she expected the matchmaker to be a brothel madame who intended to buy her.)
- Genocide Backfire: Mugen's treatment of the Speer Island caused Hesperia to take sides in the Second Poppy War. And they left Altan and Rin alive.
- Godzilla Threshold - A major theme is subverting the Godzilla Threshold. Thresholds pop up repeatedly:
- In a strategy exercise, Rin suggests destroying a dam to kill a large mass of enemy soldiers (and sacrificing civilians and some of her troops in the process). A classmate objects, pointing out that she's not considering the long-term effects - the flood would wash away topsoil in the entire river delta, causing widespread starvation and disease for years to come. At the end of the first book, someone has pulled off such a move, and Rin reflects that her classmate was right.note
- Altan's solution to the Mugen invasion - release thousands of unkillable madmen with godlike powers in the hope of making things better. It becomes very clear this was a terrible idea, and the only person released absolutely makes things worse.
- At the book's climax, Rin uses the Phoenix to destroy Mugen. It's made clear that this won't help much - the invasion force, not being in Mugen, was untouched and now has no home to return to.
- Groin Attack: “This is the only kick you'll ever need, really. A kick to bring down the most powerful warriors.” Some martial art teachers disagree.
- Humanoid Abomination: Shamans who succumb to madness turn into permanent conduits for the gods. The resulting entities look human enough, but they're utterly mad, prone to chaos and destruction, and they can never, ever die. The only solution is to seal them in the Chuluu Korikh for all time.
- Hypnotic Eyes: The Vipress’s.
- Informed Attribute: Rin claims to have practically raised Kesegi and loves him. Once she's accepted into Sinegard, she promptly leaves him without a backward glance and never bothers to write to him afterwards.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Despite his many, many flaws, and previous violent behavior, Nezha's disgusted when it becomes clear Altan physically abused Rin - in part because he knows Rin didn't take anything like it from him.
- Kick the Dog: What the Mugenese army does to the civilians of Golyn Niis takes this up to eleven.
- Magic Knight: Shamans are commonly, though not universally, warriors of this sort. Rin is no exception, and wields fire and sword alike with deadly proficiency.
- Military School: A significant part of the first book happens at Sinegard Academy, the best military school in Nikara.
- Playing with Fire: Channeling the Phoenix grants Rin the power to produce huge amounts of fire from her body. She hones more precise control over her abilities during the second book.
- The Power of Hate: Ultimately the way to channel the Phoenix. Altan is very, very good at hating because he was experimented on as a child. Rin, after seeing the horrors the Federation wreaks upon her country and people, becomes even better at it.
- Powers via Possession: Shamans can perform magic in the physical world by calling on gods to possess them.
- The Purge: After the Republican forces triumph over the Empire in the Nikada civil war, Vaisra cleans house, rounding up and executing the Southern Warlords and the remaining Cike members who fought for him during the war.
- Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: The Cike, the empire's assassins and shamans division.
- Rape as Backstory: In her youth, Su Daji was raped by a Hesperian soldier and rescued by a Mugenese one. She sees the setting's geopolitics as essentially a macrocosm of this single event, motivating her actions throughout the series.
- Rape, Pillage, and Burn: The Mugenese troops who massacre Nikani civilians with abandon wherever they go, reaching its peak with the slaughter at Golyn Niis where hundreds of thousands of people experience roughly every brand of warcrime known to man.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Changhan gives one to Rin, calling her out on her constant disrespect and obnoxiousness towards everyone around her, including her commanding officer, and tells her to stop acting like a little bitch because Altan won't pat her on the head.
- The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized: The republican revolution in the second book has clear tendencies of this; sure they hold plebiscites when they capture settlements, but the options are either voting to join the Republic or having all adult men executed. Things go From Bad to Worse shortly after the Republic wins the Nikani civil war and Vaisra initiates a Purge of the Cike and the Warlords who supported him.
- Shout-Out: Kitay spreads a rumor that he is "the heir to the long-forgotten Fist of the North Wind, an art that allowed the user to incapacitate opponents by touching a few choice pressure points."
- Spoiled Brat: Nezha and a few other students at Sinegard. Nezha gets better, though.
- Ironically, despite not being spoiled by the Fang's at all, Rin sometimes demonstrates behaviour like this when she throws a tantrum because Jiang won't show her how to harness the Phoenix right now when she's a volatile, untrained sixteen-year-old girl, or continuously backtalks and insults Altan because he's ignoring her.
- Supernatural Martial Arts: The teachers at Sinegard Academy are adamant that ki manipulation is not supernatural. Then you have shamans.
- The Mengele: Dr. Shiro. He conducted experiments on the Speerlies to find out the origin of their powers.
- Training from Hell: To build muscle mass, Rin must carry a baby pig up a mountain every day. The thing about baby pigs: they do not stay babies. And that's a pretty mild task. The Sinegard deliberately overloads its students with work and expects a twenty percent dropoff in the first year, and then the Combat master bars her from his class for a minor infraction essentially because she's a village girl and not a noble's daughter.
- Villain Protagonist: By the end of the third book, Rin has become an increasingly merciless, self-absorbed dictator on the level of most other leaders in the series, probably worse as it's lampshaded that her main strength is soldiering and making wars even bloodier, not uniting and/or leading a stable nation.
- War Is Hell: Kuang doesn't shy away from vividly describing the horrors of war and its effects on the civilian population.
- What the Hell, Hero?: By the end of the first book, Kitay and Rin are no longer friends because he can't conscience her destroying the entire Federation homeland.
