‘I like the Poppy War series but there are many things wrong with it’ Overall conclusion. Part One (and how it links to Battle Shonen anime)

Spoilers for the entire trilogy.

Honestly, the series had some great ideas but was poor in execution.

When reading the books, I noticed they shared similar battle Shonen tropes, such as the tournament arc, the older male powerful character (Altan is essentially a Senpai) the old mentor, kids being forced to stop studying to fight a war, the rival to friend to enemy.

The books also contained many flaws of Battle Shonen.

One example is that Battle Shonen tend to introduce a bunch of characters, then kill off or sideline them and introduce more characters, then some from the previous bunch return and more get killed off and sidelined, and then the pattern continues.

The Poppy War was the same, We meet the Sinegard people, then some get abandoned and we meet the Cike, then in the second book we meet the Hesperians and Ketreyids, and then the Cike get mostly killed off, then in the third book we meet Souji, he dies and then a bunch of new shamans get introduced right near the end.

As a result, there’s too many characters and not enough time to develop them all before they get killed off and sidelined.

Battle Shonen has the same issue with plotlines. Too many plotlines mean some don’t get developed enough.

In the series we had, North vs South Nikara, Mugan vs Nikara, everyone oppressing Speer, Vaisra vs Su Daji and then the Hesperians show up.

Too many plotlines and not enough time to develop all of them. The third book starts with fighting the Muganese again and then it quickly moves on to fighting Nezha and the Hesperian. The mob violence felt glossed over. It’s all so overstuffed.

Another flaw is female characters. Despite its female MC, TPW falls into the same trap Battle Shonen does with female characters. As in there being so few and despite this they get killed off at the same rate as male characters. Sure, male characters get undeveloped and killed off, but it sticks out more with women when there’s so few of them.

In the second book, we have Qara, the Sorquan Sira, that female officer and Niang all getting killed off.

Speaking of women, I think the series needed to explain better the position of women in Nikara. We see female students at the military academy but it’s reinforced so few women join the military. Why is that exactly? One of the teachers, Jima, was a woman. Now that I think about it, we never saw her again.

And why do they want female soldiers losing their womb when won’t better female soldiers make stronger kids?

We got a sorta 2 girl one boy trio with the new shamans in the third book, but that was too close to the end.

And as for Mugan, did they not have any women?

That brings me to my next point, the book series had such poor antagonists. Battle Shonen, for its many flaws, have great antagonists.

For some reason RF Kuang ignored this and as a result none of the TPW antagonists were compelling.

Mugan were poorly developed with the nuance in book 3 coming off as shallow since we barely get names. Hesperian was mostly the same, just a bunch of racist colonisers. There was Angus who was nice but still racist and he gets killed off quickly.

Jun, Lady Saikhara, Riga, all a bunch of one dimensional jerks.

Vaisra was slightly better but we don’t get an insight to why he’s fine with the Hesperians taking over.

Nezha could have been a great antagonist if it wasn’t for the fact he was a stooge of the Hesperians.

Honestly, the Hesperians made everything feel overstuffed.

Su Daji was an exception in that she was quite complex but I don’t get why she believed from just her experience that Hesperia is better than Mugan when she lived under Mugabese occupation and probably heard of Mugan men raping women.

What’s weird is that Kuang was inspired by Avatar the Last Airbender. Did she miss the point of how Avatar emphasised that Antagonists are people too?

I wonder if she heard of people being more invested in the Imperial Japanese and Nazis over the unsympathetic resistance from Man in the High Castle and so decided to make her antagonists cartoonishly evil as possible.

Honestly, I’ll have to make a part 2 of this.