A Character Arc Masterclass: R. F. Kuang’s ‘The Burning God’
“I am the end and the beginning. The world is a painting and I hold the brush. I am a god.”
This book is dedicated to the readers who stayed with the series until the end and came prepared with a bucket for their tears… Words to heed.
I wrote out all my book 3 theories right after finishing TDR and the only thing I was 100% certain about going in was that a certain character would survive. I literally typed out the words “Character X will definitely make it. They’re the only one I’m sure of”. So I’ll just be over here slathering on my clown makeup. Bless him. All he ever did was read, write, create, invent, and love her.
What a glorious glorious outro to the series. I raced through the last few chapters by the light of a flickering cinnamon chai candle one torturous night during first lockdown to the tune of torrential rain and distant thunder and tbqh it was like being delicately, lovingly fed through a wood chipper. What’re the wee hours anyway without a bit of weeping.
“We were the righteous river of blood.”
Rin muses throughout the book about the “whims of fate” and its great canvas of crimson script, the portentous strokes scrawled by a fickle brush she thought she’d wrested from the claws of divinity. “This world is a butterfly’s dream” is a maxim that brings her both existential horror and a frightening mantle of total calm, like when she burst through the clouds in TDR on wings of leather and found herself hanging in vast boundless blue, for the first time in her life feeling an impossible yet undeniable sense of perfect peace.
“The universe was a waking dream, a fragile and mutable thing, a blur of colors shaped by the unpredictable whims of divinity.”
She concludes that really that’s all the world is: a puppet show of constantly shifting shapes ever in flux given all that is “objectively material are only shadows” flitting across the walls as in Plato’s cave, the gods ever lurking behind the scenes “wielding the puppets”. It’s an inherently nihilistic world view, assigning special providence to the fall of a sparrow, but ultimately that’s what enables agency, and imbues it with such power, as she learns to reach behind the canvas and seize the brush.
Hesperian doctor Petra, one of the colonisers under the guise of missionaries from the barbaric west, lectures Rin about how the world inexorably marches towards order and that’s why she’ll lose, but it’s really Chaghan’s assessment of the Tolkienesque cycles of destruction that holds true… a circle of civilisation and chaos, ever entropic. Indeed entropy is the entire point. His insistence that there are no new stories gorgeously echoes Rin’s equation of gods and stories in her theology lessons with Jiang right back in book 1.
The way it all rushes into alignment for her in that soul-shredding crescendo of the final chapter when she realises she’s just “the latest iteration of the same scene in a tapestry that had been spun long before her birth” is just… chef’s kiss.
It all ultimately comes back to that string of Old Nikara characters carved into the cliffs over Arlong by the Red Emperor moments before his flayed body was hung over the gates of his stormed palace, “glinting in the noon sun like freshly spilled blood”, for which Nezha and Kitay gave two different translations. In the end, both are true…
Nothing lasts. The world does not exist.
But the final note in that tragic requiem of an ending is one of hope, because Rin reclaims her agency, and Nezha lingers on like Horatio to rewrite the narrative.
“People are attracted to power, darling. They can’t help themselves. Power seduces. Exert it, make a show of it, and they’ll follow you.”
I’ll be hard-pressed to ever find another character arc that comes close to rivalling my love for Fang Runin, one that so masterfully vivisects the anatomy of an anti-hero, especially in a series so exponentially elevated by its epic setting, the role of divinity, and the sheer weight of real-world history behind it.
“This story will end.” Daji had been watching their exchange in silence, her mouth twisted in an unreadable expression. Now, her cool voice sliced the air like a knife. “The way it was always meant to.”
