ohhhhhh my god. This feels so specific to the minutiae of publishing, and of literary twitter world as well as Asian American online discourse which is A Lot and then you have June Hayward stumbling her way through it guaranteed to feel like nails on chalkboard with every choice she makes. Very well written and so very sharp but I don't know that I ever want to reread it lol

Everything is so thinly veiled. Jasmine Zheng the filmmaker is Chloe Zhao. Kimmy Deng is probably Cindy Pham (as she notes in her review of Yellowface, ha), even the MRAzns make an appearance in a twitter dust up (though Athena refers to them as AMRA instead). Also, a lot of self critique- I feel like by killing off Athena Liu, Rebecca kills the ideal caricature of herself, and in both June's musings and Discourse on whether she has the right to tell real life stories in her own way (notably, The Poppy War includes atrocities from the Rape of Nanking among other war crimes) and I found that aspect really interesting.

It took me longer to finish the second half of the duology than the first, whoops- combination of getting put in a chokehold by Robin Hobb as my ebook, but also just not feeling as compelled to finish.

What's up with Viqi Shesh? I guess we need a new politician to hate besides Fey'la. This also highlighted to me how our readalong skipped the Corellia trilogy as there were several callbacks relevant to the plot here (surprisingly: Courtship of Princess Leia was also relevant). Han Solo is back to business, though, which is probably the better takeaway even though once again the Yuuzhan Vong make other devastating strikes.

also was funny to read about Hutt intrigue as we finally got around to watching Mandalorian and Grogu while I was reading this, haha.