Talk:Rachel/@comment-27933088-20190918010345

I've only read just up to the start of the 30th floor tests so far, and I've done my best to avoid too many spoilers, but it's been hard not to notice the copious amount of hate that this character gets in the comments sections and the equally vehement defending.

I think that the hatred mostly comes down to two things: She's freely and willingly crossed a moral event horizon (a couple of times), and she never seems to get her comeuppance or ever really suffer any serious negative consequences for her actions. I understand that the author is trying to tell a very grey story with tangled morality and complex and believable motivations and that he's doing his best to make her relatable (it seems like mostly later on, in the chapters that I haven't read yet) but, for all of his creative genius, he's ignoring the fact that these are cardinal sins when it comes to making your character likeable or rehabilitating an apparent antagonist.

The fact that she focuses her anger and blame on Bam at the start of this whole thing for circumstances beyond his control just strikes a reader as a fundamentally selfish and unfair basis for her motivations. Jealousy is understandable. Resentment and a sense of helplessness are too, but (generally) one of the most important characteristics of 'good' characters and, by extension, 'good' people is the fact that they realize that these feelings may be justified but the target of them has done nothing to deserve their hatred, and they try to wrestle with that and confront it in some over the course of their personal growth.

The way that her deadweight act willingly endangers her teammates and ostensible friends under false pretenses doesn't earn her any points either. Yes, it's 'clever', but it also just comes across as selfish on a grand level, which is what differentiates it from conceptually similar instances where Khun or another manipulator puts their comrades at risk without them having full knowledge of how and why. In those cases, the five-dimensional chess plays is their own most valuable piece on the board and is usually in mortal danger themselves. Individually selfish actions by the likes of Endorsi and Anaak also stain their characters to some extent, but they're written as representing an early stage of legitimate character growth that eventually progresses, making them somewhat more forgivable.

Most egregious, though, is what she does to Dann. Up until then, I was skeptical but still willing to get on board with a well-written redemption arc. I don't know, I still might be, but it'll take a lot of doing. It's because her actions there are nothing short of gratuitously sadistic. It's just outright cruelty for no visible benefit other than her own twisted emotional satisfaction. It's an act that, for me at least, speaks to her fundamental nature.

Compounding everything is the fact that she continues to skate by, completely unscathed, with normally intelligent and cunning characters getting hoodwinked and deceived by her despite being aware of her true nature. The character that she is at the point in the story where I am isn't believable as anything other than utterly vile, to be honest. An explanation or some background on why she is the way that she is would be interesting, but I don't view it as being redemptive. She remains an aggressively selfish individual demonstrably capable of extreme sadism against a harmless target. A redemption arc that involves growth and change might be something that I could buy, but for things to feel morally equivalent, I think she'll probably have to suffer some serious consequences for her actions along the way.

We'll see how I feel another hundred pages in but, at this point, the hatred towards her character, even if it's laughably over the top at times, feels pretty justified to me. Sorry for the essay. /endrant