The Endless Saga of ‘To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods’

A month ago, the Young Adult publishing community was in quite a stir over the convoluted controversy involving To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods by Molly X. Chang. Many expected the publisher to canceled the six-figure debut novel. That hasn’t happened. The April 16^th publication date has sat where it always has, quite unchanged. So too, has the marketing cycle, which remains as nonexistent and uncommunicative now as it did back when the controversy first broke. Penguin Random House appears to have decided to fulfill the bare minimum of their contract and let the whole thing die–a similarly ignomonious end to the similarly silly controversy behind Blood Heir by Amelie Wen Zhao.

But let’s try to start from the beginning. The initial marketing for Gaze Upon Wicked Gods emphasized the story’s more multicultural elements- namely that it’s an anti-colonial fantasy based on Manchurian ghost tales. In a blurb that haunts haunt the book’s release, Molly X. Chang directly cited the activities of Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army as an inspiring element for the worldbuilding. This is awkward mainly because PRH is now marketing the book as a dark romance.  But it wouldn’t register on the calendar at all if not for the convoluted review-bombing drama that’s surrounded the book.

Last December in the young adult publishing world, debut author Cait Corrain alienated pretty much all of her peers and the publishing world by review bombing other debut authors she was competing with. Molly X. Chang was among these authors. Corrain read Advance Review Copies granted to her as a fellow author, then made fake accounts on GoodReads to attack these books while also giving glowing reviews to her own books. Suffice to say, Cait Corrain no longer has a literary career, though she did try to apologize as gracefully as she could on her way out.

Of course, Cait Corrine didn’t invent the concept of GoodReads review bombing. The practice now lives in infamy for sabotaging Blood Heirs as being racist for depicting slaves as having dark skin. If this sounds tepid, well, this is why even at the time many thought the Blood Heirs controversy barely even counted as a controversy.

The Gaze Upon Wicked Gods controversy is similarly very online and very pedantic. It’s so online, in fact, that if you actually look at the Goodreads page where Gaze Upon Wicked Gods is supposedly receiving review bombs, you might observe that the 3.6 rating out of 5 doesn’t sound all that awful, even if it is somewhat low for a book that only advance readers had access to. Hence the drama. Molly X. Chang claimed that reviewers assembled a troll army to attack her story. Her reviewers in turn claimed that Molly X. Chang assembled her own troll army to attack them.

The more interesting bit of all this than the silly hearsay is the question of whether Molly X. Chang actually wrote a story about a sexy chemical warfare specialist in the Japanese Empire having a romantic relationship with her story’s lead character. And she didn’t–Chang wrote a story about a princess in an oriental fantasy empire, captured by a prince in an occidental fantasy empire, who forces her to use her magic powers for evil. Except she also kind of consented to it first, because the prince of the occidental fantasy empire isn’t so bad, aside from the whole part where he had her tortured first.

This doesn’t even sound like an engaging plot, but that on its own isn’t controversial. Different people have different tastes, and while I might not personally be a fan of harlequin novels, I don’t think a person who enjoys them is necessarily a bad person. And this is why there’s even a controversy about Gaze Upon Wicked Gods in the first place. Gaze Upon Wicked Gods isn’t a regular romantic fantasy. It’s a Random House Young Adult Romantic Fantasy that earned a six figure contract in part because it explicitly promised more awareness of multicultural viewpoints, to the point that it mostly irrelevantly invoked Unit 731 mainly to give the whole project a greater feeling of seriousness and pathos.

There is, of course, an irony in that–a genre literally called “Young Adult” having such strong pretensions of needing to somehow be socially relevant, as opposed to just being generally relateble to adolescent development. But then, it’s not exactly a secret that these days that “Young Adult” branding is meant to express political guidance more than vocabulary level. Hardly anyone who reads or discusses young adult fiction is actually a young adult at this point. And this is what makes the political correctness so important. It’s important for young people, after all, to have access to stories that teach correct beliefs about other cultures.

This is how we arrive at the Gaze Upon Wicked Gods controversy. Critics are calling the book insufficiently anticolonialist, which steers the conversation to implicitly racist condemnation of its author Molly X. Chang. The actual content of the story is irrelevant, and really, it can’t exactly be relevant when we’re talking about a book hardly anyone can actually read, where what little discourse we see is leaking out of internal disputes in the Young Adult writing community with people more interested in advocating for a specific political position than they are in explaining what the controversy is even about.

The greater irony of all of this, of course, is that ideally we shouldn’t be teaching children any ideologies. We should be trying to teach them to think for themselves with open-ended complex ethical situations- something all the great books in the young adult genre do, but which hardly any of the big up-and-coming projects ever even aspire to. The ridiculous marketing strategies, which assume among other things that authors can rally armies of social media followers to their aid on Goodreads, might be part of the problem with that.

Gaze Upon Wicked Gods, to its credit, received no favors from a marketing campaign that emphasized the story’s edgy romance without stopping to consider how gross it comes off after all the prior comparisons of Rome (yes that’s what Chang actually calls the colonialist empire in the book) to Unit 731. Incidentally, Blood Heir, a book that you’ve most likely heard of only because for its cancelation, came out out only four months after the initial date, but it also has two sequels, none of them remarkably successful. To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods, delayed or not, likewise seems destined to fade into obscurity even if it, too, gets sequels.