The Poppy War

Content Warnings: This section of the guide discusses self-harm, drug addiction, racism, classism, colorism, explicit wartime violence, sexual assault, human experimentation, suicide, and genocide.

The brutality of war manifests in several different ways, but it is primarily tied to the dehumanization of one’s enemies. Both the Mugenese and the Nikara are taught to dehumanize each other—and the Speerlies—to make killing easier. This theme is tied to The Influence of Stories on Social Structures.

When Rin kills her first Mugenese soldier, she registers “temporary shock, then the grim realization that she needed to do this again, and again, and again” (242). Until this point, Rin has not given any thought to her enemies. When Kitay wonders what they look like, Rin says she doesn’t want to know, because “then [she] might think they’re human. And they’re not human” (232-33). She justifies this dehumanization with the Federation’s previous war crimes. The fact that Kitay asks the question at all—and often wonders what the Mugenese fight for and how they feel—shows that the Nikara are not educated about the Mugenese beyond biased history lessons.

Battle becomes more difficult when Rin is forced to acknowledge the humanity of Mugenese soldiers. On Rin’s first mission with the Cike, she is attacked by a Federation soldier whose face is “round and soft like a child’s” (311), which makes her realize that Nikan is not the only country to send its children to war. When Rin sees Mugenese soldiers up close, she is “disturbed that the Federation soldiers so closely [resemble] her people” (327). Seeing their similarities forces Rin to acknowledge that she must kill humans like herself—and if those humans are capable of atrocities, so are the Nikara.

The Brutality of War and the Dehumanization of the Enemy is most clearly shown in the Golyn Niis Massacre. Rin sees:

Corpses in states of incredible desecration, grotesque positions that defied human imagination. Corpses nailed to boards. Corpses hung by their tongues from hooks. Corpses dismembered in every possible way; headless, limbless, displaying mutilations that must have been performed while the victim was still alive. Fingers removed, then stacked in a small pile beside stubby hands. An entire line of castrated men, severed penises placed delicately on their slack-jawed mouths (414).

These explicit descriptions are based off of the war crimes committed during the Nanjing Massacre in World War II. They become a poignant commentary on what humans are capable of when they are taught to dehumanize others. Rin realizes the Federation soldiers’ logic: “[I]f your opponent was not human, if your opponent was a cockroach, what did it matter how many of them you killed?” (432).

Rin takes this logic into her genocide of the Mugenese people to cope with the horror of her actions: “The lives were so many that she ceased to acknowledge them for what they were. […] She thought of the flies that she had crushed under her finger. Those weren’t lives” (504). The parallel imagery of insects shows that Rin has become as brutal as the Mugenese she views as monsters. Just like at the beginning of the war, Rin refuses to humanize the Mugenese; this time, however, it is because she has committed incomprehensible violence. If she acknowledges how many individuals she killed with the Phoenix—including civilians, or even young women like herself—her mind will break.

Dehumanization of victims leads to acts of violence that, in turn, allow for the dehumanization of their perpetrators, creating a cycle of brutal war. Kitay points out this hypocrisy when Rin defends herself by saying the Mugenese were monsters. He argues that no race deserves genocide, no matter their crimes.

The Speerlies arguably suffer the worst of The Brutality of War and the Dehumanization of the Enemy, as they are dehumanized by both the Nikara and the Mugenese. Rin suspects that Nikan sacrificed Speer because “the Speerlies weren’t really Nikara at all. Tall and brown-skinned, they were an island people who had always been ethnically separate from the Nikara mainlanders” (53). Nezha cites racist pseudoscience to dehumanize Speerlies, implying they are uncultured, unintelligent, and predisposed to violence. Several characters mention the Speerly affinity for fire; it is eventually revealed that this stems from their connection to the Phoenix, but in present-day Nikan, such stories only set them further apart from the Nikara. The Mugenese also separate Speer from Nikan; Chaghan recounts the torturous medical experiments the Federation performed on Speerlies in attempts to uncover the secrets of shamanism, and Shiro states that Rin and Altan are “nothing like those pathetic Nikara” because they are “composed of such lovely material” (476). Shiro and other Mugenese doctors perform brutal experiments on Speerlies to obtain violent power for their own soldiers, at the cost of those they only view as specimens.