#katabasis — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #katabasis, aggregated by home.social.
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A Dream of Poe – Katabasis: A Marriage Among Ashes Review
Miguel Santos loves Edgar Allan Poe. He turned that love into a (sort of) one-man metal project called…
#NewsBeep #News #Music #2026 #3.5 #ADreamofPoe #Apr26 #CA #Canada #Dolven #DoomMetal #Entertainment #FuneralDoom #Katabasis:AMarriageAmongAshes #MeuseMusic #MyDyingBride #ParadiseLost #PortugueseMetal #review #reviews #SymphonicDoom #SymphonicMetal #TempestuousFall
https://www.newsbeep.com/ca/625651/ -
CW: Spoilers "Katabasis"
Another "Katabasis" thought: both main characters hide behind a stereotype, I think.
Alice is deeply depressed and traumatized. She uses the Asian-American do-gooder who is after gold stars as a mask.
Peter has a disabling condition and varying number of spoons. He uses the scatterbrained, otherworldly genius as a mask.
Both don't even let their best friends see behind that mask until they've literally been through hell together.
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CW: Spoilers "Katabasis"
That's certainly possible. But could she, would she choose to, mask as a carefree, scatterbrained genius? I am not sure.
Genius without effort is so strongly male-coded I can't see her getting away with it. People would tell her to dress differently. They would talk about her being unprofessional and awkward and not a good fit.
So, gender-swapping "Katabasis"? Not completely, I think.
(3/n, n=3)
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CW: Spoilers "Katabasis"
When he's groomed and assaulted by his advisor, he's on his own not because he should've known better, but because this doesn't happen to men. He tells no one, spirals into depression until he breaks.
Yeah, that works. Needs work not to tap into anti-gay bigotry but can be done.
And Peter, could he be Petra (with maybe a more stereotypically English first name)? A chronically ill woman who doesn't tell anyone because she doesn't want to be seen as weak?
(2/n)
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CW: Spoilers "Katabasis"
Ach, come on. Now the draft is finished: my (spoilery, so under a CN they go) thoughts on gender-swapping Alice and Peter, the two grad students venturing into the underworld in R.F. Kuang's "Katabasis".
Alice could be Al, I think. Asian-American boy with loving parents, a drive to succeed and a fascination for Old Europe. He comes to England and deals with racism, imposter syndrome, stereotyping.
(1/n)
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“This was the key to flourishing in graduate school. You could do anything if you were delusional.”
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“Meteorologically, Hell didn’t seem much worse than an English spring.”
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Katabasis on tähän mennessä paras lukemani kirja tälle vuodelle.
Se on myös ainoa. Mutta ei siitä tarvitse välittää, se on silti hyvä kirja.
Manalan matkailua, kuolemaa, ihmissuhteita, akateemista julkaisemista, ohjaajia ja ohjattavia, taikaa ja kuolemaa. Ei edes liian väkivaltaista, vaikka välillä meno on aika mäiskimistä.
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Zuletzt beendetes Buch: "Katabasis" von R.F Kuang. Wie ihr "Babel" grossartig 💚 Wieder Akademia, diesmal: Was nutzen Logik, Philosophie und Magietheorie in der Hölle? Nach Dante's Inferno: Lesen! #Katabasis #RFKuang #Fantasyromane #bookstodon #buchstodon #amreadingfantasy
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Since I'm sick over Christmas break I've been able to finish Katabasis in a few days... Not sure what I think of this one. I liked it I think? #books #fantasy #katabasis
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I finished #Katabasis by R. F. Kuang. Really fun (and dark) as a satire on academia, but tonally and thematically quite uneven and drags after the first third. (Is this a romance? Is it Voyage of the Dawn Treader in Hell? Is it a Zelazny-esque mashup of world mythologies? What it is is a mess).
There's an abrupt shift in the main character I just couldn't buy about 2/3rds in. And a lengthy section on sexual assault and feminism in academia whose intent I could not puzzle out.
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Both carry trauma, and anger, and secrets, and their motivations are more complex than the desire for recommendation letters.
I didn't find the characters and their journey very likeable or interesting, although they're good explorations of *types* and the problems they encounter in a toxic academic culture. But I did like the worldbuilding: hell's geometry; the logical paradoxes; the creepily unsettling landscape.
(3/n)
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Like "Babel", Kuang scathingly points out the damage a racist, misogynist, ableist academia can do, even if one really loves the great project of expanding humanity's knowledge. And like "Babel", "Katabasis" doesn't offer an easy solution. Alice and Peter don't burn it all down; they just leave, without a clear alternative path.
And all other ways of dealing with academia the novel presents are horrible.
(4/n)
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Being a massive asshole, being a deadweight, neglecting both your research and your children, committing suicide, being bitter instead of showing solidarity. Even the person who seemingly has it all ends up a twisted monster in hell.
This ending left me unsatisfied but happy for our protagonists. "Katabasis" is an intriguing read, but it *is* gory and violent at times - a little too much so for me.
(5/n)
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It also has sexual abuse and disordered eating content, so if you're sensitive to that or infodumps about logic, it's probably not a read for you.
One review I read criticized it it's not a subtle book. That's true: Kuang makes all her analogies very clear and the similarities between hell and Cambridge are on-the-nose. This didn't bother me, actually: I'm bad at metaphor and inferring things from the text, so I like it when an author is direct.
(6/n, n=6)
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Which, of course, is the point it's trying to make about academia. And hell. After all, these two are mirror images of each other.
So. As our grad students go to hell using this universe's magick, which works by inscribing paradoxes, we learn both a lot about the landscape (in hyperbolic geometry 😍) they encounter and themselves. Driven do-gooder Alice isn't as good as she seems, and light-hearted genius Peter isn't as privileged as he seems.
(2/n)
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Yeah, right. R.F. Kuang's "Katabasis". First sentence and pitch sound fun: "grad students in a parallel Cambridge with magick venture into the underworld to get their deceased advisor to write them recommendation letters". While this sounds like dark fun, "Katabasis" is something else entirely. It *is* funny at times, yes. But it's mostly dark. Very dark. And bleakly hopeless. Exhausting.
(1/n)
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"How could she deserve life? Who ever deserved life? But you could not question such gifts. Elspeth had taught her this. There was no answer, only wondrous and inexplicable grace, and the only thing to do in return was simply to live."
The ending feels a little flat and unclear, but that thought sure is beautiful and true.
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"He’d destroyed her faith in her own ability to think, and to judge the results of her thought, instead of turning to him at every step for confirmation. And it was just so unfortunate that it took his death for her to conceive, research, and carry out an entire project on her own."
It's such a waste, because that's almost precisely the *opposite* of what a PhD should be for.
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"Alice’s mind went unbidden to the acknowledgments of so many monographs. Last of all, many thanks to my loving wife, who kept our house, set our tables, fed our children, typed up all my notes, and came up with most of my original ideas as well. My dear, you make our lives possible; your love inspires me."
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CW: disordered eating mentioned
Alice starving herself and not eating real food for weeks; how she always mentions how thin Peter is; Grime's type being "underfed".
There is a disordered eating theme here.
Asceticism as a form of showing how you're truly focused on the life of the mind.
I'm reminded of Courtney Martin's "Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters", which explores how post-feminist, driven girls struggle with eating disorders.
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"They evoked ideals more than they did particular people. Uniform strong brows, eyes lifted upward, straight patrician noses. Mouths set in heroic, defiant frowns."
Make that *white* ideals, eh.
(Is Alice white? She's American and speaks classical Chinese - maybe Asian-American? Wouldn't that be too much of a cliché?)
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A history of #DarkAcademia that focuses on the recent novel #Katabasis by #RFKuang .
Dark Academia Grows Up - Public Books https://www.publicbooks.org/dark-academia-grows-up/
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‘Babel’ Author R.F. Kuang’s New Book ‘Katabasis’ in the Works as Amazon TV Series From Writer Angela Kang (EXCLUSIVE)
#Variety #News #AmazonMGMStudios #AngelaKang #Katabasis #RFKuanghttps://variety.com/2025/tv/news/katabasis-tv-series-amazon-rf-kuang-angela-kang-1236493620/
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Hey there! My film Katabasis will be playing at SCUFF this coming November and I'm super excited to be going! I'll be there for the whole weekend to watch some indie films as well so it should be a lot of fun! If you're interested in checking it out, goto https://www.sc-uff.org/ for more info! :ablobblewobble:
