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Chapter 24
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Poppy War, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Dehumanization and the Horrors of War
Identity, Cultural Trauma, and Coming of Age
The Purpose of Education
Addiction, Drugs, and Control
History
Summary
Analysis
Rin seems to swim for hours or days. The water is warm, thanks to Altan’s flames, and Rin considers drowning. She hallucinates his voice, and the Phoenix tells her to bring it her pain. The Woman tells Rin to stay away, but Rin insists on pushing forward. Rin sees visions of a god of the wind in the mountains, and of Chaghan and Qara breaking a dam. In the spirit world, Rin touches Chaghan, but he asks for Altan. Rin’s spirit, scared, flies into the past. She sees Tearza refusing to sacrifice Speer, and the Phoenix condemning her to a spiritual lifetime of pain. Then, she’s whipped away to the Gatekeeper and asks why he abandoned “us.” He just stares at her until, finally, he shakes her and tells her to wake so she doesn’t drown.
The journey Rin’s spirit takes provides a brief overview of what’s happening right now. Chaghan and Qara are breaking a dam, and the Chaghan reaffirms his commitment to Altan. It also gives perhaps a truer version of what happened between Tearza and the Phoenix: Tearza was unwilling to give it the bloody sacrifice it asked for, believing subjugation to be better than whatever the Phoenix was going to do. What exactly the Phoenix planned to do, however, remains mysterious. Finally, Rin asks Jiang (the Gatekeeper) about his seeming abandonment. But notice that while he’s not physically with her, he also likely saves her life here by telling her to wake up. That is, he doesn’t seem to be gone.
Themes
Rin climbs out of the water onto sand. She realizes that the sand is littered with human bones, and she stumbles for the trees. A voice in her head tells her to look for the paths to the temple. Finally, she finds a rocky path and follows it, hallucinating terrifying animals. The path leads to a clearing and some ruins, but Rin realizes the temple itself is underground. She journeys down, feeling like she’s getting closer to the Phoenix. There’s a carving of the Phoenix on the wall, and Rin ascends to the spirit world when she looks in the carving’s eye. But once again, she encounters Mai’rinnen Tearza’s ghost, and Tearza begs Rin not to continue. She explains that embracing the Phoenix would’ve caused the world to burn. Rin doesn’t think it was okay to condemn Speer to a millennium of abuse, and she wants revenge. Tearza insists that revenge won’t help.
Rin and Tearza’s conversation lays out a difficult moral quandary, one the book leaves it up to readers to answer: would it have been worth it to save Speer—a tiny island—if it meant the rest of the world suffered in return? Tearza, it’s implied, thought it wasn’t worth it. Rin clearly disagrees, as she seems ready to embrace the Phoenix and whatever destruction it sees fit. Once again, the novel doesn’t imply that Speer deserved what it got. But it nevertheless suggests that Rin’s alternative entails dehumanizing a massive number of people and condemning them to suffering, something that Tearza, at least, doesn’t think is the answer to the centuries of suffering Speer endured.
Themes
Rin calls the fire, dissolving Tearza’s ghost, and appears before the Phoenix. The Phoenix insists that Altan was weak and that Jiang was a coward. Altan, Rin realizes, got a martyr’s death because he couldn’t stand the thought of staying alive. The Phoenix asks Rin what she wants, and Rin lets “the last part of what [i]s human out of her soul and g[i]ve[s] way to her hatred.” She asks for the Federation to disappear—which is what the Phoenix wants. But the Phoenix laughs: gods don’t want things. They just help humans do what they want, and destiny doesn’t exist. Rin has made choices every step of the way, and now she’s here, asking the Phoenix to destroy Mugen. Rin insists that the Mugenese aren’t people, and more people will live if they all die. She promises the Phoenix worship and blood.
It's a key moment here when Rin lets go of “the last part of what [i]s human” in her in order to fully accept the Phoenix. When she does this, Rin asks for the entire population of Mugen to be wiped out in an instant, not caring that she’s calling for the deaths of unknown numbers of fellow human beings. She’s been taught too fully to dehumanize her enemies, and it’s that dehumanization that allows her to justify asking for this bloodshed. The Phoenix suggests that Rin is making this choice of her own volition, but the fact remains that the Phoenix craves destruction. It might not have specifics in mind, but it isn’t helping Rin make different choices.
Themes
Rin bursts into flame in the temple. It’s so painful, she wants to die. Inside her, “something […] disappear[s].” Just then, Rin feels like she’s merely a conduit for the Phoenix. Then the world starts to burn. On the island of Mugen, innocent civilians die suddenly. Rin tells herself they weren’t people, and she finds that the part of her that could once empathize and understand death as a tragedy doesn’t work anymore. Several hours later, Rin stands up. She still bursts into flame when she moves; she can’t control it. The burning is so painful.
Rin feels immense pain as she channels the Phoenix, which destroys Mugen in an instant. It’s also telling that she can’t empathize with the dead anymore. As a result of her choice to embrace the Phoenix, she’s fully let go of one of the things that made her human: her ability to recognize others’ humanity.
Themes
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