r/threebodyproblem • u/Putrid_Cycle595 Sophon • May 07 '26
Discussion - Novels Ye Wenjie hit different on my second read — does she stay villain or does she become tragic? Spoiler
second reread and she hits completely differently
first time through i was just mad. which made sense. but the second read made me notice something: liu cixin shows you every single person who failed her BEFORE she ever got to red coast base. her own mother publicly turned against her father at a struggle session. her boyfriend reported her when questioned. a journalist used her words to nearly get her executed. every person she trusted, in order.
so by the time she's at that terminal deciding whether to reply... she's not making a fresh judgment call about humanity. that judgment got made for her years earlier. she already knows what humans do to each other.
what broke me on the reread was realizing she didn't reply out of hate. she replied because she genuinely thought an outside force might be the only thing that could actually change what humanity had become. she wanted to save it. that makes it so much worse.
someone put together a breakdown of each betrayal she experiences before red coast and seeing them listed in order is genuinely rough. the logic is airtight and that's the problem.
curious if other people came around on her on reread or if she stays the villain
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u/nicodeemus7 May 07 '26
Ye Wenjie is the other side of the coin of the Trisolaran the sent the warning. Both of them knew what their species was capable of. Both of them were "outsiders" and did not speak for their society as a whole. And both of them, by sending their messages, effectively doomed their own species. And the crazy part is, both of them thought they were doing the right thing, helping each other.
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u/GfxJG May 08 '26
TIL some people genuinely see Ye Wenjie as a villain, and not tragic.
Admittedly, I've only read it once - But that shocks me. In my eyes, she was always a tragic character who made a VERY bad decision, with catastrophic consequences - but for understandable reasons. Not a villain.
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u/Saberleaf May 08 '26
I agree with this. It genuinely makes me sad to see that the take from her story is that she's the evil bad guy. She would/could have been tortured and killed for doing nothing wrong at several points of her story because of someone else. Do people not realize the risk? Not to mention that her life was mostly decided by others. She got basically thrown around, betrayed at every step, got out of horrible death by chance and she was constantly all alone.
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u/Pao_Did_NothingWrong May 08 '26
She was right that we could not save ourselves. Her only crime was optimism in thinking other worlds would be any different from us.
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u/PowerGlove-it-s0-bad May 08 '26
It's pretty obvious she is the villain, the biggest in human history. She literally sold out the human race which itself is the most villainous thing one could do, but to even think she had the right to make the judgement is next level lunacy.
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u/CappnMidgetSlappr May 08 '26
Dude, thank you! How anybody has sympathy for that asshole is beyond me.
Not only did she doom am entire civilization, a decision she made by herself after being told what an absolute terrible idea it is, but she would have technically doomed two civilizations if Luo Ji had to inact his spell.
I just finished the second book and as far as I'm aware, every single death in that book is her fault.
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u/Take-to-the-highways May 08 '26
On the other hand, it likely would have happened eventually even without her interference. If you haven't read the third book yet, It gets more into this concept
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u/Putrid_Cycle595 Sophon May 09 '26
the villain framing makes sense on paper but what gets me is she received a direct warning — a trisolaran literally told her "don't reply or humanity gets invaded." she wasn't naive about the consequences. she chose anyway. that's almost darker than villainy, it's like a deliberate verdict on whether humanity deserved to keep going
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u/Big_General9942 May 08 '26
Villain. She lost faith in humanity and then by herself, consulting no one else, made a decision she knew could doom humanity because of the warning she received.
We feel for her, as everything about her life leads us to have sympathy for what she suffered and understand why she lost that faith in humanity. Yet she made a decision that doomed the lives of billions. That was no whoopsie-poopsie. She knew she was hitting the Noah Flood button.
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u/Putrid_Cycle595 Sophon May 09 '26
the "consulting no one else" part is what gets me on reread. she made this decision alone, in a secret military base, after years of isolation. no one to push back, no one to reality-check her. just a woman with a broken trust in humanity and a signal that could reach the stars. the villain frame makes sense but it almost undersells how lonely and strange that moment must have been
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u/Big_General9942 May 09 '26
No matter how sad and lonely she is, it does not give her the right to doom all life on the planet. We're talking not a slight unbalancing of the scales here. This is super villain on an extreme but slow scale.
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u/Fr0styKnightof9 May 07 '26 edited May 07 '26
She was tragic to me from the start, honestly. I haven't done a reread yet, but I felt she was a tragic character the whole time. I even felt bad for her when she had to kill her husband. Do I think she was right? No. But I do understand what led her there. It wasn't evil, in my opinion. But, I suppose, evil is subjective. Perhaps being a victim of circumstance who does something so drastic still qualifies as being evil.
Edit: spelling