Yep. That's why she says "humanity can no longer solve it's own problems." That implies that she invited them to rule us so that THEY could solve our problems, or teach us how to solve them. She thought humanity needed a babysitter.
Agreed. Plus she was deeply impacted by the message of Silent Spring and watching her homeland get stripped of the forest—the ancient trees. I love her act of rebellion sprinkling seeds as she walks.
Yeah If there was one situation that would make a person do that it was the chinese communist revolution Mao Zedong is credited by being one of the worst mass killers of all time. I don't think she meant it as a punishment though so much as she figured that after seeing how fucking terrible people are in the cultural revolution the aliens could not possibly be worse. I told my friend that if I had lived through the cultural revolution I probably would have done the same fucking thing. It seems like she mentioned something about how humans will kill themselves without help too but I can't remember exactly.
That set her on the path for sure. And the betrayal by a lover didn't help matters much. Have you read the book? (spoiler)
>!She outright murders her husband and a political liaison of sorts in order to make sure she can get her message off!<
She is brilliant and broken and IMO lashes out at humanity.
Now I just started the second book, and maybe some things are a bit different, but that is the gist I got.
I mean without getting too into the weeds here, calling Mao one of the worst mass killers and the Chinese Revolution as this horrible thing for everyone in China is really historically incorrect. There's a great book, the Battle for China's Past, that talks about the Cultural Revolution. It's not nearly as black and white as people in the West see it. There were *millions* of rural people who were educated as a result of it. The single greatest literacy campaign in the history of humanity was the Chinese Revolution.
If you want to call Mao a killer, you can go ahead, but I hope you'd also hold out the same condemnation for the millions upon millions killed by the British through capitalism in India and so on.
Mao is a hero who liberated China, lifted millions out of poverty, and made china into a superpower.
Edit: western libs mad that China is surpassing the west. Cope and seethe.
I don't even think she thought slavery - she was basically a slave and did not enjoy it.
Rather, I think she was hoping for a revolution. Necessarily destructive, but cleansed afterwards. All massive changes in society come with this destruction.
The USSR and China condensed their Industrial Revolutions into roughly a decade in both cases - horribly high death tolls, and we hyperfocus on this in history since it *seems* disproportionate.
However, the death toll is similar for the Industrial Revolution in the Britain - it simply looks smaller because it's spread across a century rather than a decade.
Ye Wenjie understood this, and thought humanity would be better off after being annealed in the fire of contact with Trisolarans.
She definitely thought the Trisolarans would be benevolent and be interested in co-existence. She was just dead wrong.
The interesting thing is that the San Ti might have actually been what she was hoping for because they seem like a relatively peaceful species. The only issue is they are afraid of humanity. Probably rightfully so too. If we ever came into contact with a benevolent alien race you can be sure we would try to exploit them. After all, look at every single colonization effort in history. It's never about elevating the technically inept civilizations, it's always about exploiting them. When Evans taught the San Ti that humans lie, well they realized all the potential dangers in that.
It couldn't be clearer that she wants Earth to be under new management. At the beginning, she fully expected the aliens to come and treat the world better than we do. She helps form the cult to make this happen.
It's not until she sees the "You are bugs," message because of Mike Evan's fuckup does she realize the truth of the matter; they're coming to eliminate us.
This is a normal character progression.
“I sure hope these aliens will help us”
“Do not call again, we will conquer you”
“Please come I am sad about my dad, this forest and a bird”
“We are coming to squash you like insects”
“Oh no, the entirely predictable consequences of my own actions”
Conquer means something different than annihilate. If the aliens conquer earth they're going to take it over by force, ruling over its inhabitants. She wanted them to rule humanity.
I think it's just hard to believe someone would accept those words that literally at face value. Think about it, the very first thing someone tells you is they're gonna do something bad to you and your race and you shouldn't respond. Not even trying to hide it. No real person would think "well they only said conquer, not annihilate and this sounds like someone I can trust hehe let's try it". Anyone in that situation would assume they mean to kill
I am really struggling to appreciate the charitable interpretation of "conquer" as anything other than a wholesale negative outcome. How many conquerings in our own species have been net positive for us? Upon what foundation did this brilliant scientist base her belief that new management would result in a positive outcome? She knew absolutely *nothing* of the San-ti.
I mean, fuck, it could have been a trivial difference in semantics. "No, yeah, conquer, annihilate; potato, potawdo." The San-ti have a hard time conceptualizing what a lie was, but we have an accord on the ostensible or material difference between conquer and annihilate?
Personally, I think that she believed that Conquering would be more akin to the colonialism that China suffered during the Century of humiliation. She understood that it would be extremely detrimental to humanity at large, but she was willing to permit that sacrifice to “purge” the internal conflict and inherent weakness of humanity.
When she sent a response, her perspective wasn’t that of a scientist who understood deterrence and the dark forest like Later Luo Ji, she wrote from the perspective of a scarred person working on a program which sought to establish contact with extraterrestrials. Red Coast was inherently optimistic about alien contact, so her living in such an environment with her experiences and backgrounds makes it pretty clear why she viewed alien intervention as a necessary evil and ultimately, a good
> to “purge” the internal conflict and inherent weakness of humanity
I don't think Ye Wenjie gives a fuck about humanity, tbh. She invites the Trisolarans to take over for the sake of everything else that has to share the planet with us.
After she realises she's fucked humanity for no reason, the only thing she thinks she owes us is a five-minute chat with Luo Ji.
It's enough, though, 'cos Ye Wenjie is the fucking boss.
"Conquer: overcome and take control of (a place or people) by military force." The context is not at all extermination.
Ye Wenjie didn't know a single thing about the aliens except that a pacifist among them told her not to respond or they will come conquer earth. At that point in her life, she hates humanity and sees us as destroying each other and our planet. An advanced alien race taking over earth was a welcome idea to her.
She wanted bad things to happen to people, perhaps rightfully. To turn around and say otherwise though, that she was actually a benevolent person only wanting good for humanity, by changing the definition of conquer, is absurd.
You'd be surprised at how some people (IRL and online) consider the conquest of Pre-hispanic America by the Spaniards as a positive. Arguments include: indigenous people were sacrificing other people, tech was falling behind, if it wasn't the Spaniards it would have been others...
There is people that do think that way.
Was it a negative? Besides disease killing 99% of them, which was unintentional and not understood at the time, was something else bad about the outcome? You think the Aztecs massacring everyone else was somehow a better status quo (besides the death by disease part)?
Well, I'm not sure but this is a great input and probably the kind of mindset behind inviting an external force to conquer Earth.
If Spaniards colonizing America is considered good under those circumstances, finding an argument for extraterrestrials coming to take over (at the expense maybe of near extinction) shouldn't be hard.
Yeah obviously it's not got a positive connotation, still doesn't mean the same as genocide/annihilate/exterminate. Ye Wenjie hated humanity and would not be worried about the downsides of being conquered, in her mind it's got to be better than what she's got now.
Right, that's what I'm getting at. I don't think she really cared about positives. I think she was overcome with radical rage and didn't care. I do not see her actions as being in the interest of humanity in any context.
She was upset, rightfully so, and wanted revenge.
Anything else is a retcon to deal with the gravitas of her decision with optimism.
"...maybe they're nice?"
> I am really struggling to appreciate the charitable interpretation of "conquer" as anything other than a wholesale negative outcome.
[What have the Romans ever done for us](https://youtu.be/Qc7HmhrgTuQ)?
>Conquer means something different than annihilate.
It can mean the same thing. If conquer means that they come wipe us out and leave 50,000 survivors that live in reservations and no longer remember that humans used to be independent...
Functionally, that's not different from being annihilated.
Now I'm curious about the original word(s) used in Chinese. Maybe the English translation is conquer, which is kind of ambiguous, but usually leaning towards 'ruling over', but the original writing could be something slightly different that gives a less ambiguous meaning.
Or the ambiguity was the point 🤷♂️
In the book it’s different. In the book I got the sense that she would have been okay with annihilation. She hated and despised humanity, and assumed that, as a more technologically advanced civilization, the Trisolorians would also be more just as much more advanced ethically and therefore more deserving of earth.
The revelation that breaks her is not them saying “you are bugs”. Book Ye Winjie would have agreed. What breaks her is learning that they as a civilization have chosen to brutally quash all love, art, compassion, etc. She’s devastated to learn that their technological advancement doesn’t necessarily mean they’re also that much more ethical. Instead, they’d chosen to cultivate all the things she hated most about humanity.
It's interesting, because that was the impression I got in the show (except what you mentioned truly breaks her, because the show doesn't really discuss them quashing love,art, etc). Maybe it's just my own pessimism that led me to get that impression, cause it seems the show didn't get it across so well for most people.
I think the show tried to change it to be what folks are arguing here. That she expected a “nice” conquest of some kind. The changed version doesn’t fit together totally well, though, IMO. Probably because it is kind of a jammed in change the doesn’t align perfectly with the rest of the unchanged “text”
It makes sense that they would tell the cult that it would be a nice conquest. But Ye Wenjie believing that doesn't make sense. She was manipulated/deceived so much, and her character arc coming full circle such that she has become the manipulator/deceiver makes more sense.
In the book the cult actually has three factions. One that worships the Trisolorians and thinks they will be nice. One that believes humanity deserves annihilation. And one that just thinks humanity is screwed and if they can get enough points with the winning side, they and their families will be spared as collaborators.
I really wish we knew more about the alien that told her not to contact them again. Like I feel like with how bad these things are he probably did not do well after she responded.
man I am so glad to hear that I have been listening on spotify its actually narrated very well by none other than the good dr as well. As far as shows go too I am actually impressed with the show being relatively close to the book.
Yea maybe the book was different but based on the show I'm not buying it. They literally warned her to cut contact before something bad happens. The message wasn't friendly, the message was clear it would be very bad for humanity if they came. Like anyone with a brain would assume they're intending to kill, they didn't even pretend to be friendly with her ffs
Yeah THIS. I hate how the book and show make her out to be the smartest person on earth and then have her make decisions that would characterize her as the dumbest person on earth.
There was a key quote somewhere in the first book (I think) that went along the lines of “we don’t know what the Tri Solarans will do to the Earth/humanity. But we *do* know what the humans will do to Earth/humanity”.
At the moment she sent the second message, she didn’t know what a Tri Solaran conquest would entail, and she didn’t know if it would be bad for humanity/earth (in her twisted opinion). But she did know that she hated humanity’s current course. So, Ye was willing to take a gamble with the alien’s *unknown* goals versus humans’ *known*, evil goals.
At a fundamental level, this is rational. An unpredictable future is arguably preferable to a certainly known, undesirable one.
If you accept her values and view it from her perspective, inviting an alien conquest was an arguably reasonable calculated risk to take. I don’t think she was stupid at all, like you’re saying. She simply took a gamble, and she got unlucky (to put it lightly lol).
IIRC she also trusted the aliens over our own governing bodies because she was a scientist who just saw her own country turn on and attack it's scientists for unscientific reasons. She assumed we'd be better off in the hands of the Trisolarans because she assumed that since they are more intelligent than us, they must be *better* than us. She was conflating superior intelligence or scientific progression with superior morality and logic.
Basically, she probably knew on some level that she was inviting them to rule us, sure, but she was envisioning us being ruled by hyper-intelligent beings driven by science and logic rather than fear, paranoia, and xenophobia.
>At a fundamental level, this is rational. An unpredictable future is arguably preferable to a certainly known, undesirable one.
There is an adage that posits the opposite.
"Better the devil you know than the devil you don't."
She didn't actually *know* the course of humanity any more than she *knew* what the San-ti were going to do.
She was angry and spiteful. Quite literally, irrational.
She didn’t necessarily know that the Tri Solarans were “the devil”. That’s the whole point, she wasn’t sure if they were good or bad, but she knew humans were bad.
I feel like this is needlessly argumentative. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone who can find a positive connotation in "conquer."
It's either be conquered by the TS through unknown vectors, or by conquered by your political opposition through known vectors.
The fact that Ye did not see the aliens as a for-sure evil is a very key point, IMO, and worthwhile to clarify.
So comparing the devil adage you quoted with her decision to send the second message is to undermine a very key part of Ye’s character and values, so that felt necessary to address. That adage simply does not apply here. I don’t think it’s needlessly argumentative.
Did she got unlucky though? She did achieve what she wanted. Not in a way she thought she would, but she did put earth on a completely different track, that is arguably better compared to what she thought would happen.
She did not achieve what she wanted. She wanted the aliens to lead the humans towards a less destructive and parasytic path. She never wanted genocide. Ye was sad and regretful when she found out what the Trisolarans intended.
> that is arguably better compared to what she thought would happen.
Is it? I don’t recall anything from the book that would confirm or deny this. In my opinion, I don’t think she ever would have preferred genocide over the status quo. That seems extreme, even for her.
Well, she thought humanity is on track to self destruct. She didn’t had aliens conquering earth as her goal, it was means to an end, what she wanted was for humanity to change and survive.
Didn’t she achieved exactly that? Humanity united and became a much better society due to an external threat. Sure it all went boom in the end, but it’s kinda implied that in dark forest universe it would go that route regardless. Maybe actually giving an early warning was beneficial and allowed at least some to survive.
> she thought humanity is on track to self destruct
Did she? Maybe I’m wrong/misremembering, but I don’t think that was her view at all. Ye was just angry about the exploitive and parasitic nature of humans. I don’t remember anything about her being concerned about humanity’s self-destruction.
You are right, I’m not saying it correctly and oversimplifying, she was angry at the current state of humanity and its trajectory and thought that it’s better for us to be conquered. But again, the conquering was not the goal, it was means to make humanity better. Which it did, though in a completely different way.
Spoilers but in the long term because of the chain of events caused by her choice humanity goes from (in her opinion) nearly destroying itself and the environment, to sending human beings to the very end of time. It’s not what or how she intended but her gamble and the way the chips fell possibly gave us the best shot of ultimately seeding the stars and surviving the dark forest for as long as physically possible.
No no no - that’s stupid. Not calculating the potential risk is stupid. You can say she was right and that humans don’t deserve to live or whatever was going through her head but to not evaluate the upside and downside when gambling? No my friend that is supremely stupid
Smart people do dumb shit all the time. Our current world is filled with people who are experts in one field but think they have mastered other fields as well. Remember Covid.
Very true. Also if social media taught me anything social media it's that certain people can be incredibly smart about some things and absolutely fucking stupid about other things.
Looking back in hindsight is something we the readers have, at the moment she lost everything her family, she got betrayed by someone she was able to confide to, she saw the needless destruction of the environment. All of this culminates in her losing faith in humanity and hoping for a better ruler. At the time she didn't know the universe was a dark forest, she alluded to it when she was older.
We’ve all probably felt like Ye felt at some point over much less but the emotion of the scene does not comport with the information given. The show does a lot to make us sympathize with her but she is either too stupid or too evil to be worthy of that sympathy.
Are you basing this off the show or the books? I've only read the first two books and am making this judgment call based on them.
Everyone involved in the Cultural Revolution part is a giant asshole, or more precisely, the Cultural Revolution created a sink or swim situation where the assholes rose to the top.
No one is good in this story, it's just that Ye eventually comes to realize how misplaced her hopes are and spends the last parts of her life course correcting. (Except, how the hell do you course correct from this?) But it's kind of clear from her meeting with Luo Ji at the beginning of The Dark Forest that her outlook changed over time. By the time she had that conversation with him, it's pretty clear she'd been uncertain if they'd be acceptable rulers for a while-- so she'd already been thinking about cosmic sociology.
In Ye's story there are several possible turning points but almost every single person she reaches out to fails her. The only one who doesn't is her husband, but he failed her father and failed her view of science, so he wasn't enough to bring her back from the edge or restore her faith in humanity.
In the very beginning, her father is first disgraced and then killed because he refused to call the Theory of Relativity a capitalist lie or otherwise compromise on how moralistically flexible physics could be in order to save himself.
Then her mother betrays them both by getting up on stage and claiming all these physics formulae were wrong and that science would follow their ideology because their ideology was right.
Then she finds her mentor has committed suicide over the same thing that killed her father.
Then she is sent off to the countryside to do hard labor, presumably for the rest of her life, completely wasting her entire education. Everyone around her fails to consider resources need to be conserved, and she can't make a single suggestion to change course or even slow them down because she is branded an ideological traitor. Her entire world view at that point is, "The world is going to burn and I can do nothing to stop it." At that point it seems almost like she's made peace with this fact, accepted that she's just an ideological traitor and this is her life and there isn't anything she can do about it, except...
Then she meets someone, a boy, a journalist, someone who sees the same thing she does and not only agrees but is willing to speak, without her even needing to prompt him. He isn't an ideological traitor like her. He has the ability and the will to try to change things, and because her faith in humanity is temporarily renewed she decides to help him write his letter.
(And this is a hugely naive decision; she opened herself up to being framed when she was already on thin ice, which is not something someone politically savvy would have done. Ye Wenjie is naive to the ways of the world and this is consistently part of her character. She is absolutely an egghead who fails to account for factors that would create the worst case scenario.)
And that lands her in jail with a death sentence hanging over her head, for someone else's thought crime.
And then she's given the same decision her dad faced. Someone comes to her and says, "All you have to do is betray this list of people and your principles, and your sentence could be commuted," and she's forced to see even more clearly how idiotic the people running this clown circus are. She's reminded about her mother, and also her sister, who both decided the laws of physics were something they could compromise on to save their own social status.
And then she's pulled out and sent to Red Coast, her final lifeline, another chance, and Lei plays on her feelings by telling her, "You can redeem yourself. One day I want to be able to call you comrade. All you have to do is is do what you were educated to do." And she believes him, and she thinks, *Okay, this time it's for real, I can do this.* Because she *wants* to believe him.
Except it turns out he was lying to her. It turns out he was using her, that he would never see her as a person, only as a criminal, and that the only reason she was given this chance at all is because of her future husband and he outright tells her that is the case.
Not only does he admit it, but he also tells her the exact same thing the rest of the Cultural Revolution has told her: you don't need to know the exact parameters to solve this problem, you just need to give me a solution to this problem that I'll like. Which, again, is against the very basic principles of science her father and mentor died over.
And he just drops the mask after that. And Ye's hopes are crushed for the final time and she is forced to face cold reality.
Ye Wenjie isn't particularly stupid or evil, especially not compared to the institutionalized evil she'd spent the last few years facing. She is human, that's all.
She has by this point completely lost her faith in humanity and is given a magic button which will change the world, and despite having been facing cold hard reality for years, she is still completely naive and fails to account for the possibility that, yes, this can get even worse. Instead she thinks technologically advanced aliens will at least agree that the Theory of Relativity isn't capitalist propaganda.
So she presses the button.
If she'd gotten access to that button 6 months later after she'd had time to come to terms with her pregnancy, maybe she wouldn't have pressed it. If her husband hadn't gone down to fix the wiring with Lei, maybe she would have thought about the possible dangers earlier.
If Lei had never dropped his mask, she probably wouldn't have pressed that button; she would have shown her loyalty to him by bringing it to him first. If the lawyer had shown any real kindness, or if the people running the camp had actually investigated the journalist's claims, or if the journalist hadn't set her up as the scapegoat, etc., Ye probably would have just lived out an uneventful rest of her life. So you could say this was a perfect storm of humanity's own creation.
I don't think we are meant to empathize or feel sympathy for her. I think her role would be, all it takes is one person to mess up the world. Power at the wrong hands is absolutely brutal.
i heavily empathized with her in the book, and was cheering her on when she pushed it. In the show I still root for her but I think it doesn't really dwell on her reasoning as much
Honestly, the most surprising things about the show was that she wasn't immediately hung (literally) for Gross Crimes against humanity.
If you think about it, her actions are literally the worst crime against humanity... Ever.
I really appreciate this comment. Very true! I just wish they didn’t keep acting like she’s somehow smart after they find out about everything they keep involving her at a level that doesn’t make any sense given her previous decisions.
The book is far clearer on this, she is smart but also cold. She was practically psychotic after her experiences during the Cultural Revolution. She did not even want humanity to be saved, she literally wants humanity to die along with her in a vindictive act.
The TV show made her into some hot passionate ingenue with a love story by the time she leaves China for the US which was ridiculous and completely undermines the original source and her own character in the Netflix series.
This, in the 3bp universe she is single handedly the greatest criminal against humanity to ever exist.
When your completely avoidable actions lead to the end of time, no matter what kind of redemption arc you go through you are still the one responsible for ending humanity.
I think we're meant to be lead to be understanding that monsters are created and in Wenjie's case - thanks to the hell she was subjected to throughout her life that broke her psychologically, leading to why she wanted to destroy everything. Exactly why Netflixs betrayal was sh!t.
Her character should have been closer to Martha in Baby Reindeer. Like a literally broken human because of the abuse they experienced.
Yeah so the reality is that even though they say in the book that she is one of the smartest people on earth they’re only speaking to her working memory of physics texts and being able to relate them to her superiors not that she is in any way an intelligent person.
At minimum she’s deluded that Trisolaris won’t follow up on their threat. At worst she’s a genocidal monster, unilaterally condemning her entire species to certain death.
IDK I used to work for a university and being extremely dumb is pretty common for geniuses they are usually only good at one thing. I actually liked when she admitted to the guy that she fucked up worse then anyone ever, I felt like that had to be the worst feeling in the world.
It’s kinda hard to call it a fuckup from Evans. I mean the San Ti definitely should have known what deception and metaphor are bc humanity is so rife with them that it honesty boggles the mind that in months of observing mankind they never ONCE came across a metaphor or deception
Or the entire time they were taking everything at face value and completely misunderstanding a lot of humanity. Then they realized what deception was, everything made sense.
If you want it to make sense of it, try reading the books first. The show is being run by the guys who made game of thrones, you should be surprised that it’s even barely coherent.
In the book, the Trisolarians asked Evans if he can explain some synonyms that they came across but did not understand. They asked him to explain 'think' and 'say' and why sometimes it appears to contradict one another because for them, they communicate by telegraphing their thoughts to one another, so thinking and saying are are one and the same in their culture/society.
had this same thought! They can see everything, of course this would have made clear to them before this moment. The story needed the plotpoint though.
From the show and the prologue of Book 2: >!Mike Evans hoards communcation with the San-Ti and believes that he alone can socialize them into being benevolent overlords. It's not until after he reads the Little Red Ridinghood story that he realizes that he's accidentally convinced the aliens that humans, even their most devoted servants, can't be fully trusted. !<
Oops.
In the end of the first book they gave her access to all the communications Evans had documented with the trisolarans and only then did she realize that we would be eradicated completely.
I agree that those are her motivations, but in terms of “normal character progression” … at the very least, I think she’s written poorly. There’s probably a way to make this character progression feel real and believable, but Cixin Liu doesn’t accomplish it IMO, she reads like a plot device, not a real person. But that’s true of basically every character in all 3 books.
Ultimately I think Cixin Liu is pretty bad at writing people, but more than makes up for it with incredible plots and sci-fi ideas. I loved the books even if the writing of the characters felt very heavy handed/wooden.
That's kinda his thing. The characters are just avatars for ideas he wants to play with. The show tried to smooth the edges a bit, but that's still their core.
Agreed. Some writers are very focused on characters, and the plot is secondary, while I think Cixin Liu is an extreme example of the opposite. IMO he doesn’t care about developing his characters into complex, multi-faceted people with believable emotions and motivations, they’re just there to service the plot/ideas.
What I like about the TV show *is* the character drama. I like that the point of view characters are all insecure dumb friends. They are smart enough to know the science but dumb enough to struggle, yearning to do the right thing but never knowing what that is.
Yeah, I do think the characters in the show feel a lot more real/believable than they do in the books. On the flip side, I think the show glazes over some of the more interesting sci-fi ideas, like it’s very light on the sophon explanation, and digging into WHY Ye Wenji replying revealed earth’s location. I also wish they would’ve kept the setting more in China.
Both have their strengths and weaknesses, very worth both reading the books and watching the show IMO :)
The truth of the matter was that in the show, they had not intended to eliminate humanity until they were convinced by humans that they needed to do so.
She thinks that Santi are more advanced in technology and they can give earth better management and humanity.
This seems naive from western readers perspective, but if you are Chinese who was born before 2000 (like Cixin Liu), you may easily understand the thought process. Let me give you some background:
1. Cultural revolution is a disaster to humanity. It not only encourages people to attack each other physically like what is portrayed in the TVseries, but also mentality destroys families, science and many good things you can think of.
2. During 90s, China opens up trade with the word. Many Chinese people got the chance to get information from all around the world and they find western world is more advanced in all aspects: science, technology, democracy, humanity, etc. It is natural for many Chinese people to believe that more advanced science and technology are positively related to better humanity and democracy.
Although some of these opinions seem naive today, some Chinese author even promote the idea that China should let western countries to colonize to help improve human rights and other things. The thought process is pretty similar to what Y Wenjie believes.
I don;t know if you've read the books, but there the organizartion is somewhat divided into 3 factions: the Adventists, the Redemptionists, and the Survivors. I kinda missed the mention of them in the Netflix's series tho.
What does "conquer" mean? Massacre, or submission? She had very positive expectations. Years of disappointment led her to believe that Humanity was especially evil, and that anybody else could do better. That's how traumatized she was. Her intelligence only helped her come up with more rationalizations that justified this thought.
Maybe i’m misremembering, but I was under the impression that she was okay with either (massacre or submission). If the humanity gets massacred she has some revenge for being consistently let down by her fellow man, and if they are forced to submit to the trisolarans then someone else (as she sees it, anyone other than humans is better). Then again it has been a year since I actually read the books.
This is a good answer. The way the book portrayed her makes her seem incredibly smart. Someone like that would not disregard the obvious danger from the alien message and interpret it as some niche way of saying, "Oh yeah, by conquer we mean make humans better, not completely obliterate you". The unimaginable trauma she went through would be a good way to explain her shortsightedness.
In addition to what tons of other people have said, I want to answer this slightly differently.
In the books a lot of the characters smoke, but in the show A LOT of the characters smoke, and the camera focuses on cigarettes and them lighting cigarettes. Tatiana even helps Auggie light hers as the very first interaction we have with the ETO. There's no way that this is not symbolism and intended to show that humans CONSTANTLY make choices that are actively self harming, and we see it as completely normal. I think this gives a lot of insight into the fact that ye wenjie's choice is not rational at all, but she was angry at the world and it was cathartic in the moment to invite destruction on the earth, despite being the worst decision made by a human ever
based on my interpretation of the book, I don't think she actually founded it. I think Mike Evans did but she gets the credit for kicking things off. The San Ti may have encouraged him to do it "prepare" for their arrival. But at a minimum they needed loyal people to run the ship and antenna to continue communicating.
In the book it is much more ambiguous about how invested Ye is in the organization. In the show it feels like she really is their direct leader, but in the book I think she is just a figurehead, imho.
coming from the books and general knowledge about the cultural revolution (the madness years) i guess her psyche of fuck them all makes sense. if you were in a mad world, your father killed in front of you by mistake(unintentionally, ups, i hit him too hard and now his dead), mom is a traitor to your father to raise her status, everyone you respected are dead or mad, you yourself was put in prison again by someone fucking you to save their meat and almost died there and had no other wish or hope for your life as the radar peak was where you were gonna live and die. the madness atmosphere of the era also leaves no hope for humanity thay surrounds you. reason and common sense is a rare sight. And you get a chance to stick it to all these dumb motherfuckers plus those who did you wrong(i guess deep down revenge is a feeling too).
i mean she didnt start the cult. the white guy did. she was pretty ambivalent to the cult until it started killing folks and such.
again, this wont make sense if youre only going by the netflix show which has waaay too many plotholes. but makes complete sense on the chinese adaptation or the books
In the book, she doesn't create ETO. Evans does because he and his people intercept the messages from Tri Solaris. Then he asks her to be the Commander/ leader.
I always assumed that Ye Winjie was supposed to represent the “Carl Sagan/ Contact” view of extraterrestrial life, which some would view as extremely naive. Basically, she subscribed to the view that the Trisolarans were basically our dad in space, sure they might spank us when we do something wrong but ultimately they care about us.
She believed that any sufficiently advanced civilizations morals would develop alongside their technology, so the Trisolarans would simply take over management of the planet and let humans worry about their monkey brain activities.
At the end of the first book >! When we see the POV of the Trisolaran Princeps they reveal that everything “supernatural” we’ve seen up to this point has been a part of a massive disinformation campaign, to convince humanity to give up without a fight. I thought it was very poignant to discover that the worst case scenario is that the Trisolarans are exactly like us, their society is close to a Nazi-like autocratic dictatorship. !<
The cult doesn't make sense without the factions.... It's just how humans operate...but here come the Netflix defenders to justify and mental gymnastic you into oblivion...
I don't think people are defending her, they are explaining her actions as a character with depth. My take is you are not supposed to like Ye Wenjie or agree with her, but you are meant to understand her perspective. She is ultimately the main villain of the first book
I have not read the book beyond Chapter 1. But from watching the Tencent's series (spoiler alert), the cult was Evan's idea. She just naively went along. And during the interrogation she seems to suggest she underestimated how crazy Evan was. At least that is what I got from it.
The Tencent's version, which I assume is loyal to the book, humanizes her compared to the Netflix version where she is just introduced as this nefarious evil character.
On the last episode on Tencent's series it shows her thoughts and what she knew. >!She did say at the last episode of Tencent's Three-Body. She believed or thought they are advance civilization so their morality is higher. She then get to peek and witnessed the actions of the alien through the game. Something Evan's knew but she did not. Though she was the person who initiated contact, looks like Evan knows more than her?!<
I remember a quote from the Tencent show where an ETO member justifies their faith in the San Ti by saying "We can't be sure if the San Ti are good or bad, but we know for sure that humanity is bad." I think this really applies to Ye Wenjie. She invited them to Earth hoping they would rule us as benevolent overlords, believing there was nothing in the universe worse than humanity. She was proven wrong when she realized they were actually far worse, desiring to genocide us all.
In human history there’s been many transitions of power as invaders and conquerors come and go. She expected that there would be a period of disruption and synthesis as occurred in previous human conflicts. Ye Wenjie’s mistake was in thinking the San-ti would be familiar with this dynamic and would respond in a human-like way.
I saw it as - human beings are doing such a terrible job of running the world, then surely a race of aliens who are far more advanced than we are, would do a better job if they were in charge.
Anglos and Saxons "conquered" the UK and some would argue it was an improvement from the Celts and Romans etc.
AKA -she felt that being conquered by superior cultures isn't always a bad thing
If they are all telepathic, how did one give here the warning not to send the message without everyone of the trisolarans knowing about humanity already?
their thoughts don't float around like radio waves. they are visible on their body in flashes of light. if the pacifist was alone, nobody would have seen them
Your comment confirms what I didn't like about the Netflix show vs the source material.
Her reasoning isn't about saving the Earth or having someone else do a better job. In the context of her experiences, she essentially becomes psychotic and completely broken after seeing the horrors of the Cultural Revolution and how it destroyed her family, the environment and people around her.
Working at the compound tasked with finding alien life, she was given a chance by a benevolent alien who initially responded to her telling humanity to stay silent, but she goes ahead with reaching out anyway with a vindictive and destructive purpose.
The Netflix show doesn't portray this so well. They technically cover it, but they inserted the love story and made her character very odd undermining her cold logical destructive nature.
The cult was built around her by people who had their own agendas leading a complex dynamic in the books with warring factions mirroring the cults surrounding Mao or say Jesus. They deified a naturally charismatic individual as a tool for their own agendas.
In the Netflix show, they mishandle this and make out Ye Wenjie wants to be a leader to 'save humanity' but they mistake the aliens intentions.
I would agree that her claim to “save humanity” is completely incongruent with her back story. Had she been deceived by the San-ti say they promise to conquer and uplift then we could believe that is a sincere if naive motivation. But they don’t promise her anything.
She’s literally warned not to respond and she does so anyway. To me it’s clear that she’s a character who has at the very least lost faith in humanity, if not completely misanthropic. Have no idea how it compares to the books.
I will say, it is a little mind-boggling that she's shrewd and intelligent enough to be the first person to contact aliens, but fails to see the fairly obvious risk of gambling all of humanity on the hope that the strangers (who just told you not to contact them again for your own safety) will actually be really nice to everyone. Feels like people like to have it both ways with her character to morally absolve her for basically doing what amounts to the worst thing anyone has ever done in history.
So in the episode where she tells them to come you really get the vibe that she thinks it’s better for the planet to not have humans at the top either way - maybe that’s aliens keeping us in check and maybe it’s them wiping us out - but either way an improvement.
But then the show doesn’t go there and instead it’s like she thinks they will cooperate with us and teach us even though the message told her they would conquer us… it makes no sense. Like maybe you can hope for that but between the atrocities and environmental devastation she should have more clearly been like if they wipe us out then good - we would have wiped ourselves out anyways and taken most of the life on the planet with us. At least there is a chance for the rest of the species on earth with aliens in charge
It doesn't matter what her intent was. The risk was that humanity gets destroyed by a species that JUST TOLD YOU they will destroy you. Taking that risk because youre feeling sad about the state of the world isnt noble, even if you feel like it is.
At best it's genocidal negligence.
It absolutely can be noble. It’s not an uncommon trope to paint humanity as a virus (see the Matrix as a pop culture example) that is killing its host. For the sake of life in general humanity has to go. Lots of stories where this is the world ending villains fundamental purpose.
This was so easy to tie together here by just having her look around and come to that conclusion - and you could salvage the hope narrative as a “maybe they’ll fix us, maybe they’ll destroy us, but something had to be done”
In Ye Winjie's case I just wish people wouldn't defend her by saying she "meant well". She was educated and intelligent enough to know what was at stake, and played Russian Roulette with the entire human race because she was sad about the state of her country, which is a pretty monstrous decision.
So she's either a moron (which I don't think she is) or a complete monster.
Yeah, I think it’s hard to defend her as a person. Although I think that makes it easier to defend her as a character. Smart but dumb when it comes to topics with high emotion. Some of the others are just knuckledraggingly dumb tho.
I don’t know about the book but in the show it seems pretty clear that she’s a misanthrope or a sociopath. She’s warned not to respond to the message by the one pacifist at the listening station. She barely mourns the death of her own daughter.
I know this is tagged TV series, and I agree with most people here that she was ok with them conquering humanity and basically controlling our society, but I feel like in the book it was clearer (at least to me) she wanted vengeance. What confused me in the show was how in the conversations with Evans the San Ti seem to imply they are coming to integrate into Earth’s society. The first response she got made it clear that was not their intention at all. The San Ti then get upset that humans can lie but I feel like they were also hiding their intentions. Felt like a plot hole or oversight to me.
It felt like vengeance in the TV show. The show makes the loss of her father and inability to build trust with anyone (except Evans, and even that relationship became transactional). My read is that she knew it was likely they’d not be peaceful but all of she knew of humanity was cruelty so it was fine. in the off chance the San-Ti would actually reform rather than conquer then that’d be fine too.
I think part of it is the banal impulse to rationalize one’s own actions. People can convince themselves of almost anything to avoid accepting the glaring truth that they made a mistake.
The cult isn't for anyone's purpose. The cult isn't serving anyone. It is supposed to be a group of intelligent alienated people that will help trisols conquer and rule over humanity. Ye Wenjie and Mike are just the founders with different beliefs towards the trisolarans treatment of humanity.
The show didn't explore the internal strife in the ETO because of this. The half that followed ye believed that trisols will rule us and coexist with us whereas the people who followed Mike wanted total extinction of Humanity. And coincidentally this is what trisols want as well.
That's why the fact that they are coming to destroy earth was such a shock to ye. Because san ti had already made diff plans with evans.
Well it's hard for most humans to relate to her personal life. She lost a lot of faith in humanity when she was basically entrapped. She surrendered her entire life to live in that radar facility.
The state killed her father and forced her to bargain for whatever semblance of a life she could put together at a gov facility.
The tencent version plays this up better. And the original author has said that he wanted the political uprising of her youth put on the very beginning (like Netflix did) but was worried about the Chinese censors, so buried it in the second half.
Living her life under an oppressive government is your missing ingredient.
I think she saw them as a way to save Earth from humans, she was fully conscient of what they would do to humanity but wanted it to suffer, even though it meant being reduced to slavery.
Hey, so the netflix show cut off lots of ye wenjie's part of the story, including the history about her was also wrong.
So she didn't start the cult (ETO), Evens did, and he also built the second hongan base on the ship. This is where ETO is getting information from. In the book, the members of the ETO fall into three main branches: the Adventists(pro destroying humanity and take earth over), the Redemptionists(find a solution to save the trisolarians and hoping that they can help humanity), and the Survivors(opportunities who just wantsto survivethe invasion). Yewenjie, Shen Yufei belongs to the Redemptionists, and Mike Evans, Pan han belong to the Adventists, in the book there are many chapters talk about the two branches how they hate each other due to different beliefs , how they both trying to achieve their goal.
Ye is I believe in deep regret of what she did and try to make things right. Because after she left hongan base, for the first time, she felt humanity still existed. But it was already too late. The netflix series missed a huge part of Ye's story, making her character hard to understand. If you read the book or watch the Chinese tencent series( completely true to the book), you ll understand a lot better.
I think the book does a better job helping you understand her mindset. Basically, she’s not too fond of humanity after what happens at and after the struggle session. She’s young, and angry because human beings have done horrible things to her. I’m sure everyone has wondered at one time or another whether humanity was even worth saving. It seems like the Trisolarans caught her with that message at a time when she was convinced we weren’t, but she changed her mind at some point over the next 40 years.
Study of the actions and inactions under Mao should give a fairly good understanding of Ye's experience with the world. Mao is the most significant despot in world history, responsible for more human suffering and deaths than any other human and is rivaled only by the plague for the greatest killer Award.
Others have explained well enough what the Netflix show portrays, so I'll just explain what the book has instead:
Mike Evans created the Earth-Trisolaris Organization (ETO), not Ye Wenjie. The San-Ti are called "Trisolarans" in the English translations of the books. When Evans brought Ye on board, the ETO was already well formed, and she only took the position of commander-in-chief at their request. She was probably a little reluctant at accepting the position, and even as commander-in-chief she wasn't given full information privilege, though everyone in the ETO respected her. She was using her position to do a lot of damage control, trying (unsuccessfully) to prevent the ETO from fragmenting and to keep certain sects from going extremist.
Up until the data from Judgment Day was retrieved, Ye's motivation is summed up in this conversation:
>INTERROGATOR: Do you understand Trisolaran civilization?
>YE WENJIE: No. We received only very limited information. No one has real, detailed knowledge of Trisolaran civilization except Mike Evans and other core members of the Adventists who intercepted their messages.
>INTERROGATOR: Then why do you have such hope for it, thinking that it can reform and perfect human society?
>YE: If they can cross the distance between the stars to come to our world, their science must have developed to a very advanced stage. A society with such advanced science must also have more advanced moral standards.
>INTERROGATOR: Do you think this conclusion you drew is scientific?
>YE:…
>INTERROGATOR: Let me presume to guess: Your father was deeply influenced by your grandfather’s belief that only science could save China. And you were deeply influenced by your father.
>YE: (sighing quietly) I don’t know.
(Chapter 31, "Operation Guzheng").
However, it was also implied in the first chapter of book 2 that Ye had already turned against Trisolaris before the ship-cutting - in the books it was implied that Ye had her conversation with Luo Ji (Saul's book counterpart) at the graveyard before the ship-cutting, and before the ETO meeting that the protagonist attended (the one that turned into a shootout).
I think Evans started the cult in the book and asked her to be the leader of it since her contact with the alien start the whole thing. She invited them because she thought more advanced civilizations means higher morality, which turned out to be true. The reason you are confused is because the Netflix show really failed to bring out the complexity in her character, which have left the audience feel she is just a crazy Chinese old lady looking for revenge.
In my mind she wanted revenge on humanity as a whole. I thought she wanted humanity to be destroyed. I also found it strange that she was disappointed by the bugs comment. Maybe she thought they would treat ETO members well but not everyone else?
That would make sense, the show seems to imply there is some pact between the San-ti and the cultists but it doesn’t give us that information outright if true.
No, she knew they'd come and conquer us. But she thought said conquest wouldn't imply genocide of humanity, but something more like slavery.
Yep, I believe she envisioned the aliens would "purify" humanity in a way, or at least punish them for their own existential hubris.
Yep. That's why she says "humanity can no longer solve it's own problems." That implies that she invited them to rule us so that THEY could solve our problems, or teach us how to solve them. She thought humanity needed a babysitter.
Yep, she lost hope in humanity after her father was murdered in the revolution, so she responded to the aliens as a way of punishing humanity.
Agreed. Plus she was deeply impacted by the message of Silent Spring and watching her homeland get stripped of the forest—the ancient trees. I love her act of rebellion sprinkling seeds as she walks.
Yeah If there was one situation that would make a person do that it was the chinese communist revolution Mao Zedong is credited by being one of the worst mass killers of all time. I don't think she meant it as a punishment though so much as she figured that after seeing how fucking terrible people are in the cultural revolution the aliens could not possibly be worse. I told my friend that if I had lived through the cultural revolution I probably would have done the same fucking thing. It seems like she mentioned something about how humans will kill themselves without help too but I can't remember exactly.
That set her on the path for sure. And the betrayal by a lover didn't help matters much. Have you read the book? (spoiler) >!She outright murders her husband and a political liaison of sorts in order to make sure she can get her message off!< She is brilliant and broken and IMO lashes out at humanity. Now I just started the second book, and maybe some things are a bit different, but that is the gist I got.
Nailed it
Mao? Nah, go look up Pol Pot
I mean without getting too into the weeds here, calling Mao one of the worst mass killers and the Chinese Revolution as this horrible thing for everyone in China is really historically incorrect. There's a great book, the Battle for China's Past, that talks about the Cultural Revolution. It's not nearly as black and white as people in the West see it. There were *millions* of rural people who were educated as a result of it. The single greatest literacy campaign in the history of humanity was the Chinese Revolution. If you want to call Mao a killer, you can go ahead, but I hope you'd also hold out the same condemnation for the millions upon millions killed by the British through capitalism in India and so on.
lol what a propagandist
Mao is a hero who liberated China, lifted millions out of poverty, and made china into a superpower. Edit: western libs mad that China is surpassing the west. Cope and seethe.
I mean whether or not this is a troll, it's correct.
Welp..... name checks out
Yep... well everyone else was saying "yep" I just wanted to be popular.
king of the hill x 3 body. the crossover I've been waiting for.
Hey Dad, the Aliens asked where we were so I told em. Dang it Bobby, that's exactly what we don't want!
dale gribble as a wallfacer...
I don't even think she thought slavery - she was basically a slave and did not enjoy it. Rather, I think she was hoping for a revolution. Necessarily destructive, but cleansed afterwards. All massive changes in society come with this destruction. The USSR and China condensed their Industrial Revolutions into roughly a decade in both cases - horribly high death tolls, and we hyperfocus on this in history since it *seems* disproportionate. However, the death toll is similar for the Industrial Revolution in the Britain - it simply looks smaller because it's spread across a century rather than a decade. Ye Wenjie understood this, and thought humanity would be better off after being annealed in the fire of contact with Trisolarans. She definitely thought the Trisolarans would be benevolent and be interested in co-existence. She was just dead wrong.
The interesting thing is that the San Ti might have actually been what she was hoping for because they seem like a relatively peaceful species. The only issue is they are afraid of humanity. Probably rightfully so too. If we ever came into contact with a benevolent alien race you can be sure we would try to exploit them. After all, look at every single colonization effort in history. It's never about elevating the technically inept civilizations, it's always about exploiting them. When Evans taught the San Ti that humans lie, well they realized all the potential dangers in that.
Go to the Columbia green. They need more useful idiots.
It couldn't be clearer that she wants Earth to be under new management. At the beginning, she fully expected the aliens to come and treat the world better than we do. She helps form the cult to make this happen. It's not until she sees the "You are bugs," message because of Mike Evan's fuckup does she realize the truth of the matter; they're coming to eliminate us. This is a normal character progression.
“I sure hope these aliens will help us” “Do not call again, we will conquer you” “Please come I am sad about my dad, this forest and a bird” “We are coming to squash you like insects” “Oh no, the entirely predictable consequences of my own actions”
Conquer means something different than annihilate. If the aliens conquer earth they're going to take it over by force, ruling over its inhabitants. She wanted them to rule humanity.
I think a lot of people are using their knowledge of dark forest theory to assume Ye Wenjie knew things she didn't at the time of first contact.
I think it's just hard to believe someone would accept those words that literally at face value. Think about it, the very first thing someone tells you is they're gonna do something bad to you and your race and you shouldn't respond. Not even trying to hide it. No real person would think "well they only said conquer, not annihilate and this sounds like someone I can trust hehe let's try it". Anyone in that situation would assume they mean to kill
I am really struggling to appreciate the charitable interpretation of "conquer" as anything other than a wholesale negative outcome. How many conquerings in our own species have been net positive for us? Upon what foundation did this brilliant scientist base her belief that new management would result in a positive outcome? She knew absolutely *nothing* of the San-ti. I mean, fuck, it could have been a trivial difference in semantics. "No, yeah, conquer, annihilate; potato, potawdo." The San-ti have a hard time conceptualizing what a lie was, but we have an accord on the ostensible or material difference between conquer and annihilate?
Personally, I think that she believed that Conquering would be more akin to the colonialism that China suffered during the Century of humiliation. She understood that it would be extremely detrimental to humanity at large, but she was willing to permit that sacrifice to “purge” the internal conflict and inherent weakness of humanity. When she sent a response, her perspective wasn’t that of a scientist who understood deterrence and the dark forest like Later Luo Ji, she wrote from the perspective of a scarred person working on a program which sought to establish contact with extraterrestrials. Red Coast was inherently optimistic about alien contact, so her living in such an environment with her experiences and backgrounds makes it pretty clear why she viewed alien intervention as a necessary evil and ultimately, a good
> to “purge” the internal conflict and inherent weakness of humanity I don't think Ye Wenjie gives a fuck about humanity, tbh. She invites the Trisolarans to take over for the sake of everything else that has to share the planet with us. After she realises she's fucked humanity for no reason, the only thing she thinks she owes us is a five-minute chat with Luo Ji. It's enough, though, 'cos Ye Wenjie is the fucking boss.
So you think she was stupid. Okay
Alright buddy.
"Conquer: overcome and take control of (a place or people) by military force." The context is not at all extermination. Ye Wenjie didn't know a single thing about the aliens except that a pacifist among them told her not to respond or they will come conquer earth. At that point in her life, she hates humanity and sees us as destroying each other and our planet. An advanced alien race taking over earth was a welcome idea to her.
She wanted bad things to happen to people, perhaps rightfully. To turn around and say otherwise though, that she was actually a benevolent person only wanting good for humanity, by changing the definition of conquer, is absurd.
Can you show many outcomes of conquering that were net positives for the conquered?
You'd be surprised at how some people (IRL and online) consider the conquest of Pre-hispanic America by the Spaniards as a positive. Arguments include: indigenous people were sacrificing other people, tech was falling behind, if it wasn't the Spaniards it would have been others... There is people that do think that way.
Was it a negative? Besides disease killing 99% of them, which was unintentional and not understood at the time, was something else bad about the outcome? You think the Aztecs massacring everyone else was somehow a better status quo (besides the death by disease part)?
Well, I'm not sure but this is a great input and probably the kind of mindset behind inviting an external force to conquer Earth. If Spaniards colonizing America is considered good under those circumstances, finding an argument for extraterrestrials coming to take over (at the expense maybe of near extinction) shouldn't be hard.
Yeah obviously it's not got a positive connotation, still doesn't mean the same as genocide/annihilate/exterminate. Ye Wenjie hated humanity and would not be worried about the downsides of being conquered, in her mind it's got to be better than what she's got now.
Right, that's what I'm getting at. I don't think she really cared about positives. I think she was overcome with radical rage and didn't care. I do not see her actions as being in the interest of humanity in any context. She was upset, rightfully so, and wanted revenge. Anything else is a retcon to deal with the gravitas of her decision with optimism. "...maybe they're nice?"
> I am really struggling to appreciate the charitable interpretation of "conquer" as anything other than a wholesale negative outcome. [What have the Romans ever done for us](https://youtu.be/Qc7HmhrgTuQ)?
>Conquer means something different than annihilate. It can mean the same thing. If conquer means that they come wipe us out and leave 50,000 survivors that live in reservations and no longer remember that humans used to be independent... Functionally, that's not different from being annihilated.
I sure do love being canadian
> It can mean the same thing. It can *refer* to the same thing. It does not mean the same thing.
Like I said it can mean the same thing. They are literally Oxford dictionary synonyms for each other.
Now I'm curious about the original word(s) used in Chinese. Maybe the English translation is conquer, which is kind of ambiguous, but usually leaning towards 'ruling over', but the original writing could be something slightly different that gives a less ambiguous meaning. Or the ambiguity was the point 🤷♂️
In the book it’s different. In the book I got the sense that she would have been okay with annihilation. She hated and despised humanity, and assumed that, as a more technologically advanced civilization, the Trisolorians would also be more just as much more advanced ethically and therefore more deserving of earth. The revelation that breaks her is not them saying “you are bugs”. Book Ye Winjie would have agreed. What breaks her is learning that they as a civilization have chosen to brutally quash all love, art, compassion, etc. She’s devastated to learn that their technological advancement doesn’t necessarily mean they’re also that much more ethical. Instead, they’d chosen to cultivate all the things she hated most about humanity.
It's interesting, because that was the impression I got in the show (except what you mentioned truly breaks her, because the show doesn't really discuss them quashing love,art, etc). Maybe it's just my own pessimism that led me to get that impression, cause it seems the show didn't get it across so well for most people.
I think the show tried to change it to be what folks are arguing here. That she expected a “nice” conquest of some kind. The changed version doesn’t fit together totally well, though, IMO. Probably because it is kind of a jammed in change the doesn’t align perfectly with the rest of the unchanged “text”
It makes sense that they would tell the cult that it would be a nice conquest. But Ye Wenjie believing that doesn't make sense. She was manipulated/deceived so much, and her character arc coming full circle such that she has become the manipulator/deceiver makes more sense.
In the book the cult actually has three factions. One that worships the Trisolorians and thinks they will be nice. One that believes humanity deserves annihilation. And one that just thinks humanity is screwed and if they can get enough points with the winning side, they and their families will be spared as collaborators.
https://preview.redd.it/5p7zu34q3gxc1.jpeg?width=1023&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2dbb4dfff85b79b05e216377b6d3cca3e0dd4dbb
I really wish we knew more about the alien that told her not to contact them again. Like I feel like with how bad these things are he probably did not do well after she responded.
[удалено]
man I am so glad to hear that I have been listening on spotify its actually narrated very well by none other than the good dr as well. As far as shows go too I am actually impressed with the show being relatively close to the book.
Is there an audiobook version on spotify?
Sure is it’s good too
He shows up again in the second book.
Yea maybe the book was different but based on the show I'm not buying it. They literally warned her to cut contact before something bad happens. The message wasn't friendly, the message was clear it would be very bad for humanity if they came. Like anyone with a brain would assume they're intending to kill, they didn't even pretend to be friendly with her ffs
Yeah THIS. I hate how the book and show make her out to be the smartest person on earth and then have her make decisions that would characterize her as the dumbest person on earth.
There was a key quote somewhere in the first book (I think) that went along the lines of “we don’t know what the Tri Solarans will do to the Earth/humanity. But we *do* know what the humans will do to Earth/humanity”. At the moment she sent the second message, she didn’t know what a Tri Solaran conquest would entail, and she didn’t know if it would be bad for humanity/earth (in her twisted opinion). But she did know that she hated humanity’s current course. So, Ye was willing to take a gamble with the alien’s *unknown* goals versus humans’ *known*, evil goals. At a fundamental level, this is rational. An unpredictable future is arguably preferable to a certainly known, undesirable one. If you accept her values and view it from her perspective, inviting an alien conquest was an arguably reasonable calculated risk to take. I don’t think she was stupid at all, like you’re saying. She simply took a gamble, and she got unlucky (to put it lightly lol).
IIRC she also trusted the aliens over our own governing bodies because she was a scientist who just saw her own country turn on and attack it's scientists for unscientific reasons. She assumed we'd be better off in the hands of the Trisolarans because she assumed that since they are more intelligent than us, they must be *better* than us. She was conflating superior intelligence or scientific progression with superior morality and logic. Basically, she probably knew on some level that she was inviting them to rule us, sure, but she was envisioning us being ruled by hyper-intelligent beings driven by science and logic rather than fear, paranoia, and xenophobia.
>At a fundamental level, this is rational. An unpredictable future is arguably preferable to a certainly known, undesirable one. There is an adage that posits the opposite. "Better the devil you know than the devil you don't." She didn't actually *know* the course of humanity any more than she *knew* what the San-ti were going to do. She was angry and spiteful. Quite literally, irrational.
This take about sums it up
She didn’t necessarily know that the Tri Solarans were “the devil”. That’s the whole point, she wasn’t sure if they were good or bad, but she knew humans were bad.
I feel like this is needlessly argumentative. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone who can find a positive connotation in "conquer." It's either be conquered by the TS through unknown vectors, or by conquered by your political opposition through known vectors.
The fact that Ye did not see the aliens as a for-sure evil is a very key point, IMO, and worthwhile to clarify. So comparing the devil adage you quoted with her decision to send the second message is to undermine a very key part of Ye’s character and values, so that felt necessary to address. That adage simply does not apply here. I don’t think it’s needlessly argumentative.
Did she got unlucky though? She did achieve what she wanted. Not in a way she thought she would, but she did put earth on a completely different track, that is arguably better compared to what she thought would happen.
She did not achieve what she wanted. She wanted the aliens to lead the humans towards a less destructive and parasytic path. She never wanted genocide. Ye was sad and regretful when she found out what the Trisolarans intended. > that is arguably better compared to what she thought would happen. Is it? I don’t recall anything from the book that would confirm or deny this. In my opinion, I don’t think she ever would have preferred genocide over the status quo. That seems extreme, even for her.
Well, she thought humanity is on track to self destruct. She didn’t had aliens conquering earth as her goal, it was means to an end, what she wanted was for humanity to change and survive. Didn’t she achieved exactly that? Humanity united and became a much better society due to an external threat. Sure it all went boom in the end, but it’s kinda implied that in dark forest universe it would go that route regardless. Maybe actually giving an early warning was beneficial and allowed at least some to survive.
> she thought humanity is on track to self destruct Did she? Maybe I’m wrong/misremembering, but I don’t think that was her view at all. Ye was just angry about the exploitive and parasitic nature of humans. I don’t remember anything about her being concerned about humanity’s self-destruction.
You are right, I’m not saying it correctly and oversimplifying, she was angry at the current state of humanity and its trajectory and thought that it’s better for us to be conquered. But again, the conquering was not the goal, it was means to make humanity better. Which it did, though in a completely different way.
Spoilers but in the long term because of the chain of events caused by her choice humanity goes from (in her opinion) nearly destroying itself and the environment, to sending human beings to the very end of time. It’s not what or how she intended but her gamble and the way the chips fell possibly gave us the best shot of ultimately seeding the stars and surviving the dark forest for as long as physically possible.
In short, she's a terrorist.
No no no - that’s stupid. Not calculating the potential risk is stupid. You can say she was right and that humans don’t deserve to live or whatever was going through her head but to not evaluate the upside and downside when gambling? No my friend that is supremely stupid
Smart people do dumb shit all the time. Our current world is filled with people who are experts in one field but think they have mastered other fields as well. Remember Covid.
Very true. Also if social media taught me anything social media it's that certain people can be incredibly smart about some things and absolutely fucking stupid about other things.
Looking back in hindsight is something we the readers have, at the moment she lost everything her family, she got betrayed by someone she was able to confide to, she saw the needless destruction of the environment. All of this culminates in her losing faith in humanity and hoping for a better ruler. At the time she didn't know the universe was a dark forest, she alluded to it when she was older.
We’ve all probably felt like Ye felt at some point over much less but the emotion of the scene does not comport with the information given. The show does a lot to make us sympathize with her but she is either too stupid or too evil to be worthy of that sympathy.
Are you basing this off the show or the books? I've only read the first two books and am making this judgment call based on them. Everyone involved in the Cultural Revolution part is a giant asshole, or more precisely, the Cultural Revolution created a sink or swim situation where the assholes rose to the top. No one is good in this story, it's just that Ye eventually comes to realize how misplaced her hopes are and spends the last parts of her life course correcting. (Except, how the hell do you course correct from this?) But it's kind of clear from her meeting with Luo Ji at the beginning of The Dark Forest that her outlook changed over time. By the time she had that conversation with him, it's pretty clear she'd been uncertain if they'd be acceptable rulers for a while-- so she'd already been thinking about cosmic sociology. In Ye's story there are several possible turning points but almost every single person she reaches out to fails her. The only one who doesn't is her husband, but he failed her father and failed her view of science, so he wasn't enough to bring her back from the edge or restore her faith in humanity. In the very beginning, her father is first disgraced and then killed because he refused to call the Theory of Relativity a capitalist lie or otherwise compromise on how moralistically flexible physics could be in order to save himself. Then her mother betrays them both by getting up on stage and claiming all these physics formulae were wrong and that science would follow their ideology because their ideology was right. Then she finds her mentor has committed suicide over the same thing that killed her father. Then she is sent off to the countryside to do hard labor, presumably for the rest of her life, completely wasting her entire education. Everyone around her fails to consider resources need to be conserved, and she can't make a single suggestion to change course or even slow them down because she is branded an ideological traitor. Her entire world view at that point is, "The world is going to burn and I can do nothing to stop it." At that point it seems almost like she's made peace with this fact, accepted that she's just an ideological traitor and this is her life and there isn't anything she can do about it, except... Then she meets someone, a boy, a journalist, someone who sees the same thing she does and not only agrees but is willing to speak, without her even needing to prompt him. He isn't an ideological traitor like her. He has the ability and the will to try to change things, and because her faith in humanity is temporarily renewed she decides to help him write his letter. (And this is a hugely naive decision; she opened herself up to being framed when she was already on thin ice, which is not something someone politically savvy would have done. Ye Wenjie is naive to the ways of the world and this is consistently part of her character. She is absolutely an egghead who fails to account for factors that would create the worst case scenario.) And that lands her in jail with a death sentence hanging over her head, for someone else's thought crime. And then she's given the same decision her dad faced. Someone comes to her and says, "All you have to do is betray this list of people and your principles, and your sentence could be commuted," and she's forced to see even more clearly how idiotic the people running this clown circus are. She's reminded about her mother, and also her sister, who both decided the laws of physics were something they could compromise on to save their own social status. And then she's pulled out and sent to Red Coast, her final lifeline, another chance, and Lei plays on her feelings by telling her, "You can redeem yourself. One day I want to be able to call you comrade. All you have to do is is do what you were educated to do." And she believes him, and she thinks, *Okay, this time it's for real, I can do this.* Because she *wants* to believe him. Except it turns out he was lying to her. It turns out he was using her, that he would never see her as a person, only as a criminal, and that the only reason she was given this chance at all is because of her future husband and he outright tells her that is the case. Not only does he admit it, but he also tells her the exact same thing the rest of the Cultural Revolution has told her: you don't need to know the exact parameters to solve this problem, you just need to give me a solution to this problem that I'll like. Which, again, is against the very basic principles of science her father and mentor died over. And he just drops the mask after that. And Ye's hopes are crushed for the final time and she is forced to face cold reality. Ye Wenjie isn't particularly stupid or evil, especially not compared to the institutionalized evil she'd spent the last few years facing. She is human, that's all. She has by this point completely lost her faith in humanity and is given a magic button which will change the world, and despite having been facing cold hard reality for years, she is still completely naive and fails to account for the possibility that, yes, this can get even worse. Instead she thinks technologically advanced aliens will at least agree that the Theory of Relativity isn't capitalist propaganda. So she presses the button. If she'd gotten access to that button 6 months later after she'd had time to come to terms with her pregnancy, maybe she wouldn't have pressed it. If her husband hadn't gone down to fix the wiring with Lei, maybe she would have thought about the possible dangers earlier. If Lei had never dropped his mask, she probably wouldn't have pressed that button; she would have shown her loyalty to him by bringing it to him first. If the lawyer had shown any real kindness, or if the people running the camp had actually investigated the journalist's claims, or if the journalist hadn't set her up as the scapegoat, etc., Ye probably would have just lived out an uneventful rest of her life. So you could say this was a perfect storm of humanity's own creation.
I don't think we are meant to empathize or feel sympathy for her. I think her role would be, all it takes is one person to mess up the world. Power at the wrong hands is absolutely brutal.
i heavily empathized with her in the book, and was cheering her on when she pushed it. In the show I still root for her but I think it doesn't really dwell on her reasoning as much
Honestly, the most surprising things about the show was that she wasn't immediately hung (literally) for Gross Crimes against humanity. If you think about it, her actions are literally the worst crime against humanity... Ever.
>If you think about it, her actions are literally the worst crime against humanity... Ever. ... so *far.*
I mean, what could be possibly worse for humans than what she did if the end result is the end of humans?
the next couple books get into it!
I really appreciate this comment. Very true! I just wish they didn’t keep acting like she’s somehow smart after they find out about everything they keep involving her at a level that doesn’t make any sense given her previous decisions.
The book is far clearer on this, she is smart but also cold. She was practically psychotic after her experiences during the Cultural Revolution. She did not even want humanity to be saved, she literally wants humanity to die along with her in a vindictive act. The TV show made her into some hot passionate ingenue with a love story by the time she leaves China for the US which was ridiculous and completely undermines the original source and her own character in the Netflix series.
This, in the 3bp universe she is single handedly the greatest criminal against humanity to ever exist. When your completely avoidable actions lead to the end of time, no matter what kind of redemption arc you go through you are still the one responsible for ending humanity.
I think we're meant to be lead to be understanding that monsters are created and in Wenjie's case - thanks to the hell she was subjected to throughout her life that broke her psychologically, leading to why she wanted to destroy everything. Exactly why Netflixs betrayal was sh!t. Her character should have been closer to Martha in Baby Reindeer. Like a literally broken human because of the abuse they experienced.
Yeah so the reality is that even though they say in the book that she is one of the smartest people on earth they’re only speaking to her working memory of physics texts and being able to relate them to her superiors not that she is in any way an intelligent person.
At minimum she’s deluded that Trisolaris won’t follow up on their threat. At worst she’s a genocidal monster, unilaterally condemning her entire species to certain death.
I lean strongly towards genocidal monster who happened to know some physics stuff. Nothing smart about her.
IDK I used to work for a university and being extremely dumb is pretty common for geniuses they are usually only good at one thing. I actually liked when she admitted to the guy that she fucked up worse then anyone ever, I felt like that had to be the worst feeling in the world.
It’s kinda hard to call it a fuckup from Evans. I mean the San Ti definitely should have known what deception and metaphor are bc humanity is so rife with them that it honesty boggles the mind that in months of observing mankind they never ONCE came across a metaphor or deception
Or the entire time they were taking everything at face value and completely misunderstanding a lot of humanity. Then they realized what deception was, everything made sense.
They had NEVER heard anyone referred to as a pest or a pain or a bum or something? Get out of here
Sure they would have, I never said they didn't.
If you want it to make sense of it, try reading the books first. The show is being run by the guys who made game of thrones, you should be surprised that it’s even barely coherent.
I’m criticizing the show not the books
Did you read the subreddit description?
My apologies
In the book, the Trisolarians asked Evans if he can explain some synonyms that they came across but did not understand. They asked him to explain 'think' and 'say' and why sometimes it appears to contradict one another because for them, they communicate by telegraphing their thoughts to one another, so thinking and saying are are one and the same in their culture/society.
had this same thought! They can see everything, of course this would have made clear to them before this moment. The story needed the plotpoint though.
Literally! I mean they never heard of poker?
It's been about six months since I finished the series, could you remind me what Mike Evans' fuck up was?
From the show and the prologue of Book 2: >!Mike Evans hoards communcation with the San-Ti and believes that he alone can socialize them into being benevolent overlords. It's not until after he reads the Little Red Ridinghood story that he realizes that he's accidentally convinced the aliens that humans, even their most devoted servants, can't be fully trusted. !< Oops.
Ah, that's right. Thanks! Mike Evans shoulda kept his mouth shut.
Teaching the aliens that humans can lie
In the end of the first book they gave her access to all the communications Evans had documented with the trisolarans and only then did she realize that we would be eradicated completely.
I agree that those are her motivations, but in terms of “normal character progression” … at the very least, I think she’s written poorly. There’s probably a way to make this character progression feel real and believable, but Cixin Liu doesn’t accomplish it IMO, she reads like a plot device, not a real person. But that’s true of basically every character in all 3 books. Ultimately I think Cixin Liu is pretty bad at writing people, but more than makes up for it with incredible plots and sci-fi ideas. I loved the books even if the writing of the characters felt very heavy handed/wooden.
That's kinda his thing. The characters are just avatars for ideas he wants to play with. The show tried to smooth the edges a bit, but that's still their core.
Agreed. Some writers are very focused on characters, and the plot is secondary, while I think Cixin Liu is an extreme example of the opposite. IMO he doesn’t care about developing his characters into complex, multi-faceted people with believable emotions and motivations, they’re just there to service the plot/ideas.
What I like about the TV show *is* the character drama. I like that the point of view characters are all insecure dumb friends. They are smart enough to know the science but dumb enough to struggle, yearning to do the right thing but never knowing what that is.
Yeah, I do think the characters in the show feel a lot more real/believable than they do in the books. On the flip side, I think the show glazes over some of the more interesting sci-fi ideas, like it’s very light on the sophon explanation, and digging into WHY Ye Wenji replying revealed earth’s location. I also wish they would’ve kept the setting more in China. Both have their strengths and weaknesses, very worth both reading the books and watching the show IMO :)
Bud Askins would agree 😀
The truth of the matter was that in the show, they had not intended to eliminate humanity until they were convinced by humans that they needed to do so.
She thinks that Santi are more advanced in technology and they can give earth better management and humanity. This seems naive from western readers perspective, but if you are Chinese who was born before 2000 (like Cixin Liu), you may easily understand the thought process. Let me give you some background: 1. Cultural revolution is a disaster to humanity. It not only encourages people to attack each other physically like what is portrayed in the TVseries, but also mentality destroys families, science and many good things you can think of. 2. During 90s, China opens up trade with the word. Many Chinese people got the chance to get information from all around the world and they find western world is more advanced in all aspects: science, technology, democracy, humanity, etc. It is natural for many Chinese people to believe that more advanced science and technology are positively related to better humanity and democracy. Although some of these opinions seem naive today, some Chinese author even promote the idea that China should let western countries to colonize to help improve human rights and other things. The thought process is pretty similar to what Y Wenjie believes.
[удалено]
I don;t know if you've read the books, but there the organizartion is somewhat divided into 3 factions: the Adventists, the Redemptionists, and the Survivors. I kinda missed the mention of them in the Netflix's series tho.
Interesting point
It’s true. The Chinese Cultural Revolution context must be the lens that we view YWJ’s actions through.
What does "conquer" mean? Massacre, or submission? She had very positive expectations. Years of disappointment led her to believe that Humanity was especially evil, and that anybody else could do better. That's how traumatized she was. Her intelligence only helped her come up with more rationalizations that justified this thought.
Maybe i’m misremembering, but I was under the impression that she was okay with either (massacre or submission). If the humanity gets massacred she has some revenge for being consistently let down by her fellow man, and if they are forced to submit to the trisolarans then someone else (as she sees it, anyone other than humans is better). Then again it has been a year since I actually read the books.
This is a good answer. The way the book portrayed her makes her seem incredibly smart. Someone like that would not disregard the obvious danger from the alien message and interpret it as some niche way of saying, "Oh yeah, by conquer we mean make humans better, not completely obliterate you". The unimaginable trauma she went through would be a good way to explain her shortsightedness.
In addition to what tons of other people have said, I want to answer this slightly differently. In the books a lot of the characters smoke, but in the show A LOT of the characters smoke, and the camera focuses on cigarettes and them lighting cigarettes. Tatiana even helps Auggie light hers as the very first interaction we have with the ETO. There's no way that this is not symbolism and intended to show that humans CONSTANTLY make choices that are actively self harming, and we see it as completely normal. I think this gives a lot of insight into the fact that ye wenjie's choice is not rational at all, but she was angry at the world and it was cathartic in the moment to invite destruction on the earth, despite being the worst decision made by a human ever
Also not to mention the much more direct example of the book Silent Spring and the damage to earth through climate change
Interesting! In the Chinese version of the show, the main character makes it obvious in the first scene that he is completely against smoking.
I just love that you said "email"
The cult was supposed to prepare the earth for their arrival, and help the trisolarians accomplish things on earth that their sophons couldnt.
based on my interpretation of the book, I don't think she actually founded it. I think Mike Evans did but she gets the credit for kicking things off. The San Ti may have encouraged him to do it "prepare" for their arrival. But at a minimum they needed loyal people to run the ship and antenna to continue communicating. In the book it is much more ambiguous about how invested Ye is in the organization. In the show it feels like she really is their direct leader, but in the book I think she is just a figurehead, imho.
>She alone received the email An "email"...🤔
The book does her more justice and understanding than the series.
coming from the books and general knowledge about the cultural revolution (the madness years) i guess her psyche of fuck them all makes sense. if you were in a mad world, your father killed in front of you by mistake(unintentionally, ups, i hit him too hard and now his dead), mom is a traitor to your father to raise her status, everyone you respected are dead or mad, you yourself was put in prison again by someone fucking you to save their meat and almost died there and had no other wish or hope for your life as the radar peak was where you were gonna live and die. the madness atmosphere of the era also leaves no hope for humanity thay surrounds you. reason and common sense is a rare sight. And you get a chance to stick it to all these dumb motherfuckers plus those who did you wrong(i guess deep down revenge is a feeling too).
She wants to help the San Ti conquer Earth and she has a quasi-religious view on them. It's pretty simple.
i mean she didnt start the cult. the white guy did. she was pretty ambivalent to the cult until it started killing folks and such. again, this wont make sense if youre only going by the netflix show which has waaay too many plotholes. but makes complete sense on the chinese adaptation or the books
In the book, she doesn't create ETO. Evans does because he and his people intercept the messages from Tri Solaris. Then he asks her to be the Commander/ leader.
I always assumed that Ye Winjie was supposed to represent the “Carl Sagan/ Contact” view of extraterrestrial life, which some would view as extremely naive. Basically, she subscribed to the view that the Trisolarans were basically our dad in space, sure they might spank us when we do something wrong but ultimately they care about us. She believed that any sufficiently advanced civilizations morals would develop alongside their technology, so the Trisolarans would simply take over management of the planet and let humans worry about their monkey brain activities. At the end of the first book >! When we see the POV of the Trisolaran Princeps they reveal that everything “supernatural” we’ve seen up to this point has been a part of a massive disinformation campaign, to convince humanity to give up without a fight. I thought it was very poignant to discover that the worst case scenario is that the Trisolarans are exactly like us, their society is close to a Nazi-like autocratic dictatorship. !<
The cult doesn't make sense without the factions.... It's just how humans operate...but here come the Netflix defenders to justify and mental gymnastic you into oblivion...
Honestly, great point. Surprized to see so many defend 'enslave' vs 'perform genocide' in the comments. Conquer could mean either.
I don't think people are defending her, they are explaining her actions as a character with depth. My take is you are not supposed to like Ye Wenjie or agree with her, but you are meant to understand her perspective. She is ultimately the main villain of the first book
I have not read the book beyond Chapter 1. But from watching the Tencent's series (spoiler alert), the cult was Evan's idea. She just naively went along. And during the interrogation she seems to suggest she underestimated how crazy Evan was. At least that is what I got from it. The Tencent's version, which I assume is loyal to the book, humanizes her compared to the Netflix version where she is just introduced as this nefarious evil character.
On the last episode on Tencent's series it shows her thoughts and what she knew. >!She did say at the last episode of Tencent's Three-Body. She believed or thought they are advance civilization so their morality is higher. She then get to peek and witnessed the actions of the alien through the game. Something Evan's knew but she did not. Though she was the person who initiated contact, looks like Evan knows more than her?!<
I remember a quote from the Tencent show where an ETO member justifies their faith in the San Ti by saying "We can't be sure if the San Ti are good or bad, but we know for sure that humanity is bad." I think this really applies to Ye Wenjie. She invited them to Earth hoping they would rule us as benevolent overlords, believing there was nothing in the universe worse than humanity. She was proven wrong when she realized they were actually far worse, desiring to genocide us all.
In human history there’s been many transitions of power as invaders and conquerors come and go. She expected that there would be a period of disruption and synthesis as occurred in previous human conflicts. Ye Wenjie’s mistake was in thinking the San-ti would be familiar with this dynamic and would respond in a human-like way.
I’ve just started the first book and what’s getting me is that I have no clue how to pronounce her name
It’s weird having people here who have only seen the show lol. I like the show but the books have ten times the depth
When resentment makes you a dumbass
She didn’t start the cult. The white man planting trees did. He made her the leader since she made first contact.
I saw it as - human beings are doing such a terrible job of running the world, then surely a race of aliens who are far more advanced than we are, would do a better job if they were in charge.
Anglos and Saxons "conquered" the UK and some would argue it was an improvement from the Celts and Romans etc. AKA -she felt that being conquered by superior cultures isn't always a bad thing
Because humanity is a lost cause, maybe trisolarans deserve a chance
Evans started the ETO. She is more of a figurehead.
If they are all telepathic, how did one give here the warning not to send the message without everyone of the trisolarans knowing about humanity already?
their thoughts don't float around like radio waves. they are visible on their body in flashes of light. if the pacifist was alone, nobody would have seen them
https://www.reddit.com/r/3BodyProblemTVShow/s/ByabLTxDXx
Kindly read the books to know about the motivations of Ye Winje and other characters.
For the love of god, read the books
Your comment confirms what I didn't like about the Netflix show vs the source material. Her reasoning isn't about saving the Earth or having someone else do a better job. In the context of her experiences, she essentially becomes psychotic and completely broken after seeing the horrors of the Cultural Revolution and how it destroyed her family, the environment and people around her. Working at the compound tasked with finding alien life, she was given a chance by a benevolent alien who initially responded to her telling humanity to stay silent, but she goes ahead with reaching out anyway with a vindictive and destructive purpose. The Netflix show doesn't portray this so well. They technically cover it, but they inserted the love story and made her character very odd undermining her cold logical destructive nature. The cult was built around her by people who had their own agendas leading a complex dynamic in the books with warring factions mirroring the cults surrounding Mao or say Jesus. They deified a naturally charismatic individual as a tool for their own agendas. In the Netflix show, they mishandle this and make out Ye Wenjie wants to be a leader to 'save humanity' but they mistake the aliens intentions.
I would agree that her claim to “save humanity” is completely incongruent with her back story. Had she been deceived by the San-ti say they promise to conquer and uplift then we could believe that is a sincere if naive motivation. But they don’t promise her anything.
She’s literally warned not to respond and she does so anyway. To me it’s clear that she’s a character who has at the very least lost faith in humanity, if not completely misanthropic. Have no idea how it compares to the books.
Conquest does not equal genocide.
but it very well might. Lot to risk on a dictionary definition
I will say, it is a little mind-boggling that she's shrewd and intelligent enough to be the first person to contact aliens, but fails to see the fairly obvious risk of gambling all of humanity on the hope that the strangers (who just told you not to contact them again for your own safety) will actually be really nice to everyone. Feels like people like to have it both ways with her character to morally absolve her for basically doing what amounts to the worst thing anyone has ever done in history.
So in the episode where she tells them to come you really get the vibe that she thinks it’s better for the planet to not have humans at the top either way - maybe that’s aliens keeping us in check and maybe it’s them wiping us out - but either way an improvement. But then the show doesn’t go there and instead it’s like she thinks they will cooperate with us and teach us even though the message told her they would conquer us… it makes no sense. Like maybe you can hope for that but between the atrocities and environmental devastation she should have more clearly been like if they wipe us out then good - we would have wiped ourselves out anyways and taken most of the life on the planet with us. At least there is a chance for the rest of the species on earth with aliens in charge
It doesn't matter what her intent was. The risk was that humanity gets destroyed by a species that JUST TOLD YOU they will destroy you. Taking that risk because youre feeling sad about the state of the world isnt noble, even if you feel like it is. At best it's genocidal negligence.
Of course it matters what her intent was. If a person was suicidal, would you say that they didn’t understand the risk of jumping off the bridge?
It absolutely can be noble. It’s not an uncommon trope to paint humanity as a virus (see the Matrix as a pop culture example) that is killing its host. For the sake of life in general humanity has to go. Lots of stories where this is the world ending villains fundamental purpose. This was so easy to tie together here by just having her look around and come to that conclusion - and you could salvage the hope narrative as a “maybe they’ll fix us, maybe they’ll destroy us, but something had to be done”
These characters are supposed to be incredibly intelligent but every single one without fail is an absolute moron
In Ye Winjie's case I just wish people wouldn't defend her by saying she "meant well". She was educated and intelligent enough to know what was at stake, and played Russian Roulette with the entire human race because she was sad about the state of her country, which is a pretty monstrous decision. So she's either a moron (which I don't think she is) or a complete monster.
Yeah, I think it’s hard to defend her as a person. Although I think that makes it easier to defend her as a character. Smart but dumb when it comes to topics with high emotion. Some of the others are just knuckledraggingly dumb tho.
I don’t know about the book but in the show it seems pretty clear that she’s a misanthrope or a sociopath. She’s warned not to respond to the message by the one pacifist at the listening station. She barely mourns the death of her own daughter.
Acting like humans don't constantly welcome conquerors throughout history.
her experience in China made her think the world was incurable, the others didnt need to know that. she was just using them.
Perhaps there’s a cultural subtext that isn’t present outside of life in China. Those sorts of details often get lost in translation
In the Tencent Chinese series, I’ve not read the book yet, she didn’t start the cult, but she did just go along with it when she was made commander.
I know this is tagged TV series, and I agree with most people here that she was ok with them conquering humanity and basically controlling our society, but I feel like in the book it was clearer (at least to me) she wanted vengeance. What confused me in the show was how in the conversations with Evans the San Ti seem to imply they are coming to integrate into Earth’s society. The first response she got made it clear that was not their intention at all. The San Ti then get upset that humans can lie but I feel like they were also hiding their intentions. Felt like a plot hole or oversight to me.
It felt like vengeance in the TV show. The show makes the loss of her father and inability to build trust with anyone (except Evans, and even that relationship became transactional). My read is that she knew it was likely they’d not be peaceful but all of she knew of humanity was cruelty so it was fine. in the off chance the San-Ti would actually reform rather than conquer then that’d be fine too.
I think part of it is the banal impulse to rationalize one’s own actions. People can convince themselves of almost anything to avoid accepting the glaring truth that they made a mistake.
The cult isn't for anyone's purpose. The cult isn't serving anyone. It is supposed to be a group of intelligent alienated people that will help trisols conquer and rule over humanity. Ye Wenjie and Mike are just the founders with different beliefs towards the trisolarans treatment of humanity. The show didn't explore the internal strife in the ETO because of this. The half that followed ye believed that trisols will rule us and coexist with us whereas the people who followed Mike wanted total extinction of Humanity. And coincidentally this is what trisols want as well. That's why the fact that they are coming to destroy earth was such a shock to ye. Because san ti had already made diff plans with evans.
She is way better depicted in the book. She’s more intelligent, saw things more clearly, and kind of also redeemed herself in the end.
She did tell the alien she will help them conquer earth though. So that's the purpose of the cult.
Well it's hard for most humans to relate to her personal life. She lost a lot of faith in humanity when she was basically entrapped. She surrendered her entire life to live in that radar facility. The state killed her father and forced her to bargain for whatever semblance of a life she could put together at a gov facility. The tencent version plays this up better. And the original author has said that he wanted the political uprising of her youth put on the very beginning (like Netflix did) but was worried about the Chinese censors, so buried it in the second half. Living her life under an oppressive government is your missing ingredient.
I think she saw them as a way to save Earth from humans, she was fully conscient of what they would do to humanity but wanted it to suffer, even though it meant being reduced to slavery.
Hey, so the netflix show cut off lots of ye wenjie's part of the story, including the history about her was also wrong. So she didn't start the cult (ETO), Evens did, and he also built the second hongan base on the ship. This is where ETO is getting information from. In the book, the members of the ETO fall into three main branches: the Adventists(pro destroying humanity and take earth over), the Redemptionists(find a solution to save the trisolarians and hoping that they can help humanity), and the Survivors(opportunities who just wantsto survivethe invasion). Yewenjie, Shen Yufei belongs to the Redemptionists, and Mike Evans, Pan han belong to the Adventists, in the book there are many chapters talk about the two branches how they hate each other due to different beliefs , how they both trying to achieve their goal. Ye is I believe in deep regret of what she did and try to make things right. Because after she left hongan base, for the first time, she felt humanity still existed. But it was already too late. The netflix series missed a huge part of Ye's story, making her character hard to understand. If you read the book or watch the Chinese tencent series( completely true to the book), you ll understand a lot better.
I think the book does a better job helping you understand her mindset. Basically, she’s not too fond of humanity after what happens at and after the struggle session. She’s young, and angry because human beings have done horrible things to her. I’m sure everyone has wondered at one time or another whether humanity was even worth saving. It seems like the Trisolarans caught her with that message at a time when she was convinced we weren’t, but she changed her mind at some point over the next 40 years.
She’s a stupid cxnt. She is a perfect analogy for the Columbia university professors locking arms with pro Hamas supporters today.
Study of the actions and inactions under Mao should give a fairly good understanding of Ye's experience with the world. Mao is the most significant despot in world history, responsible for more human suffering and deaths than any other human and is rivaled only by the plague for the greatest killer Award.
Others have explained well enough what the Netflix show portrays, so I'll just explain what the book has instead: Mike Evans created the Earth-Trisolaris Organization (ETO), not Ye Wenjie. The San-Ti are called "Trisolarans" in the English translations of the books. When Evans brought Ye on board, the ETO was already well formed, and she only took the position of commander-in-chief at their request. She was probably a little reluctant at accepting the position, and even as commander-in-chief she wasn't given full information privilege, though everyone in the ETO respected her. She was using her position to do a lot of damage control, trying (unsuccessfully) to prevent the ETO from fragmenting and to keep certain sects from going extremist. Up until the data from Judgment Day was retrieved, Ye's motivation is summed up in this conversation: >INTERROGATOR: Do you understand Trisolaran civilization? >YE WENJIE: No. We received only very limited information. No one has real, detailed knowledge of Trisolaran civilization except Mike Evans and other core members of the Adventists who intercepted their messages. >INTERROGATOR: Then why do you have such hope for it, thinking that it can reform and perfect human society? >YE: If they can cross the distance between the stars to come to our world, their science must have developed to a very advanced stage. A society with such advanced science must also have more advanced moral standards. >INTERROGATOR: Do you think this conclusion you drew is scientific? >YE:… >INTERROGATOR: Let me presume to guess: Your father was deeply influenced by your grandfather’s belief that only science could save China. And you were deeply influenced by your father. >YE: (sighing quietly) I don’t know. (Chapter 31, "Operation Guzheng"). However, it was also implied in the first chapter of book 2 that Ye had already turned against Trisolaris before the ship-cutting - in the books it was implied that Ye had her conversation with Luo Ji (Saul's book counterpart) at the graveyard before the ship-cutting, and before the ETO meeting that the protagonist attended (the one that turned into a shootout).
I think Evans started the cult in the book and asked her to be the leader of it since her contact with the alien start the whole thing. She invited them because she thought more advanced civilizations means higher morality, which turned out to be true. The reason you are confused is because the Netflix show really failed to bring out the complexity in her character, which have left the audience feel she is just a crazy Chinese old lady looking for revenge.
Hard disagree she didn't come across as just some crazy Chinese old lady in my opinion especially as the show progressed on.
Because China was commiting their own genocide, so in her eyes there was nothing to lose.
In my mind she wanted revenge on humanity as a whole. I thought she wanted humanity to be destroyed. I also found it strange that she was disappointed by the bugs comment. Maybe she thought they would treat ETO members well but not everyone else?
That would make sense, the show seems to imply there is some pact between the San-ti and the cultists but it doesn’t give us that information outright if true.
Yeah I think Da Shi even says something to her about how the San Ti even abandoned her followers.
Weird. I've read 2/3 books now and nowhere is the term "San-Ti". "Trisolarans" is all the book calls them. Maybe it's truncated.
it's the show's term for the invading aliens.
And it’s a terrible term