Discussing Molly X. Chang
Toxic GoodReads and Book Twitter Continue to Disappoint
Molly X. Chang is having a difficult year and it’s only March. A debut author with her fantasy novel, To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods, set to come out in April of this year, Chang has found herself in the midst of several book twitter kerfuffles—one of which will sound familiar to those of you who follow my particular Substack. It has been several months worth of scandals involving authors whose books haven’t even been released yet, making this one of the most controversy-laden set of debut authors of which most of us have ever heard. Chang, one of the more prominent victims of Cait Corrain’s review-bombing campaign, is now being accused of all kinds of transgressions against the book community including “invading” reviewer spaces, “doxxing” a reviewer, and “writing a colonizer romance,” leading her to become the next great evil to be eradicated among the throngs of bad-faith “reviewers” searching for blood.
If you’ve followed my substack for a decent amount of time or you were there when the old magic was written on Twitter in late 2020, you’ll recall what happened when I released a short Omegaverse story on Archive of Our Own called “The Liberator.” Besieged by angry peanuts from the peanut gallery who had never read the story and who were spurred on by “fandom scholar” Rukmini Pande and a tumblr user whose name I’ve now forgotten (“marina” on Ao3), I was subjected to some pretty intense statements and complete fabrications as to both the plot and the characterization within the story itself. All of this was made possible due to the speed at which a lie can travel and the relative inaccessibility manufactured by my “critics” as they refused to link the story (ostensibly so that nobody could tell they were lying about it) and had blocked me to prevent any corrections to their falsehoods for as long as they could. This, as it turns out, seems almost like a trial run or a tiny little precursor to what would then be happening only 3 and a half years later to Molly Chang.
Molly Chang’s case is far more egregious. The level to which her debut novel is being defamed and mischaracterized is absurd. The absolute unbelievable gymnastic-level reaching that is taking place on the cesspit of Twitter has been tying most people’s logical brains into knots, creating a level of confusion around the work that would take actually reading the book to unravel. But that’s the catch—much like the carefully orchestrated ruse led by fandom heavies against my short story, Chang finds herself in similar circumstances. As of right now, it is March 12th, 2024 and To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods does not officially release until April 16th. The only people who have actually read the novel are those who were granted an Advanced Reader’s Copy. This means that the great majority of people who are spreading lies about Chang’s book have never read it. Those who have sought to originate and spread the lies about her work include a group on the popular book review site GoodReads who have purposefully curated “bookshelves” of books they hate, giving them one star reviews as a punishment for their alleged “colonizer” romance plot lines. According to Twitter user dhampirwomen, these Mean Girls™ reviewers have also dunked on another Corrain victim, Thea Guanzon. Aptly, at least one of them has stated in their GoodReads biography section: “The Anti-Colonizer Romance Club.” They’re not alone, either. A contingent of Twitter nasties have been adamantly spreading lies that Chang has personally wronged these reviewers, providing absolutely zero evidence that Chang has ever bullied, harassed, or doxxed any of the reviewers.
So where did these claims come from? Apparently, it’s a bit more messy than most Book Twitter dramas, but it comes down to a tweet Chang made in February after Cait Corrain had made a statement to a journalist and around that same time, more reviews were cropping up on the books the now disgraced author had targeted, leaving one star reviews eerily similar to those of Corrain’s sockpuppets. According to Chang, one of those accounts was actually named “Jane Corrain,” leading her to tweet this series of tweets in a thread:
hello, I had originally tried to ignore this, but several people have alerted me of suspicious Goodreads accounts either made in Dec 2023 or January 2024 and gave TO GAZE UPON WICKED GODS either 1 or 2 star ratings recently and around when cait’s article came out (1/?)
I don’t know if this is Cait or a racist copycat who is out to harass me, but since this isn’t the first time I was targeted I am a little paranoid so if you’ve genuinely read the book and enjoyed it, can you please leave a review/rating to neutralize any further star-bombing?
If you haven’t read it yet please consider requesting a review copy/pre-order and leave a genuine rating to combat these fake ones. Anyway I hope when the book is out whoever this is will get bored and leave me alone🙃
This thread was twisted into the interpretation that Chang was somehow going into reviewer spaces and “policing” her reviews which, if one read these tweets, one would find that she was alerted to suspicious accounts, not trawling them herself looking for transgressions. Similarly, Chang also states later on that she was told about another troublemaker on the platform (and yes, Chang could theoretically lie but there’s no credible evidence to suggest that she has) who happens to be the sister of another author Chang knows in person. What should have been a mild interpersonal tiff transformed into a massive public internet drama when reviewers decided they were somehow being targeted by Chang maliciously, claiming “doxxing” when Chang had merely connected a GoodReads account with an Instagram account. When they could no longer get away with the “doxx” accusation, they tried to use the term “soft doxx” which, to be frank, is not a thing and does not exist. People who are not close to the issue do not know the identities of any of these people who were allegedly “doxxed.”
Beyond what could amount to be tangible harm (but isn’t), it seems that the most evil of her transgressions was the book she wrote, being characterized as a “colonizer romance” as the main character allegedly falls in love with a man who is part of an oppressing force over her people. Chang states that she wrote the book under the inspiration of her grandfather’s ghost stories from his time living in China, a country often victimized by colonial forces throughout history. In her fantasy story, the villains are quite clearly based on Romans though what most bad-faith reviewers latched onto was an element introduced late into the narrative where it is revealed (spoiler, sorry), that the love interest has been either perpetrating or complicit in human experimentations on the female main character’s people. A reviewer made the sudden jump from this story element to the very real Unit 731, a Japanese military unit which is purported to have murdered anywhere between 200,000 to 300,000 Chinese and Koreans via “lethal human experimentation.” From here the attitudes toward Chang’s book altered its entire plot for those who had not read it. Twitter users claimed that it was “literally” a “Unit 731 Romance” with one user explicitly stating (translated from Chinese) “If your grandpa knew you were in love with a Japanese soldier from Unit 731, it would be weird if he didn’t jump out of the coffin board and break your legs. He’d be sick and vomiting.” [sic] with another (user Dante45p) proclaiming confidently and wrongly, “Spoilers its about romancing a unit 731 officer” [sic]. Due to these accusations, Chang felt pressured to fix the misrepresentations of her work as a World War II story and to reiterate that the tale is “About the weight of survival in a cruel world, and what desperate people do to survive” [sic] and beyond this, she felt forced to spoil her own story by revealing the title of the second in the series which suggests that the first book’s male love interest is likely considered the main antagonist of the second installment…and likely dead by the end of it.
Despite that the reviewers of Chang’s work claim that they have been subjected to horrific harassment due to her alleged interference (none of which has been proven to exist), it is evident that Chang herself has now become the target of the bulk of Twitter’s hate mobs, being the subject of tweets suggesting she should be “executed” or that she is a “disgrace” to the Chinese people. These are the drastic examples, of course, while most are simply the moral reactionaries, Twitter user OyyeHoyyeBasket asking unironically, “so now y’all think it’s okay to write romance where someone falls in love with their oppressor? WTF?” while neglecting to consider that this statement in itself would preclude any and all heterosexual romances under patriarchy and would necessitate divulging every single ounce of ethnicity in one’s blood before one was allowed to even let two white people kiss: too much English on one side and too much Irish on the other and we might have to burn your book. This whole scenario has also provided a pretext by which individuals who are already harboring anti-Chinese or Asian sentiments can air their racism and violent fantasies, one commenting, “do you know how easy I can run up on a stage at Barnes and Noble?? do you have no fear???” [sic] and another grouping in Thea Guanzon, claiming that “[This discourse] also made me regret buying The Hurricane Wars.”
All of this hits me as a writer particularly hard. My own critics had, in fact, claimed the very same thing about me—that because I drew attention to their lies about my story, I had directed hate toward them and subjected them to harassment, none of which was at all proven with any evidence while I was sent messages such as “Cut your throat you white Nazi bitch” and “I hope your coomer boyfriend punches you to sleep every night” along with the words of others weaponizing the suffering of their own grandparents during the Holocaust to use as a gotcha against a stranger who wrote a short story they didn’t read. To my critics’ credit, at least I actually wrote a World War II story so even if they hadn’t gotten literally anything else right about it, at least the largest part was true. With Chang, even that is a complete fabrication, casting a stark light on the disingenuous intent of her detractors.
The original reviewers who signed the statement made with absolutely no evidence, Sid, Zana, Mai, Sarah Hernandez, and the pseudonymed “Annabeth” claimed that “as reviewers, we ask only to be allowed to do what we love; read and discuss books.” Perhaps they should consider all of the backlash against their statement merely part of the “discussion” around their interpretation of the book and the narrative. After all, all they want is to discuss books…can they not handle that discussion with the counter speech of hundreds of other people who liked a book that they lied about? They complain in their statement that they have suffered their integrity being questioned and accusations that they have “misinterpreted” the books. Why not? Why haven’t you? This is all part of a discussion is it not? And who is to say that you haven’t egregiously misinterpreted or misrepresented the book in question because it made you have feelings you didn’t particularly like or you had personal beef with Chang herself? Reviewers and criticism are not beyond their own criticism, after all and you threw the first stone. As I have often thought when it came to the controversy around “The Liberator:”
Don’t start shit, won’t be shit.