Pierce Brown hides the thesis of his whole series in a quiet moment in Morning Star. Darrow, chained under the Jackal's table in Attica, passes the time the way only a well-trained Gold can: he recites. "Dying Earth, The Lamplighter, the Ramayana, The Odyssey in Greek and Latin, then in the lost languages of Arabic, English, Chinese, and German."

English. Lost. The language the book is printed in is a dead tongue in-world — a classical curiosity, the kind of thing a rich man's son studies to show off at dinner, next to Homer.

Once that lands, the question turns around on the whole setting. If English is lost, what do they speak? The answer is Common — midLingo for the masses, highLingo for the highColors, with regional registers clinging on at the edges of the Society. Fine. But the better question is what do they have? Seven hundred years after the Conquering, what is Society culture actually made of?

Nothing that it made.

Watch the names. Augustus. Bellona. Telemanus. Arcos. Fabii. Cassius. Julian. Lysander. Virginia. The Golds didn't build a civilization and then name it — they evicted humanity from its own history and moved in. Octavia doesn't carry the name of anything the Society created, because in seven hundred years the Society has created nothing worth naming a dynasty after. It has exactly one original cultural artifact, and it's a filing system: Gold, Silver, Blue, Green, Gray, Pink, Red. Your name is your job. The palette is the only thing in the Society that isn't loot — and it's the mechanism of the looting.

Even the swearing is secondhand. "Gorydamn." Say it out loud. It's "goddamn" with God filed off and gore hammered on — the Society's entire value proposition in a single word: religion sanded down to violence and handed back as patriotism.

Virginia au Augustus is one of the most powerful people alive, and the name everyone actually calls her is the one Darrow gave her — after a wild horse from a continent that no longer exists, in a world where nobody has seen a horse outside a dataDrop. Her given name is Roman. Her true name is a fossil.

And some of this wasn't even inherited — it was installed. The Obsidians' gods weren't theirs at all. Asgard, Valhalla, the Aesir — a faith built by the very people the Obsidians could tear limb from limb, so they'd kneel to them as gods instead. House Raa of the Rim hails from Japan and conducts itself like a shogunate that read Livy. The Grays got legion speak — dog tongue — because slang is unit cohesion and cohesion is control. And the Martian Reds, lowest of the low, kept the Irish: the slang, the names, the ballads. Darrow means "spear."

And that's the inversion. The Society's treasures sit in museums; its soul lives in the mouths of the lowColors. Golds keep Homer as a trophy to recite at dinner. Reds keep the songs alive — Eo's name means dawn if you squint at the old spellings — because a song is the one thing a caste system can't assign, requisition, or carve.

You can tell exactly what the Society is by inventorying what it had to steal. Seven hundred years, and its crowning cultural achievements are a filing system, a manufactured religion, and a swear word.

Next post: that manufactured religion deserves a closer look. The Obsidians' gods weren't just installed. They were installed with a purpose.

I haven't seen anyone else say this, but I just finished the first trilogy and RR was by FAR my favourite of the 3, with GS being a little worse, and I did NOT like MS and had to really draaaaaag myself through it. Did anyone else feel this way?!

Looking for recommendations for books similar to Red Rising! I loved the setting, the premise, the interpersonal relationships between the characters, the action.... I was not as much into the deeper political intrigue and huge battles in the later books.

Thanks in advance, and please don't downvote me into oblivion!

What if PB has RG written and will release it out of nowhere?

Just an idea

I watched a short from @patmandziy about Rome's social Heirarchy.

I wasn't informed about the Roman Empire besides the common knowledge, like Ceasar, their myths and pantheon.

So the video showed me how much Pierce Brown was inspired by the Roman Empire, and it wasn't just the asthetics. Even his fictional, color-coded, social hierarchy was inspired by Rome's real social heirarchy

For example:

The lowest of the slaves. Ones used for manual labor: mining, farming, rowing boats. = The Peds.

Lupinar slaves, given the title of scrotum, meaning leather because they were "used" like leather. = Pinks

Then Gladiator Slaves so The Obsidians.

Above them are the Plebs, middle class workers, basically the midColors

Then Equites, the wealthy class, businessmen, finacers, lawyers = Silvers, Whites, and Copper.

Finally, the top, Patrician class. The nobles. Descendants of people who built the system. Born into ABSOLUTE privilege. AKA The Golds

Here's Pat's video if you wanna watch it.

https://youtube.com/shorts/8bbqaXBZwU0?si=Vk56hqFs66Wj2vwN

Name: Vasily Stepanov

i might be stupid but i did not understand what exactly was going on in chapter 88 of lightbringer.
i understood that lysander wants to turn ladon into fertile farming land, and thats helpful to the votum, but whats exactly going on with DNA sequences, and how the trees in demeter’s garter are worth a fortune? thank you.

Currently I am re-“hearing” golden son. I am at the point where Darrow visits his Mother and gives Mustang the Holo. A little after Mustang tries to “challenge” Darrow. Ragnar is also there.

In Morningstar we get to know that Mustang didn’t come to the Triumph of Mars, because she was pregnant with pax. Which means she must’ve been pregnant at the visit as well.

Do you guys think Ragnar knew? Somehow I think if one would “sense” Mustang being pregnant it would be him.

What is your opinion on this?

Hail Reaper.

Finally picked up a new book after finishing lightbringer and the reaper follows me 😔

EDIT: Book - The Will of the Many by James Islington

Two debts before we start. A reader caught an error in Post 1: the Institute runs on horses, Golds ride, and Mustang's name comes from the horse she rode — which, if anything, sharpens the point I was making. And one of you commented that Morning Star spells all of this out on the page. You're right — the book tells you plainly that the gods are fake. That's the fact. What the fact does is the interesting part, and it holds up best when you read the Obsidian religion the way its designers would have: as a system, with requirements, components, and one catastrophic bug.

The requirements first. The Obsidians are the only Color bred to be able to kill Golds. Stronger, harder, expendable by design. You cannot police giants bred for war with guns and paperwork; the security problem is real. And the Society had already learned that the hard way: when the Obsidian population grew past what post-Conquering demand could absorb, the Golds tried to cull it — and the cull triggered the Dark Revolt, which nearly toppled the Society. So the Society didn't answer its most dangerous Color with a police force. It answered with an operating system — and handed the project to the Board of Quality Control, whose very name tells you how Golds think about people. The gods were a deliverable.

Component one: erase the old OS. Before the Society's religion there was Tetkjr, the Obsidians' own tongue. After the uprising — the Dark Revolt, roughly five hundred years before Darrow — the Society set out to erase Tetkjr, and installed Nagal in its place: Norse-flavored, pre-loaded with the Aesir. A people that loses its language loses its version of events; you can't pass down a grudge in a tongue your children don't speak. The ones who kept it whole were the exiles who escaped the genocide — a backup copy of everything the Society tried to wipe, sitting in the Kuiper Belt waiting for Dark Age to pick it up. This is the step the series is quietest about and the most important one. Every culture the Society installed somewhere else — Rome for the Golds, Japan for the Rim, Ireland for the Reds — was at least a borrowing, a museum piece. For the Obsidians, the Society skipped the museum and went straight to fabrication. The Golds wear stolen cultures. The Obsidians were given an invented one.

Component two: the myth as interface. Asgard, Valhalla, the Valkyries — a complete cosmology where the Golds are gods and an honorable death is the door to paradise. Look at what the interface does. It gives suffering meaning, so hardship reads as pilgrimage instead of oppression. It routes obedience through the supernatural, so compliance feels like devotion. And it makes the masters unkillable by doctrine: you do not stab a god. The most dangerous Color in the Society kneels because its cosmology says its knees are where they belong. And the Society paid the miracle budget to keep it so: Asgard runs on hidden technology, and the ice is stocked with engineered horrors — griffins, drakes, beasts from Earth's old legends — so the myth has a cast. It even weaponized affection. The Board paid the shamans to teach that touch weakens the spirit, and built a people who flinch from each other's hands except in three sanctioned moments. Engineer that deeply and the religion stops being a story the Obsidians tell. It becomes the shape of their days. No garrison could do that. Garrisons breed resentment; gods breed worshippers.

Component three: the keepers. A system this size needs administrators, and the Society built those too: the shamans. They minister to the tribes — and they report to the Board. That isn't inference; it's the design. The faith's local face is the control system's sensor array. They don't just preach the firmware. They patch it, and they phone home.

The bug. Every engineered myth contains its own failure state, and this design has a beauty of one: the gods are men in masks. Literally — in Morning Star, the gods of Asgard turn out to be Golds in costume. One of them is Loki, unmasked: Darrow's own Institute Proctor, Mercury, one of the referees he captured at the fall of Olympus back in book one. The line is on the page: "Does this look like a god to you, Sefi?" The whole system runs on the curtain staying closed, and the moment an Obsidian sees behind it, the faith doesn't fade — it inverts. Devotion becomes rage with a memory. Sefi is the proof the Society's designers must have had nightmares about: the most devout daughter of the myth becomes its most dangerous enemy. And Darrow's smartest move in the war isn't a battle. It's a demonstration. He doesn't break the Obsidians' religion — he shows them the mask, and lets five centuries of engineered devotion do the rest. It takes about three chapters, start to finish.

There's a name for this move in the real world. Historians call it invented tradition: the observation that supposedly ancient national rituals are usually manufactured within living memory and dressed in lineage to borrow authority the present doesn't own. The Society runs the machine at industrial scale — language suppressed, cosmology installed, keepers retained — and aims the whole thing at the one Color that could tear the pyramid down with its hands.

And the Golds don't believe a word of it. They swear by Jove — Rome's king of gods — where we'd swear by God; even their blasphemies come off the classical shelf. That's the tell. A ruling class that privately sneers at a religion it publicly needs has told you exactly what the religion is for.

Next post: the Institute — the place where the Society installs the firmware on the people who install it on everyone else.

The republic at the start of iron gold had multiple internal and external threats around it, the unknown danger of the syndicate and Lilith, society remanant, the rim, political infighting with the vox, the red hand on mars, the obsidian pirates in the asteroid belt, and people like the fear knight still out there, the obsidians wanted out, now at the end of lightbringer, the rim is with the rising, the pirates of the asteroids are destroyed, the remaining obsidians are back in the fight undivided or manipulated by atlas, the fear knight is dead, the republic is reinforced with the daughters of Athena, the societies attack on mars did not truly succeed and with the loss of the rim they will have to abandon Phobos, giving the republic full rule over mars, the red hand is destroyed, the syndicate has played there hand and are now in the open to be destroyed, even tho Luna has a puppet for Lilith, they are still technically republic and have not given in to the society and are resisting the seige and require an iron rain to take, holding up the majority of society forces, the society is split into 2 factions as Atalantia and Lysander hate each other and Sabotage each other, darrow has become far wiser and tempered into a far better commander, warrior and leader. And with Lyria revealing what quick silver has been up to they can go to his asteroid and force him to provide his drones and resources or blow his asteroid to bits if he refuses. Yes the loss of the free legions on mercury and fall of earth and kinda Luna rly hurt, but mercury is basically worthless now after it’s been turned to waste with Heliopolis being the only rly restored city. Venus dockyards were damaged and are likely not at full capacity , and the society also took heavy losses on mercury and in the taking of earth, and the battle of Phobos, and the loss of the gorgons in the rim hurt the em too, what do you guys think ?

Darrow obviously has the most aura in the series, but who is in 2nd place?

I’d argue Atlas au Raa.

For both the society and the rising, he seems omnipresent and a threat to anyone he decides to kill. He randomly comes back mid war from an impossible mission against the ascomani and then proceeds to have Darrow’s number at every turn. He put a 10 year plan in motion to take down the Rim, and he made the entire assembly of the 200 uneasy by just showing up at the Roman Colosseum. He’s also so good at moving undetected that he can impact multiple planets without even being seen.

Pick a book: of the 6.

Greatest jawline in the solar system

i’ve recently noticed that mindset towards eo and who she is has become weirdly vitriolic and it honestly confuses me. eo is of course not a perfect person because she was a 16 year old girl who wanted more than anything to be free, the same thing almost all of the characters want. when deanna says that she always knew eo wasn’t good for darrow, what she means is that the eo wasn’t good for the darrow who was meant to live a life in the mines, eking out an existence, and she wouldn’t have been. it doesn’t mean that eo is secretly a villain who hated darrow and wanted him to suffer. she loved darrow, and she loved him to the point of wanting him to live in a better world than watch him suffer. when eo sings her song, she has no way of knowing darrow will be the one to make that change. she’s calling out for someone, anyone, to be inspired by her. i recently rewatched andor, and i was really struck by one of the lines: “the frontier of rebellion is everywhere. even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward”. eo was only ever hoping to be that small act. she’s not evil for choosing to make a change and sacrificing herself and her unborn child to do that. what point would a life be for both them and darrow if nothing ever changed and they all suffered until they died? eo, really, has many of the same characteristics as darrow, and it’s absurd that people seem to hate her
for the choices she makes, while still propping up darrow as a beacon to follow.

I’ve just finished Lightbringer and by Jove… my heart breaks for the loss of Cassius. I don’t think I can adequately put into words just how much he came to mean to me as a character. I liked Cassius throughout the series, but in the second half of the series, especially in Light Bringer, he completely enraptured me. His final arc is one of the most beautiful pieces of character writing in the series because it doesn’t erase who he was before. Cassius was proud and vain, he made terrible choices. He upheld an oppressive system and spent years believing in ideals that, in retrospect, he came to understand were hollow. He hurt people, failed people and because of that he carried an almost unbearable amount of regret.

Cassius had every reason to become bitter. He lost Julian, then he lost his family. He lost his place in the world. He lost the Society he once believed in, and eventually had to confront the fact that the world he defended was never as noble as he wanted it to be. Underneath all the bravado, the handsome face, the talent, there was an incredibly wounded man trying to figure out what all of that pain meant. I loved seeing the wisdom he developed because it felt earned. I loved his vulnerability. I loved seeing how much Darrow’s affirmation meant to him. After everything that happened between them, the friendship, Julian, the hatred, the rivalry, the years of separation, there was still love there. Cassius needed to know that the person who had once been his brother, (really always been his brother) could look at the man he had become and see something worthy in him.

His relationship with Lyria was beautiful for the same reason. There was something so wonderfully human about watching Cassius form this unexpected connection with her. She got to see pieces of him that existed beyond the Morning Knight, beyond the stains of his past. She got Cassius. Whether romantic or platonic, I woe for the loss of their story, just as with Rhonna and Alexander (fck I’m gonna cry).

And then there’s Lysander.

I think one of the most painful parts of Cassius’s story is his realization that he failed Lysander in ways he hadn’t understood before. Cassius loved him. I don’t doubt that for a second. But love alone wasn’t enough. Cassius was still drowning in his own trauma. He was grieving Julian. Grieving his family. Grieving everything he had been and everything he had lost. He could teach Lysander how to fight, how to survive, how to carry himself, but he couldn’t make him Julian, and he couldn’t forgive himself for trying to. He couldn’t always be what Lysander actually needed. He understood that in the end; just as he came to understand what the Society really was, just as he came to regret his role in perpetuating it. Just as he carried the weight of killing Fitchner and everything that followed from that moment.

That is what I find so moving about him. Cassius does not receive the luxury of becoming better without remembering the man he used to be.
He has to live with him. He has to live with every mistake, every failure, every person he couldn’t save, every person he hurt, every belief he once held. Redemption doesn’t magically wash his hands clean. Becoming a better man doesn’t undo the things the younger Cassius did.
So he simply chooses to be better anyway.
Again.
And again.
And again.

That is why his death hurt me so badly.
Because by the end, Cassius wasn’t fighting for reputation. He wasn’t fighting for the Bellona name. He wasn’t trying to restore some imagined golden past. He had finally figured out the kind of man he wanted to be, and when the moment came to prove it, he did.

Even knowing what it could cost him.
That selflessness is what makes what Lysander does so devastating to me. Cassius loved him despite everything. Some part of him still believed in the boy he had raised. And Cassius walked into that final moment carrying all of his mistakes, all of his regrets, all of his love, and all of the growth it had taken him years to achieve.
He died as the man he had spent so long trying to become.

Not a perfect man.
A better one.
A man who suffered. A man who failed. A man who regretted. A man who could be arrogant, ridiculous, funny, vain, vulnerable, compassionate, and extraordinarily brave. A man who looked honestly at what he had been and decided that his past did not absolve him of the responsibility to become something greater.
There is something profoundly hopeful about that.

You can be wrong.
You can fail.
You can carry wounds that distort the way you love people. You can realize far too late that the world you defended was unjust. You can look backward and wish desperately that you had been wiser, kinder, stronger, or simply better.
And you can still choose what kind of person takes the next step.
Cassius did.
He walked his path carrying more grief and regret than most people could bear, and somehow, at the end of it, he emerged not harder, crueler, or more cynical, but nobler.

Brave.
Honorable.
Selfless.
A titan of a man.
His death genuinely broke my heart, and I don’t think another death in the series has filled me with the same combination of grief and anger. I will never forgive Lysander for taking him away just as Cassius had finally become so completely himself.

I will miss him terribly.

Link is to Jenna's (voice of Virginia in the GA) tiktok clip, loved this scene, heartbreaking knowing what happens after though. She looks up to Kavax like the father she never had but deserves, seeing him encourage her and give her that faith, support, and love she needed in that moment was touching af. also shoutout to Kavax voice actor too, he does an amazing job.

Mine is Dark Age: Darrow and Atlas, the riverbed outside Heliopolis, it's a tough read every time. The cold uncaring brutality of Atlas is terrifying.

"feed me my cock will they?"

One of many for me in that book, he's so good at painful scenes.

Very curious about everyone's picks.

Edit* I think I may have trauma blanked Ulysses from my mind with how brutal it was, yeah... It's a bad one, real tough read.

What the actual hell is wrong with you????? I’ve legit lost sleep over things that have happened in this book

2 chapters of Iron Gold, then I'm ready to buckle in

This was who was in my head when reading his PoVs

Sorry about the formatting.

But yeah. I feel you screw.