Lit on Fire

Red Rising by Pierce Brown

• Elizabeth Hahn and Peter Whetzel • Season 1 • Episode 7

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A color-coded empire tells its workers to love their chains, and a miner learns how deep the lie runs. We take you inside Red Rising’s brutal hierarchy to examine how propaganda, spectacle, and masculinity prop up a system that rewards obedience while punishing dissent. Starting with Eo’s defiant vision and Darrow’s infiltration of the Golds, we unpack the moral trade-offs of fighting a rigged game from the inside and the lingering question of whether true change requires reform or a clean break.

We dive into the Institute’s dark experiment in leadership, where violence is normalized, women’s bodies are treated as battlegrounds, and status is measured by who can dominate. That lens opens a broader conversation about gender, power, and why patriarchy so often survives revolutions. Mustang emerges as a counterweight to Darrow’s competitive instinct, showing how coalition, perspective, and shared authority can expand what leadership looks like and who it serves.

Along the way, we map Brown’s world to our own: laurel quotas as KPI culture, mobility myths that mask rigging, and nationalist narratives that sanctify sacrifice for the “greater good.” Historical echoes from abolition to modern wealth worship complicate easy answers and force us to ask what comes after the fall. Can a system built on domination be redeemed without replicating its logic, or does justice require starting over?

If you’re hungry for sharp literary analysis that meets real-world stakes, this conversation is for you. Press play, then tell us where you land: careful reform, or light the match? And if you’re new here, follow the show, leave a review, and share this episode with a friend who loves big questions and bigger books.

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SPEAKER_01:

Welcome to Lit on Fire, the podcast where literature meets controversy, where banned books, silenced voices, and dangerous ideas refuse to stay quiet. From classrooms to courtrooms, novels to news cycles, we explore how stories challenge power, expose injustice, and ignite social change. So if you're ready to question, to argue, to feel uncomfortable, and to think deeper, you're in the right place.

SPEAKER_00:

I'm Dita Wetzel.

SPEAKER_01:

And I'm Elizabeth Hahn.

SPEAKER_00:

And this is Lit on Fire.

SPEAKER_01:

Welcome back. Today we're descending into the brutal, color-coded cast system of Pierce Brown's Red Rising, a science fiction epic that masquerades as a revolution story, but quickly reveals itself as something far more complicated. On the surface, Red Rising is about a young man who infiltrates an elite ruling class to dismantle an oppressive empire from within. But beneath the battles, betrayals, and political maneuvering lies a world obsessed with hierarchy, purity, masculinity, and domination. It's a society built on spectacle, mythmaking, and the romantization of violence, and one that raises urgent questions about who gets power, who is allowed to lead, and whose suffering is rendered invisible. In this episode, we're exploring Red Rising by examining its portrayal of women, class stratification, colonialism, militarized masculinity, and revolutionary ethics. We'll interrogate how women navigate a system designed by and for elite men, how bodies become tools of the state, and whether the narrative ultimately challenges or reinforces patriarchal storytelling traditions. So sharpen your sling blades, tighten your grab boots, and prepare to enter a world where revolution is messy, morality is murky, and power always comes at a cost. So, Peter, you introduced this book to me. What is your take on it?

SPEAKER_00:

I do love this book, and I love the series in general. I've read all seven books, and I can't wait for the eighth and final book, Red God, coming out soon. I will say that this first book is probably my least favorite in the series. It was a great start, but the tone of the story and series shifts so dramatically from the first book to the second book. This first book is more of a dark academia, and the rest of the series is more like a military war space opera. There's a lot of difference in those other books. I love Pierce Brown's writing. I think he is very passionate and poetic in the way that he writes his prose. There's some great quotes, some awesome speeches that get made that just stir up so much emotion within me that I love it. And it's very dark, it's very, very brutal.

SPEAKER_01:

Right.

SPEAKER_00:

And it's very masculine, which is why I love to hear the perspective of a woman on your experience reading this book as a woman. You tell me what you think.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay. I would also compliment Pierce Brown on all the things that you complimented him on. I haven't read the whole series. I've been isolated to this book. So that gives me just this framework to work with. And you say it's your least favorite, interestingly, but for me it's my only one. So even evaluating only this book, I think the characters are magnificent. He sets up a great social structure for us to work in and understand. There's depth to it. I've heard some people compare it to different things, but really in the end, when I got done reading the book, I felt like it does stand on its own as far as what he's created, even though I too saw connections to some other things I was familiar with. Regarding the masculinity, it is in your face, alpha male fighting and domination. And there are female characters, but a lot of them are used in some way or sacrificed. And you can struggle with it as a woman because if you don't like to read these really kind of brutal books, you know, you can get stuck on that masculinity. However, it has a lot to say about politics. He really gets in there and starts examining the political maneuvering and the things that are going on with the caste system. And I was talking to my 10th graders today, and we have been in this magical realism unit. We read Ursula Le Guin's A Wife Story, and then I listened to an interview with her, and she has passed away several years ago. But in this interview from 2015, someone asked her why she focused so much on imaginative fiction rather than realistic fiction. And she said that imaginative fiction, particularly dystopias and science fictions, gives us this chance to enter alternate realities and examine these different tracks or paths or extremes that mankind can take. When asked if she was always fixated on what might happen in the future, she said, My books are not about the future, which is unusual for science fiction. Science fiction writers often say we're writing about a possible future. She said, My books aren't about the future, they're about the present and how we need to navigate to make the future better. But my books, even though they're imaginative fiction, give us a chance to look at the present through a different lens. So I really thought that was apt today when I listened to that interview with my students because I was just finishing reading this book and I was thinking, Pierce Brown really successfully does that. It's imaginative fiction, it's got the dystopia and the science fiction, but he clearly has set it up so we can draw a lot of present parallels.

SPEAKER_00:

Right. And I'm glad you said that because my take about the treatment of women in this book is that that is how women are treated.

SPEAKER_01:

Right.

SPEAKER_00:

And so it's it's very fair and honest, especially the more society is based around physical prowess, that even in the highest tiers of power, women still take a secondary role to men in that regard. Right. And still very much do not have as much ability to maneuver within the system as the man does. Right. What's interesting about the very beginning of this book is that that's a situation between Darrow and his wife, Eo. Within Darrow's own class of people, the Reds, which are at the bottom of the totem hole, he is very happy with his situation. His dreams are very small. He's accepted his place in the hierarchy, and he is satisfied with being the elite of his own subculture. Whereas Eo, the woman, is very much dissatisfied. And I don't think he realizes just how dissatisfied she is, because her dreams are much bigger. And I think that's interesting because it just shows in every single subsystem of the society the difference between the men and the women being able to maneuver within realms of their power, right?

SPEAKER_01:

And possibly recognize the things that are going wrong.

SPEAKER_00:

Exactly. So she's much more sensitive to that because she is a woman and because he's a man and he still holds a degree of power within the group, he is not as sensitive to it.

SPEAKER_01:

Let me clarify something real quick. We have the reds, the top is the golds. Are the reds all red-haired?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. They're gingers. Yeah, I I think they're essentially supposed to represent the Irish. Which when you look at the colonization and American history, that's very profound in a way, because we did kind of build this country on the back of certain groups of people's labor, right? And the golds are building their empire on the backs of the reds. They're essentially slave labor. They all live underground, and in this case on Mars, and they've been told that they are working for a glorious future, that their purpose is so great, and that they should be proud of what they are doing. And, you know, they just built up this propaganda kind of lie to get them to be subservient and satisfied within their place.

SPEAKER_01:

Right. And they're disposable and they live a shorter amount of time in comparison to the goals.

SPEAKER_00:

Right, because at 17 years old, which is crazy. Darrow is essentially in his midlife.

SPEAKER_01:

He's already married and prosperous in his career.

SPEAKER_00:

Unprosperous in his career already as a hell diver is one of the elites, like I said, within his own society.

SPEAKER_01:

So it really says something, like you said, both about the way the sexes experience oppression and the fact that he does have power that his wife does not, so there's a different experience there. But it also says something about how when groups are conditioned to accept a role in society that they're told they have to fill, that they can be blinded to so many things that are going on around them. Like he is pushing along, excited about at the beginning in particular, he is excited about winning this contest, the laurel.

SPEAKER_00:

Right. Which is who can be the most productive.

SPEAKER_01:

Right, which is a deliberate scheme, an obvious ploy by the government to guarantee a productive workforce with a goal to meet to push them forward. It reminds me very much of George Orwell's animal farm, and the pigs are in charge, and all the other farm animals. It's like, we must build the windmill, we must get this much grain, push for the quotas, comrade. And that's kind of what we have with the Reds living underground trying to mine for the good of the people. Meet this quota and you can get a reward. And it pushes them forward.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. It's lowering the expectations of upward mobility, but as long as you can get the little carrot that's dangled out in front of you. Feel some sense of some sense of accomplishment and yeah, and and success, then they've taught society to settle for so much less. And it reminds me, parallel to our own world, of the fact that the lowest economic classes in our society will defend so passionately the rights of the billionaires' elites to have the money and the power that they have, even to their own detriment, because they've been sold this lie that if they don't prop up this capitalist system, then they themselves won't be able to dream of one day being there. If they prop up this capitalist system, then they have just as much opportunity as anyone else to one day become a billionaire themselves.

SPEAKER_01:

Right. And it's all under this guise that this other form of government somehow inhibits this freedom. But if we look at this, if we always have this thing to aim for, then we're in a better situation and we're free and we have upward mobility. When really most of the classes that we look at have very marginal, very minimal upward mobility. Right. And that's just the truth. That's why we deal with cyclical poverty and areas that are just chronically depressed. We are here in the South, and I can't help but look at the fact that you can still see the marks of racial division that are still tense, but not just in an attitude way, but it's in the social structure that people are kept in this cycle, no matter how many things we've changed. It's amazing that we can continue to spin our wheels like that. It's not easy for the upward mobility, and yet we keep thinking, oh no, we can get there. We have the freedom to get there, but can we?

SPEAKER_00:

No. The system is rigged against that.

SPEAKER_01:

Right. And that brings up an important point because right away in this book, Darrow discovers that the system is rigged even on the small level. And that's the first discovery. And then, of course, he makes the big discovery that really pushes him over the edge to revolution. But even in the small things, he thinks he can make it, you know, and then he realizes it's rigged.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes.

SPEAKER_01:

And that's a very defeating sensation, a very defeatist feeling when you think you've got something and you don't. And I really think that's the first thing on a very small level that sticks to him. And then, of course, his wife bringing out the second thing that it's not enough.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes, I have a quote that I love that she says, she says to him, I live for the dream that my children will be born free. She says, that they will be what they like, that they will own the land their father gave them. I live for you, I say sadly. EO kisses my cheek, then you must live for more. And it's only until she is taken away from him as his purpose for living that he becomes capable of finally living for more than he was.

SPEAKER_01:

Right, because his two choices are die with her, yeah, or find a new purpose, because she has been his purpose up to this point.

SPEAKER_00:

Find out what she died for. Correct. Die or find out what she died for.

SPEAKER_01:

So that you can do something about it. And he moves forward in this idea of fulfilling this promise, this unspoken promise, or in some way, spoken request of Eos.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, it's Eo's dream, not his, but it becomes his.

SPEAKER_01:

It becomes his dream over time. Right. So there's a lot to say here about what your responsibility is when you're living in such a society, when you realize the oppression or when you see the oppression of others. Too often, as we see in this book, the golds are perfectly happy to exist the way they are because they have all the power. And everyone within the structure has some measure of power, even the reds with their motivation toward production and fulfilling the hopes of a society. And so everyone just kind of exists. EO calls that into question for us first. What is the person's responsibility when you realize the problems in the system? And she asks that after Darrow has witnessed one of the small rigging moments in the system. What should we take from that as individuals in society when we look at oppression around us, when we look at poor structures and people that are being marginalized and discriminated against, is it enough to simply live on the small scale or are we called to something more?

SPEAKER_00:

I personally feel that whatever power you are given in life, you should use to help raise others up to your level. And if we all did that, then we'd have a much more equitable society, right? But most people are satisfied with the status quo. Right. They don't want to cause trouble. Because if you cause too much trouble, then there are consequences. And so there's this attitude to people who've face the consequences for causing trouble to the status quo that, well, they got what they deserved. And we're seeing that more than ever today, as far as people who are fighting for a better world. The attitude when they get shot down in the streets is that, well, they should have just complied, right?

SPEAKER_01:

Right. If they just complied with the rules at hand, then they would not have been shot.

SPEAKER_00:

That's a completely hierarchical attitude, you know. I'm happy being a red. Why are you making life difficult for me?

SPEAKER_01:

Right.

SPEAKER_00:

You're making everybody's life more difficult because you're advocating for change and I don't want the change. It's making me uncomfortable, I'm scared of it, whatever.

SPEAKER_01:

Right. It's disruptive, it violates the norm. And that has been traditional throughout our history.

SPEAKER_00:

Right. It's interesting that there are so many people that have almost been sold this idea that their place in the world has been preordained in almost a religious sense. And so the arrogance of somebody not being satisfied with their place in the world is almost sacrilege to them.

SPEAKER_01:

Right. This is what's been determined for you. This is God's will. This is And so change then becomes immoral. It does. This is what's right. I think it's interesting that this falls into a bit of nationalism as well. When we look at this particular text, it is incredibly nationalistic. We have bought this story for the national good. We are mining the earth down below ground and sacrificing ourselves for the national good. This is what we need to do for our country or for the world. And it's very driven that way. And we see that same type of determinative factor. And unfortunately, while you don't see overt religion in this book, we know that religion and nationalism mesh like this and create a very convoluted system to break out of that mindset. Exactly, yes. So looking at the system that's been created, clearly, when Darrow moves out from being a red and makes this transition into a gold, he makes the decision to work within the system to take it down, which you kind of already hinted at. It raises a lot of interesting questions for me. When we talked about this being a hyper-masculine book and we look at the institute he has to go to in order to achieve this highest level of gold, I feel like we are called to question the methods of taking down a system. There are really two options take it down from within the way he is trying to do, or directly attack it from without. So my thing with Darrow is do you think there's a point at which, as we're in this male-centric society, he begins to be absorbed by the system as opposed to fully working against it?

SPEAKER_00:

Yes, and I think that's very believable, honestly.

SPEAKER_01:

Right.

SPEAKER_00:

That we have the temptation to begin with good intentions, but then as we learn to maneuver within the system using the mechanized that everybody else does, kind of turning it against it, there's a temptation to kind of lose your way. And I think that's constantly a problem with him, that he is loses his loses his moral compass and even what his overall goal is.

SPEAKER_01:

Right. He loses the purpose that he's supposed to have in sight, which if Eo was really his compass and he's lost her and tries to pick up on her dream, there's a good portion of this book for me that he struggles to stay with that dream.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Because he never fully owned it.

SPEAKER_00:

He's a very competitive person in a way that makes him the perfect person to prop up the system. Because his goal is to always be the best of the best, which is right along the mindset of those who have the most power deserve to rule.

SPEAKER_01:

Right. It's the dog-eat dog, the survival of the fittest. We've got all those things going on with him. And there are times where I don't like him in the center of the book because I'm watching him go through this and I'm seeing him evolve into what he is supposed to be working against.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, he's an excellent leader, but he might not be the best person to launch this internal revolution.

SPEAKER_01:

Right. And he certainly begins to rise to the occasion at the end. There are some good moments there where you see growth in his character. But I did find myself very frustrated with him for large portions of the book. So if we get into the methods of this society, it really calls us then to look at the treatment of women in this process that we see, the treatment of women's bodies, because we certainly have those issues going on in this process. And part of that is mixed in with Darrow kind of getting misguided at different points. So the women that are part of this institute that he goes into, where all these people are golds and they're trying to achieve this highest level, we see them within this environment raped. We see them injured, we see them at risk in several different places. And initially, Darrow knows it's wrong. He doesn't like it, but when he goes after the problem, he doesn't necessarily go. Go after it to save the women. They'll recover. Right. Those are the moments where I struggle to like him when he is kind of sitting back and he's saying, Okay, I'm gonna go after this guy that's leading because he, it's under his watch that all this has happened, but it's not so much I need to do something to help these women move forward.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes. Yeah. Because as a man, he's still got male privilege.

SPEAKER_01:

Right. And that is very evident.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes.

SPEAKER_01:

He's not at that type of risk that the women are at.

SPEAKER_00:

No matter how powerful the women are within the society, they are still the most vulnerable.

SPEAKER_01:

So and that goes into when you say vulnerable, that is the part where you're saying about the strong really motivating the society, that that's part of the achievement of leadership and proving yourself. And it says something about where the body plays into establishing social status and control. So simply by virtue that these women are not going to beat these men in a fist fight, then we've got this shifting of social status, even amongst the goats.

SPEAKER_00:

And Darrow very much needs his feminine counterpart, which of course he finds in the form of Mustang or Virginia.

SPEAKER_01:

And she is one of those strongest female characters or the most persistent and present female characters with a voice that we see in the book.

SPEAKER_00:

And it's very clear that on his own, Darrow is not enough to raise everybody up by himself because he doesn't have the perspective of he doesn't have everybody's perspective.

SPEAKER_01:

Right. He's not operating outside of his own realm, so to speak. What is the solution to all this? I know you've read more books than I have, but just me looking forward from the first book, the trajectory of Darrow is to clearly dismantle the system. At his core, he also just wants revenge on this leader that he's particularly targeted. Is the danger here that whatever replaces the current government becomes oppressive as well? What needs to replace a government that has created this highly structured caste system, this hierarchy, and established all these purposes for these individual groups and got everyone online. When you burn that down, what do you replace it with?

SPEAKER_00:

I think you've hit the nail on the head. Once again, once again, we have the question is can the system be reformed or do we just need to all burn it all to the ground? Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01:

Which is what we discussed with women of Wild Hill as well and other things.

SPEAKER_00:

And their solution was burn it to the ground. Whereas this series is very much, we're gonna see how we can reform it, which is messy as hell, you have no idea. It almost reminds me of the abolition of slavery.

unknown:

Right.

SPEAKER_00:

In the sense that, yes, we freed the slaves, except we can't we can't just abolish the entire system because the economic impact of following through on our good intentions is too great, right? Right. So there was this sort of this half-assed approach.

SPEAKER_01:

Half-assed approach.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, sort of a a betrayal of the whole initial stated purpose of ending slavery.

SPEAKER_01:

Because this is why I'm a burn it to the ground girl.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

I mean, because it is messy. You look at that and you either I'm kind of an all or nothing person and I don't always want to be like that. It's not always a great trait, but when I look at it, I'm like, okay, if it's bad, it's gotta go. Because when it doesn't just go, like you noted with slavery and the racist systemic racism that continued after that, when it doesn't just go, then you have people still holding on to shreds of the dysfunction and you have mindsets that can't change.

SPEAKER_00:

Right.

SPEAKER_01:

I start getting frustrated with that.

SPEAKER_00:

And we know that the ending of slavery did nothing to change the power structure.

SPEAKER_01:

No.

SPEAKER_00:

Whatsoever. And so you have to kind of say, okay, is it if a system is built on something that is inherently evil, and if getting rid of that evil causes the system to fail, then does the system deserve to exist at all? Or should we just say, let it fail? It's uns it's unsalvageable.

SPEAKER_01:

So I'm gonna have to read more of the books clearly in order to continue this journey while I'm reading other things that we plan to read, and really see for myself how this messy process gets going forward and what I think of it in the end.

SPEAKER_00:

I do think that you will like how the power shifts for the women in as far as as as things go on.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay. And that's good. I mean, we talk about making progress. Clearly, our society has made progress as well. The progress isn't fast enough in my mind, and I'll probably get frustrated with how fast it is in this book as well, but I'm excited to read the rest. So, Peter, tell us what we are reading next time or going over next time.

SPEAKER_00:

So, next time we'll be discussing Bat Eaters and Other Names for Core Sang by Kylie Lee Baker.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay. I'm excited. I haven't read it, you have. This is like the constant thing. You've read something, and now I'm gonna read it. It'll be great. So until then, keep reading, keep thinking, and we'll look forward to talking to you soon.