MenhirMike parent
Luo also wasn't THAT much better, mainly because he's an author self-insert that got to get his perfect mail order bride and then proceeded to play his role without any fail or mistakes once he has to step up. But the whole idea of the Dark Forest concept was IMHO legitimately good science fiction. But yeah, Cheng is a complete and utter moron. Maybe that makes her human, but I stopped reading Death's End halfway through and looked up the remaining plot summary on Wikipedia. I don't know if the author had a real plan while writing the story, because the series begins really strong and then just runs out of good ideas.
All of the books follow this pattern where 2/3rds or more is split between really bad and unlikeable characters meandering and waxing philosophically for whole chapters at a time–putting the plot in limbo–and terse, emotionless, transactional conversations sprinkled in to break up the log jam with boring exposition. It was absolutely infuriating, and I originally quit in the middle of book 2 because I could not stand another second of Luo, until my reading buddies at work hounded me to finish. They would all climax with a sudden scramble to wrap everything up in an interesting way, but the problem became worse with each subsequent book. I really don’t get how this series took off.
> I really don’t get how this series took off.
My guess: The novelty of Science Fiction from a Chinese Author, which isn't commonly translated to English, and a legitimately interesting SciFi concept. If you read the plot summary on Wikipedia, it actually sounds amazing, it's just that the books themselves don't deliver on the premise nearly as well.