52 pages • 1-hour read
King of Envy
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Themes
The Cost of Loyalty
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussion of graphic violence and sexual assault.
The main point of contention in the development of Ayana and Vuk’s relationship is the latter’s deep commitment to loyalty. As Vuk sums it up, “She [Ayana] was engaged. I was the best man. And though I’d crossed many lines and twisted many morals in my life, loyalty was the one value I held fast to” (49, emphasis added). King of Envy thus centers the importance of loyalty in Vuk’s personal ethos, while also examining the cost of such loyalty.
Vuk’s commitment to loyalty reflects his past history with the Brotherhood and the persistent threat of their assassination attempts, as the Brotherhood has no sense of loyalty and engages in frequent double-dealing with him. As the rivalry for leadership shows, the members of the Brotherhood are not even loyal to one another. By contrast, Vuk is deeply loyal to those who help him, especially Jordan, who helped him when the Brotherhood demanded a payment from him. Such loyalty, however, comes with a heavy emotional cost: In Vuk’s case, the agony of seeing the woman he’s long loved marry his best friend. Though he initially believes his feelings are unrequited for the 16 months of Ayana and Jordan’s engagement, their eventual reciprocity does not resolve this agony. Instead, it only complicates it further. Until Ayana and Jordan mutually decide to cancel their engagement, Vuk compromises his own sense of loyalty to pursue his developing relationship with Ayana.
Vuk’s conflict over loyalty costs him—for a time—a decade-long friendship, all of which could have easily been solved by a simple and honest conversation. When Jordan confronts Vuk about waiting so long to voice his true feelings, Jordan points out that loyalty is incomplete if it is not paired with honesty: “How much is our friendship really worth when you didn’t even tell me you were in love with Ayana all this time?” (267). By choosing to privilege and protect his friendship with Jordan over his feelings for Ayana, Vuk undermines the openness, the camaraderie, and the respect they’ve shared, because he chooses to keep his true feelings and his true self a secret from Jordan.
Huang therefore emphasizes that loyalty is more than simply not pursuing a friend’s partner. Instead, loyalty is only effective and true when it comprises a shared honesty and vulnerability between parties. By the novel’s end, Vuk has reconciled with Jordan and is now free to pursue Ayana, thanks to his newfound commitment to both loyalty and emotional honesty.
Cruelty Versus Personal Justice
In the second half of King of Envy, the extreme level of brutality in Vuk’s life exposes how desensitized Vuk has become to enacting violence, be it against the Brotherhood or anyone who mistreats Ayana. After his brother’s murder, Vuk has found strength in his ability to defend himself and others. As Vuk argues, “in my world, justice comes in one form: retribution” (439, emphasis added). However, the novel questions Vuk’s assertion by exploring the tensions between cruelty and personal justice.
Vuk believes that having the power to play judge, jury, and executioner on his enemies reestablishes the possibility that bad deeds and bad actors can be brought to some form of justice—something Vuk wasn’t able to achieve by legal means when he was forced to work for the Brotherhood and Lazar died. It is significant that, despite his extensive financial means, Vuk prefers personal justice over the legal system, which implies the system’s failures to fairly address crimes committed by secret organizations like the Brotherhood. Vuk thus seeks to justify his vigilante vengeance by insisting that he never harms anyone until they have harmed him first.
While Vuk may seek to reestablish what he perceives as a sense of fairness, however, his use of violence becomes a source of conflict with Ayana. From her perspective, it creates a tense duality in Vuk as “the man who could kiss [Ayana] so tenderly one day and kill so viciously the next” (439). Ayana’s reservations create a sense of moral ambiguity around Vuk’s use of violence, as Vuk is not moderate when enacting his so-called retribution. Rather, there is a sense of indulgence in his vengeful brutality, as seen in how he describes his lack of regret in inflicting pain: “What I did to the man in these photos doesn’t compare to what I did to those responsible for my brother’s death. If I had the chance to go back in time, I’d do it all again […] No one harms the people I care about and walks away intact” (440). Huang therefore suggests that there is a dehumanizing aspect in the way that Vuk doles out his brand of justice against his enemies: He can be needlessly and intentionally cruel toward his enemies to satisfy the sheer desire to impart an equal amount of pain to the one he experienced.
While Ayana eventually learns to accept Vuk’s violent past, she places a significant condition on their relationship going forward: Vuk cannot engage in gratuitous violence if he wishes to be with her. This condition suggests that, for Ayana, the line between cruelty and personal justice must remain clear and be strictly adhered to if Vuk is to avoid inflicting excessive or needless harm.
The Harms of the Modeling Industry
By situating her narrative within wealthy society and the high fashion world, Huang addresses conceptions of beauty and the visual currency of conventionally attractive individuals. Ayana, as a famous model, both benefits from, and becomes a victim of, the fashion industry and its commodification of beauty, thus enabling the novel to explore the harms of the modeling industry.
Ayana’s personhood is often reduced to her day job as a popular model, leading others to commodify her and objectify her because of her beauty. When Jordan remarks, “Half the people here want to kill you [Ayana], and the other half want to be you […] Now that’s an accomplishment,” Ayana objects, “I’m not sure that’s something to be proud of” (15). In this exchange, it becomes apparent how shallow and reductive many people’s views of Ayana really are. Distracted by her title of MOTY (Model of the Year), outsiders presume that Ayana leads an envious life.
However, from the very outset of the narrative, Ayana’s livelihood has unseen burdens. The first major burden is that modelling impacts Ayana’s sense of self. Her modelling work is in part dedicated to selling an idea or a fantasy. Doing so sometimes compromises Ayana’s more authentic sense of self, as Vuk remarks after seeing a runway show: “The Ayana Kidane on the catwalk was a different person from the one who’d invited me to coffee and teased me about bingo. Her persona morphed with every show, oscillating from playful and flirty to haughty and regal. A goddess to suit every mood” (112, emphasis added). The pressure to perform and project a fantasy image often leaves Ayana feeling empty and isolated in her private life, as she worries that no one truly sees and values her for who she really is.
The other major burden Ayana faces is her vulnerability to objectification and exploitation by powerful people in the industry. The novel depicts the high fashion world as manipulative and predatory. Ayana’s agency exploits her, driving her to overwork while withholding payments for the jobs she completes. Worst of all, they pressure Ayana into working with known sexual predators like the photographer Wentworth Holt, who arrogantly insists that since Ayana appears in sexualized photoshoots, then that must mean that he can objectify and abuse her at will. When Ayana tries to protect herself by declining to work with Wentworth Holt, her agency threatens her by saying her career can falter or even end if Ayana gains a reputation for being “difficult.”
King of Envy thus suggests that, while Ayana may have gained fame and fortune through her modelling work, there is a dark side to the fashion industry’s ostensible glamor. Through her developing relationship with Vuk, Ayana finds the courage to break free of her agency’s toxic hold upon her, enabling her to continue her modelling career on her own terms and in keeping with her authentic sense of self.
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