Pierce Brown strips his students of every luxury and law they have ever known. What is left is primal. And yet there is still order. There is still love.
In Red Rising, the Gold elite send their children to the Institute, a year-long crucible where the next generation of rulers is forged. The structure of it matters, because the structure is what makes the cruelty meaningful. Here is how the Game is built.
1. Admissions
Entry begins with a physical and psychological test and a written exam, and every applicant is ranked against the rest. Roughly twelve hundred Golds are admitted each year.
2. Drafting
Admitted students are drafted into twelve Houses, each named for a god of the Roman pantheon: Mars, Minerva, Mercury, Jupiter, Apollo, Diana, Ceres, Juno, Pluto, Vulcan, Neptune, and Venus. Each House is filled to one hundred students.
Where you land in the draft shapes everything that follows:
- First Draft — the first overall pick into a House.
- High Drafts — selected early, generally the top one percent of applicants.
- Mid Drafts — the bulk of students, between high and low.
- Low Drafts — the bottom one percent.
- Premiers — students whose House is bought by their parents, bypassing the draft entirely.
3. The Passage
Before the Game can begin, there is the Passage, the initiation ritual that turns applicants into participants. It is the door you cannot walk back through.
4. The Game
Then the Game itself: its dimensions, its landscape, and its rules. The students are turned loose to conquer, ally, betray, and survive across the Institute's terrain, with the Houses set against one another until only the strongest order remains.
5. Graduation
The student who wins the Game is named Arch Primus, the highest honor the Institute can confer and the mark of the one who mastered everyone else.
Golds vs. the US Military
Because the Gold world borrows so heavily from antiquity, it is tempting to map the Institute onto our own military. The comparison is illuminating, and the differences are sharper than they first appear.
Golds, Greys, and Obsidians vs. Officers and Enlisted
The Gold army is deeply influenced by Roman culture. Its people look up to figures like Augustus and Julius Caesar, and its titles are Roman in spirit: Sovereign, Imperator, Arch Governor, Praetor, and the like.
The US military, despite what social media would have you believe, is not culturally Roman. It is a largely non-cultural place. Its heritage runs through the old generals and commanders from the Revolutionary War onward, mostly surviving in the names of military bases. There are songs and creeds carried down from old American military tradition, and you spend a fair amount of basic training and ceremony memorizing them. There is also a large amount of cultural influence from Native Americans: vehicles like the Apache, Black Hawk, and Chinook, and unit names like Apache again, Blackfoot, Comanche, and Dakota.
The Gold Institute vs. US Officer Candidate School
The Gold Institute strips you of every luxury and law. The US Officer Candidate School lets you sleep in a bed every night. OCS is a roughly twelve-week training and testing school: tactics, exams, and a great many war-game simulations. Sadly, there are no sword fights. It has a ranking system and a drafting phase at the end that decides which branch your career flows into. So there are real similarities. But the Gold Institute, for all that it is fantasy, is more primal, more fundamental, and more visceral.
The Essay: What the Game Reveals
The Game that Pierce Brown creates strips the students of every luxury and law they are accustomed to. The Game is primal. But there is still order. There is still love.
After being stripped bare, all that is left is the raw emotion and the survival functions of a human being. Every characteristic that makes up an individual is amplified. The students who are selfish become tyrants. The students who have honor become prideful. The students who understand love become caring and compassionate. The leaders of the Game each carry their own nature into it. The leaders who are tyrants get backstabbed the second the opportunity appears. But the leaders who know love are loved and respected the most by their team.
This fictional Game pulls you into a world of immense savagery and hate, but also of compassion and love. When you read this book you will come to understand the true power that brings about leadership. You will see what is truly the most powerful force.
References and reading
Brown, Pierce. Red Rising. Del Rey, 2014.
"The Institute." Red Rising Wiki, Fandom. red-rising.fandom.com/wiki/The_Institute
"Red Rising, Chapter 16: The Institute." Red Rising Wiki, Fandom. red-rising.fandom.com
"Peerless Scarred." Red Rising Wiki, Fandom. red-rising.fandom.com/wiki/Peerless_Scarred
"Mars." Red Rising Wiki, Fandom. red-rising.fandom.com/wiki/Mars
"Red Rising." Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Rising
"Valles Marineris: Facts About the Grand Canyon of Mars." Space.com, 9 Dec. 2017. space.com/20446-valles-marineris.html
- Lucas Edward