Netflix’s Ratu Ratu Queens Character Guide

Ratu Ratu Queens is a show with slice-of-life experiences of its four immigrants. While their struggles are both unique and also very similar at their cores, the show relies on the vitality of each character and the archetypes that they represent. The plot is heavily character driven, with each character’s emotional architecture and crisis dictating the direction of the story. The resolution of their individual crises is a sense of community that the characters achieve by the end of the story, but even in the collective, their different personalities shine through. In fact, it is their individual qualities that contribute to the soothsaying quality of the collective and root them firmly in a land that is ever so eager to declare them as aliens. Let’s get familiar with our four protagonists and more!

Spoilers Ahead

Party is the epicenter of the group—the glue that binds everyone together. She came to New York with the dream of opening up her own restaurant someday, but she currently works as a waitress in a local diner. She also takes up odd jobs of being a cleaner and a maid to make up for her expenses; she lives in Queens in a fairly spacious flat, which she is planning to sublet. This is when Ance arrives with Eva, and the rest of the collective pop up one by one.

Despite her struggles for existence, Party is weighed down by her undocumented, illegal status as a worker and her mother’s colon cancer back at home. It is not just her own survival that Party has to fight for, but she also has to be the sufficient elder daughter sending money back home and helming responsibilities, standing right at the forefront. When her mother’s condition significantly worsens, Party has no choice but to give up on her dreams and go back to Indonesia. Meanwhile, Party’s coworker Luca is in love with her and has proposed to her for marriage. This is partially because of her status as a citizen and partially because of blossoming feelings. However, Party puts duty first and decides to leave Luca, her dreams, and her friends behind to make this decision. In a major part of the narrative, Party is marked with a dilemma—one that is quintessential to the immigrant’s fractured identity between ambitions and alienness. Despite her crisis, Party is a level-headed, calm, and soothing presence; she has a proper moral compass, and she feels things deeply. She nurtures everyone with her home-cooked meals and offers them space to thrive in during their worst moments. 

Ance is a single mother raising her almost teen daughter, Eva, after the loss of her husband, John. Ance is deeply rooted in reason, discipline, and establishing order around her. She is a person who likes to keep her emotions under wraps. Ance’s struggle is partially that she bottles up her emotions, refusing to let them come to the surface lest they obfuscate her dedicated vision towards survival, and partially her isolation caused by a daughter who is assimilating into a system where she still feels alien. There is a gap between Ance and Eva based on their cultural norms—where Eva feels she deserves to be in her own room, Ance is of the belief (partly due to economic reasons) that she can perfectly well share a room with her mother. Ance is also panic-stricken when Eva goes out to hang with her friends and tries to establish a sense of control over her daughter by asking her to take her permission first. Ance’s obsession with specificity around her and the urge to control everything is a mirror of how chaotic it is inside her brain, which has bottled up years of unprocessed grief and isolation. 

At the same time, Ance brings a necessary structure to the group. She is a person with a big heart, and despite her extreme confrontations with Biyah in the first and last episodes, where she tackles her physically, Ance’s heart becomes more open to love and camaraderie. 

Unlike the others starting at their lowest point, when Chinta is first introduced, she is living a happy life with the legal status of being a housewife. However, things soon go downhill for Chinta when her husband, Ricky, starts cheating on her with her best friend, Jenny. Ricky is icked out by Chinta’s roots, her cultural norms, and even her dialect. Chinta, who was cocooned in a sense of comfort and luxury, suddenly finds herself stranded on the harsh grounds of a reality. Chinta married Ricky, going against her large family of mother and sisters; she had a suitor waiting at home and a perfectly comfortable life, yet she took a leap and married Ricky. Chinta cuts contacts with her family, with Ricky being her only support system until she meets the queens of Queen. 

Among everything else as an immigrant, Chinta epitomizes the struggle of women limiting themselves to a gender role. She reduced her identity to being a white man’s wife, and when she is forcefully redacted from the role, she finds herself facing a void. Chinta’s story is one of reclamation—where she quests for her lost identity and reinvents herself. While struggling at first with her emotions—obnoxious and self-possessed—Chinta starts opening up to everyone. She makes friends (maybe more than friends in the future) with Bisma, who also encourages her to explore her Sundanese traditions and take up a job as a massage therapist. While she was always objectified and treated as a trophy wife, Chinta receiving her first paycheck is a moment of recognition of her identity.

Biyah is the most free-spirited, flamboyant, and unpredictable one among the main characters. As her first act of getting acquainted, she helps Eva to enter the apartment when she was locked out in exchange for pizza and through the emergency ladder. After this generous act, she proceeds to steal more food from the kitchen—her multitudes are quite a sight to behold. Biyah came to New York with her friend Tuti, who wanted to be a singer. She took out loans for Tuti to achieve her dreams, but Tuti blindsided her and disappeared. It is after years that Biyah finds out that Tuti has now become a celebrity. Biyah is currently being chased by a group of loan sharks called Black Dragon, who has taken her most beloved possession and her key to freedom—her van. 

Knowing what she learned from life, Biyah steals the money from a competition they win as a group and releases her van. However, she soon realizes it is not the same space for her anymore—what she craves is community, a sense of belonging, and not just escapade and rootlessness. She sells the van and comes back to the apartment, offering the money. She is prepared to live under the sky, she tells them; however, Ance stops her and welcomes her back to the house. At the end of the show, Biyah is seen to have gone back to her job of being a paparazzi, standing at the sidelines while the celebrities pass through, just as it happened with Tuti. 

In the round-up of its four protagonists, you must see that much of the story is already told. This happens because the story is not about incidents, events, or just the external struggles of the women as immigrants, but it is about the internal world of the women, and each finding a sense of belonging in the other’s world. Each of them has distinct qualities—Arty nurtures, Ance steadies, Chinta reclaims, and Biyah disrupts. However, like mismatched puzzle pieces, they fit perfectly together, constructing a picture that is unexpectedly whole. By the end of the show, their crisis does not undergo a full resolution, but it finds more shoulders and strength to carry the burden. Above all, it becomes the story of a found family, of making a home out of alien lands, and depending just a little on the kindness of the strangers!