Cuchulain Posted March 21, 2011 Share Posted March 21, 2011 Cuchulain - Thanks. That is helpful. But (1) How does Badalle get the power to call for the D'ivers, (2) How does Badalle get the power to hum and avoid the FA voice power, (3) who are the Snake kids and why do they travel in a group, and (4) there is a reference that the Snake may have traveled by warren, lead by that other kid - what's up with that? I still can't understand those points. RobI don't have definite answers to your questions but this is what I think: we've seen that the FA's magic (drawn from Akhrast Korvalain) is voice/sound-based. Badalle's power takes the form of songs/poems. This similarity may imply that Badalle is (possibly unwittingly) drawing on Akhrast Korvalain herself. The Snake's long journey of suffering in the crystal desert may have led to the forming of a bond between the kids and the D'ivers (ie the suffering FA god). This could explain why Badalle can draw on Akhrast Korvalain. It would also imply that the warren they traveled through was Akhrast Korvalain. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cable Posted March 21, 2011 Share Posted March 21, 2011 Just finished it, and I thought it was great. Need to digest it (do I ever) but I am very pleased with TCG. Great way to end the series. There were a couple characters I wanted to see a resolution for, or at least a passing mention, but I guess many characters will now fall in to ICE's "territory". This book was definitely clearer and more straightforward at times, especially regarding motives and such. I'm not sure whether Erikson wanted to make sure everyone was on the same page or if it's simply natural for something like this to happen in the last chapter of a ten-book series. I also wanted to groan a couple times at the melodrama, especially early on mostly regarding the Adjunct. I got so sick of seeing, "Gods Below, how can she?" or something similar. Still, it mostly subsided. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Larry. Posted March 22, 2011 Share Posted March 22, 2011 I finished it a few days ago, but I just now only got around to writing my review of it. For those weary of such things, I'll warn that I focused more on the thematic elements and the possibility that an Aristotelian tragedy interpretation of this series/book might be a suitable way of exploring the issues raised. Minus a few repetitive scenes that failed to further the narrative tension already established, I found this to be Erikson's best book, or at least the one that moved me the most. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MinDonner Posted March 23, 2011 Share Posted March 23, 2011 The Snake, I thought, were a manifestation of D'rek (that eventually turned into real kids when they delivered Held, a la Dawn out of Buffy).Lots of answers in the book, though all rather belated - every chapter with Sechul Lath was like INFODUMP TIME ("wow, remember how the Forkrul Assail got the K'Chain Nah'ruk to fight the short-tails for them, and you know how the Warrens are all basically Dragons and if they kill Korabas then all magic will vanish...") - would have been good to have had more than just veiled hints of all this drip-fed throughout the series.Two things that annoyed me most - 1) the need to have read RotCG to understand some of it (the Empress is dead, or missing? WTF?) and 2) Hetan magically coming back to life for no apparent reason. Where the fuck did that come from? I mean yay, but you can't just kill off a character really unpleasantly and then resurrect her with no explanation. Otherwise, pretty satisfying. Most plotlines ended up having some resolution, which by this point I hadn't really been expecting. But, did Cotillion really kill the Crippled God, or was that just a way of, I dunno, releasing him to join his followers in space? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Werthead Posted March 23, 2011 Share Posted March 23, 2011 From RotCG:Laseen is indeed dead. Mallick Rel is now the Emperor of the Malazan Empire.As for the Crippled God, my reading is that he was given a body in the Malazan world to incarnate him there and then that body needed to be destroyed to release him back to his home realm, taking his followers in the Jade Statues/Slashes with him. Presumably if he'd just died, the Jade Statues would also have been destroyed (presumably with disastrous consequences for Planet Malaz, such as Otataral Island blowing up) or the Statues/Slashes would have collided with Planet Malaz (except without Heboric around to do his anti-orbital laster battery thing from TBH).It is rather bizarre that in a 922-page, 385,000-word novel with plenty of longeurs in its first half, Erikson had to rush the last few pages so much. He could have afforded to have expanded on some of the aftermath a little bit. Seriously, we could have lost five or six scenes of that Tiste Andii woman going mental in the throne room to make room for it, no problem. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
polishgenius Posted March 23, 2011 Share Posted March 23, 2011 It is rather bizarre that in a 922-page, 385,000-word novel with plenty of longeurs in its first half, Erikson had to rush the last few pages so much. He could have afforded to have expanded on some of the aftermath a little bit. Seriously, we could have lost five or six scenes of that Tiste Andii woman going mental in the throne room to make room for it, no problem.Bloat? In Erikson? Never.As for the opinion Min expressed on Hetan coming back, of course he can. This is Erikson. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MinDonner Posted March 23, 2011 Share Posted March 23, 2011 Bloat? In Erikson? Never.As for the opinion Min expressed on Hetan coming back, of course he can. This is Erikson.Well yeah. But normally I'd have expected at least a three-chapter explanation involving Hood's warren, a bunch of philosophical introspection and a minimum of two elder gods. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
polishgenius Posted March 23, 2011 Share Posted March 23, 2011 Well this time you got a shower from a dead god of war. Which was rather bizarre. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MinDonner Posted March 23, 2011 Share Posted March 23, 2011 Magic pig's blood seems to have many special qualities. :wideeyed: But was that what brought Hetan back? Mostly it just seemed to be turning zombies into mortals and working like high-octane magic-fuel; it didn't (eg) bring Whiskeyjack back to life or any of the other ghosts. Just Deus Ex Machina juice? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lord Baelish Posted March 23, 2011 Share Posted March 23, 2011 Hetan returned to life because her soul never passed through Hood's Gate. When she died in DoD, Badalle says something about how she "holds onto Hetan's soul". This meant that, when Toc delivered her body to the area around the Spire, Fener's blood revived it, as it did the T'lan Imass ("Oh shit, this gift was badly timed!") and the undead Jaghut army. Whiskeyjack et al had gone through Hood's Gate, so they stayed dead.That said, I thought her coming back was ridiculous. Couldn't Tool's redemption have just come by being reunited with his children?As for the warrens all having dragons aspected to them, that was established as far back as The Bonehunters at least. And an Otataral Dragon is bound to kill magic; what else would it do? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Relic Posted March 23, 2011 Share Posted March 23, 2011 I'm like 200 pages into this and it dawned on me while reading last evening that i have no fucking clue what the hell is going on anymore. I think i lost Erikson sometime around Reaper's Gale. Everything since then seems a blurry haze of blahblahblahwtfomgblahblahlolblah.I don't think i can finish this book... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MinDonner Posted March 24, 2011 Share Posted March 24, 2011 As for the warrens all having dragons aspected to them, that was established as far back as The Bonehunters at least. And an Otataral Dragon is bound to kill magic; what else would it do?True, but it was never made clear exactly how closely the dragons were tied in to the magic. I mean, plenty of characters have been aligned with one house or another without anyone suggesting that if they died the house would collapse, or that the house got its power from that individual in the first place. And otataral? All we've seen it do so far was negate magic, not cause huge swathes of destruction and kill everything in its path and be the fulcrum around which all magic depends. Hints, yeah, but most of this is brand new information. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lord Baelish Posted March 24, 2011 Share Posted March 24, 2011 In The Bonehunters, Icarium and Mappo discover the body of Sorrit. They say that she was the dragon of Serc, and her death leaves Osserc as that warren's only protector. Later, Cotillion meets the three chained dragons in Shadow. He says K'rul forced them to share responsibility of the warrens with each other and with Soletaken Eleint. It's made pretty clear in the conversations that each warren has its corresponding dragon intrinsically linked to it. Remember "Mockra" that spoke to Seren Pedac in Reaper's Gale? That was actually Mockra's dragon, Eloth, as revealed near the beginning of the Crippled God.Otataral normally just negates magic, but when you have a dragon made out of it, that's another story completely. Sag'Churok says in DoD that Korabas had to be chained because of her destructive power. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RobMRobM Posted March 24, 2011 Share Posted March 24, 2011 Relic - the plot pulls together and becomes cool after p. 400 or so. Best to hang in. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Relic Posted March 24, 2011 Share Posted March 24, 2011 Relic - the plot pulls together and becomes cool after p. 400 or so. Best to hang in.should i just skip ahead then? im seriously floundering right now, caught some place between complete ambivalence and extreme frustration with the never ending stream of words that took 200 pages to tell me that the Bonehunters got mauled IN THE LAST BOOK (after 800 pages of ...what? i dont even remember! something about hobbling aaaaand...Icarium as some ghost thing fucking with some random ass people. Fuck, someone write a FAQ and a synopsis for this series PLEASE).I really wish the first 5 books were written in this fashion, i would have never made it past GotM. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jcstamu03 Posted March 24, 2011 Share Posted March 24, 2011 should i just skip ahead then? im seriously floundering right now, caught some place between complete ambivalence and extreme frustration with the never ending stream of words that took 200 pages to tell me that the Bonehunters got mauled IN THE LAST BOOK (after 800 pages of ...what? i dont even remember! something about hobbling aaaaand...Icarium as some ghost thing fucking with some random ass people. Fuck, someone write a FAQ and a synopsis for this series PLEASE).I really wish the first 5 books were written in this fashion, i would have never made it past GotM.You and me both bro. I read the first 100 pages and put it down because I literally had no idea what was happening and couldn't remember much of anything from the last few books.Pisses me off because I invested a good 6 months in this monstrosity. It's a tribute to Erikson and his wily ways that I'm even considering rereading this thing but the sheer undertaking is daunting to say the least. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Caligula_K Posted March 24, 2011 Share Posted March 24, 2011 Frantically not reading the rest of this thread, but 230 pages in and quick question on one plotline of the book I'm not understanding at all:What's the deal with the Tiste Liosan? Why are they coming now and why do they want to destroy everything? What's the significance of kneeling to them? Any help appreciated! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Seli Posted March 24, 2011 Share Posted March 24, 2011 Frantically not reading the rest of this thread, but 230 pages in and quick question on one plotline of the book I'm not understanding at all:What's the deal with the Tiste Liosan? Why are they coming now and why do they want to destroy everything? What's the significance of kneeling to them? Any help appreciated!The Liosan (an specifically this sub-fraction of them is seems) are just the bastards they have been in the whole series. They seemed to be irritated about the existence of anything outside their own realm from their first appearance. Why they actually are in here is a good question, it makes some sense but I for one am still not convinced it was necessary.The kneeling has to be done to the 'shore' more than the Liosan, I assume it is a symbol for the total submission of the Queen of the Shore to her fate (or something similar). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Caligula_K Posted March 25, 2011 Share Posted March 25, 2011 The Liosan (an specifically this sub-fraction of them is seems) are just the bastards they have been in the whole series. They seemed to be irritated about the existence of anything outside their own realm from their first appearance. Why they actually are in here is a good question, it makes some sense but I for one am still not convinced it was necessary.The kneeling has to be done to the 'shore' more than the Liosan, I assume it is a symbol for the total submission of the Queen of the Shore to her fate (or something similar).Ahh, thanks. It does feel like such a random and disconnected plotline. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MinDonner Posted March 25, 2011 Share Posted March 25, 2011 In The Bonehunters, Icarium and Mappo discover the body of Sorrit. They say that she was the dragon of Serc, and her death leaves Osserc as that warren's only protector. Later, Cotillion meets the three chained dragons in Shadow. He says K'rul forced them to share responsibility of the warrens with each other and with Soletaken Eleint. It's made pretty clear in the conversations that each warren has its corresponding dragon intrinsically linked to it. Remember "Mockra" that spoke to Seren Pedac in Reaper's Gale? That was actually Mockra's dragon, Eloth, as revealed near the beginning of the Crippled God.Otataral normally just negates magic, but when you have a dragon made out of it, that's another story completely. Sag'Churok says in DoD that Korabas had to be chained because of her destructive power.Fair enough. But we're still only talking about a few sentences or paragraphs among hundreds of pages of equally dense detail that might be important, or might be filler, and there's no way of knowing which until you actually get to the end. This would probably be a good time to resume my reread, currently stalled halfway through HoC. At least I now know what to look out for! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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