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GOODKIND VII, The sword of truthiness


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WARNING: PHANTOM SPOILERS

This shit just couldn’t wait for tomorrow, so here for your “critiquing†is the Terry Goodkind Quote of the Day PHANTOM Double Whammy. Richard and Nicci are speaking to the assembled D’Haran forces in order to make them understand what they face when fighting the Order.

“Nicci, please tell these men what will happen to them if they are captured by the Imperial Order.†[…]

“The Order does not execute their captives immediately.†<snip> “First,†she said, “every man captured is castrated.’

A collective gasp went up from the assembled men. <I got a funny vision of a hundred thousand men all grabbing their balls>

<blah blah blah, the Order hates life, yada yada yada>

Nicci spoke offhandedly into the silence. “The fried testicles of their enemies are a prized treat for the soldiers of the Imperial Order :eek: . The camp followers will scour a battlefield after a battle, looking for loot and any wounded enemy still alive that they can castrate. Those precious, bloody gems harvested from a living enemy are a valuable and sought-after commodity during the drunken celebration after a victory. The soldiers believe that such a delicacy gives them greater strength and virility. Afterwards, they turn their attention to their women captives.â€

Richard pinched the bridge of his nose between a thumb and first finger. “Anything else?â€

Nicci raised an eyebrow. “Isn’t that enough?â€

~Terry Goodkind, Phantom

I hope I didn’t catch anybody just before suppertime. :D

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So the Order castrates men and eats their balls, they are evil. Our favorite Mother Confessor makes a man cut off his own balls and eat them and she is morally superior. Makes total sense! Thank god there is no such thing as contradiction! :P

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I'm so thankful that I just ate. And no, I was not eating Rocky Mountain Oysters :P

But why doesn't this surprise me? A pseudo Freudian might even go so far as to claim that Goodkind must have compensation issues combined with latent S&M tendencies bound up in a homophobic layer. Yeesh.

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All this talk of a SOT miniseries made me a recall some casting suggestions I made in a previous incarnation of this thread. I said it then, and I will say it now: the ONLY person who could properly play Richard is Steven Seagal. Seagal and Richard share a disturbing similarity:

Richard (like Seagal) often claims to be a man of peace who respects life. If I recall correctly, in WFR, Zedd even claims that Richard is really gentle as a lamb(!). However Richard (like Seagal) often finds himself in situations that conveniently call for him to start tearing into an enemy with brutal relish.

Check out Buddah or Bust on Youtube to see Will Sasso's dead on accurate portrayal of Steven Seagal.

So in conclusion: Steven Seagal was born to play Richard Rahl. If Seagal cannot take the part, then they need to find the phone number of Will Sasso.

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And the Order eats their babies yadda yadda .... yawn, what a new type of propaganda :o

And so much for realistic evil :rolleyes: (but we knew that) ...I have visions of avid readers and writers foaming at the mouth, a little more with every book. I think you saved me from further purchases Moosey, thx!

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I would imagine the Order's speech would be something like:

Men, you've been here before. Tomorrow we battle the evil forces of D'Haran. We will bring another land under our command in the greater name of the Creator (not to be confused with Terry (BBHN)). But lads, there is one thing you should know. The D'Haran's don't execute their captives immediately. First ever man captured is tortured. Everyone here remembers the screams of Timmy several weeks ago. It went on all night, they wouldn't give the poor bastard a decent death.

They love to torture everyone that disagrees with them. They have women trained to do nothing but torture men. So if you break tomorrow I'm not going to cut you down. They will do far worse to you then I could ever image.

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I would imagine the Order's speech would be something like:

Men, you've been here before. Tomorrow we battle the evil forces of D'Haran. We will bring another land under our command in the greater name of the Creator (not to be confused with Terry (BBHN)). But lads, there is one thing you should know. The D'Haran's don't execute their captives immediately. First ever man captured is tortured. Everyone here remembers the screams of Timmy several weeks ago. It went on all night, they wouldn't give the poor bastard a decent death.

They love to torture everyone that disagrees with them. They have women trained to do nothing but torture men. So if you break tomorrow I'm not going to cut you down. They will do far worse to you then I could ever image.

:lol: I think this shows that you are obviously to immature to be reading Goodkind. If you can't understand the difference between righteous torture and evil torture you should just stick with "fantasy" books.

Seriously how is rape worse then torture? Is torture less invasive? Less harmful? I would personally say that Rape is just a form of torture. But apparently that is only because I am not morally apt enough to truly understand the teaching of Goodkind. :cry: :rolleyes:

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I don't know about Steven Seagal as Richard...he definitely is a crappy enough actor, but what about the beard? I think that if the wonders of CGI could make a Chuck Norris/Steven Seagal hybrid, that would be the perfect Yeard. Either that, or Lorenzo Lamas, from the TV show Renegade. Or maybe if they could resurrect Jesus, and remove his kindness and give him a sword and a strap of leather to make his hair into a Yeard. Or if we're talking historical figures, maybe Ulysses S. Grant (the Confederacy = the Empire!)

I still stand by my original Steve Buscemi casting, he would be the perfect creepy person who could have a sinister and brooding nature, along with the ability to only see his only moral clarity. He would be an awesome woodsguide, and have the strange personality to pull off the role. Or you go with Hayden Christiansen (Anakin Skywalker), who's "acting" is as painful as Goodkind's prose. Needless to say, both of these guys would need the best Yeards money can buy in order to pull it off.

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So the Order castrates men and eats their balls, they are evil. Our favorite Mother Confessor makes a man cut off his own balls and eat them and she is morally superior. Makes total sense! Thank god there is no such thing as contradiction! :P

The difference is that Kahlan didn't eat the other guy's balls, he made him eat them. Either way, the IO eats balls.

Clearly, in Rahlworld, the only true judge of evil is whether you eat testicles, under duress from the psychopathic whorebitch Mother Confessor armed with moral clarity or not.

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WARNING: PHANTOM SPOILERS

“Nicci, please tell these men what will happen to them if they are captured by the Imperial Order.†[…]

“The Order does not execute their captives immediately.†<snip> “First,†she said, “every man captured is castrated.’

A collective gasp went up from the assembled men. <I got a funny vision of a hundred thousand men all grabbing their balls>

Moose, you are truly a brave man. :bow:

Funny, the 'grabbing their balls' scene reminded me of Zedd, and that 'magic trick' he did in WFR, where he told the crowd that as a wizard, he just made their balls disappear.

And like Dylanfanatic, I am very thankful I've just finished eating when I've read this.

So the Order castrates men and eats their balls, they are evil. Our favorite Mother Confessor makes a man cut off his own balls and eat them and she is morally superior. Makes total sense! Thank god there is no such thing as contradiction!

Kahlan did waht she did for justice and vengeance! therefore, that makes her act morally superior.

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I don't know about Steven Seagal as Richard...he definitely is a crappy enough actor, but what about the beard? I think that if the wonders of CGI could make a Chuck Norris/Steven Seagal hybrid, that would be the perfect Yeard. Either that, or Lorenzo Lamas, from the TV show Renegade. Or maybe if they could resurrect Jesus, and remove his kindness and give him a sword and a strap of leather to make his hair into a Yeard. Or if we're talking historical figures, maybe Ulysses S. Grant (the Confederacy = the Empire!)

I still stand by my original Steve Buscemi casting, he would be the perfect creepy person who could have a sinister and brooding nature, along with the ability to only see his only moral clarity. He would be an awesome woodsguide, and have the strange personality to pull off the role. Or you go with Hayden Christiansen (Anakin Skywalker), who's "acting" is as painful as Goodkind's prose. Needless to say, both of these guys would need the best Yeards money can buy in order to pull it off.

The problem with Steve Buscemi is that he is too good of an actor to play Richard. The problem with Christiansen is that he simply doesn't have an ego big enough to play Richard. You cannot ACT Richard Rahl, you must BE Richard Rahl. And in order to do that, you must have an ego the size of the continent of Australia . I picked Seagal for many reasons, but the prime reason was his overwhelming arrogance.

Have you evver seen the move "On Deadly Ground"? Well, it was directed by Seagal himself, with Seagal playing the starring character. With almost total creative control of the project, Seagal felt the need to insert the following line of dialoge into the movie to establish his character's badassness:

My guy in D.C. tells me that we are not dealing with a student here, we're dealing with the Professor. Any time the military has an operation that can't fail, they call this guy in to train the troops, OK? He's the kind of guy that would drink a gallon of gasoline so he could piss in your campfire! You could drop this guy off at the Arctic Circle wearing a pair of bikini underwear, without his toothbrush, and tomorrow afternoon he's going to show up at your pool side with a million dollar smile and fist full of pesos. This guy's a professional, you got me? If he reaches this rig, we're all gonna be nothing but a big goddamned hole right in the middle of Alaska. So let's go find him and kill him and get rid of the son of a bitch!

Oh and as for kicking little girls and beheading protesters, consider this- at the end of "On Deadly Ground," Seagal confronts the Big Bad, portrayed by Michael Caine. Caine's character was unarmed and had no knowledge of aikido, or karate or anything like that. Caine was pissed that Seagal had essentially been torching his oil well so he demands that Seagal repair the damage and then states "I'm leaving." As Caine turns to leave, Seagal walks up to him, picks him up and then throws him to his doom in a giant vat of oil. Just to make sure no one in audience has any doubt that Seagal just murdered an unarmed man in cold blood, Seagal blows up the oil rig.

Seagal is Rahl. Come on it even rhymes!

And if they hire Seagal to play Richard, maybe the miniseries can be turned into a musical, because you know, Steven Seagal can sing.

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First post in this thread. I must say I have never read TG in real (well, except for the short story in Legends 2), but I find your QOtD and the subsequent parodies really entertaining. And I think I finally grasped the spirit of TG (BBHN) and why his work is not Fantasy :

In fantasy, making evil things is what defines the evil ones : you do evil things --> you are evil.

In TG's books, the things the evil ones do are not evil in nature but are evil because they are performed by evil people (this evil being defined by their evil purpose). They could pick flowers, it would be an evil massacre of innocents flowers, while Richard doing it for Kahlan would be something romantic, wonderful,or wonderfully romantic.

Did I get it (including the use of the "thing" word) ?

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First post in this thread. I must say I have never read TG in real (well, except for the short story in Legends 2), but I find your QOtD and the subsequent parodies really entertaining. And I think I finally grasped the spirit of TG (BBHN) and why his work is not Fantasy :

In fantasy, making evil things is what defines the evil ones : you do evil things --> you are evil.

In TG's books, the things the evil ones do are not evil in nature but are evil because they are performed by evil people (this evil being defined by their evil purpose). They could pick flowers, it would be an evil massacre of innocents flowers, while Richard doing it for Kahlan would be something romantic, wonderful,or wonderfully romantic.

Did I get it (including the use of the "thing" word) ?

I think you might be onto something, and this might explain a few things that leave me puzzled (Oh, OK, everything leaves me puzzled in this damn series :P)

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The scary thing is, that's probably intentional on Goodkind's part. Note how Richard abandons his troops in FotF because "they just do what I say because I'm Lord Rahl! That's not good enough - they have to do what I say because they understand that what I say is best!". And then there was that rant he made in the interview someone here quoted, about how we must make war on the philosophy of terrorists.

(actually, what did he mean by that? If I wanted to make war on a philosophy, I'd use propaganda and education about my own philosophy to try to get people to convert. And I suppose I'd try to remove the practical situation that made the enemy philosophy attractive - ie, if you live in squalor, the idea of a pleasant afterlife is a lot more attractive than if you do okay for yourself here and now. How does Goodkind think we should go about it? Shoot anyone who has the wrong type of thinking?)

So, yeah, it's not the actions that count but their reason. Which begs the question why Goodkind goes into such loving detail about how the atrocities of the IO. The best I can figure is that he's going for a gut reaction. It's hard to make the readers feel that someone is evil just for disagreeing with the heroes - that's too cerebral - so Goodkind has to invoke that loathing some other way. Sure, this way is blatant, clumsy and extremely hypocritical, but Goodkind doesn't have time to worry about that. No time for subtility when civilisation is crumbling!

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Just changed a few words, yet I feel the similarity is kind of creepy:

I must not fear the thing. The thing is the mind-killer. The thing is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my thing. I will permit it to rise over me and from me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the the thing has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

He was warrior and mystic, ogre and saint, the fox and the innocent, chivalrous, ruthless, less than a god, more than a man. There is no measuring Richard Rahl's motives by ordinary standards. In the moment of his triumph, he saw the death prepared for him, yet he accepted the treachery. Can you say he did this out of a sense of justice? Whose justice, then? Remember, we speak now of the Richard Rahl who slaughtered peace protestors, the Lord Rahl who denied the conventions of his predecessors with a wave of the hand, saying merely: "I am the Seeker. That is reason enough."

Solely for the Mad Moose:

O you who know what we suffer here, do not forget us in your prayers.

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Mad Moose;

Jebra the Seeress is rescued from the Imperial Order and she spends TWENTY FUCKING PAGES describing what she saw while she was their prisoner!!! TWENTY!!! TG must think his audience is so fucking stupid that even after 10 bloody books he still has to lead everybody by the hand to be sure it's fully understood that the Imperial Order are the bad guys!

Perhaps Terry is a product of US commercial-infested TV...every time I'm temporarily sucked into some US-produced Reality Show (like, say, Project Runway) I get beaten over the head with the same freaking stupid lines every five minutes! Yeah, we know that there are only 5 contestants left. Just like you said a heartbeat ago. And the heartbeat before that. Etc. etc. ad nauseam.

Thinking about it, I believe Goodkind is missing out on some prime earning potential here:

POP-UP COMMERCIALS!

Every ten pages he could have a pop-up commercial (for instance, a stereotyped MiB spook, urging: "Don't let the jackals of evil shackle us! Fightin' for your freedom, while you sleep. And shave. And make love to your wife. And pop your zits! (BTW, you missed one on your lower back! Quite unseemly!)").

No need to worry about losing track, Mr. Goodkind will make sure you won't forget who is the Bad Guys, and why.

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Based on the many posts in the different Goodkind threads, his interviews and some other message boards my problem with mr Goodkind seems to be his unwillingness to see the merits of other social philosophies and the black and white portrayal of all members of such states.

Let me try to explain this by a simplified example

THEORY

For instance Communism in its most theoretical form is an idea about a utopian society where everybody is equal. The inventors of this ideal world (Marx and Engels) knew this (total equality) in itself could only be strived for and it might never be achieved, if memory serves me well.

As a side note: In my opinion humans will be humans and will always strive for personal gain. That is why the ideal of total equality will never work.

PRACTICAL

On the other hand there is the practical side to the theory. People in Eastern Europe have suffered greatly under the power of the few. Where some societies started out with good intentions (e.g. Romania) the ruling class got corrupted along the way as inevitably was the faith of all socialist (or Communist wannabe) states.

Back on topic:

But does this mean that each and every member of - let's say - Romanian Society is evil? Don't think so (and know so). I am seriously wondering what the essential message of Mr Goodkind is. And I am even less sure the Randian theory is an answer to most social inequities (as mr Bakker has eloquently stated in a discussion on the WOT website.)

I could give many more examples of the hybrid social systems such as can be found in the Netherlands, Germany, France, Sweden etc. but my point would remain the same: inequalities exist and will always exist, it is how you handle those that defines a society. Personal experiences will play a big role as to what you prefer most but many systems have merits, there is no black or white. Objectivism as a single solution for the entire world? Thanks but no thanks, that is a nightmare scenario to me.

So if mr Goodkind's merit is writing an entertaining story, good for him. I wish he did not try to force feed a social belief as the only possible way of life, that is just plain ignorant.

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SomeNic: well, this is fairly typical (I find) of people who - I hate to say it - just aren't very smart. They latch onto a philosophy as others latch onto a religion, as a source of easy answers.

As people have pointed out, at times Mr G doesn't seem to have a good grasp on the implications of Objectivism for his story, or to understand parts of the philosophy, and this would also be typical of someone who's simply swallowed a philosophy whole, unquestioningly - who're using it as a comfort blanket instead of a tool of inquiry.

Not that I am implying that Mr G is just not that smart. ;)

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