Jump to content

Goodkind 54: How to Revive a Dead Dick


Myshkin

Recommended Posts

6 hours ago, Myshkin said:

Chapters 14-16

Earlier Bannon told a really boring story about this one time when he might or might not have met some magical sea-dwelling humanoids called selka. Nate's heard some legends about selka before; supposedly created by magic to serve as underwater armies during the Great Wizard War a million years ago. Both agree that they're probably not real. Well guess what? They're totally fucking real! How do I know that? Because this chapter starts off from the perspective of the selka queen.

The selka are the ones who killed those two Queequegs a few chapters back. It's all got to do with the wishpearls. The selka are super pissed that these shitty air-breathers are stealing their wishpearls, which as it turns out, are indeed concentrated dreams. I think. They're gonna sink the ship and send our heroes to a watery grave in retribution. I have a bit of a problem here. You see, it's been made clear by our weed smoking captain that he's been coming to this reef and harvesting wishpearls for years. So why are the selka only now getting pissy about it?

Back to Nicci. She's still all weak from the poison and almost-rape. It wouldn't do to have her at full power for the fight to come. The Queequegs who tried to rape her are still alive, but in pretty bad condition, due to their sacks being pulverized. She leaves her cabin and goes up on deck, where she finds Nate. There's a huge fuck all storm happening, but the two manage a brief conversation. Nate seems neither surprised nor worried to find out that Nicci has been poisoned and almost-raped. Whatever, that shit happens all the time. Bannon rudely interrupts this little chat by pointing out that a bunch of monsters are attacking the ship.

The fight begins. Organs and entrails are flying all over the place. Nicci, for reasons described above, is barely able to use magic. Nate, for reasons as yet unknown, doesn't seem to be able to use magic at all. The selka are crazy viscous, but they periodically stop to gobble up some of the entrails they've liberated from the bellies of sailors. This does not seem like a sound battle strategy to me.

Bannon's sword, which he has named Sturdy, is described as lackluster. I don't understand this description. Maybe it's meant literally, as in the sword lacks luster. But the kid's faring pretty well against the sea people, lackluster sword or no. Looks like his training sessions with Nate are paying dividends.

Nicci gives herself a pep talk, remembering all the male power she's stolen and all the people she's slaughtered. It kinda works; she flings some selka overboard. Nate, temporarily forgetting his impotence, steps forward dramatically to blast a bunch of selka into fucking oblivion (or bolivian, as Slamming' Cleon Salmon would say). It don't work. Obviously. But Bannon, the world-class swordsman, jumps in and saves the day.

Captain Bigamist bites it. He fucked some shit up before he went down, but he's totally dead now. The three emasculated Queequegs stumble out on deck, entirely unaware that there's a battle on. They are promptly slaughtered, and after pages and pages of disembowelments, we finally get our first spine ripping. This one even has a few ribs still attached.

The selka queen finally climbs on board the ship. Nicci notes that she is obviously female. This means she has boobs. Earlier the Queequegs had wondered aloud what color Nicci's nipples might be (soft pink it turns out), now I wonder the same about the selka queen. I'm hoping for a vibrant blue.

Queen selka informs everyone that they have to die on account of them all being thieves. Sorry, thems the rules. Nicci thinks it's pretty cool that the sea monster talks all normal like, and not in some foreign jibber-jabber. Nate thinks it's not cool at all that she called them thieves. Bannon, genius that he is, puts two and two together and lets everyone know that the lady-selka is probs talking about the wishpearls.

The queen calls wishpearls the “seeds of our dreams”. I don't know exactly what that means. Maybe they're selka eggs. At this point Terry grows bored so he gives Nicci her power back and she uses it to scare off the remaining selka. Everyone on the ship who didn't have their SAG card is dead. That leaves us with only Nicci, Nate, and Bannon left alive.

 

You make this sound very entertaining (in a so bad it's good kind of way).  Is it worth reading?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

8 hours ago, SeanF said:

You make this sound very entertaining (in a so bad it's good kind of way).  Is it worth reading?

No.

 

Chapters 17-20

The ship is beat to shit, and there's no one left to sail it anyway, so the seafaring portion of this tale is probably coming to an end soon. Nate confirms that he is fully cut off from the One Power, he cannot seize saidin. It wouldn't be a Goodkind novel unless at least one of our heroes is deprived of their magic for the sake of the narrative. He asks Nicci if she has any idea WTF is going on. To which she replies:

“I am not aware of any outside force neutralizing your gift, Wizard.”

I quote this in order to give you guys a taste of what literally every interaction between these two sounds like.

Nate comments that he doesn't even feel whole anymore. Which, holy fuck, is totally why Red the witch woman said he had to find Kol Adair; to be made whole again. Terry is a master of foreshadowing! But his prospects of ever finding Kol Adair are slim. The ship sinks. All hands lost.

Well, not all hands. No hands really, if you don't count the ones already lost before the ship sank. All three of our heroes wake up on a desolate beach. Actually, Nate seems to have drowned, but Bannon resuscitates him using the Heimlich maneuver, which besides being the wrong maneuver to use in that situation, shouldn't have worked anyway, seeing as how it's been hours since they washed up on shore.

They head off to figure out where they are, and fairly quickly find a marker. Any guess what it says? Yup, that's right, it says To Kol Adair. How lucky is that? If their ship hadn't sunk exactly when it did they'd have sailed right on by. Nate's stoked by this turn of events. Nicci reminds us for like the millionth time that she don't give no shits about Kol Adair, she's just tagging along on the journey so she can spread the good word of the second coming of Richard Rahl.

Hey did you guys know that Nate's eyes are azure? Not blue, never blue; fucking azure. Anyway, we travel along the beach all day, and now end up camping out for the night inside another, older shipwreck. Bannon don't like this shipwreck, but he ain't saying why. Also, I don't think Bannon has a scabbard for his sword, or any means by which to attach it to himself; he just carries it around in his hand.

We're inside Bannon's head now, and he's really boring. He's obviously crushing hard on Nicci, so he picks her some flowers. This would be a really stupid thing to do, except by some stroke of luck the flowers turn out to be the deadliest plants in the entire fucking world, so Nicci's pretty into them. She only keeps one though, and Bannon, freaking the fuck out like a stupid asshole, throws the rest of them in a nearby stream, poisoning the entire area's fresh water supply.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

13 hours ago, SeanF said:

You make this sound very entertaining (in a so bad it's good kind of way).  Is it worth reading?

Myshkin's commentary is entertaining, other than that the book will probably drive a lesser soul to suicide from boredom.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Chapters 21-26

So the desolate beach upon which our heroes washed up is yet another heretofore unknown land. It's called the Phantom Coast, and is supposedly far to the south of the developed parts of the Old World. This makes little sense when checked against earlier geographical descriptions. It's been only about a week since the ship left Tanimura, which is in the extreme north of the Old World, and when it sank it was still in well charted territory.

Nicci reminds everyone that despite this place being uncharted, and so far uninhabited, it is still officially part of the D'Haran Empire, and therefore subject to Emperor Dick's freedom laws. She says all this with a straight face. I feel like maybe I haven't stressed this enough, but Dick has literally claimed sovereignty over the entire fucking world.

Five days into their romantic walk on the beach, our trio finally comes across a village. Nicci orders the villagers to gather 'round, and once they do she tells them that they all belong to Richard now. The villagers are understandably confused by this. There's no time to argue however, as just then a small fleet of Japanese slavers sails into the bay.

There's a battle. Bannon seems to know who these dudes are, and he fucking hates them. Lackluster sword in hand he starts killing the shit out of them. Nicci's at full power now, so she's fully capable of wiping the floor with these assholes. But instead of doing that she makes a series of silly decisions that allow the slavers to kill or capture a good number of villagers. Eventually though she gets her ass in gear and drives them off. Nate seeing all the injured people gets super pissed, and suddenly finds his magic again. He's like Nynaeve. Wonder if he'll start tugging his braid? He tries to heal an injured villager, but he loses control and ends up gutting him like a fish. Oops, he totally forgot about the Dark One's taint.

We now get the story of how Bannon knows the slavers. The story takes up a whole chapter, but can be summed up thusly: these same slavers once kidnapped his friend while he watched. It was a total bummer for him.

As the villagers bury their dead, Nicci decides now is the perfect time to proselytize about the supreme awesomeness of Richard Rahl. She lets them know that Dicky-boy has decreed that this type of shit ain't cool no more, and once everyone gets the fucking message life will be ace. In the meantime though, Nicci tells the villagers that they're gonna have to stop allowing themselves to be victims. She's pretty shitty about it, but the villagers think it's great advice.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

There has to be an avian-that-is-not-an-avian in this village, surely? Or perhaps a bovine?  

Also, to be such an ancient old worldly type of place, The Old World, there sure seems to be a lot of uncharted territory. 

Somehow I feel like Nate needs to find the Choedan Kal.  That will solve all his problems.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Out of all this entertainment that Myshkin has been so good to provide - you are a brave one - the hardest I laughed was at the simple response "No."

I imagine some guy at a printing firm managing to get about 10,000 copies printed with an alternate cover blurb, "No." - Myshkin, Westeros.org Hell that would be so terrific that it might inspire a couple sales.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Chapters 27-29

We leave the fishing village behind. One of the villagers has informed us that he's heard some rumors about Kol Adair; it's way inland, beyond some mountains and shit. As our adventures travel they come upon some more settlements, where they mostly just spread the good news that Richard has claimed these towns as part of his awesome empire. Nicci is still wearing her black travel dress. Recall that this is the same dress that she sank in.

As they walk Nate tells a story to ease the boredom. He shouldn't have bothered. It's a long winded tale about some long dead emperor called Kurgan, who might or might not have once ruled this part of the world. Before you get your hopes up, he's nowhere near as cool as The Kurgan, played by the inimitable Clancy Brown. Anyway, this lesser Kurgan was a total bastard who conquered all of the Old World with the help of a genius general called Utros. To make a long story short we get an Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot type of story, culminating in Utros taking the entire army, 900,000 strong, and fucking off, never to be heard from again. Kurgan publicly flays his despoiled wife, then is promptly murdered in a citizen uprising. I would have left this whole part out, but I have a feeling some of this shit might come back later on.

After a week or so on the road our trio finally come upon some mountains. These aren't the mountains they're looking for. They've been told that on the other side of these mountains is a broad fertile valley, and on the other side of the valley are some more, bigger mountains, and on the other side of those mountains is Kol Adair.

While walking the mountain trail our adventurers spot what looks like an ancient watch tower on a nearby mountain. They of course decide that it's best to split up, so magicless Nate heads over to check out the tower, while Nicci and Bannon keep going on the path.

The tower is a weird place. There's all sorts of ancient skeletons laying around, and to Nate's mind shit's just not right in this joint. He climbs up to the top floor and finds a big room with 8 red glass windows; some are broken, some still intact. He cuts himself on some of the red glass and some magical shit starts to happen.

Meanwhile Nicci and Bannon come upon a village. This place is even weirder than the tower. It's completely deserted, and there's some commie statuary around. Nicci reminisces about her time as a commie, before that beautiful statue Dick carved set her free.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Why, despite Nicci being the title character, does everything Gobbo is describing make it sound like Tairy is writing an allegory about Nate Dog (loved that descriptor) solving his issues of erectile dysfunction?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

29 minutes ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

Why, despite Nicci being the title character, does everything Gobbo is describing make it sound like Tairy is writing an allegory about Nate Dog (loved that descriptor) solving his issues of erectile dysfunction?

You're not getting the bulk of the book, which is Nicci's inner monologue. The reason you're not getting it is because it's repetitive and boring.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Chapters 30-32

So those red windows in the watchtower are something called bloodglass. Nate Dog's heard of bloodglass before. It's some kind of blood magic that uses blood from blood sacrifices to allow wizards to watch bloodshed from great bloody distances. Terry really wants us to understand that blood is involved. This particular bloodglass is so potent that it allows Nate to watch battles not only from a great distance in space, but also in time. He watches what appears to be every single battle in the history of the Old World.

After a while things change, and now Nate's watching the long vanished army of general Utros advance on the very tower he's currently standing in. He's got a bad feeling about this. As well he should. Some of the skeletons in the tower come back to life, but they're chumps and Nate takes them out easy. But then the ghost soldiers of Utros' army come bursting into the tower. Apparently they're real, and actually here. Nate yells, “Come at me bro!”, and the ghosts take him up on the offer. Nate murders the shit out of the stupid ghosts. It's not clear if they ever actually posed any danger to him, but he kicked their asses anyway. Turns out in his frenzy of awesome sword moves he shattered all the remaining bloodglass windows, so the ghosts disappear.

Back to Nicci and Bannon, who have accumulated a small following of goats. Noble creatures, goats. As they enter the town square they notice that there's a shitload more anguished looking commie statues here. I'm pretty sure these aren't actually statues. And yup, I'm right. A weirdo calling himself the Adjudicator pops out of one of the nearby buildings and explains that he turned all these poor bastards into stone. As you might have guessed, the Adjudicator is a wizard, and he's also a total psycho. His mission is to “stop the spread of guilt”, whatever that means.

The Adjudicator proclaims that Nicci is guilty, which she totally fucking is, of like a million heinous crimes, and starts the process of turning her into stone. She's unable to use her magic to fight him off, because of course, so it looks like her and Bannon are totally fucked.

And back to Nate. He spends a lonely night in the mountains, then finds the creepy town the next day. He wanders around checking out the statues, until he comes across a pair he recognizes. The Adjudicator appears and starts to turn him to stone. Nate says fuck it, and seizes his tainted saidin. It works. The spell backfires on the Adjudicators and turns the judgmental old bastard into stone.

Meanwhile Nicci's going through some shit. Sort of. See the Adjudicator's spell doesn't just turn you into stone; it also forces you to relive the guilt of your worst deeds for all eternity. But Nicci's having a hard time finding anything to be guilty about. Sure, she's tortured and killed literally hundreds of thousands of people, but really that's no big deal. The only thing in her long and horrifying life she even slightly feels guilty about is that one time she tricked Kahlan into thinking that Richard had cheated on her. But Kahlan and Dick had both forgiven her for that, so whatever. Without an ounce of guilt in her soul the stone spell has no power over her, so she stops being a statue.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Myshkin said:

You're not getting the bulk of the book, which is Nicci's inner monologue. The reason you're not getting it is because it's repetitive and boring.

That doesn't mean I'm wrong about the general underlying theme of the story though...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Chapters 33-36

With the Adjudicator now a statue himself, his power wears off everyone else. So, there was really no need for that entire section about how Nicci broke free from the spell. The long petrified townsfolk are a bit disoriented, but Nicci tells them that they all belong to Richard now, so everything's cool.

Back on the road again, and Bannon's super moody. Whatever he saw during his time as a guilt statue has damaged his fragile snowflake mind. We don't know exactly what he saw, only that it has something to do with kittens. Nicci's had enough of his shit though, and demands that he tell her what his deal is. Bannon tells her to eat a dick. Good for him. But Nicci, smelling a juicy story, tries a different approach; she tells Bannon about some of the crazy psycho shit she's done, so you know, whatever is eating at him probably ain't all that big a deal anyway. It works.

It actually turns out to be a pretty big deal. About a year ago Bannon's drunkard dad decided to drown some kittens. Bannon sneaks out of the house and tries in vain to save the kittens, and while he's doing that his dad goes home and murders his mom. It's some pretty fucked up shit, told in all the lovingly gruesome detail Terry's known for.

We spend the next few days walking through the mountains, camping out beneath Terryland's famous wayward pines. The bulk of Nicci's inner monologue throughout this book has been dedicated to her ruminating on how awesome (and handsome, and smart, and great) Richard is, and here she inwardly thanks Dick for teaching her how to use wayward pines. Why one would need lessons on how to use a tree is beyond me.

Finally they get over the mountains, but the promised verdant valley beyond is now all dead and shit. Strange things are afoot at the valley floor. As our trio descends “into the badlands”, they come across a weird little girl called Thistle. Thistle eats lizards. But it's possible that everyone living around here eats lizards, so we will reserve judgment. Thistle agrees to take our heroes to her village, and hopes they can stop the spread of the Scar, which is presumably whatever the fuck destroyed this place. Oh, there's also somebody called the Lifedrinker, who's an evil wizard that lives at the heart of the Scar. These lands are lousy with evil wizards. They must be the male channelers who went crazy before Rand cleansed saidin.

We learn that life in the valley pretty much sucks 'cause there's very little water around. It's a Fury Road type situation. This is somewhat strange, seeing as how not a few hours ago Nicci and company were up in the mountains where it had been raining heavily all week. Water, generally speaking, flows downhill, so...

We get to the shitty village, where we meet Thistle's aunt and uncle. Nicci of course makes sure to inform everyone that they are Dick's subjects now. I mean, I'm not wrong to think this is crazy, am I? Richard literally doesn't know these places even exist.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Chapters 37-40

This is turning out to be a much larger undertaking than I originally envisioned. No doubt my predecessors also came to this realization. It is likely the decision to continue on that killed them. But I am stronger than they, better than they, handsomer than they. I will persevere.

Over dinner Thistle's aunt and uncle tell the story of the Before Time, in the Long Long Ago. 20 years ago a magical hidden archive called Cliffwall somehow got un-hidden. This Lifedrinker fellow emerged from the archive, said bye-dy bye to Cliffwall, and settled in the heart of the valley to drink up all the life.

The story is interrupted by a zombie attack. These zombies are called dust people, and they look like beef jerky. They are the minions of the Lifedrinker. There are only three jerky people and they're attacking a pair of old folks. Nicci is a super powerful sorceress, Death's fucking Mistress, murderer of hundreds of thousands of people; and she's absolutely fucking useless. She kills (re-kills?) one of the jerky people, but the other two still kill the old folks, magically sucking them into the ground.

More screams, and now jerky people are everywhere. They emerge out of the dirt, grab people, then suck 'em back under. No one has any clue what they should do, but Nicci's a smart chick, so she leads her group to the brick platform in the center of town. Because duh, the jerky people can't pop up through the bricks. You'd think the villagers would have figured that shit out too by now, but they're obviously death choosers. As proof of this I offer the fact that everyone in town dies, save for our original trio and Thistle.

Our group heads up into some canyons, where the rocks will protect them from further jerky people attacks. This Lifedrinker dude shouldn't have fucked with Nicci. She's so pissed off at him that she officially designates him a tyrant, which under Richard's new freedom rules means he's gotta die.

Thistle says she can take them to Cliffwall to figure out WTF is up with the Lifedrinker. All the sudden we're in a natural high desert, with cacti and scrub brush and everything. This is very confusing. Where the fuck did this desert come from? I should add that the confusion is all mine; our characters have no problem with the impossible geography. Fuck it, whatever. A few days later Thistle leads them through some canyons to Cliffwall.

Despite being in a canyon in the high desert the area around Cliffwall is super fertile. They got corn fields and apple orchards and all kinds of shit. Also, it's not a dusty old forgotten archive; there's shitloads of people happily living here. If you want to know what this place looks like just imagine the Pueblo cliff dwellings in the southwest US, but like cooler and with apple orchards.

So if I've got this right, all these farmers and shepherds and scholars at Cliffwall have been locked away behind some magic for thousands of years. This means they're all inbred as fuck. The head honchos of this place are a dude named Simon and a chick named Victoria. They say Nicci & Co. will have to convince them of their need before they're allowed to look at the books and stuff, but then decide whatevs, never mind, come on up.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Chapters 41-45

Simon and Vicky bring our group up to the main Cliffwall archive building. Inside we meet three smoking hawt acolytes; Audrey, Laurel, and Sage. Each one is a different flavor; blonde, redhead, brunette. Terry makes a point of letting us know that Sage has the most “generous” breasts of the three. There's something creepy about these chicks. Bannon immediately gets a boner for all of them.

Okay, so Cliffwall was created during the ancient wizard war to hide all this magical knowledge from some dude named Sulachan, who I'm guessing from context we know from previous books. The wizards who created Cliffwall also had a backup plan; they cast a spell on some people to give them perfect recall, so they could read and memorize all the books and stuff. It's like a Fahrenheit 451 type situation, but with magic. These people are called memmers, because, you know, they memmer stuff. For real, that's what they're called. Vicky is a memmer, as are her three creepy acolytes, who are currently serving honeyed peaches to Bannon and Nate Dog. These bitches are up to something.

Turns out these scholars are training themselves up to be wizards. Nicci and Nate think this is a real stupid idea. They're not wrong, as evidenced by the fact that the Lifedrinking is a former Cliffwall scholar who fucked up big time, and turned himself evil.

So the Lifedrinker used to be this guy called Roland who from the Dark Tower came. He got cancer and so started fucking around with magic to try to fix himself. He ended up casting a life drinking spell, but then couldn't stop it, so he fled to the middle of the valley. That was 20 years ago, and he's been drinking up all the valley's life ever since. And the shit's spreading; given long enough he'll drink up all the life in the world.

Now we start the work of looking through the million or so books at Cliffwall in order to find a way to defeat the Lifedrinker. Vicky offers the services of her memmers to aid in the search, which seems like a no-brainer to me, but Nate don't like the idea of them. The memmers seem to be a clumsy metaphor for the internet.

Nicci comes at the Lifedrinker problem from a different angle; instead of reading a bunch of dusty old books, she's gonna take Bannon and Thistle and go scout the Scar. In the Scar they're attacked by more jerky people, two of which are Thistle's aunt and uncle. I guess they weren't expecting to be attacked by jerky people, because they immediately decide to turn around and go back. They make it back to somewhat safer territory and make camp for the night.

Something occurs to me: I bet Darken Rahl coulda kicked the Lifedrinker's ass, no problem.

Back at Cliffwall Nate's not making much progress. Simon and Vicky don't seem to like each other much; there seems to be an unfriendly rivalry between the scholars and memmers. Nate's in the scholar camp; the internet is stupid. To be fair though, something's going on with these memmer chicks. I don't know what it is yet, but they can't be trusted. Oh, I bet they're feeding people Fake News!

Correction: the memmers are not a metaphor for the internet. Cliffwall is the metaphor for the internet; the memmers are a metaphor for Google. Terry is not making an argument against collating information, but rather one in favor of restricting access to that information.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yep, we know Sulachan from previous books. He's an ancient emperor guy who was bound or locked or just somehow ended up -- I am hazy at this point -- on the northerly side of a very tall non-legally-actionable wall-like structure in the "Darklands," a part of Dickland that spontaneously appeared right around 2012 after the first season of Game of Thrones had aired on HBO. I don't normally like to throw shade in this way, since fantasy tropes are fair game and etc, but this is like some absolutely e-fucking-normous wall and it had never been mentioned previously, never, not one time. Some evil torture-bishop dude used Dick's special wizard blood to resurrect / free him and together they led an army south into the heart of Dickland and fucked shit up there for a while. He is dead now or something. One day I will finish Warheart and find out. But yeah, he's definitely a known figure.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yep, he is indeed. Torture-bishop Hannis Arc uses dickblood to reanimate Sulachan and then Sulachan brings along his "legions of half-people," who are people from beyond the very tall wall-like object who are only half alive and carry the "taint of death," so shamble around the countryside constantly looking for souls to steal and also smell bad -- so they're zombies. It seems as though Terry is really embracing the whole zombie thing, what with the half people and now the jerky people -- love "jerky people" by the way, a wonderful addition to the lexicon of yeardly terms.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...