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Bakker's TGO Excerpts II: Mining our Merest Fraction [Spoilers]s


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43 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Oh, right, crackpot I came up with earlier. Chanv isn't salted sorcerer - it's salted Ciphrang. 

Which actually has a little backbone to it. Chanv is huge among the Ainoni, And who summons Ciphrang through the Diamos? The Scarlet Spires. Only drawback is that I thought I remember somewhere(in the books), where they said Chanv was cultivated in Nilnamesh(SP?). 

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Chanv is said to come from a small country in the north of High Ainion the people there are Xiuhianni, which is the one tribe of men who refused to move from Eanna to Earwa.  

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2 minutes ago, Darzin said:

Chanv is said to come from a small country in the north of High Ainion the people there are Xiuhianni, which is the one tribe of men who refused to move from Eanna to Earwa.  

Indeed, your right. Thanks for the correction. I did remember is wasnt made in High Ainon, though.

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Also, on the speculation of the Breaking of the Gates being the event that split the God into Gods - probably not. Breaking of the Gates appears to refer to part of the migration of the 5 tribes into the lands of Earwa. Crackpot might indicate that it's both - that the reason the tribes rose up at that point was because they had now become fat with desire or something like that - but chances are the breaking of the gates refers literally to gates, like, breaking and stuff.

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Alright chaps, I haven't been here in a while.  I need a tl;dr on updated theories.

 

Also, humorous the axlotl tank theory of Dunyain women was true.  Bit silly, since men and women are essentially the same aside from the y-chromosome, breeding axlotl tank women while keeping the Dunyain fairly human would be so hard as to be nearly impossible through just selection.  I could see it being done by a Sci-Fi society with, you know, genetic engineering and hormone baths to activate dormant pathways or something like that during development, but there just wouldn't be a step-wise path between human female/human male and axlotl tank/Dunyain male through just selective breeding.

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5 minutes ago, Claustrophobic Jurble said:

Alright chaps, I haven't been here in a while.  I need a tl;dr on updated theories.

 

Also, humorous the axlotl tank theory of Dunyain women was true.  Bit silly, since men and women are essentially the same aside from the y-chromosome, breeding axlotl tank women while keeping the Dunyain fairly human would be so hard as to be nearly impossible through just selection.  I could see it being done by a Sci-Fi society with, you know, genetic engineering and hormone baths to activate dormant pathways or something like that during development, but there just wouldn't be a step-wise path between human female/human male and axlotl tank/Dunyain male through just selective breeding.

Clearly you are:

-Being selective in your whining since hey, it's just fantasy maaaaaannnnn.

-Unable to deal with the HARD IMPLICATIONS only Bakker and his most loyal fans can cope with.

-A Kalbear alt

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1 hour ago, Sci-2 said:

Clearly you are:

-Being selective in your whining since hey, it's just fantasy maaaaaannnnn.

-Unable to deal with the HARD IMPLICATIONS only Bakker and his most loyal fans can cope with.

-A Kalbear alt

The gates remain closed.

See, the thing you want to say is that you get that there are a lot of misogynistic organisations in the world and really the degree of abuse isn't the issue - so suspension of disbelief issues here do not matter, the Dunyain men could have been abusing women in some other way in their fanaticism to become god. That you recognise that if whale mothers aren't possible, that doesn't mean the Dunyain women would actually have been treated just fine and dandy. And acknowledge that just focusing on the detail of it would seem a way of avoiding discussing whatever abuse they would receive and instead focusing on closing the fiction up tight so it can be packed away. That you get that people who care about women's rights will simply rationalise how the Dunyains pursuit ends up at some level of abuse (unless one wants to rationalise that Dunyain community would treat women just fine, I guess - in which case discussion would be about that rather than the whale mothers perse).

Also although it might be attributing to much to him as an author, but that Bakker might not have provided full on foreshadowing to support the fictional concept simply to trigger responses from those who are just looking at the fiction only. It's the same as how people who are interested in questions of free will and what is reality in the matrix movie don't get hung up on the idea the machines could have used cows. It's really not the point.

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52 minutes ago, Triskan said:

 

Damn, I love this theory.  I've been a big proponent of the chanv = salted sorcerer, but I could dig this.

The boy at Shimeh who was sweeping up the salt "that would be his fortune..."  Were any Ciphrang salted at Shimeh?  I recall that Iyokus calls three.  At least one I believe is taken out by the Cish, and I don't know if they would salt in that case.  The third flies off after Akka under Iyokus' instruction.  But wasn't one of them choraed?  And did they salt?

I think salt is just incredibly valuable - that's why that boy was trying to get some?

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14 minutes ago, Triskan said:

We've been over this before (not necessarily you and me, the global "we"), but I don't read that scene that way, and it seems like it's a clue that the boy is collecting salt at the scene of a sorcerer battle.  Or at least that's the way the scene reads unless someone can come up with an explanation of why the Synthese was telling him a secret and why that was the whole cause for the scene. 

Same way I've always read it. Though I believe the secret Aurang let him in on, led the boy to horrors unimaginable by Aurang. He showed the boy "love", so to say. At least that's how I read it. I think the boy knew well what the salt of a sorcerer was worth and what it is turned into, Chanv.

That was always the way I read the scene, I do like Kalbear's crackpot nonetheless.

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7 minutes ago, Michael Seswatha Jordan said:

Same way I've always read it. Though I believe the secret Aurang let him in on, led the boy to horrors unimaginable by Aurang. He showed the boy "love", so to say. At least that's how I read it. I think the boy knew well what the salt of a sorcerer was worth and what it is turned into, Chanv.

That was always the way I read the scene, I do like Kalbear's crackpot nonetheless.

Isn't Chanv production a mystery though? Why would a boy on the street know it?

And if it's not for Chanv, what reason is sorcerer salt more valuable than regular salt and why has it not be elucidated after all this time?

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Just now, Sci-2 said:

Isn't Chanv production a mystery though? Why would a boy on the street know it?

And if it's not for Chanv, what reason is sorcerer salt more valuable than regular salt and why has it not be elucidated after all this time?

I see your point. That's just how I've read it.

Maybe street urchins are the runners/pushers of Chanv and are in the know? Very common in our society.

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Sorry, it's been a while-- anyone happen to have some passages handy detailing the effects of chanv, or related trivia?

feel like there's got to be something to the effects of sranc consumption that's been foreshadowed in the books that came before. Though I could see sranc-quya-sorcerer:bug powder-mugwumps jism-black meat of giant aquatic centipede parallel. 

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1 minute ago, R'hllors Red Lobster said:

Sorry, it's been a while-- anyone happen to have some passages handy detailing the effects of chanv, or related trivia?

feel like there's got to be something to the effects of sranc consumption that's been foreshadowed in the books that came before. Though I could see sranc-quya-sorcerer:bug powder-mugwumps jism-black meat of giant aquatic centipede parallel. 

Increased intellect, extends lifespan, causes skin to go translucent.

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Increased intellect, extends lifespan, causes skin to go translucent.

When put that way, kind of makes it obvious, right?

Chanv is powdered inchoroi.

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3 hours ago, Callan S. said:

Also although it might be attributing to much to him as an author, but that Bakker might not have provided full on foreshadowing to support the fictional concept simply to trigger responses from those who are just looking at the fiction only. It's the same as how people who are interested in questions of free will and what is reality in the matrix movie don't get hung up on the idea the machines could have used cows. It's really not the point.

It's worth pointing out that from a Gnostic perspective the Machines in the Matrix are akin to the Archons in that they lack the fragment of divine light (IIRC this the pleroma). So the sucking on humans as batteries is more the Archons hunger for the pleroma than an optimal means of getting electricity.

Comparing this with the Bakkerverse - are the Hundred also somehow artificial, or at least lacking in something Earwan souls possess? The text even suggests they are more like spiders than humans - and for all their power they can't even fight against the No-God or perceive its arrival. 

Perhaps the Hundred and No-God are forms of material life, and just as the Hundred need to feed on souls to live the No-God needs a soul in the Carapace to exist? But if a human or Nonman soul possesses that shard of pleroma, a fragment of the True God, can that fragment somehow serve to awaken that deity somehow? Is this how the No-God was defeated the first time around?

 

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8 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

When put that way, kind of makes it obvious, right?

Chanv is powdered inchoroi.

Ah so the Well of the Aborted is located near Chanv production?

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