The Unholy Consult Post-Release SPOILER THREAD

[Michael Seswatha Jordan]

Lol. Someone else said it earlier in the thread, maybe DR, but who uses "cunny" in the real world.

[Kalbear]

HAHAHAHHA

Only dragons and GRRM

[Castel]

Bakker's dragons are such little shits. At least Smaug had gravitas

[Hello World]

I liked Wutteat.

[Kalbear]

4 minutes ago, Castel said:

Bakker's dragons are such little shits. At least Smaug had gravitas

IS 
NOT
CUNNY
INFINITE

[Sheep the Evicted]

7 hours ago, WalterX said:

I feel like on the whole 'going over to the Consult' thing... it is  super hard to do...

Yeah fair enough, still sucks that The Unholy Consult was basically only four people though.

2 hours ago, Michael Seswatha Jordan said:

Well, about the only thing I got right was a connection with Ajokli, his love for Esme and that he truly was trying to destroy the Consult and "save" humanity.

Having said that, Kellhus is not a good guy working to save humanity because of gaining emotion. Missed a bit there. Lol.

 

8 hours ago, Castel said:

Whose Messiah? He seems to want to save the world...so he and Ajokli could do to it what the Inchoroi would love to do. 

Why are you guys so quick to believe the things that Kellhus said in the Golden Room ? Remember he was having a war of wills with the Dunyain and - if i'm right - he was out to cheat Ajokli from the beginning. We can be confident that the things he said to Proyas are true but not so confident about the things he said in the Golden Room so as far as I'm concerned the mission is still to save humanity, the Path is just longer than people thought it would be.

2 hours ago, Kalbear said:

Yep, though holy crap was the MRA dragon bad. Seriously, for those of you who got the manuscript early, how could you not tell him how bad this was? How did an editor read this and think 'yes, this is good stuff'. 

Honestly I think its just your bias showing. When I read it I thought it was odd and strangely out of place but i didn't think it was AWFUL!

[Sheep the Evicted]

Does anyone mind reposting the scene of Mim banishing the Wight so we can see how close it is to the No-God scene - I don't have TAE with me. Because while I really want Wert's theory to be true I have to admit most of the textual evidence is in favour of the hologram. Basically the only argument against it is we can't really see why the Dunsult would even bother doing that.

[PapushiSun]

8 hours ago, Kalbear said:

they create the Womb Plague (though I don't know why, only that it was stated that they do)

To stop the cycle of souls without the No-God I think. Making the Nonmen immortal stops souls from leaving for the Outside; killing of the women stops souls from coming into the world and also goes towards the goal of reducing the population to 144,000.

[Michael Seswatha Jordan]

I think Kellhus is in the Outside and we haven't seen the last of him. I think his goal was to save humanity from the Consult from the beginning. Though the Thought evolved, he found about he'll and damnation, so there's more to it now. 

[Castel]

28 minutes ago, Sheep the Evicted said:

Why are you guys so quick to believe the things that Kellhus said in the Golden Room ? Remember he was having a war of wills with the Dunyain and - if i'm right - he was out to cheat Ajokli from the beginning. We can be confident that the things he said to Proyas are true but not so confident about the things he said in the Golden Room so as far as I'm concerned the mission is still to save humanity, the Path is just longer than people thought it would be.

1. I said that's what it seems like, and it is.

2.Why not believe him?

 

[lokisnow]

2. Why not believe kellhus is dead? 

Mornghus is dead after all And we / i did more with much less there . We / I were wrong too.

 

speaking of big moe. Upthread someonr posted a comment from Bakker on how for cishaurim sorcery THOUGHT is the key, and I find it interesting that exposed to cishaurim culture moe came up with the thousandfold THOUGHT. Might be an indication of the ultimate falliability of the thought, it's no more a reliable authority than the inverse fire, seswatha or ajokli. All the various approaches are wrong, tainted by cultural exposure as kellhus states.

[kuenjato]

Bakker's talked about the third series for a long, long time. On the old Three Seas forum, preserved somewhere on the 'nets, he stated that PoN would be followed by two more series, "probably duologies" (this was around the release of TWP), and that TSA consisted of three books split into smaller volumes. The whole "TUC fulfills my original vision" points to his teenage idea of TSA, not what it was by the time of PoN. Bakker being fairly incompetent at self-promotion, it's no wonder a lot of fans are unaware of a third series... has he ever really talked about it on his blog? 

I believe we'll get a third series. This is Bakker's magnum opus, he's certainly not writing/motivated at this point for big financial recognition. As to when, who knows. If it's self-published, well, I doubt the whole "professional editing" will make much of a difference, as we already have a pretty good look as to what unedited Bakker is -- TGO and TUC. Which might be good in some respects: he could go full Bakker with the craziness. It might also be bad in some respects, like the dragon scene from this last volume. And yes, it was bad. It felt like a deliberate thumbing to his critics; the problem is, it cheapens the conflict with its silliness. In fact, that entire sequence + the Ordeal battle was sort of ill-placed... the only important storyline at that point was the Golden Room, everything else was trivial and just delaying the climax. It would have been better to have placed both of those sequences as their own chapter, then given us the climactic scene that determined everything as its own mic-drop. 

[jurble]

More thoughts on the No-God literally being God - Samarmas, the voice in Li'l Kel's head, is God.  It's a inversion of "The Devil made me do it." - in this case it's "God made me do it."

[.H.]

15 hours ago, Kalbear said:

The gods can apparently see sranc and bashrag - or at least Mimara can. I agree, it's not entirely clear. Do gods see snakes? Or is the god view like the view of Xavier through Cerebro?

We are definitely confounded by the fact that Mimara has the God's sight and mundane vision as well.  It means we can't really be sure what gods can see by themselves though.  Perhaps that is why the Judging Eye exists?  To allow the God of gods to "see" what it normally could not?

I still carry my crackpot theory that they don't really see manufactured beings the same as they see "natural" ones, on account of them being outside the lines they can follow.  I think it might go even further, Golgotterath is said to be outside the god's vision, because it is profoundly alien to Eärwa.  In this way, I think anyone who enters in it and so is moved by it, is sort of "lost" to the god's sight then.  A thread separated from the main cord of causality and so unseen by them.  In the same way, the things made by the Ark are not readily accessible by the gods, because they are not of the gods, not truly of Eärwa.

I am fully prepared to be wrong though, like usual.

16 hours ago, Kalbear said:

As I said, it makes sense if the Ark needs a soul from each world to determine the code of that world and then subsume it via No-God initiation.

Unless, the Ark didn't need a soul, because the Ark already had a soul.

Consider, the Ark made the Inchoroi to serve it.  Why?  It was the Ark itself who was looking for the answer to the "soul problem."  So, when Seswatha says the Ark was once living, it wasn't living in the sense of breathing, it was living in the sense of it having had a soul.  In other words, perhaps the Ark is the Progenitor, or rather, what is left of them.

But wait, look how the DûnSult refer to it.  Not the Ark, but just Ark.  That's it's name.  It is a being.  A mostly artificial one at this point, but one nonetheless.  It died, in the sense that the soul that kept it running was gone, post-Arkfall though, which is why the Inchoroi were so lost, they were a weapon race with nothing to wield them.  Because it was Ark who wielded them before, via the No-God apparatus, which was probably where the soul of Ark was.  It was Ark's "brain," which is probably why it can control all the Tekne things too.

So the No-God apparatus didn't need a soul while Ark "lived," Ark had it's own soul, a soul that was seeking to find the answer to the 144,000 question.  That question is what lead to it making the Inchoroi, who, later abandoned by Ark when it died in the fall, were left to try to figure out just what Ark was trying to do.  A prosthesis needs something to wield it.  Ark wielded it while it was still "alive" but now, some other soul needs to "read the code."

So, what kind of soul is needed to do so?  Presumably one that is suitably close to Ark's original one.  And if the DûnSult are right and the Progenitor's sin was to stray too close to Absolute, then the surrogate soul needs to also be suitably close to the Absolute too.

17 hours ago, Kalbear said:

No-God functions as a tripartite system to seal a world from the Outside. It does so by the following:

• Stops all soul movement from the Outside while population is being reduced & redirects all soul movement to the Outside from death and reads it until it hits the magic number
• Introduces a virulent plague that kills most of the population in a selective fashion, reducing the population to 144k.
• Introduces another plague that does not kill, but leaves the remaining population immortal and sterile, thus preserving the 144k number forever.

The inchoroi used the No-God system to determine the Womb Plague first, jerry-rigging that part to work on the Nonmen. They only thought that it made them immortal, and didn't realize it made the females sterile, but it was working as intended. This discovery let them discover at least more about the No-God and how it worked. 

Shae was able to determine that the No-God required a soul to function as its primary system, and the Inchoroi knew they had to reduce the population down to 144k (but did not know how this was done in the past other than shooting things and blowing things up). None of them knew about the Indigo plague. 

When the No-God was destroyed, the Indigo plague was released.

Alternate crackpot: The No-God was never destroyed. The planned operation is that the No-God reads in souls, gets some amount of information, and when it receives enough it releases a plague to kill most of the remaining population, assuming that the population has already been made sterile and immortal. Thus the No-God death and indigo plague release is simply the normal thing, and it would have sealed off the world - but since men had not been inoculated with the womb plague, it didn't stop the cycle.

I don't know, I think on the one hand, it's probably clear that the No-God functions to end the cycle of souls.

On the other though, the rest is unclear.  If the Indigo Plague was in there the whole time, why not just let it out and kill tons of people that way?  Why hold it in?

There is one thing the DûnSult say though, that is isn't just about achieving a number, but rather the art of reaching that number.  I don't think that people passing, say "silently" by plague or some such, is enough to ignite "the code."  No, it requires death violent and abrupt, perhaps.

I think the Inchoroi thought that they could "fake" the effect of the No-God via the Womb-Plague and it would be alright.  Only to realize that Men were now as much of a problem as Nonmen.  But they probably somehow expended their ability to sequence DNA at that point, having already perhaps "used it up" in rendering the Nonmen's genetic material for use in Sranc and Bashrags.  Not to mention Wracû.  Or perhaps Sil was the one who knew that too and he was dead.

Aurang was left to try to figure out what he could with no real idea what was what.  That might be why there was no Womb-Plague for Man coming.

 

On a different note, I was confused at this passage at first:

Quote

To live is to be sodden. There is nothing arid about existence, nothing laundered or distinct. To live is to reek, to forever seep into circumstances. All gateways to the human stink. The ears. The mouth as much as the anus, for some.

And the eyes, the eyes most of all.

To live is to consume and to exude, to excrete and to chew, to turn upon a thousand hidden alchemies, rheumy transformations of what we lust into what we abhor ... or love.

And so life convulsed and life was expelled from the socket, drawn sheeted in blood from the suffocating real, the very muck of amniotic origin, and held exposed to the scrutiny of cold Void, the hospice of prayer ...

So that some essence might alight ...

Some breath be drawn and screamed.

But I think this is literally describing the process of being put in the Carapace.  Note the emphasis on eyes, despite the fact that the No-God is functionally blind.  Fruit that perhaps bears more scrutiny.

[Kalbear]

My assumption is how the inchoroi used the womb plague and no God is by rule that whatever they do is incomplete and probably wrong. So why did the indigo plague get released? By accident; the consult had no idea it existed. They didn't know that this was the normal means of the prosthesis working. They didn't know how the thing worked anyway. For a thousand years they tried to get it working and lucked out without understanding why it worked, and then for 2000 years they tried more. They were surprised about the womb plague and genuinely thought it was a good thing. 

But just take it on first principles: if your mission was to go from planet to planet, reducing the population while the no God is active to 144k and then stopping, how would you do this in the most efficient way? Especially if simply obliterating the populace isn't an option and isn't what you want?

Would you create a weapon race that was built to seduce and control and subvert? Why? The inchoroi aren't particularly good warriors; what they are is very good terrorist and abductors. 

Why do you need to abduct anyone? Because that's what you need to get the prosthesis functional. After it is active you can wait. 

[PapushiSun]

9 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Would you create a weapon race that was built to seduce and control and subvert? Why? The inchoroi aren't particularly good warriors; what they are is very good terrorist and abductors. 

The progenitors designed the Inchoroi to heap damnation upon themselves so that they would be driven to close the world from the outside. I think the Inchoroi were lost and leaderless without the Ark's intelligence to lead them. They're like the sranc or bashrag that way. Under the leadership of the Ark and the No-God they're great warriors.

 

18 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

They were surprised about the womb plague

Were they? According the glossary, the Inchoroi were already evacuating to the ark and when the Cunuroi marched to the ark, the Inchoroi were ready for war with new weapons races and chorae. 

[.H.]

32 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

But just take it on first principles: if your mission was to go from planet to planet, reducing the population while the no God is active to 144k and then stopping, how would you do this in the most efficient way? Especially if simply obliterating the populace isn't an option and isn't what you want?

Would you create a weapon race that was built to seduce and control and subvert? Why? The inchoroi aren't particularly good warriors; what they are is very good terrorist and abductors. 

Why do you need to abduct anyone? Because that's what you need to get the prosthesis functional. After it is active you can wait. 

Well, actually it seems the pre-Arkfall they were pretty proficient warriors.  Sil sounds like he was pretty "built for war" and heck, even Aurang claims he wrestled Ciolgli himself and bested him.  He says it was "gaft after graft" that "sapped his monumental frame."  Plausibly some grafts also made Aurax into a grovelling idiot too, unfortunately.

I think once Sil, probably the biggest and most war-like died, the remaining Inchoroi realized that physical prowess was not going to get it done on Eärwa, like it did everywhere else.  Ark being broken though, Aurang was left to try to figure out, on his own, the best way to do that.  As we know, Aurang is a deranged, depraved monstrosity, so of course he picked some weird, fucked up, not-so-great-idea way to do it.  The result was the weirdo, rape alien we see in the series.

Not that I am saying that pre-graft Inchoroi would have been nice guys.  In fact, we are told just the opposite, they are made to heap damnation on themselves to keep them enslaved on the Inverse Fire and so on Ark's mission.

Indeed though, for all Aurang's crappy ideas, he does actually (round-aboutly) get the No-God functional, via Shae though.  So the rapey, seduction route almost works, really.  That doesn't mean it was the mods-operandi for every world.  In fact, I think it's just the opposite really.  The plan was descend on a world and have Ark watch it die screaming, checking for the "code flash."

The whole thing went to shit though when Ark fucked up and crashed into Eärwa, killing itself...

[Kalbear]

As to the glossary I used to think that too, until Bakker's comment that it was jerry-rigged and unintentional. I can try and find it If you like.

 

On designing inchoroi to be damned - that's true. But why would you design them to seduce? That's not a warrior ability in any real way, and it's certainly not necessary to do horrible things when you're 10 feet tall and are strong.  

[Valandil]

Just finished last night. Loved it. It's clearly not the end of the story and its quality or maybe the satisfaction to be gained from this series depends to a large extent on the resolutions in next series. As a cliffhanger though it was brutal!.

1. Found the drift into dehumanisation of the ordeal devastating, maybe a trifle overlong, but it was an ordeal.

2. Sorwa's arc was slightly unsatisfying although I loved Ishterebinth from TGO, so maybe worth the detour. Perhaps it was the manner of his death which was meant to show us something.. about Kelmomas and how he saw through the White Luck when even Kelhus could not (or appeared not to). 

3. Liked Serwa's stuff too. Exciting. 

4. Loved the Dunsult reveal. Only against other Dunyain can he really be in trouble

5. The Ajokli stuff in the golden room was fascinating, as has been the discussion of it here. I feel like the daimos and its implications should have figured larger in discussions of what Kelhus' plans were, especially with the POV in the Outside and the power available there, and given the whole series in some ways is about how to avoid going there! My take on it while reading it is the same as some here, it's part of the grand plan to overcome damnation. He willingly died to save humanity (Christlike) and is down there harrowing or conquering Hell using power he got from, or through his pact with Ajokli. The "bootstrap god" theory that he has become a god or godlike being through his pact with Ajokli or accumulation of worshippers (or even his atrocities as appears to be happening with Cnaiur) and therefore exists outside of time and has been influencing things up to the point of perhaps even sacrificing his mortal self unbeknownst to that mortal self appeals to me also. 

6. I like Werthead's theory that there were two timelines operating until Mimara observing Kelhus / No-god collapsed them into one (wrong one Mimara) otherwise whats the point of her, or the eye, just an extra few seconds warning that shit's about to get apocalyptic? Big deal. Not saying its right but it feels like it should be. 

7. Malowebi is a bit of a puzzler? Just for the 3rd party POV?

8. Kelmomas is No-god. Also feel like in hindsight the clues were there, sharing the two souled nature with Nau-cauyuti, his ability to see the narindar, yet not be seen etc.

Obviously there are people posting here who's knowledge of the series and its philosophical underpinnings would justify the awarding of PHDs. Forgive the superficiality of my observations.

[PapushiSun]

2 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

until Bakker's comment that it was jerry-rigged and unintentional.

I think I remember RSB's comment about the womb plague being a kluge. But I didn't read that as saying the womb plague being unintentional, just a rough workaround to accomplish the death of birth. Stopping births is necessary.

 

8 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

But why would you design them to seduce?

I don't think they were. Their seductions are clearly sorcery, which the Inchoroi could've only learned after arrival on Earwa.