The Unholy Consult Post-Release SPOILER THREAD II

[Michael Seswatha Jordan]

Here's his response to my question at SA about how much he has written on TNG. Scads-a large number or quantity. Had to look that one up, lol.

As for THE NO-GOD, I have scads of snippets centering mostly on individual characters, but I still have a huge amount of decisions to make.

Like i said before, he has been working on it, but its new. Not part of his original story he conceived 30 years ago. As i said at SA, TNG will probably, imho, focus on what humanity is capable of on its own. 

[Michael Seswatha Jordan]

4 minutes ago, Grizzly Mormont said:

I don't think he knows the answers to the questions. Otherwise, why be so dickish about people asking questions when you just said it's purposefully difficult (impossible) to understand? 

Also, why wait until after kellhus is dead to tell us his pov? 

Despite not knowing what the fuck the story is about, i still enjoy reading it.

Yea, i get that feeling as well sometimes. A lot of cool ideas that ultimately will stay incomplete. I was a little upset about the amount of answers we got, but the ending wasn't a frustrating to me as some have said it was to them. I mean there is a thread at SA right now about the No-God and Ajokli being Dues ex Machina. What? Did you read the same series as I? The No-God was literally introduced in the first half of TDTCB and Ajokli is heavily featured in TAE. I made several posts about how him being called a companion to the Gods in EG was meaningful and that there was more there than what we thought. So I dont see how the ending came out of nowhere. Not saying it was done perfect, but DEM it was not.

[Hello World]

54 minutes ago, Corvinus said:

Just read through the AMA. So Kellhus is fucking dead. Just like that. What a load of BS.

3 minutes ago, Grizzly Mormont said:

I don't think he knows the answers to the questions. Otherwise, why be so dickish about people asking questions when you just said it's purposefully difficult (impossible) to understand? 

There is also something to be said about not giving an answer in the book itself, or at least making something ambiguous enough to allow multiple interpretations, and then giving an authoritative answer in an AMA. And yes, some people might think that he left some mysteries unresolved because he was depicting some very deep philosophical positions when he just didn't know what to do and left things unresolved to later say that he was being deep and ambiguous on purpose.

[redeagl]

1 hour ago, Michael Seswatha Jordan said:

He said that doing a conical is something he would like to do, but with the metaphysics he fears there would still be alot of ambiguity because of its nature. From what i have gotten from the Q&A and AMA is that the 3rd series will not be a linear story, more like Atrocity Tales following different characters and all that. @Darth Richard II, he said he has started and has been writing already, at the moment, Crabicus has been his focus.

Can you post the quote when he specifically said that he is working on Crabicus chapters? 

[Kalbear]

36 minutes ago, Michael Seswatha Jordan said:

Yea, i get that feeling as well sometimes. A lot of cool ideas that ultimately will stay incomplete. I was a little upset about the amount of answers we got, but the ending wasn't a frustrating to me as some have said it was to them. I mean there is a thread at SA right now about the No-God and Ajokli being Dues ex Machina. What? Did you read the same series as I? The No-God was literally introduced in the first half of TDTCB and Ajokli is heavily featured in TAE. I made several posts about how him being called a companion to the Gods in EG was meaningful and that there was more there than what we thought. So I dont see how the ending came out of nowhere. Not saying it was done perfect, but DEM it was not.

Eh. A good argument can be made that it absolutely is, and even was by design. Kelmomas being the No-God and destined to be the No-God and therefore he's invisible to the gods because he is the No-God and he is the No-God because he's blind to the gods is...well, that's kind of special. Especially when said blindness really only gets revealed at the very, very end of TGO and then touched again on TUC.

Him showing up in the Golden Room with almost no setup whatsoever even more so. 

Him not being executed by Kellhus because of the Love That Whatever for Esme, even more so. 

While all of those things can be fated, there's something to be said for things being fated and that result happening as an outcome of fairly organic writing and actions, and those things happening because they need to in order for the story to work out the way it did. When you have people actively asking how Kelmomas even got into the Golden Room, that's less of organic and more of a story convenience; when you have that character living for gods know what reason, you have it even more. And you can go back further - if Kellhus suspected the Dunyain would ever be a threat to him, why on earth did he not destroy them utterly? If he suspected Kelmomas would be a problem, why not orchestrate it so that he died via suicide or something?

Ajokli is another one where the setup was pretty lacking; until pretty much the middle of TUC did we have any vague inkling, and certainly nothing about the God that speaks through Kellhus being a god. Then we get, in all places, the appendix for a description of the Decapitants? Again, doesn't explain anything about why Kellhus couldn't just port into the Golden Room and kill everything (or heck, why he didn't do that to begin with). And while Ajokli is mentioned throughout TAE, he isn't remotely heavily featured; we get a small conversation with the Narindar, we get Kelmomas wrongly thinking he's Ajokli's, and that's it. The notion that the whole war is basically a proxy war between Yatwer and Ajokli isn't even hinted at until chapter 18's end. 

There's a lot of...very convenient happenings. 

[Corvinus85]

Another question came to mind: what exactly happened at Dagliash that gave Kellhus the suspicion that Dunyain were behind it? So an Inchoroi nuke was used. Not sure how that would be impossible for Aurang/Shae to plant.

[Lies And Perfidy]

28 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Ajokli is another one where the setup was pretty lacking; until pretty much the middle of TUC did we have any vague inkling, and certainly nothing about the God that speaks through Kellhus being a god. Then we get, in all places, the appendix for a description of the Decapitants? Again, doesn't explain anything about why Kellhus couldn't just port into the Golden Room and kill everything (or heck, why he didn't do that to begin with). And while Ajokli is mentioned throughout TAE, he isn't remotely heavily featured; we get a small conversation with the Narindar, we get Kelmomas wrongly thinking he's Ajokli's, and that's it. The notion that the whole war is basically a proxy war between Yatwer and Ajokli isn't even hinted at until chapter 18's end. 

I think the problem with Ajokli is one of worldbuilding. Bakker mentioned in the AMA that he didn't talk about the individual gods a ton in the original trilogy because it was just too messy and he had too many other things to introduce. That's fine, I respect it. The problem is he that he did talk about the God of Gods, and the Absolute, and the Solitary God, and probably other things I'm forgetting. And as the first hints of Kellhus's madness and possession crept onto the page, we, as readers, tied them to the elements of the World that we had been introduced to.

So in TAE, by the time Yatwer and Ajokli took center stage, we'd already had an introduction to the various uncertainties around Kellhus and what might be causing them. And that context informed everything that happened in the tetratology. I specifically viewed Ajokli in counterpoint to the Dunyain-vs-divinity mysteries of Kellhus's plan; like, everything had gotten so fucked up by this unexpected (and possibly, to the gods, undetectable) presence that they were starting to involve themselves on the world stage. The idea that Ajokli had been involved all along was just not within the bounds of the world we'd been invited to inhabit.

Of course, it's entirely possibly Bakker did that on purpose -- primed us for uncertainty or whatever by concealing information about the setting -- but if that is the case, within a secondary-world fantasy that's just a cheap fucking trick that doesn't challenge anything except for my patience.

[Kalbear]

37 minutes ago, Corvinus said:

Another question came to mind: what exactly happened at Dagliash that gave Kellhus the suspicion that Dunyain were behind it? So an Inchoroi nuke was used. Not sure how that would be impossible for Aurang/Shae to plant.

Nukes hadn't been used since the Cuno-Inchoroi wars, over 4000 years ago. That they were suddenly deployed - and deployed in a fairly clever way compared to how they had been in the past - made him think Dunyain were definitely behind it.

Of course, going for DunShae style points, this isn't the case at all; Shae is the one who is really good at trapping and luring people into things that appear fine but are not, Shae is the one who knows about Dagliash and the well (as he killed Titirga with it), and Shae is the one who can do new things with nukes that hadn't been previously seen. Kellhus assumes Dunyain because he has no ability to comprehend that a worldborn would be able to do something clever. The concept that the Dunyain would be subsumed (which...come to think of it, they say point blank) by Shae is not something he could reasonably fathom. 

[Darth Richard II]

2 hours ago, Grizzly Mormont said:

 

Despite not knowing what the fuck the story is about, i still enjoy reading it.

I call that the David Lynch effect.

Or that one Gene Wolfe short story about jobs.

[Faint]

This is purely my own suspicion but I do think there is something of a correlation relating to how satisfied one was with the last book tied to whether a reader perceives (perceived?) Kellhus as the protagonist of the story or whether instead they though that title belonged to Achamian.  I have always been of the latter group and nothing Bakker did in the The Unholy Consult was of much surprise to me (excepting, perhaps, the seemingly continued importance of Esmenet).  

In other words, much of the disappointment with Bakker seems to be an outgrowth of the fact that so many readers had their entire conceptions of the story intertwined with Kellhus as the evil genius who was controlling all events, and now that that this theory has been obliterated, they feel adrift of the whole enterprise.  What is more, this group of people -- at least as evidenced by the online forums where this series is much discussed -- seems to be the majority of readers.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the fact that Kellhus remains the central topic of discussion here even though his cause ended in total irrelevancy and is not central to the conclusion of the story, whereas Achamian, Mimara, and Esmenet (maybe even Kayûtas and Serwa), who do factor going forward, are completely ignored. 

[Castel]

42 minutes ago, Faint said:

This is purely my own suspicion but I do think there is something of a correlation relating to how satisfied one was with the last book tied to whether a reader perceives (perceived?) Kellhus as the protagonist of the story or whether instead they though that title belonged to Achamian.  I have always been of the latter group and nothing Bakker did in the The Unholy Consult was of much surprise to me (excepting, perhaps, the seemingly continued importance of Esmenet).  

In other words, much of the disappointment with Bakker seems to be an outgrowth of the fact that so many readers had their entire conceptions of the story intertwined with Kellhus as the evil genius who was controlling all events, and now that that this theory has been obliterated, they feel adrift of the whole enterprise.  What is more, this group of people -- at least as evidenced by the online forums where this series is much discussed -- seems to be the majority of readers.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the fact that Kellhus remains the central topic of discussion here even though his cause ended in total irrelevancy and is not central to the conclusion of the story, whereas Achamian, Mimara, and Esmenet (maybe even Kayûtas and Serwa), who do factor going forward, are completely ignored. 

Insofar as they are ignored (and I've seen a lot of discussion on Mimara and her baby) it's cause we have no idea where they're going. Things haven't got that much clearer since they left Ishual. There is at least something concrete to Kellhus and his plan revealed here. Where the rest of them are going we're going to have to wait till the next series. And it's not a Westworld thing where you can easily predict the next chapter either, Bakker is almost deliberately opaque.

Like...what does one even say about Esmenet after this book? Who cares? 

[Grizzly Mormont]

1 hour ago, Faint said:

 

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the fact that Kellhus remains the central topic of discussion here even though his cause ended in total irrelevancy and is not central to the conclusion of the story, whereas Achamian, Mimara, and Esmenet (maybe even Kayûtas and Serwa), who do factor going forward, are completely ignored. 

As far as I can tell, and to the detriment of the books, it is the author who ignored those characters, not the readers. 

[Damelon]

10 hours ago, Kalbear said:

As to how Kelmomas got into the room - first he frees himself with the file Esme gives him. Then he ends up on the other side of the crater, and runs into (and kills) a Scylvendi scout. We get that scout's pov. We then have him run into a skin-spy that is dressed all in black (just like the Golden Room ones) which is disguised as Esme, and tells him that she'll be whatever he needs. Somehow they go from there through THE ENTIRE FUCKING ORDEAL AND WAR and end up in the Golden room without a single person noticing. 

 

 

Wasn't there a network of tunnels underneath, connecting Golgotterath with the Ring Mountains...?

[Kalbear]

2 minutes ago, Damelon said:

Wasn't there a network of tunnels underneath, connecting Golgotterath with the Ring Mountains...?

Yep, though where they come out and go in and how they were used (and why Kellhus didn't find them) is left as an exercise to the reader.

Like, okay, if you remember there's a detail in the appendix about those tunnels and you think that it's reasonable that a skin-spy knows to disguise itself as Esme and is somehow following Kelmomas despite his teleporting halfway across the world in about 4 days and it makes sense that Kelmomas would be all 'yeah, I'm totally gonna follow that completely not dangerous-seeming skin spy thing because it looks kind of like mom but kills things for funsies' AND it makes sense that Scylvendi scouts are just hanging out by themselves without any kind of backup and it makes sense that they'd just let this insane psychopath kid bounce around the room on the off-chance that he can defeat a god-entangled Kellhus despite no one, not even the reader, knowing about that detail...

Then yeah, it's plausible. 

[Damelon]

1 hour ago, Kalbear said:

Yep, though where they come out and go in and how they were used (and why Kellhus didn't find them) is left as an exercise to the reader.

Like, okay, if you remember there's a detail in the appendix about those tunnels and you think that it's reasonable that a skin-spy knows to disguise itself as Esme and is somehow following Kelmomas despite his teleporting halfway across the world in about 4 days and it makes sense that Kelmomas would be all 'yeah, I'm totally gonna follow that completely not dangerous-seeming skin spy thing because it looks kind of like mom but kills things for funsies' AND it makes sense that Scylvendi scouts are just hanging out by themselves without any kind of backup and it makes sense that they'd just let this insane psychopath kid bounce around the room on the off-chance that he can defeat a god-entangled Kellhus despite no one, not even the reader, knowing about that detail...

Then yeah, it's plausible. 

Kellhus is not omnipotent, despite fans clamoring. That should have been clear by now. I'm not sure what you expect, Kalbear. You find Kelmomas plus Skin-spy traveling to Golgotterath across the battlefield implausible, - rightly so -, another option that is hinted at you find implausible as well. Did you expect RSB drawing out a map for you, connecting the dots that one might have missed? Was that the impression you got from pre-TUC installments?

Kelmomas is Dunyain and the No-God, so who knows what he can or cannot, will or will not do. For me, it was plausible enough and satisfactory. YMMV. I appreciate your passionate posting. I also am glad to read a series, including TUC, that challenges me.

 

 

[Sheep the Evicted]

12 hours ago, Kalbear said:

Aurax might be putting on a show for Kellhus. I'm starting to buy that as a viewpoint, especially if the DunSult is Shae. 

I just don't give a single shit about little Moe or the Scylvendi now that Cnaiur is gone. Not one solitary shit.

 

Like I said to Jurble on the reddit thread (i lost track of his name changes is Jurble Hello World or Aojokli ?) Im not buying Shae being the Dunyain theory. If they were all really sharing one soul one of the Mutilated would have turned to the others and explained what was going on when Aokojli revealed himself. But there is clearly SOMETHING going on there.

 

As for little Moe he actually kind of impressed me. He is too strong (think of everything he endured under the Ghouls) and the intuitive leaps he was making in the tent went too far and happened too fast; for all his (justified) inferiority complex it really does seem like his siblings divinity rubbed off on him.

 

 

15 hours ago, Kalbear said:

Again, I made the comparison to Lost, and now we have confirmation that Bakker's intent is to make his entire series deliberately ambiguous for the most part in order to cause frission. That he now is going into discovery mode and doesn't have the next series mapped out or have a good idea of where he wants to go with it should be an extra big warning; this level of ambiguity is what he has when he KNOWS what he's wanted for 20 years, right? What's it going to be like when he has no idea?

 

Yeah, this is definitely a worry for me. But he's only human and he's juggling alot of balls; I can't really begrudge him a few misses now and again.

[Hello World]

Kellhus wanted to stop the No-God to fulfill his deal with Ajokli, not to save humanity. Humanity was fucked under either outcome. Arguably even more so under the Ajokli plan than the Consult's. 

[.H.]

18 minutes ago, Hello World said:

Kellhus wanted to stop the No-God to fulfill his deal with Ajokli, not to save humanity. Humanity was fucked under either outcome. Arguably even more so under the Ajokli plan than the Consult's. 

True, but we don't know if Kellhus actually realized this.

It's plausible that Kellhus figured he was trading the world for all their souls.  If the vision was Ajokli, he says "I war not with Men, it says, but with the God."  That doesn't really predicate Hell on Eärwa, but of course Ajokli's deal is a monkey's paw.  Even so, I think Kellhus' deal with him is his own sort of monkey's paw, because (possibly) Kellhus thinks he can (via the Daimos) reshape Hell.

[Rhom]

Well... I didn't quite see that coming... The "Lot's Wife" conclusion wasn't on my radar.  

Now to delve into the beginning of this topic.

I'm on the slog of slogs!

[.H.]

Just had a thought about the Shae-Mutilated connection.

Possibly, Shae realized that the Mutilated were actually more suited to best Kellhus and run the Resumption operation, being that 5 super-human-computers are better off than one pretty clever guy.

In other words, where the Progenetors "crafted" the Inchoroi (really Ark, who in turn made Inchoroi, but still the same point) to be salves to the No-God mission and the Inverse Fire, Shae "crafted" the Mutilated to be the same on his own part.