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Bakker L - Unholy Consultation and Collaboration (Now with TUC Spoilers!)


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I feel like if they don't have a big budget a lot of things will come off as cartoonish. Sorcery, the Consult, Kellhus's kung-fu skills, the Synthese, etc. In fact almost everything, especially when the political intrigue in season 1 gets compared to GoT and people realize that it's not as good.

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I don't get the Bakker's world is sexist argument, neither the "that's how it was back then" . 

 

Of course sexism and other "isms" are worse in this book than in "reality". Half of the world was destroyed by crazed monsters, schoolmen can kill thousands with their powers and Gods are real(and insane). Human rights,enlightment ideals etc arise if the conditions are right, they don't just appear out of thin air.... Our morals evolved because technology made it possible. As far as I know Earwa doesn't even have the printing press, let alone electricity and internet. 

 

Most readers(especially americans) are outraged because they don't appreciate how hard it was to get here. Thousands of wars, genocides, rebellions etc before ideas like freedom, equality etc became possible. 

 

Heck, you blame Earwans for being unfair yet the "self evident truth" of all men being equal came with a lot of cavaets... in a society much more advanced than Bakker's world

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20 minutes ago, Hello World said:

I feel like if they don't have a big budget a lot of things will come off as cartoonish. Sorcery, the Consult, Kellhus's kung-fu skills, the Synthese, etc. In fact almost everything, especially when the political intrigue in season 1 gets compared to GoT and people realize that it's not as good.

Exactly. While I think you could get away with some lower-grade FX such as the Synthese and perhaps the skin-spies, and you can go for just cartoon thuggery for Kellhus and Cnaiur fighting, Bakkerverse is above all else high fantasy and high magic, and pretending it isn't makes it really dull. There is virtually no intrigue worth a damn, the characters are okay but not insanely compelling on their own, there isn't that much sex or reason for sex unless you're going for that demographic of old incontinent dude fucking prostitute action (which to be fair is probably a big demographic). So you've basically got two things to differentiate: the philosophical arguments and the sorcery. 

Good luck with the first, and good luck doing the second without having a decent budget.

That said, if the Magicians can do it I don't see why this can't. The expense would largely be about making things like the capital look alive and interesting and having all those extras. 

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3 minutes ago, Lutarez said:

I don't get the Bakker's world is sexist argument, neither the "that's how it was back then" . 

 

Bakker set out to make a world that was specifically worse than our own. He said this point blank. You can choose not to get it if you want, and that's cool, but it doesn't make it accurate.

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1 hour ago, Darth Richard II said:

I don't want to go down this rabbit hole to deep again, but the "that's how it was back then" has been thoroughly debunked by many posters and Bakker himself, who is on record saying he made things way worse than it would have been on earth in a similar time period on purpose.

Edit: and you all already ironed all that out. That's what I get for posting before I read the whole thread.

It's worse in more fonts than just the sexism, tbh.

1 hour ago, Hello World said:

I feel like if they don't have a big budget a lot of things will come off as cartoonish. Sorcery, the Consult, Kellhus's kung-fu skills, the Synthese, etc. In fact almost everything, especially when the political intrigue in season 1 gets compared to GoT and people realize that it's not as good.

It can't be made without a huge budget. Bakker's armies are far bigger than GoT's. The biggest GoT battle is like the equivalent of the smallest Bakker battle ( Kiyuth. ) .

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2 hours ago, Kalbear said:

Kelmomas, by the way, got taken by a skin-spy or at least met one in the guise of Esme, a few chapters before the Golden Room. How he crossed the entire battle line and was welcomed by the Consult is left as an exercise to the reader.

I didn't mean how he got there - that was relatively clear: the faux-Esmenet took him there.

No, the explanation I was after is why Kel is invisible to the Gods.

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11 minutes ago, Mark Erikson said:

I didn't mean how he got there - that was relatively clear: the faux-Esmenet took him there.

No, the explanation I was after is why Kel is invisible to the Gods.

 

9 minutes ago, Hello World said:

The only explanation is that he's the no God and so was always invisible to the gods, just like Mimara always had the judging eye even before she got pregnant. This was Bakker's answer in the ama too, by the way. 

Yep, this. While I did actually figure this out prior to Bakker's reveal, the only actual reveal of this was extratextual. 

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1 hour ago, Kalbear said:

Bakker set out to make a world that was specifically worse than our own. He said this point blank. You can choose not to get it if you want, and that's cool, but it doesn't make it accurate.

Did you read my whole comment ? I understand that Bakker's world is sexist, racist and all arround horrible, what I don't understand is the argument against that. Simple math. 

 

Our medieval world=sexist 

Our medieval world+ Sranc, the apocalypse etc = even more sexist 

 

If he made the ammount of sexism less(or the same) than medieval Europe, his world would not be authentic.

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Show writer, use Kalbear's (I think it was him, forgive me if I'm not giving proper credit) idea posted a few months/years ago. Make Akka a woman and have Kellhus seduce her.

Also, every beard must be plaited. This is going to start a trend in facial hair.

Good luck portraying the Nonmen without Ridley Scott suing you for stealing the design of the Engineers.

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38 minutes ago, Hello World said:

The only explanation is that he's the no God and so was always invisible to the gods, just like Mimara always had the judging eye even before she got pregnant. This was Bakker's answer in the ama too, by the way. 

 

One crazy  explanation that kinda makes sense(without being a paradox) is basically having multiple universes. 

 

If in one universe someone becomes the no-god then this affects all other realities. That is why Kelmomas is invisible, in another reality (similar but still different)he has already become the no-god . The gods only exist in one reality, hence they confuse the two. Kellmomas and alt-Kelmomas are both invisible

 

This way the logos (that what comes after) still works.

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11 minutes ago, Cithrin's Ale said:

Show writer, use Kalbear's (I think it was him, forgive me if I'm not giving proper credit) idea posted a few months/years ago. Make Akka a woman and have Kellhus seduce her.

Also, every beard must be plaited. This is going to start a trend in facial hair.

Good luck portraying the Nonmen without Ridley Scott suing you for stealing the design of the Engineers.

It's too bad H.R. Giger is no longer with us.

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7 minutes ago, Lutarez said:

 

One crazy  explanation that kinda makes sense(without being a paradox) is basically having multiple universes. 

 

If in one universe someone becomes the no-god then this affects all other realities. That is why Kelmomas is invisible, in another reality (similar but still different)he has already become the no-god . The gods only exist in one reality, hence they confuse the two. Kellmomas and alt-Kelmomas are both invisible

 

This way the logos (that what comes after) still works.

Bakker has explained it though and said it's a paradox. Whether or not you believe him is a matter of some, eh, "discussion".

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18 minutes ago, Lutarez said:

Did you read my whole comment ? I understand that Bakker's world is sexist, racist and all arround horrible, what I don't understand is the argument against that. Simple math. 

 

Our medieval world=sexist 

Our medieval world+ Sranc, the apocalypse etc = even more sexist 

 

 

If he made the ammount of sexism less(or the same) than medieval Europe, his world would not be authentic.

Except that's not the reason why.

Our medieval world = sexist.

Earwa is a medieval world which also arbitrarily defines women as less than men. It has nothing to do with sranc, or the apocalypse, or Inchoroi, or any of that. It is because the rules of the entire universe are set so that women are objectively worth less than men, and you can even see this if you have the right viewer.

People object to that because it's incredibly arbitrary and also appears to have zero actual point other than to show how things would suck really bad. 

Note that Bakker had originally thought of making it about race instead of gender - where the darker-skinned people were worth less than lighter-skinned - but his publisher flat out said it wouldn't get published. I am more skeptical of this claim now, but the point is that Bakker always wanted to make some arbitrary rule of worth being immoral to our current sensibilities, and stuck with women. 

Now, if the world had been made more sexist over time because of how the world evolves, that'd be one thing. I made an argument for that a long time back - where in a world where 60% of the women got wiped out by a plague, it would be an obvious thing to make women even more coveted and prized as a resource, making them more protected and more treated as objects. That would make sense in the same way that the sexism in Fury Road makes sense, but that's not what this world is. 

18 minutes ago, Cithrin's Ale said:

Show writer, use Kalbear's (I think it was him, forgive me if I'm not giving proper credit) idea posted a few months/years ago. Make Akka a woman and have Kellhus seduce her.

So my idea wasn't just to make Akka a woman - it was to make the entire Mandate, Seswatha included, be women. This does a number of interesting things to the story, though it would change it significantly; notably, it makes the Mandate sacrifice of no family/children be a lot more personal, it makes the Mandate knowing the gnosis vs. the anagnosis be about gender, and it makes the Akka/Kellhus dynamics and the Esme/Kellhus dynamics more interesting. Kellhus doesn't have to seduce Akka, seducing a lesbian Esme is almost as interesting and is a good parallel to Moe seducing Cnaiur. 

Conphas as a woman is also really good, though, and a lot easier.

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1 hour ago, Hello World said:

The only explanation is that he's the no God and so was always invisible to the gods, just like Mimara always had the judging eye even before she got pregnant. This was Bakker's answer in the ama too, by the way. 

It's not a particularly satisfying answer.  The Consult just have to wait around until a No-God randomly gets born?  The text sort of implied this, with the Dunyain saying that the Consult had jammed soul after soul into the Carapace until they got their hands on Nau-Cayuti, but still, that's a pretty bad plan (and as far as I can recall, we aren't given an explanation of why Nau-Cayuti was a No-God candidate either).

The whole "he was fated to be the No-God" just doesn't sit right with me.  It does feel paradoxical.  Fate, presumably, is the domain of the Gods.  Why would fate spin out a soul that is outside its own scope?

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