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Bakker LI - The Darkness That Lies Ahead (TUC Spoilers!)


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1 hour ago, Rhom said:

The way I remember reading it, the scene felt like the DunSult just sort of thought, “Well... look here... we’ve got another Anasurimbor.  Let’s use him.”

Yeah, that's the impression I got. The Consult were like "oh shit, Ajokli is here, we're fucked..." then Kelmomas shows up and Kellhus is killed, they realize there is something special about Kelmomas so they shove him into the sarcophagus. I haven't re-read or factored in any AMA comments on this if they exist.

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12 hours ago, Rhom said:

If Lil Kel was brought to the Golden Room before AK, why didn’t they go ahead and shove him in the sarcophagus before Kellhus ever got there????

I haven't really done a reread, but why should we assume that little Kel gets to the Golden Room before Kellhus does?

I mean, it's plausible he does, but also that he was being held in another place and only found the Golden Room after Kellhus had already entered (i.e. the DunSult had called all the skin-spies, so no one would have been guarding him).  It seems implausible that if he was in the Golden Room for as long as Kellhus was there, that he would wait so long to reveal himself.

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1 hour ago, The Prince of Newcastle said:

I dont understand:

Exactly how the arc functions

What the No God actually is

How the sarcophogas works

Why the No God is a whirlwind

How technologicaly advanced the Inchoroi are etc.

I have no idea why they need an Anasurimbor to reboot the No God either.

 

You honestly wouldnt think I had read 7 books in this series 

Well, no one understands how the Ark actually functions, not even anyone in the book's universe most probably, because the Progenitors are most likely all dead.

We have discussed for years and years the nature of the No-God and probably will for many more, so I don't think you are at all alone there.

Again, like the Ark, the mechanism of it's function is completely unknown in-Universe and out.

The Whirlwind is mostly a Biblical allusion, but consider how the No-God is likened to a "collapse of Subject and Object" I don't find it hard to relate the Whirlwind to the physical symptom of that metaphysical collapse.  In the same way that the sigularity of a black hole creates an accretion disk via the collapsing matter, so perhaps the No-God.

No one really knows how adanced they were though, since they were part of the tail-end of the technology themselves.

Some similarity between Nau-Cayuti (and little Kel) to whatever was designed to run the system in the first place seems most likely.

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19 hours ago, Hello World said:

Yeah, that's the impression I got. The Consult were like "oh shit, Ajokli is here, we're fucked..." then Kelmomas shows up and Kellhus is killed, they realize there is something special about Kelmomas so they shove him into the sarcophagus. I haven't re-read or factored in any AMA comments on this if they exist.

My take on this was that Kelmomas was being held just in case, and had already had a conversation prior to this ("I told you the gods can't see me"). The Dunyain, after Kellhus was killed and they saw what Kelmomas could do, immediately came to the conclusion that he was the promised Anasurimbor. Prior to that, they had assumed wrongly that Kellhus was the destined one. 

But simply given the new information - that the gods really couldn't see Kelmomas and he was an Anasurimbor - they realized the truth. 

As to this book feeling unsatisfying even though the bad guys 'win' - I think it's largely because the bad guys won by doing basically fuck all to oppose the heroes. They weren't very successful at any point in the game, there was never any real feel about how Kellhus was going to pull this off, and even the attack on Golgotterath felt like it was going to be a win. Their plot to recreate the No-God didn't have any major steps going for it or any real keys save 'let Kellhus come here'. And even that turned out to be unnecessary. Combine that with Mimara and Akka's aborted, weak conclusion and the relative lack of inertia that the Momemn storyline had, and the result was an unsatisfying arc with a reasonable conclusion that to me felt a bit unearned. 

Heck, the only times that Kellhus did anything stupid or bad happened to be around Ajokli and his darkness; if he simply doesn't go back to Momemn he wins (or at least Ajokli does). The failures aren't because the enemy was awesome, but because the good guys were dumb. That works a lot better with Martin when he uses the good guys' failings as an opportunity by smart people; in this case, the good guys failed and the bad guys barely even knew. 

This goes with the comments made about how for a book called The Unholy Consult, there wasn't a whole lot of Consult in it. 

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Yea, it certainly went against a lot of expectations. When something is called, the Unholy Consult, you'd think they would have been a lot more active. Then, I remember thinking that they probably didn't have to do much at all considering what was going on with the Ordeal.

I have no problem with something going against expectation. Circle of Iron did that and I LOVED that movie, but with the Unholy Consult, so much of it felt a bit anti-climatic. 

Honestly, even if Kellhus DID succeed, what happens next? Mathinet got that right. 

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I think the 'anticlimaxes' are kind of the point - it's like watching giants of meaning dying. The arc being a kind of elephants graveyard. It's a bit avante gard, yes, a bit too much like academic literature which tries to avoid action in favor of being real semantically clever that's possibly aimed more toward PHD having ingroups (and even they might just pretend to get it). But the ending does have action and events. The thing with the series is that big, broad events are fairly clear. But as you get down into the smaller and smaller pictures, things become vague and uncertain. With bigger picture questions, like did the ordeal get to Golgoterath, the answer is clear. But get down to smaller pciture things, even if they determine big picture things (like Mimara if she'd seen Kellhus with the judging eye) and you get indeterminacy. I think if the big picture stuff was vague, I wouldn't be all that happy with the ending. But I think there's a compromise there between action and thought inducing mysteriousness.

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17 hours ago, Dora Vee said:

Honestly, even if Kellhus DID succeed, what happens next?

He would conquer hell, enslave the Outside. I think that's what Kellhus' deal with Ajokli was all about. Kellhus give Ajokli access to the world in return for power in the Outside. 

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5 hours ago, PapushiSun said:

He would conquer hell, enslave the Outside. I think that's what Kellhus' deal with Ajokli was all about. Kellhus give Ajokli access to the world in return for power in the Outside. 

Per the AMA, Kellhus didn't intend for this to occur. What he DID intend is still unclear, but he did not expect to give Ajokli power over the granary. 

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29 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Per the AMA, Kellhus didn't intend for this to occur. What he DID intend is still unclear, but he did not expect to give Ajokli power over the granary. 

Did we ever decide who the other Kellhus was in the granary scene?  Is it meant to be Ajokli?

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44 minutes ago, Darth Richard II said:

I thought there was no deal, per the AMA. I'm all confused again.

I think unclear. Per AMA there was no understanding by Kellhus that Ajokli could use him like a rag doll avatar. 

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6 hours ago, Hello World said:

The other Kellhus? Are you talking about the Hell scene in TGO?

Yes, when Kellhus says that he tends the fields and the other image of him says “Who better to burn them?”

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11 hours ago, Kalbear said:

Per the AMA, Kellhus didn't intend for this to occur. What he DID intend is still unclear, but he did not expect to give Ajokli power over the granary. 

I'm still unsure how much stock to put into his AMA. His answers are completely at odds with the way the scene reads.

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3 hours ago, PapushiSun said:

I'm still unsure how much stock to put into his AMA. His answers are completely at odds with the way the scene reads.

He's an author that like to play with how a text can be read in more than one way. Indeed I'd say he plays with how the one scene could be read in different ways in order to illustrate the hijack - Kellhus's soul can't read the difference between it and Ajokli, so Ajokli's alternate reading/soul takes over.

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6 hours ago, PapushiSun said:

I'm still unsure how much stock to put into his AMA. His answers are completely at odds with the way the scene reads.

All this tells me is that either he's a lying liar who lies... or the scene is terribly written.  :dunno: 

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