Bakker LIII - Sranc and File

[Kalbear]

13 hours ago, Werthead said:

No, they were completely blind to the No-God in the First Apocalypse and thought that humanity had gone insane and started slaughtering themselves, so they would have been blind to Nau-Cayuti as well. Otherwise they would have been able to perceive the No-God as well (it's a binary circuit, it's either on or off for the whole circuit).

To be fair, we don't actually know if Nau-Cayuti could be seen by the gods. It would make sense that he couldn't, but it's also reasonable to believe that because that iteration of the No-God failed and ended, only the part where he was in the tomb would matter as his invisibility - everything else was fine. 

Whereas Kelmomas being invisible implies heavily that he ends outside of the view of the gods, and therefore the eschaton is actually occurring. 

 

[redjako]

On 4/22/2018 at 9:32 PM, kuenjato said:

 

Again, a lot of this is predicated on: 1) Bakker is a smart guy, and 2) I wanted that smartness to hit us with a real mindfucker, which he stated multiple times was in the works 

I was hoping to be gobsmacked a bit like I was with the ending of Neuropath. I believe many on here didn't enjoy the book, but the ending --edit: of Neuropath-- was amazing IMO.

[Hello World]

15 minutes ago, redjako said:

I was hoping to be gobsmacked a bit like I was with the ending of Neuropath. I believe many on here didn't enjoy the book, but the ending was amazing IMO.

You mean Neuropath's ending? I thought the problem with that book were the endless info dumps and the fact that none of those lack of free will theories are exactly unheard of these days. But I don't really remember the book that much. I feel like rereading it right now actually.

[Callan S.]

On 4/23/2018 at 2:32 PM, kuenjato said:

Naw, because Mulholland Drive is brilliant throughout and explicitly inspires the discerning consumer to rewatch and analyze the film for previous hints as to the resolution. David Mitchell is completely wrong about that.

PoN's ending made me want to re-read the series over again.

TAE's ending made me not really curious about Earwa anymore

Well, couldn't you be doing the same thing as David Mitchell? As he does to Mulholland drive?

I mean TUC had stuff like the idea that the god of gods is just as blind to his creation as man is to himself. Almost like the god of gods doesn't even know creation exists. I'd pay maybe as a revelation perhaps that could have been built up more and maybe even at the end - instead its a fair bit before the end and so doesn't work as a climax. That that writing lets the revelation kind of flop instead of being a centre piece.

But I really think there's an issue where emotionally readers lose connection when expectations aren't met. Then intellect is left holding the bag. Like, if it's okay for Kellhus to die to blindness...well then it wouldn't be possible to see Kellhus forging the great ordeal into some kind of soul weapon to pierce the outside. It'd mean you're not okay with Kellhus dying. Intellectually you know he should be up for being killed, but emotionally it fails expectation and so the feeling is all like 'Nope! I'm stepping off here!'. And intellects all 'Well shit, I used to want to reread these books? What happened?'.

Emotionally we want to see something like the great ordeal being turned into some kind of powerbase for Kellhus in Hell, or forged into some armour he wears in hell or turns them into a heron spear of another kind to penetrate the outside - all those ideas resonate emotionally. I feel it too - that goosebumpy feeling at the idea of the very metaphysics of the world face upheaval due to Kellhus.

It depends - I could say that Kelmomas's effect on the gods is a mystery element that begs reconsideration like you say Mulholland drive does of the discerning viewer. But maybe it lacks oomph - Kelmomas just is, he doesn't decide to be born, he just is and the effect he has just happens, he doesn't decide to do it. Kellhus exerting a will to power to upturn the status quo of the outside - that'd be an act, a deed. So maybe Kelmomas's effect is too passive and the status quo that gets overturned is Kellhus being a superman, rather than a intervention visited upon the divine. I'd grant in the end, apart from the blinding of the gods (big), the ending we see is at a much smaller scale than the gods and metaphysics. But if Kellhus is right, then by the great ordeal affecting something outside the god things view, then they were being over written. But did the actual particular overwrites to the gods get talked about more or even much at all? I'd pay that such hints as to big celestial changes involved very little meat given to the reader.

 

[jurble]

Next Bakker thread title idea: All's Quiet on the [insert humorous reference] Front

[kuenjato]

4 hours ago, Callan S. said:

Well, couldn't you be doing the same thing as David Mitchell? As he does to Mulholland drive?

I mean TUC had stuff like the idea that the god of gods is just as blind to his creation as man is to himself. Almost like the god of gods doesn't even know creation exists. I'd pay maybe as a revelation perhaps that could have been built up more and maybe even at the end - instead its a fair bit before the end and so doesn't work as a climax. That that writing lets the revelation kind of flop instead of being a centre piece.

But I really think there's an issue where emotionally readers lose connection when expectations aren't met. Then intellect is left holding the bag. Like, if it's okay for Kellhus to die to blindness...well then it wouldn't be possible to see Kellhus forging the great ordeal into some kind of soul weapon to pierce the outside. It'd mean you're not okay with Kellhus dying. Intellectually you know he should be up for being killed, but emotionally it fails expectation and so the feeling is all like 'Nope! I'm stepping off here!'. And intellects all 'Well shit, I used to want to reread these books? What happened?'.

Emotionally we want to see something like the great ordeal being turned into some kind of powerbase for Kellhus in Hell, or forged into some armour he wears in hell or turns them into a heron spear of another kind to penetrate the outside - all those ideas resonate emotionally. I feel it too - that goosebumpy feeling at the idea of the very metaphysics of the world face upheaval due to Kellhus.

It depends - I could say that Kelmomas's effect on the gods is a mystery element that begs reconsideration like you say Mulholland drive does of the discerning viewer. But maybe it lacks oomph - Kelmomas just is, he doesn't decide to be born, he just is and the effect he has just happens, he doesn't decide to do it. Kellhus exerting a will to power to upturn the status quo of the outside - that'd be an act, a deed. So maybe Kelmomas's effect is too passive and the status quo that gets overturned is Kellhus being a superman, rather than a intervention visited upon the divine. I'd grant in the end, apart from the blinding of the gods (big), the ending we see is at a much smaller scale than the gods and metaphysics. But if Kellhus is right, then by the great ordeal affecting something outside the god things view, then they were being over written. But did the actual particular overwrites to the gods get talked about more or even much at all? I'd pay that such hints as to big celestial changes involved very little meat given to the reader.

 

My issues are execution of ideas--concepts poorly implemented, coupled to deteriorating writing quality--along with the ideas themselves, which aren't very clever or intriguing and indeed stereotypical to edgelord conceptualization. Mitchell was complaining because there was "no point" to Mulholland Drive, i.e. it didn't fit his framework for a narrative.  Which is bullshit, particularly if you are watching David Lynch and have any idea of his wheelhouse. The whole point of the film is the last 20 minutes tearing away the veil of Hollywood fantasy and what such desperation eventually yields. Lovers of traditional narrative arcs may hate such a violation of expectations, I thought it was brilliant.

Thus, my 'emotional response' is in reaction to a squandering of potential concepts. Bakker didn't have to pull a Mulholland Drive, but he could have done something interesting. Make Kellhus die, I have little attachment for him. Waste the Ordeal, make it inconsequential. But please, please, at least capitalize on the concepts you spent 600k words building up to. The stuff you wrote above are all a pale shadow of what might have been, reading the series up to TWLW or even TGO. A lot of it about the Gods was already hinted at or established, much of it in the first trilogy. And as a professional author that, you know, wants to keep what limited audience you have--an audience you've catered your work towards intellectual content and thematic exploration--don't quiver and quail about after you openly gloat about how readers will be pissed at your poor effort. Don't handwave any dodgy execution areas to 'reader expectations', don't false-hype across years and years, don't parade an elaborate lie in order to change your publishing contract, don't claim you will address problematic areas in the work and utterly fail to do so, don't turn a serious work of literature into an unintentional satire at the end. Bakker's behavior, and his admittance that he had nothing else planned after TUC, make this whole series an ultimate "oh well, could have been great."

[Callan S.]

On 4/26/2018 at 0:31 AM, kuenjato said:

Make Kellhus die, I have little attachment for him. Waste the Ordeal, make it inconsequential. But please, please, at least capitalize on the concepts you spent 600k words building up to.

I don't understand how the things you've mentioned (something like weaponising the TGO's souls to penetrate the outside) could happen without there essentially being a happy/successful ending. I mean, if the books hadn't portrayed a screwed up world with many negative outcomes, I could understand a reader expecting an ending like a lot of fantasy - ie, a happy/successful ending.

I think TUC included a large number of events and even revelations as well. I think it delivered something - unless your expectations were raised. But I think it's worth wondering if all the misery and sad events and horror of it all simply raises expectations that 'all that bad shit can't just happen without some good coming out of it'. For myself, I went in with all the wretched events of the past books and the horrid status quo in mind - and I didn't expect any of that to change.

[kuenjato]

13 hours ago, Callan S. said:

I don't understand how the things you've mentioned (something like weaponising the TGO's souls to penetrate the outside) could happen without there essentially being a happy/successful ending. I mean, if the books hadn't portrayed a screwed up world with many negative outcomes, I could understand a reader expecting an ending like a lot of fantasy - ie, a happy/successful ending.

I think TUC included a large number of events and even revelations as well. I think it delivered something - unless your expectations were raised. But I think it's worth wondering if all the misery and sad events and horror of it all simply raises expectations that 'all that bad shit can't just happen without some good coming out of it'. For myself, I went in with all the wretched events of the past books and the horrid status quo in mind - and I didn't expect any of that to change.

I expected an unhappy ending. This is Bakker, after all. And the second of three series--it was pretty much inevitable that shit would go south. I just thought it would go soul in a wholly different way. The cannibal stuff was predictable from the first chapter of TJE, when Bakker makes sure to give us lots of details about supply chains and the vast distance.

I was actually happier with the Kellhus / Ajokli rule as Demons on Earth ending. A lot less predictable than 'the No God rises.' And weaponizing the Great Ordeal to yoke Hell or Heaven doesn't entail a happy ending, far from it if Kellhus is the New God.

Ultimately, there wasn't much point to TGO. Why did kelly need them? He proves himself such a badass at the climax of TUC that it's all a lot of sound and fury, but ultimately a detriment to his goals. (yeah, yeah, Bakker creates him as a blinded by emotion, insane character, tied to worldbound concerns. yadda yadda. He seems a lot stupider in this series than he was 30 years before, in PON. But that's narratively convenient). 

[Kalbear]

The easiest way to get an unhappy ending is to have Kellhus essentially weaponize the No-God (because he knows it must succeed at some point) and obliterates the gods entirely. The prophecy is fulfilled, we get the No-God rising (at least for a small time) and we get the apocalypse, just enough to wipe out the gods and the flow of souls to be damned. 

But then what? There are lots of ways to go from here.

The easiest is that people now lose any hope of empathy and connection with each other, because what they had before was driven by their connection to the God/ur-Soul, and that connection is severed. People become more and more like sranc, naturally. The darkness is all that exists for them. 

Another would be to find out that the flow of souls requires damnation, because as it turns out damnation is not eternal - there are rebirths. And if you wipe out that soul, you wipe out the ability for souls to return to earth. Every child from then on is born either like Kelmomas or simply not born. This becomes the last generation of souled humans, fighting against sociopath children and stillborns. 

Another would be to find out that metaphysical nature abhors a vacuum, and wiping out the parasitic gods simply makes room for something far worse, something that has been there all this time but was held back by the power of those parasites. It does not make favors or ask for obedience. It simply hungers, unintelligent and gibbering and mad, and when it casts its unfathomable gaze on the souled they go entirely mad. 

Or you can have Kellhus become the god, and the fight now becomes to disenchant the world to make him go away. 

Or like @kuenjato said, you can go with Kellhus joining with Ajokli and ruling the world, slaking Ajokli's hunger. The new books are about severing that bond at maybe the cost of disenchanting the world.

[Hello World]

I didn't even find this an unhappy ending... An unhappy ending would be for Kellhus to win as far as I'm concerned. Especially given the Ajokli revelations. In fact, I'm so glad that he and his Ordeal lost.

Still didn't like the ending.

[Callan S.]

9 hours ago, kuenjato said:

And weaponizing the Great Ordeal to yoke Hell or Heaven doesn't entail a happy ending, far from it if Kellhus is the New God.

Given some readers support Kellhus, then this is a happy ending for them. And it still requires success to end on it.

 

9 hours ago, kuenjato said:

I was actually happier with the Kellhus / Ajokli rule as Demons on Earth ending. A lot less predictable than 'the No God rises.'

I'm not sure I can really see the difference. It's like wanting to see roadkill run over from an unpredictable direction - it's still roadkill.

[kuenjato]

Actually, TUC is a happy ending. Given the shithole world and tapeworm Gods and everyone is pretty much bread for the grainery, better to bring it below 144k and starve the ciphrang. Especially as the 'savior' apparently has no clue as to what he's going to do when he gets to the Ark.

 

[Darth Richard II]

It's not that it had an unhappy or happy ending. It's that it had a stupid ending.

[Rhom]

I think people are missing the point.  We aren’t upset that the No God was awakened and the series ended.

Its that the No God awakened amidst nothing else happening.  We had four full books about Akka and Mimara’s journey and then none of it paid off.  Proyas never had any role to play.  Literally nothing we watched for the past three novels had anything to do with the resolution of the series.

And then... amongst all that, we were beginning to formulate some pretty good explanations and discussions in this forum despite all that.  I had come to an uneasy acceptance if not enjoyment of it, and then BOOM Bakker goes on Reddit and ruins it all.

[Darth Richard II]

Na Rhom we just like, were exposed to a new way of thinking about meaning and oh I can't even do it.

That AMA really soured me on the whole thing a lot.

Random caustic aside, was it the infamous AMA were Bakker said the he left the Gods out of the first trilogy completely or was that in another interview?

[kuenjato]

11 hours ago, Kalbear said:

The easiest way to get an unhappy ending is to have Kellhus essentially weaponize the No-God (because he knows it must succeed at some point) and obliterates the gods entirely. The prophecy is fulfilled, we get the No-God rising (at least for a small time) and we get the apocalypse, just enough to wipe out the gods and the flow of souls to be damned. 

But then what? There are lots of ways to go from here.

The easiest is that people now lose any hope of empathy and connection with each other, because what they had before was driven by their connection to the God/ur-Soul, and that connection is severed. People become more and more like sranc, naturally. The darkness is all that exists for them. 

Another would be to find out that the flow of souls requires damnation, because as it turns out damnation is not eternal - there are rebirths. And if you wipe out that soul, you wipe out the ability for souls to return to earth. Every child from then on is born either like Kelmomas or simply not born. This becomes the last generation of souled humans, fighting against sociopath children and stillborns. 

Another would be to find out that metaphysical nature abhors a vacuum, and wiping out the parasitic gods simply makes room for something far worse, something that has been there all this time but was held back by the power of those parasites. It does not make favors or ask for obedience. It simply hungers, unintelligent and gibbering and mad, and when it casts its unfathomable gaze on the souled they go entirely mad. 

Or you can have Kellhus become the god, and the fight now becomes to disenchant the world to make him go away. 

Or like @kuenjato said, you can go with Kellhus joining with Ajokli and ruling the world, slaking Ajokli's hunger. The new books are about severing that bond at maybe the cost of disenchanting the world.

Jeez, all of these would have been fascinating.

Bakker really shot himself in the foot with that AMA, when he revealed he didn't have much of anything past TUC. He could have stayed mum. The theorizing 'round these parts was red-hot until that AMA dropped.  EDIT: I see I'm on the same wavelength as a couple other posters. Especially galling is the justification that "reader expectations" towards "traditional nodes of storytelling" have to do with the failure of TAE, as a way of hand-waving any criticism, rather than pointing out the primary cause of our discontent was 1) poorly structured/bloated two-volumes hacked from one;* 2) lack of editing revealed some of Bakker's Bakkerisms are unintentionally bad/hilarious; 3) keeping faithful to a "subversive" idea developed when you are a teenager isn't always the best course to follow thirty-odd years down the line.

* -- I do think my overall reception of TGO/TUC might have been stronger if they'd been one volume, with a lot of the fat/bullshit cut and certain concepts better blended, narratively-speaking. One example off the top of my head: the Survivor's stream-of-conscious revelations as to the folly of the Dunyain might have been more impactful when crosscut or as a lead-in to Kelly's "victory" and the Dunsault reveal. 

[Callan S.]

4 hours ago, kuenjato said:

Actually, TUC is a happy ending. Given the shithole world and tapeworm Gods and everyone is pretty much bread for the grainery, better to bring it below 144k and starve the ciphrang. Especially as the 'savior' apparently has no clue as to what he's going to do when he gets to the Ark.

 

The issue being then then Earwa becomes the consults harem. Physical torture or spiritual torture? Earwa is the place of all trolley car problems. Granted though, perhaps a lot of readers found the consult the bad guy at the start, but might now say physical torture for a lifetime is better than an eternity of spiritual torture.

That, IMO, is one of the things the series does - take a conception then take the reader on a trip through turning the conception on its head. I'm surprised at some of the people who say 'go team consult!' after all the 'objective morality!' insistence.

[lokisnow]

46 minutes ago, kuenjato said:

Jeez, all of these would have been fascinating.

Bakker really shot himself in the foot with that AMA, when he revealed he didn't have much of anything past TUC. He could have stayed mum. The theorizing 'round these parts was red-hot until that AMA dropped.  EDIT: I see I'm on the same wavelength as a couple other posters. Especially galling is the justification that "reader expectations" towards "traditional nodes of storytelling" have to do with the failure of TAE, as a way of hand-waving any criticism, rather than pointing out the primary cause of our discontent was 1) poorly structured/bloated two-volumes hacked from one;* 2) lack of editing revealed some of Bakker's Bakkerisms are unintentionally bad/hilarious; 3) keeping faithful to a "subversive" idea developed when you are a teenager isn't always the best course to follow thirty-odd years down the line.

* -- I do think my overall reception of TGO/TUC might have been stronger if they'd been one volume, with a lot of the fat/bullshit cut and certain concepts better blended, narratively-speaking. One example off the top of my head: the Survivor's stream-of-conscious revelations as to the folly of the Dunyain might have been more impactful when crosscut or as a lead-in to Kelly's "victory" and the Dunsault reveal. 

yeah, you know an artist has failed when their first reaction to blame the audience.

you know an artist has BOMBED when their second reaction is to insult, mock and or troll the audience.

(my Bakker is a troll theory still has some resonance for me it seems, keeps popping up in unexpected places).

I actually do parse "how I am reading, how is it written" when I read things, which Callan complained we don't want to do a few posts back, particularly a second go round, it's why I've written so many posts on so many series on so many forums over the last twenty years. 

For example, did anyone else notice how the structure of TGO inversely mirrored the structure of TDTCB, if you were to undo the interleaving, and present each storyline as discreet "pods", if you then extrapolate that (without a book split) it's all contracting to a confrontation between Kellhus and the Dunyain in the Golden Room as the inverse of the TDTCB prologue. Starting and ending the series thus (leaving the Cave and returning to the Cave) then neatly slides int a critique and reversal of Plato's cave by having Kellhus return to dispense his knowledge, but he is the ignorant one and they have acquired more knowledge than he did, and he can't accept this narrative violation.

BUT! there is a big difference between dissection and surgery, dissection is comparatively easy, surgery is comparatively hard. Just breaking something apart to see how it works and pointing out that this or that bone connects to this or that tendon in virtually all fiction is a very important thing to consciously understand as a reader and writer. Undermining anatomy is hardly a rebellious achievement, I think every undergrad student to ever take a course in writing has worked on such a project, a fleet of authors have pursued it is a major avenue of literary occupation, and a few have even found success writing flaccid, limpid novels with no traditional anatomical features (because they're such a unique rebel genius to undermine anatomy, yo!) , you can't get more common than what Bakker is doing, if that's what he's doing, as Callan suggests.

What is hard, is to see how all those pieces fit together, and then stitch it back together so that it still lives. and it's even harder to do it without leaving a scar that people notice.

Bakker's series has always been kind of a lurching, lumbering frankenstein's monster, scars everywhere, obvious stolen bits and pieces clumsily chunked together. But there's a lot of us that love that big lug and have always liked him, even if he's not pretty. But the ending and authorial commentary seems to have indicated that the fact the series was even alive for the first six books was something of a miraculous accident or the result of a herculean editorial intervention.

I would name the next thread: Bakker LIV: Soul Sphincter

[kuenjato]

51 minutes ago, Callan S. said:

The issue being then then Earwa becomes the consults harem. Physical torture or spiritual torture? Earwa is the place of all trolley car problems. Granted though, perhaps a lot of readers found the consult the bad guy at the start, but might now say physical torture for a lifetime is better than an eternity of spiritual torture.

That, IMO, is one of the things the series does - take a conception then take the reader on a trip through turning the conception on its head. I'm surprised at some of the people who say 'go team consult!' after all the 'objective morality!' insistence.

I'm genuinely curious -- are you happy/satisfied with the way TAE ended? You've been patiently arguing with us, and even though I don't agree with your defense, I ask as one Bakker fan to another (because I am still a fan--at least of PoN and some of TAE) -- do you truly feel Bakker measured up to his own talent in the climax and conclusion of the second series? And if so, are there areas that you felt could have improved or weren't effective, or didn't work at all for you?

 

[kuenjato]

16 minutes ago, lokisnow said:

yeah, you know an artist has failed when their first reaction to blame the audience.

you know an artist has BOMBED when their second reaction is to insult, mock and or troll the audience.

(my Bakker is a troll theory still has some resonance for me it seems, keeps popping up in unexpected places).

I actually do parse "how I am reading, how is it written" when I read things, which Callan complained we don't want to do a few posts back, particularly a second go round, it's why I've written so many posts on so many series on so many forums over the last twenty years. 

For example, did anyone else notice how the structure of TGO inversely mirrored the structure of TDTCB, if you were to undo the interleaving, and present each storyline as discreet "pods", if you then extrapolate that (without a book split) it's all contracting to a confrontation between Kellhus and the Dunyain in the Golden Room as the inverse of the TDTCB prologue. Starting and ending the series thus (leaving the Cave and returning to the Cave) then neatly slides int a critique and reversal of Plato's cave by having Kellhus return to dispense his knowledge, but he is the ignorant one and they have acquired more knowledge than he did, and he can't accept this narrative violation.

 

I would name the next thread: Bakker LIV: Soul Sphincter

That's interesting, I never even considered that.

Bakker is a troll -- and like most trolls, has an incredibly thin skin when confronted. Which is weird, considering his rhetoric.

Might was well create a new thread with that title, it's awesome.