Kalbear

1 hour ago, WarGalley said:

I haven't read Strange Dogs and likely won't before S6 or Leviathan Falls. Is there anything revealing in it? 

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I understand the protagonist is the protomolecule kid on Laconia but is there anything revealing about them, their mannerisms or differences between them and regular humans? I can barely recall what Elvi was doing with the kids at the end of Tiamat's Wrath.

Also the trailer has me super pumped for Friday. I forgot that the show is dropping one episode a week instead of all at once. Streaming has spoiled me.

Strange dogs talks about how the kids were made. It's creepy and interesting but not particularly spoilery

The goths were also akin to Duarte and his prisoner dilemma. 

One dark idea I have is that the changes they make to the systems aren't actually local to that system. They do turn off and on something for just a few minutes, but every effect goths have done has been alocal to the system. Why would it not spread from there?

Which means that once it is introduced - why would it not spread at the speed of light across the galaxy? 

So yeah, in my headcanon systems are going to eventually be hit by a wave of ionic bonding change that will wipe out any organic life in that system at that time and will last for like 20 minutes. 

Also that made me go back and reread the epilogue of PR, and its neat how they establish the first aspects of the hive mind for humans there - how Duarte can see thought patterns and see the actual connections people make to each other. It kind of bugged me that the hive mind thing seemed to come out of left field, but they did ser some of it up. 

1 hour ago, mcbigski said:

Actually it was Overstreet, Tanaka's replacement, that actually killed Singh.  

You're right - it was Tanakas orders via Trejo, but it was her replacement who did it. Nice catch. 

yay on to the second page and no spoiler tags needed.

To correct a small thing - Tanaka kills Singh when it's clear that Singh was about to order the mass murder of civilians. He hadn't done it yet, but that was precisely what she was tasked to look out for. 

And Singh technically outranks her as well, though she's given more leniency and flexibility as part of this secret mission. 

It's also clear that Tanaka in that exchange does not remotely think what Singh is doing is wrong. She thinks that they will never, ever become Laconian, and it's better to kill them - but she also recognizes that these are her orders and other people above her disagree. 

@Maltaran - 

Yeah, on Naomi

As we've done in the past this will be a spoiler thread for those who have read the book or want spoilers. The first page should be spoiler tagged in case someone accidentally stumbles in. 

So it's really good! I think LW and NG are better, but this is definitely a good finale. 

And again, these are super spoilers. So be warned. 

Fucking LOL
 

That's a pretty crazy amount of adamantium that they're just leaving around

7 minutes ago, Caligula_K3 said:

If the showrunners knew that they were only getting six seasons, then that makes many of the recent adaptation decisions very... questionable. Of course, there's no way you can adapt all nine books in six seasons. But if you know as of the end of Season 3 that you're only getting three more seasons, you don't try to adapt all nine books, and you don't follow books 4-5 as closely as the show did. You focus on a few plotlines. And one of those absolutely has to be the protomolecule plotline. I agree with @Spockydog that it's going to be a very unsatisfactory ending if all of that is ignored.

Unless the showrunners know something I don't, which is possible, it's also very naive to hope that this cancellation is a pause. Actors and crew get other gigs. This must be an expensive show relative to its audience. The Expanse isn't such a cult hit that we can expect a Twin Peaks like revival in 20 years.

So they didn't know at the end of season 3, but they did know as part of the pitch - and the goal was to make it a satisfying (at least on some level) conclusion. I'm pretty worried too! But that's okay.

My suspicion is that it'll be fine to do the last 3 books with an entirely different plot and actors and go something of a different direction. But I also recognize that while Expanse is really pretty and I love it, it apparently isn't doing super well. 

My understanding was that when they pitched this to Amazon to get picked up, they did so with the idea that it would be able to be wrapped in 6 seasons total. That was always the target, they said.

And that kind of makes sense given what we know of the books and the jump between books 6 and 7.

Again, the author said he deliberately put in red herrings in order to mislead readers. This is not about the ideas of readers being better than the conclusion. This is about putting in shit meant to imply things that are never intended for followup. 

I don't get this repeated argument about being upset with the presented conclusion as a response. 

I mean, we can also talk about the shitty ideas of the last book if you want, too! The incel dragon, the 4 chapters of cannibal shitraping, the opaque wiring that made basic details like what happened to main characters and how they died unclear, the entire dropping of mimara and Akka and esmes plots, the whole kayutas as insertant and am anasurimbor being a whole cuck fantasy. Those all sucked and were way worse than things discussed on the boards!

But that isn't the complaint. 

30 minutes ago, Corvinus85 said:

Mass Effect borrowed heavily from B5, so maybe the new B5 could borrow from ME and make the Minbari more like the Asari. Have them gender fluid and able to mate with multiple humanoid races.

As long as we maintain the canonical giant prehensile tentacle squid penises that Centauri have, sure!

Rebooting it on a second rate pg13 network does not spark joy.

There's also this quote:
 

Quote

The Conphas entry is just an oversight. Some 'errors' are intentional on my part, however. For one, prescientific encyclopedias are messy, messy things, and for another, working on the EG makes me feel like God... a cruel and wicked one.

5 hours ago, sologdin said:

dunno, kal. the series is named the second apocalypse.  the narrative just caught up to the title, is all.

Think you're misinterpreting what I'm complaining about. The complaint is not 'it ended with the apocalypse' - as you say, that would be a ridiculous complaint on its surface. The issue is with inserting those points that 'deny stable interpretation' as he put it above. 

5 hours ago, sologdin said:

 i don't mind the narrative being suspended--that enacts in terms of literary form the significance of the content. if it remains unfinished, it'll mean that the suspension is indefinite.

I don't really care that the narrative is suspended. What is bothersome is that many of those things were inserted and will have literally no actual resolution, by design. Not because it is a serialized story, but because they were explicitly put in to convey meaning and not have anything to pay off later. 

Here's an example. The 'head on a pole behind you' screed. Do you know what that means? What it's supposed to mean? Per Bakker, it was just a cool phrase that he came up with because he saw the reflection of a head in a window at a coffee shop. There will be nothing more about that. There is nothing there. 

5 hours ago, sologdin said:

 this is still a matter of interpretation, and what one reader thought was a plot hint regarding things beyond the text might've turned out to be something simply regarding the setting or character or thematics or whatever. 

Or, per Bakker above, it was a deliberate insertion to convey meaning that was never intended to exist. 

5 hours ago, sologdin said:

it's difficult to discuss abstractly, though, without knowing what you thought were the markers that got lost--it's not obvious to me what people think is a dead end, you know?

Regardless of whether or not people think it was a dead end or not, I think it's not a good thing to deliberately put things in to a book with the knowledge you will never intentionally resolve them - but still hint at some future existence. I think there's a difference between the reader never getting a clear idea of what's going on (but there still being some actual knowledge behind the scenes), and the author deliberately putting things in when they themselves have no idea what's going on. 

39 minutes ago, larrytheimp said:

I believe the idea that Bakker was trolling everyone came from some of his responses in a reddit AMA?

 

 

 

Thats correct. 

8 hours ago, sologdin said:

kal--

it may well be prickish.  i have an appreciation for his books that has nothing to do with who he is or what he purportedly intended--this cross-examination is complicated the fact that he is said to have misled readers about his intentions--which set of allegations are to be accepted?

of course if others dislike him or his books because of his character or conduct, that's not for me to dispute.

assuming that he did rickroll everyone, and as i've written somewhere at some point, it makes him the stravinsky of the tolkienian set--working within the generic conventions but then confronting them with a disruption that prevents the discharge that the inertia of the text has come to owe readers. that's hall of fame right there.

Its not conventions of the genre he is subverting - its conventions of basic storytelling, anywhere. And it isn't subversive to plant hints and imply depth and not have any. Its very easy to put in things that don't go anywhere. 

The master of this kind of teasing was a short story I read back in middle school where a person on a train was listening to two lawyers talk about how these guys got away with murder - or almost did. The ending is of course that the tellers got off the train before he heard the climax. The whole point of that story was to lead you to that suffering. If that was bakkers intent, well, I suspect he did well in that regard. 

5 hours ago, sologdin said:

kal, that position works with a vessel metaphor: the text is a container that can hold things, and that someone can put inside and another can take out.  i don't accept that metaphor as descriptive of literacy.  no doubt authors write specific words in lieu of other specific words, and there's likely an intention in doing so that is surplus beyond the actual words selected--but the knowability of intention is something i respectfully decline, as is the importance of that intention.

I don't think that's reasonable as a human being, but to each their own. Mostly, when an author says "I'm going to troll you" I think it's kind of reasonable to say 'that's a dick move'. When a whole lot of the reason people enjoyed a story turns out to be a very large troll job with no payoff ever intended, only implied, that is a dick move too. 

I'm not saying you can't enjoy it in spite of that, or for some people because of it, but I don't think the trolling or the dick move are particularly up for debate, any more than debating whether being pranked on Punk'd means that you got pranked on Punk'd. It's a weird anti-tautology to insist otherwise. 

39 minutes ago, sologdin said:

To me this is somewhat like debating whether or not GRRM deliberately put in something that implied Jon's parentage. We know that this is the case. It's not something to be debated. 

the author interprets the text that way, but we need not.  we can agree that the author believes that the text does this work, but whether it actually achieves this alleged goal is a different question.

We can debate the efficacy, but the actual action isn't really up for debate, right? Unless you're interested in debating it epistemologically or something. 

50 minutes ago, sologdin said:

kal, sure, if we accept the notion that authors monopolize the meanings of their writings, which are containers filled intentionally with items to be discovered by clever readers. i don't accept that, and don't see any reason to do so, though i understand that reasonable persons disagree on the point.

Again, this is less about meanings and more about actual story points and manipulation of them. To me this is somewhat like debating whether or not GRRM deliberately put in something that implied Jon's parentage. We know that this is the case. It's not something to be debated. 

Now, imagine he put those things in and then...never answered it. And never intended to answer it. 

50 minutes ago, sologdin said:

that said, is the thesis that RSB was fucking with readers--that it's all a tolkienian/sadean rickroll?

That's not just the thesis, that's the actual stated goal of RSB. 

20 hours ago, sologdin said:

It is over-analyzing and the text simply doesn’t justify it. It isn’t there or not to the extent that people thought it were 

am doubting the viability of over-analysis as an grievance.  under-analysis, maybe.

it's a bit odd to claim that something isn't there when people are actively discussing it.  the assumption is apparently that the text has things inside it, either inherently or placed therein by the author--and only those things may be there, which means that the reader has no creativity or agency--reading in this view is not a productive labor, but is merely consumptive.  that strikes me as an erroneous linguistics, and a fairly docile theory of how literacy functions.

i like the schopenhauer thesis.  it works with the adorno epigraph in one of the books, as the frankfurt school is paradoxically a schopenhauerian marxism, pessimistic optimists, or so.  crazy.

I think you're conflating thematic elements with story elements. I think especially given the author that thematic elements of philosophy are likely intentional. I think given the author it is also likely that there are a whole lot of inserted clues to things that do not actually exist and were deliberately put in to imply future existence knowing they would not actually pay off. 

3 minutes ago, sologdin said:

was an incel dragon. That also sucked. 

i've forgotten, but what was the aesthetic objection to the inclusion of the perspective of aggressive internet virgins in the dialogue of a villain?

in writing that, i realize it may be a rhetorical question.

...

1 hour ago, .H. said:

There is no outside-text, right?  If I follow where you are going, that is.

I don't think that follows, and i think this forum is a good example of why. 

ASOS and events in it hit hard because they were pretty big amazing things - but also because all the clues were set up beforehand. If the only thing you cared about was the second apocalypse thatd be one thing, but there was a whole lot more setup that did not go anywhere at all - and apparently that it was meant to signify going somewhere was done intentionally, as was the lack of payoff. I dont think this has as much to do with the weight of secondary textual analysis and and more to do with there being absolutely nothing. 

Also there was a incel dragon. That also sucked. 

2 hours ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

10 didn't seem rushed to you?  

I guess? But I'm fine with that too. Fast paced super changing things and getting actual answers along with some amazing dialog was good for me.