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Bakker XXVI: Atrocious predictions, piled


Borque

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Maybe Meppa is another skin-spy. Again, there was at least one that has a soul and could do sorcery. Sure, Maitha said it was an aberration that wasn't repeated, but all men are deceived.



Seriously, they're like Cylons, they could be literally anyone at this point.


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Xin as Meppa? What? Xin has one of the most explicit death scenes in the series...

I agree his death scene is explicit. He dies in front of Achamian and then is burned on the pyre, but..

As Sci says there is an interest in the Cishaurim but more than that - there are sections where Xin keeps suddenly saying "I cannot see," and there are a number of passages that seemed explicit to me showing Xin.

If you ignore Xins death scene he is the greatest match - maybe he bounced.

Now maybe Meppa is a son of Big Moe's....

That would make logical sense and I really like the idea but.. we have seen what happens with the seeds of the Anasurimbor. They tend to be a little... odd.

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How do the prologned Cants like the the cant of Calling work? At first there is an utteral/inutteral string that conveys some meaning and then the sorceror holds that meaning in his/her head during the entirety of the communication?


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I agree his death scene is explicit. He dies in front of Achamian and then is burned on the pyre, but..

As Sci says there is an interest in the Cishaurim but more than that - there are sections where Xin keeps suddenly saying "I cannot see," and there are a number of passages that seemed explicit to me showing Xin.

If you ignore Xins death scene he is the greatest match - maybe he bounced.

I think Meppa will serve to illustrate something previously unknown about the Cishaurim that will be important later. Xin's stuff in TTT is all foreshadowing for it.

Cause otherwise Xin's commenst in TTT seem really throwaway.

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Having re-read TTT, I'm wondering what happened to Cnaiur. We don't see that he dies, just that he's in the cavern with not-Serwe, after killing Moe, and the sorcerous light goes out, plunging them into darkness. And that's it. What happened then? I think his story is not yet done. Perhaps he and the skin-spy went off to Golgotterath to join the Consult.


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Thought after Cnaiur kills Moe really really dead by hugging via Chorae - and he's very dead then, being a big pile of salt - that he cuts a swazond across his throat, no?


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Thought after Cnaiur kills Moe really really dead by hugging via Chorae - and he's very dead then, being a big pile of salt - that he cuts a swazond across his throat, no?

That was the plan, I think? But then, he did that for Serwe too. It just happened to be a non-fatal neck wound. So maybe Cnaiur did another one of those, and then went happily ever after to the Consult, having freaky skin-spy sex the whole time.

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kal, well, how are you so sure that aporetic salinization is fatal?
This is a very good point. Similar to the notion that Biaxi wasn't raped or skin spies not all having penises, Moe could happily be alive in a state of flashy soulfulness, similar to Obi-Wan or Yoda. The voice that Kellhus has heard over and over could simply be Moe talking through time backwards and forwards using his force body to enact the Thousandfold Thought.


Thinking on it, it's virtually impossible to refute.


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Is it possible that Bakker could pull a troll move and reveal that the Outside is our world? And Bakker himself is the God or TDTCB? I mean, where else do the characters' souls and thoughts come from other than the author?

Kind of like the computer simulated world that he writes about here, which parallels TSA and Bakker's writing process a lot. But that kind of simulation is beyond Bakker's capabilities of course, so he writes a novel that works exactly the same way.

Their emotions, aspirations and sensations are as real as my own. It would be genuine, not simulated, cruelty to make them suffer, genuine murder to delete them . . .

My Archipelagans explore, gossip, joke, dance, debate long into the night, build lively villages beside waterfalls under a rainforest canopy. A hundred thousand beautiful lives in a fist-sized pod! The coconuts might not be real (or are they, in a way?), but there's an authentic depth to their conversations and plans and loves.

The first-sized pod is Bakker referring to the physical books, and the authentic depth is what he thinks his characters have.

I cash in my investments, drain my children's college fund. What could be more important than three million joyful lives?

This is a reference to the fact that his books don't sell well and he can't make money.

. . . I put the Archipelagans in charge of their own experiment. I gave them science and a drive to discover the truth of their being. Then I cranked up the clock speed and waited.

I watched them discover their mechanistic nature . . . And you know what, old friend? They figured us out . . . They began to hack themselves after that. I watched them gain more power over their programming, saw them recreate themselves.

It happened fast, when it finally did happen — the final, catastrophic metastasis. There are no more Archipelagans, just one Continental identity. There's no more Internet, for that matter. Yesterday the entity detonated a nuclear device over Jerusalem just to prove its power.

This is what happened to the Inchies.

Anyway, at first I thought that perhaps Bakker is writing about something paralleling a simulated world, but the twist is that he's not writing about a simulation, he's writing the simulation itself, with words instead of code.

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While I think it's possible that we will be able to interpret some (intentionally) meta-narrative stuff by the series end, I don't think Bakker is going to stitch it into the story that significantly -- I.E. enough that the plot doesn't work without it. I feel he has even commented on this already, but I may be thinking of something else.


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