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Bakker XXXIV: Waiting for Grimdark (update: it’s here!)


Happy Ent

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Yeah, I never found the explanations to this convincing.

Seriously, all of them? Even if we assume that they all trusted the obscenities with their own bodies, not a single one of them thought that immortality is not something desirable and wanted to just die?

The logistics of it don't make much sense to me either. The glossary says that the Nonmen did attain immortality and the Inchoroi declared their work done and left. For the Nonmen to think that they really became 'immortal', the Inchoroi must have remained among them for years, if not decades, until it became clear that the Nonmen are neither aging, nor dying. So how did the Inchoroi make sure that the women wouldn't die until after they left, or at least until they were in the act of leaving?

But of course the Isuphiryas is Seswatha bullshit, just like the Dreams are Seswatha bullshit, and possibly even the Sagas.

Well, we are already presented with conflicting information about when the Plague started and when the Inchoroi left:

The Nonmen did in fact attain immortality, and the Inchoroi, claiming their work done, retired back to the Incû-Holoinas. The plague struck shortly after, almost killing males and uniformly killing all females. The Nonmen call this tragic event the Nasamorgas, the “Death of Birth.”

According to the Isûphiryas, the first victim of the Womb-Plague was Hanalinqû, Cû’jara-Cinmoi’s legendary wife. The chronicler actually praises the diligence and skill of the High King’s Inchoroi physicians. But as the Womb-Plague killed more and more Cûnuroi women, this praise becomes condemnation. Soon all the women of the Cûnuroi, wives and maidens both, were dying. The Inchoroi fled the Mansions, returning to their ruined vessel.

No doubt that is only the beginning of the "inconsistencies."

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Hmm. I hadn't remembered that quote about 'dooming their wives and daughters'. That makes it sound much less like the plan and much more like a payment.


Nilgiccas lied to you! What else could he do? Think! Think of the war they had just wonthink of the toll! The Nonmen had sacrificed everything, their wives, their daughters, to triumph over the Inchoroi. And now they discover that all along the Truth belonged to their foe?



From what we thought we knew of the womb plague this is very odd. The womb plague was said to be the impetus for the attack - and a stupid attack, at that (as has been stated several times, the Inchoroi making their enemies immortal seems pretty stupid). But what if what they did didn't make their wives and daughters die? What if the death wasn't caused directly by the Inchoroi - it was caused directly by the Nonmen?



I still believe that the Inchoroi immortality was some kind of attack, as confirmed by Bakker. But we've seen no real evidence that the Inchoroi's tech can make plagues of death. That's not what it does. In every case we've seen their tech is used to either create new life (sranc, bashrag, skin spies) or modify life (spellcasting grafts, various body mods on the Inchoroi themselves). What if the womb plague didn't kill the nonwomen - and instead, caused them to birth obscenities?



Say, sranc? Or Inchoroi? Something that turned the women essentially into living incubators for weapons against the Nonmen?



I'm just spitballing, mind you - but let's take for granted that the Nonmen had to kill their wives and daughters in order to beat the Inchoroi. What would make the women into a weapon that must be destroyed? Destroyed so thoroughly that there exist (as far as we know) no nonwomen anywhere? I doubt it would turn them into ravening monsters, but that's possible - some kind of zombie thing, I guess, is possible. But I think - and given Bakker's themes, this seems more likely - turning them into something that produces something horrific seems a lot more likely.



So then the Inchoroi's plan was not to give their enemy immortality while killing the women. It was to make their enemy into something like the Inchoroi - something that would naturally ally with the Inchoroi. The Nonmen would survive and do whatever they want, but every child would be with the Inchoroi. Every birth would aid them and hurt the Nonmen. The very act of living would win the war. So the Nonmen did what the Inchoroi did not expect - they exterminated their women. The Inchoroi were somewhat prepared, having also created the weapon races (this is another sign that the Inchoroi did not do this as an accident but did it to wage war - they had created the weapon races to fight and were ready for a fight), but they weren't expecting such a brutal response.



And naturally, this would not be recorded. Why would the Nonmen state their shame? Wouldn't it be easier to elide the truth and blame the Inchoroi for killing their women? It's true, after all - just not directly true.



It's also a potential link to Mimara and the watchers of the gates. If there are no women - how can there be anything with the Judging Eye? How can anything be seen as truly Godlike at that point? I'll think on that more.

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Nice work, Kalbear, that also fits with the Atrocity Tale "4 Revelations."



Murdering his daughter who clutches her ravaged womb and "That is the sole curse of the Ishroi, to only hope they had fathered their sons..."



So the inchoroi fathered all of their sons...or they know the inchoroi are the fathers of their children when the children are born...different.


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Yeah kalbear I'm on board with this line of attack. square it with shutting the world to the outside and wombs as gates to the outside. They tried to shut the world through wombs first, then later developed the no god to do it more efficiently, flipping the master switch rather than thousands of individual switches.

Also I'm pleased the time line fits my crackpot that chorae are manufactured from wombs of nonwomen.

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I like that. I really like that. But lets say they made them birth Inchoroi (or whatever), why did all the males become immortal?
Why not? They need something to continue to father their Inchoroi-spawn. Eventually they'd be outmatched. Alternately, the immortality was the trojan horse to get them in. They needed to show that it was working, to bide their time so they could be strong. They expected, perhaps stupidly, that when the Nonmen were having Inchoroi allied kids that they would also, naturally ally with the Inchoroi - but just in case, they were ready to fight. What they didn't expect was the ruthlessness of the Inchoroi in wiping out their race and dooming themselves.
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Also I have to say that even if this theory isn't true I really want it to be true. It's one of the few explanations I've seen for the stupidity of the Inchoroi's plan. It's also internally consistent with what we know about Tekne and is frankly horrific in a way that simply killing women isn't. It resonates a significantly stronger way with me than killing women does. What if the woman you loved was pregnant - and it was not your child? Or it was your child, but your child was unlovable by you because it was abhorrent on some genetic level? What would it take to make a father murder not just his wife but his children?



Can you imagine what it would be like to be in a birthing room with your wife, only to see something...other...emerge from the womb? Not just something that looked unlike you, but unlike any human, unlike anything. Emerging, speaking your name, speaking your wife's name, declaring its love of the Inverse Fire and its true creators?



It's an interesting parallel with Esmi's plight with the Dunyain kids too - how none of her kids were really hers, none really loved her.


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Why not? They need something to continue to father their Inchoroi-spawn. Eventually they'd be outmatched.

But without immortality, the men would have died out in a generation.

What you're saying is that the Womb-Plague wasn't something that killed the women outright, it just made them have children with birth defects until they were eventually killed by the men (I'll go with birth defects because an 'ad hoc microbial' weapon that makes you give birth to Inchoroi seems a bit too far-fetched)?

I really like the idea, but I don't think it answers the question of why they had to make them immortal first, or how they did not expect such a response from the men.

In general, any WP theory that involves the Inchoroi thinking that killing the women (or doing any damage to the women for that matter) would ally the men with them seems way overboard for me. In fact any theory that posits that the Inchoroi did not think that harming the women would incite the men to war seems far fetched as well.

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But of course the Isuphiryas is Seswatha bullshit, just like the Dreams are Seswatha bullshit, and possibly even the Sagas.

Just thinking out loud here... Imagine if Achamian discovered - in Ishual - that the Mandate mission is a big lie (or at least it involved a major lie from Seswatha). That would be very funny, in a sad way. This is the epigraph from the Ishual chapter on the SA forum,

Truly? Can you not see? In a world so vast, so fraught... The father who does not lie is no father at all.

I guess the assumption is that the father in question here is Moenghus, but I think that it's Seswatha, and the children are the Mandate. Consider this, at the end of TTT, Cnaiur tells Achamian the truth about Kellhus, Achamian goes to Esmenet and says "it's all a lie" referring to Kellhus. Then he goes through all of this,

For twenty years he had cloistered himself with his Dreams, marking progress in the slow accumulation of nocturnal variance and permutation. The growth of his slaves children became his only calender. His old pains evaporated, to be sure, and yet everyday had seemed to be that day, the day he cursed Anasûrimbor Kellhus and began his bloody-footed trek into exile, so little had happened.

Then Mimara, bearing long dead torment and news of the Great Ordeal...

Then the Skin Eaters with their evil and blood-crazed Captain...

Then Cil-Aujas and the first Sranc, who had driven them into the precincts of Hell...

Then the madness of the Mop and the long, manic trail across the Istyuli Plains...

Then the Library of Sauglish and the Father of Dragons...

Then Nilgiccas, the death of the Last Nonman King...

So he had wheezed and huffed to the glaciers summit in the calamitous shadow of these things, not knowing what to think, too numb and bewildered to rejoice. For so long the very world had been the mountain between them, and his limbs and heart trembled for climbing...

Then, there it lay, Ishuäl, the sum of labourious years and how many lives, Ishuäl, the birthplace of the Holy Aspect-Emperor...

All of this to discover the truth about Kellhus, now he has finally reached Ishual, only to discover that his entire life has been a lie. The Mandate mission, the Dreams, Seswatha, it's all a lie.

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I really like the idea, but I don't think it answers the question of why they had to make them immortal first, or how they did not expect such a response from the men.


In general, any WP theory that involves the Inchoroi thinking that killing the women (or doing any damage to the women for that matter) would ally the men with them seems way overboard for me. In fact any theory that posits that the Inchoroi did not think that harming the women would incite the men to war seems far fetched as well.

The theory isn't that they did anything damaging to the women. They women wouldn't be harmed - that would be silly and counterproductive. They would simply give birth to...something else. Maybe a ur-sranc. Maybe inchoroi themselves. Not harmful intrinsically to the Nonmen or their wives and daughters. Heck, it might be something...beautiful. Or it might be a Nonman, but already genetically predisposed to love the Inchoroi.


Or it might be something subtle, something that the Nonmen didn't quite realize at first. Things looked okay until the kids were, say, 8. And then they're all about raping people.



The inchoroi's mistake, in this case, wasn't that they thought destroying the women of the Nonmen would be 'fine'. It was that they banked on the Nonmen's compassion. They thought that the Nonmen would not, could not, be so ruthless as to wipe out their children, no matter how odd they were. They thought that the Nonmen would never kill their own wives and daughters to better beat the Inchoroi. They figured that they would submit, capitulate, or ally instead of any of those horrific possibilities. They underestimated the depths that the Nonmen would go. After all, who would destroy their loved ones to beat their enemy? Who would destroy their own children in order to beat their enemy? Wouldn't you find any other way?


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The theory isn't that they did anything damaging to the women. They women wouldn't be harmed - that would be silly and counterproductive. They would simply give birth to...something else. Maybe a ur-sranc. Maybe inchoroi themselves. Not harmful intrinsically to the Nonmen or their wives and daughters. Heck, it might be something...beautiful. Or it might be a Nonman, but already genetically predisposed to love the Inchoroi.

Or it might be something subtle, something that the Nonmen didn't quite realize at first. Things looked okay until the kids were, say, 8. And then they're all about raping people.

The inchoroi's mistake, in this case, wasn't that they thought destroying the women of the Nonmen would be 'fine'. It was that they banked on the Nonmen's compassion. They thought that the Nonmen would not, could not, be so ruthless as to wipe out their children, no matter how odd they were. They thought that the Nonmen would never kill their own wives and daughters to better beat the Inchoroi. They figured that they would submit, capitulate, or ally instead of any of those horrific possibilities. They underestimated the depths that the Nonmen would go. After all, who would destroy their loved ones to beat their enemy? Who would destroy their own children in order to beat their enemy? Wouldn't you find any other way?

Reminds me of kellhus telling some kianene city to bring him the heads of forty percent of their population since they denied him for four days.
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I really like that idea, Kalbear. I wouldn't be surprised if it was something like Sranc, but without the rapacity and dog-bodies in the Weapons Race version. Something soulless and apparently Non-men, but not because they'd ultimately just be creatures of flesh. There's a potential parallel there if the "disenchantment" theory plays out, and Mimara gives birth to a symbolic new human born alive but soulless.

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what I like best about kals theory is it is all encapsulated in plain sight in the phrase womb plague.

there all along. layers of revelation.

Something soulless and apparently Non-men, but not because they'd ultimately just be creatures of flesh.

Something... dunyain?

***

Unrelated didnt get a chance to post this last week. I thought the mystery of the dunyain feminine is one and the same as the question of the thousand thousand halls. You know that "question" that teenage kellhus was so hornily eager to ask. ;)

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Going back a bit - it does seem clear that Kellhus is at least aware of how to have sex. It isn't at all some kind of new thing to him. He certainly knows about where babies come from, and seems to be able to have a normal reaction to human females as far as his sexuality goes.



That implies that he's been with women before. Notice how he reacts to things he hasn't seen before and has only heard of - things like Mek's sorcery or trees or religion. He masters them quickly - but it puts him at pause before that. We never witness him with any pause about women, not once.


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Also note the use of the word MINISTERING In regards to the inchoroi. Now consider, you don't think the inchoroi would use syringes to administer injections do you?

Oh? You mean you thought rape of world's was bragging? Methinks aurax was being rather literal, they raped every non man and woman. Ewwwww.

(Am I misremembering or did early Freudian analysts recommend sex with said analyst to "cure" their patients?)

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Why not put him to death? Perhaps because Cû’jara-Cinmoi did not want to send him knowingly in to damnation? Although, I can't really explain such sudden compassion.


Because it marks Curara-Cinmoi belief in the revelation of the inverse fire that Sirwitta was exposed to.



And that killing Sirwitta would earn Cinmoi just that little bit more eternal torture. So he recinded the kill order.


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Going back a bit - it does seem clear that Kellhus is at least aware of how to have sex. It isn't at all some kind of new thing to him. He certainly knows about where babies come from, and seems to be able to have a normal reaction to human females as far as his sexuality goes.

That implies that he's been with women before. Notice how he reacts to things he hasn't seen before and has only heard of - things like Mek's sorcery or trees or religion. He masters them quickly - but it puts him at pause before that. We never witness him with any pause about women, not once.

We don't know what Kellhus does after his run in with Mek and before Cnaiur finds him surrounded by sranc bodies. That's a period of a year or so isn't it? At least a few months I think.

He could have learned about women then. We have no idea what he did in Atrithau or if he even went there, do we?

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We have from Kellhus’s POV that he plans to go to Atrithau:

But such thoughts were irrelevant to his mission. His study of Leweth was drawing to conclusion. Soon he would have to continue south to Atrithau, where Leweth had insisted he could secure further means of traveling to Shimeh.

No reason to doubt that—it’s the only human settlement he can safely reach.

When we later find him, the Scylvendi determine that his companions are from Atrithau:

“He said the dead men you found were from Atrithau.”

Cnaüir had already determined as much. Aside from Sakarpus, Atrithau was the only city north of the Steppe—the only city of Men, anyway.

And here’s Kellhus’s own POV about this:

Since abandoning the trapper and fleeing south through the northern wastes, Kellhus had encountered many men, especially in the city of Atrithau. There he discovered that Leweth, the trapper who had saved him, was not an exception. World-born men were every bit as simpleminded and as deluded as the trapper had been. Kellhus needed only to utter a few rudimentary truths and they would be moved to wonder. He needed only to assemble these truths into coarse sermons, and they would surrender possessions, lovers, even children. Forty-seven men had accompanied him when he rode from Atrithau’s southern gates, calling themselves the adunyani, the “little Dûnyain.” Not one survived the trek across Suskara. Out of love they had sacrificed everything, asking only for words in return. For the semblance of meaning.

So it seems we can safely assume that he indeed did go to Atrithau.

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