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R Scott Bakker's :The Great Ordeal (spoilers)


Kalbear

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I've yet to actually read this excerpt, just browsed through and got the gist. The one part that really stuck out to me is Koringhus asking wether his father had grasped the Absolute. This seems to suggest that the Dunyain knew of Kellhus going out into the world, ergo, he is the culmination of their plan. The monks committing suicide? Bullshit. And I think that's why Koringhus was allowed to live, while being a defect. Though the child did say the Logos always burned the brightest in him. Alas, I don't think we're done in Ishual and there are more revelations there.

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27 minutes ago, JEORDHl said:

 

I'm not disagreeing as strongly as I came off in my first response, I suppose, it's just so fucking... ugh. What the fuck is wrong with this guy. Like, I know this is fiction and dark as darkling fuck, but I'd be lying if I wasn't morbidly curious about what Bakker's wife might wonder is behind that adoring gaze of his and the shit he comes up with.   

 

edited for lots of stuffs 

He has a genuine talent for horror. Sort of the fantasy book equivalent of Takashi Miike. The whale mother stuff reminds me of the climax of Neuropath, which was disturbing enough that I have no desire to ever read that book again.

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I think we are getting a little to personal when we openly worry about people's wives. The book is the book and the man is the man, because one comes from the other doesn't say anything about him except his imagination.

 

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23 minutes ago, Darth Richard II said:

Not that I disagree, but you're just realizing NOW that Bakker may not be quite right in the head? :P

I'm not arguing otherwise. Thing is, at least insofar as his stated drive of, amongst other things, depicting a world where women being inferior wasn't subjective but actually an objective reality, it was consistent. The nauseating extreme he's taken that to though...   

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1 hour ago, Kalbear said:

It's not a spoiler for the Dune series. Not at all. It's a mechanic in the Dune series. It's a spoiler the way the existence of the planet Dune is a spoiler for the Dune series. 

 

not really,

Spoiler

axolotl tanks are thought to be technology until the fifth or sixth book reveals that they are women forced into the role of becoming "tanks" 

 

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2 minutes ago, Latan said:

I think we are getting a little to personal when we openly worry about people's wives. The book is the book and the man is the man, because one comes from the other doesn't say anything about him except his imagination.

 

Nah, I'm not worrying about it. I'm curious about it. It's a broad distinction, not a fine one-- but fair enough. 

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Holy shit... what a great day. Who was it again that said they’re "done with Bakker" if the "whale mothers" theory turns out to be correct?

This chapter read like a horror novel for me, not just the tanks part, but the bit with the kid and when he first says the survivor's name... I almost had to take a break.

But I guess the massive spoiler is Mimara's vision of Kellhus?

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1 hour ago, Kalbear said:

But again, that doesn't make sense. That kind of sexual dimorphism doesn't happen in mammals, especially not after only a few generations. 

I'm not discounting it. In the sentence you quoted from me I'm stating it as the actual problem. I'm disagreeing with the premise. Genetically it just doesn't make sense at all. And it's a lot harder for me, personally, to sympathize with some weird misshapen thing that might not even have the ability to think. 

It also doesn't make sense from what we've seen of the offspring Kellhus has had. Why are Theliopia and Serwa both basically normal humans other than their brain? So...one X chromosome from Kellhus contains perfectly viable recessive traits, the Y chromosome contains totally dominant ones that also happen to be awesome, and XX becomes recessive but also unlocks ultimate brood mare? I guess Theliopia's arms and legs might be like this, but not exactly.

Putting my geneticist hat on it would be tricky for a recessive X mutation to affect the women because it's more likely to kill the men who automatically will only have the dodgy X, while the women have a chance of a back up normal X. So it's more likely for the males to veer off the basic design (and more likely to be an X chromosome mutation than a Y - the Y chromosome is pretty pathetic besides some "essentials"). The Y chromosome would need to have a gene that switched off the gene causing the women to be unrecognisable.

The angler fish is an example of how things can be very different so it's not impossible. Although the male appears to get the bad part of the deal. The Dunyain could arguably benefit from being fertile hermaphrodites with the ability to clone themselves when fit and have sexual reproduction when they want to mix things up.

Proof that it's either genetically different to achieve such vast difference and(hopefully)/or humans wanted to remain similar is the fact humans decided to give birth to relatrively under-developed offspring rather than women having to walk on all fours so that their hips were large enough to give birth to a baby that could crawl. Delivering "premature" babies was the way we went.

If the Dunyain don't have science on their side I think it would be incredibly hard to achieve said goal without altering the males as well. Then again males on Earwa may be XX and the women XY because it's a fantasy world.

 

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Just now, unJon said:

I like how Pat's leadin says the chapter doesn't contain spoilers. :P

Yeah that was funny...

I wonder if the Dunyain send they're best monk into the outside world every generation and then wonder if he grasped the Absolute. Moenghus fails and then send Kellhus, perhaps they were going to send Koringhus if Kellhus failed as well.

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20 minutes ago, red snow said:

The angler fish is an example of how things can be very different so it's not impossible. Although the male appears to get the bad part of the deal. The Dunyain could arguably benefit from being fertile hermaphrodites with the ability to clone themselves when fit and have sexual reproduction when they want to mix things up.

 

Yeah, there are existing examples of such odd dimorphism in the sexes in the animal kingdom - but none that are mammalian to my knowledge. Even when breeding artificially (such as bulldogs) the female isn't changed significantly from the male, and that's with the head making it impossible to give birth naturally. 

I'd be willing to buy that Dunyain were hermaphrodites and bred via parthenogenesis than I am this odd dimorphism, honestly. 

Not that that specifically matters - it dragged me out of the moment a bit, but as you say, it's a fantasy. What I think was disappointing was that he made the whale-mothers inhuman. I think it would have been a lot more horrific to make them entirely human and then have Mimara see them chained up, raped, their jaws and tongues surgically removed, their legs purposely and deliberately crippled. I can see it as being horrific for men thinking about having sex with these whales in some way, though, so it's more of an artistic license, but I think it robbed the scene of being a bit more affecting on doing something to someone who is human - and choosing to do it anyway. Breeding women so that their only role is a broodmare and making that their only physical trait makes me think more of the sentient cow at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, who was happy to be eaten. 

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1 hour ago, Darth Richard II said:

Didn't shut them up though.

Yep. Heh. I went back to look at old threads, and I had to reiterate this again to someone - back in February. (I also look like a fucking stud in terms of predictions):

Quote

And this, IMO, is why it feels wrong that you didn't pay attention to the messages about women and gender in the book - because Bakker spent a whole lot of time deliberately putting it in. For a while a lot of people thought that it was an accident, or that implied something about Bakker - or, perversely, that Bakker was simply telling things like they used to be and was being super realistic, far more than most authors. But none of that is true. Bakker set out to deliberately create a world that was worse than ours with respect to women, where how the ancestors thought about women was actually truth. Now, we don't know what spiritual worth might mean - it may simply be how tasty things are to the gods Outside, or how much potential someone has for doing evil, or any number of things - but it is an observable fact in Earwa that women are not as worthwhile as men. 

 

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You definitely hit those predictions, Kal. Hell, you were probably the one who came up with the

Spoiler

Axolotl Tank

theory back in the "Bakker and Women" threads years ago, back when Bakker himself would pop in for a visit. 

Ugh. It almost makes me wonder if Bakker's doing it for spite now. 

As for how the Inchoroi eventually find Ishual, it could be that one of the Erratics originally came from the Nonmen Mansion that it used to be, and remembered its location for searching. They weren't terribly far away from it to begin with, given that Kellhus came across Sranc and Mek in Sobel (a few weeks' travel southward from Ishual). 

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6 minutes ago, Hello World said:

Actually, why should we believe those two anyway? For all I know Kellhus staged that entire scene.

It's possible, though there's a lot to stage. There's the mountain of sranc corpses, the scars and stains of magic use, the age of the bodies and the wars there. Mostly, though, I'd ask why. What would be the point of staging it?

Also, on the prediction thing: the whale mothers have made me more convinced that the idea of the nonmen killing their wives and daughters to avoid having Inchie kids is true. We get yet another mention of cuckolding in this chapter, we got earlier how 'horrible' it is to not know whether your children are your own, and the theme of TGO so far appears to be 'how horrible men are to women'. It'd fit right in as well as give a nice checkmark to the twin horrors for Men's Rights Activists: being cuckolded and having sex with fat women. 

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