Jump to content

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


Kalbear

Recommended Posts

@Sci-2

Quote

However I do suspect Ishual has regular women around in addition to the whale mothers based on the fact Kellhus expressed no wonder or surprise, even internally, at the sight of women in the first trilogy.

Sterile drones, maybe.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, Electric Bass said:

@Sci-2

Sterile drones, maybe.

Now that would be an interesting point.

One of the reasons we hypothesized the whale mothers was that logically, they wouldn't want these warrior monks to spend any time thinking about sex or having kids. It just takes too much time out of the way. 

So instead, the Dunyain have essentially three (or more, I suppose) genders. They have the male, which we've seen. The whale mothers, who are some kind of stunt that happens infrequently and can be either sex; the males are killed and the females are used as breeders. And then a third, who are female in biology and are otherwise unencumbered but do not breed.

And the goal of the whole process is to make the Absolute that unencumbered

You naturally need men, and they found that you need to train the men as you do the women. The whale mothers are then enslaved not just by the men but by the women who benefit. They are aware of these aberrations in the basement being tortured for their entire lives and accept it, and participate in it. Because they get what they want. And because they are less likely to be slaves to their desires (per apparently every single mention of philosophy in the text) they are more likely to be able to tame the Darkness that Comes Before. 

Boy, that would have been super problematic. On a whole lot of levels. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 minutes ago, Electric Bass said:

@Sci-2

Sterile drones, maybe.

I don't know. It seems odd that Kellhus recognizes the inherent intellectual capabilities of women and has no sexist attitude toward them if the only women he knows are drones and whale mothers?

Though perhaps I'm misconstruing what you mean by drones?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

14 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

I think you're right in TAE where the horror comes from, but it's not entirely a Bakker thing to only be epochal in horror. 

I admit to only having reread TAE in recent years so you might be right about that.

9 minutes ago, lokisnow said:

No. The dunyain all systematically shave their heads and have for millenia. but they haven't bred out hair. Kell starts out bald. Moenghus is bald. the Pragma is bald and so on.

being bald is probably just part of a kung-fu visual Bakker had in his head as a teenager. but not breeding out hair sure as fuck doesn't fit with the capability of breeding whale mothers.

Why would they bother?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 minutes ago, Sci-2 said:

I don't know. It seems odd that Kellhus recognizes the inherent intellectual capabilities of women and has no sexist attitude toward them if the only women he knows are drones and whale mothers?

Though perhaps I'm misconstruing what you mean by drones?

I think you are - he means drones as in things that don't breed. Not things that are robots. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, generic said:

Why would they bother?

There's all sorts of weird research about it. In the olden times it'd be a health issue - you shave because you don't want lice and things, and because it's easier to keep clean. Now we know that hair contains all sorts of pheremones, bacteria, microfauna, etc. 

I don't mind it exactly, but it does seem odd. Mostly, it seems odd just in general - why would the 'perfect' human be what looks like a biologically successful male (that also happens to look just like Bakker...uh) instead of something else? Why would genetic breeding that can produce a perfect womb not be able to produce, I dunno, giant-headed babies with three tongues and a quadricameral brain? Or hermaphrodites that can go fuck themselves? 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

11 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

I think you are - he means drones as in things that don't breed. Not things that are robots. 

This.

Although we don't actually know what Kellhus' initial reaction to normal women was. He went to Atrithau before coming south, and all we know about it is that he used Dunyain tactics to gather a group of folks willing to lay down their lives to escort him southward. He presumably came across women while he was there.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, Electric Bass said:

This.

Although we don't actually know what Kellhus' initial reaction to normal women was. He went to Atrithau before coming south, and all we know about it is that he used Dunyain tactics to gather a group of folks willing to lay down their lives to escort him southward. He presumably came across women while he was there.

That's fair. Though it would be a bit of cheat IMO that Kellhus never seems surprised by Esmi's intellect.

In fact that's sort of another problem with the Whale Mother subspecies - how do you breed better strains? Why doesn't Kellhus think fucking any chick will give him super Dunyain sons?

Unless the Whale Mother transformation is something that happens after you've sorted the smart girls and killed off the dumb ones in each generation...though that again would seem to require things the Dunyain don't have - knowledge of how to manipulate the Bios.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

19 minutes ago, Hello World said:

Maybe Dunyain men breed with the whale moms but the moms themselves are part of an entirely different species that are themselves bred with whale fathers? Like how Kellhus breeds with Esmi.

There ya go. Ishual is just the first foundation while the women go actually grasp the absolute and use Ishual as a breeding ground and daycare. It's like a gymboree, but with slightly more torture.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Jeez, you guys are all insane. :P

I must say, if Bakker is trolling the MRA/Gamgergate crowd, good for him. And yeah, you very rarely see those types on this forum, mainly cause, you know, the mods here are sane and those people are, well, there was a topic here a long time before I even signed up when I was still lurking, where someone reading The Wheel of Time wanted to know when the girls would start getting raped, and didn't understand when we tried to explain to him that they don't. It's terrifying and frightening at the same time if you can dig it up.

I derail, carry on.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Eh, I kinda hope he's about done with the gender allegory stuff. It had some value in the first series but now just seems to weaken the narrative.

I mean I didn't take anything away from the whale mothers other than "Well that's creepy" and "How implausible is this even in the setting?" Is anyone really going to read this and reflect on their own misogynistic tendencies?

That said Lockesnow's point about the Dunyain deceiving themselves and conceiving the God and the path to said Deity in the shadow of their own prejudices is interesting. Surely if conditioning stains everyone it stains Kellhus as well?

Everyone gets confused when they go to the Outside, but Kellhus seems sure he knows what the God is...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

36 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

There ya go. Ishual is just the first foundation while the women go actually grasp the absolute and use Ishual as a breeding ground and daycare. It's like a gymboree, but with slightly more torture.

I shudder to think of what a Whale Father would be in Ishual. Some type of misshapen creature with eight arms for grasping tightly on to the Whale Mothers and a giant set of genitals . . . oh.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

14 minutes ago, lokisnow said:

on my last reread I struggled to see the difference between dunyain and inchoroi and continually failed to see such a distinction.

Isn't that one of the theories about the Inchoroi? That they tried to use genetic and bio-engineering to turn themselves into Dunyain, but couldn't remove the "sex" and "violence" parts of themselves and thus fucked themselves up?

Then again, the Dunyain seem to have done that better than the Inchoroi.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 minutes ago, lokisnow said:

on my last reread I struggled to see the difference between dunyain and inchoroi and continually failed to see such a distinction.

It's an interesting point. Wanted to get to this a bit.

Thematically, the books seem to be going to the inescapable conclusion that women are kind of totally hosed, and they're  totally hosed because of men. 

The religious such as Yatwer see the world and see that women are less - and rightfully so - because they are the ones who are the object of desire. They exist as Mimara saw them - they exist to give. To give to the desires of men. They exist to slake the desires of men. And of course the gods want this - because to give in to desire is to damn ones self. And damnation is extra tasty. For religious and gods, women are not the grain in the granary, and they are not the bread; they are the yeast. They are what makes the bread rise. That is their purpose. The desire of worldborne is to procreate, to continue, to be righteous - and to allow that desire women must be less. End result: they fuck over women. 

The Inchoroi said 'hey, let's not worry about things like what body shape we are and focus on improving our appetites for lust.' As we get more and more hinted at, desire is the source of damnation. And more importantly, desire is more masculine than feminine. So the inchies, in their goals of enhancing their desire and enhancing the gains from their desire, became more and more hypermasculine - removing all feminine traits such as parenting, empathy and risk aversion. (not my thoughts, but this is the 'all people are are their biology' thought experiment). End result: they fuck over women.

The Dunyain said 'hey, let's become god'. Let's forsake our worldly desires and ignore them in favor of this Godhead thing. Except...that just replaced one desire with another. They logically determined that the Shortest Path was to have rape farms of whale mothers so that they were not distracted by their worldly desires, and they didn't even consider that the Shortest Path might be a woman. Why would they? The world has shown them again and again that women are there to slake the desires of men. These men desire God - why would a woman do anything other than help? End result: they fuck over women. (even better, they deceive themselves and think they are forsaking desire when they are simply trading the target). 

All of these things are based on the idea that masculine desire - the simple biological fact of it - will invariably doom women. That modernity, or body modification, or belief - none of those paths end up anywhere other than doom, and the reason is that they are all based on desire. 

It is like the link earlier by Foz Meadows indicated - a perfectly logical conclusion if you assume that we are nothing more than biology, cannot overcome said biology, and the male biology is based on the above thoughts. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Has anyone thought about Koringhus's question, "Has he grasped the Absolute?"? To me, it implies that The Dunyain did indeed know about Kellhus going out into the World and he is the culmination of their goal to grasp the Absolute. It just doesn't make sense otherwise, unless we get some other explanation in the next Ishual chapter. Also, I found it funny that Bakker told Pat that this chapter contained no spoilers. Imagine what else Akka and Mimara encounter in the TTH's....

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...