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Bakker: The Great Ordeal SPOILER THREAD pt. II


kuenjato

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9 minutes ago, Hello World said:

If Dunyain women turned into whales over time, how can Kellhus produce normal girls with Esmenet?

When he mates with the whales they produce that look and function like whales, but when he mates with Esmenet he produces normal girls that look like him.

Well, that could conceivably explain why he has so low rate of success in producing viable children.

Also, if genetics in Earwa is teleologic, doesn't it by  itself falsify the principle of what comes before?

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10 minutes ago, Hello World said:

If Dunyain women turned into whales over time, how can Kellhus produce normal girls with Esmenet?

When he mates with the whales they produce that look and function like whales, but when he mates with Esmenet he produces normal girls that look like him.

My guess is that most Dunyain women are not whale mothers and are probably considered Defectives and therefore put to work or used as subjects for Neuropuncture or whatever.

Can I just say that I was very disappointed by the direction Dunyain society took with women?  Considering how readily Kellhus legitimized witchcraft, I was hoping that we would discover that Dunyain society was egalitarian.

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"My guess is that most Dunyain women are not whale mothers and are probably considered Defectives and therefore put to work or used as subjects for Neuropuncture or whatever."

The exchange where the boy asks if Mimara resembles the first mothers seems to discredit that, though.

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3 minutes ago, Hello World said:

"My guess is that most Dunyain women are not whale mothers and are probably considered Defectives and therefore put to work or used as subjects for Neuropuncture or whatever."

The exchange where the boy asks if Mimara resembles the first mothers seems to discredit that, though.

I don't think it does, though, because only the whale mothers are mothers.  The other women are Defectives and not considered people at all by the Dunyain.

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2 hours ago, sologdin said:

it's the same as in dune.

It's not. The axolotl tanks in dune are women specifically bred and cloned to the purpose of acting as an artificial womb for others. They do not pass on their genes to their children and do not breed with the ghola or face dancers. They also have a separate gene line.

The whale mothers are what a female dunyain looks like. They breed with dunyain males, they share genes, they pass on their genes to their dunyain kids.

If the dunyain had been using IVF techniques and also had real women who provided fertilized eggs to be implanted it would be similar to dune. But it isn't that way, and as a result is stupid.

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28 minutes ago, WrathOfTinyKittens said:

I don't think it does, though, because only the whale mothers are mothers.  The other women are Defectives and not considered people at all by the Dunyain.

That wasn't what bakker indicated.

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"only the whale mothers are mothers.  The other women are Defectives and not considered people at all by the Dunyain."

Sorry, but where is this from? The text and Bakker's comments on this say that the Dunyain race consists of men that resemble Kellhus and female whale mothers (who in the past used to resemble women like Mimara). The male defectives like the boy are consistent with what Dunyain men are like. Presumably female defectives resemble the whale mothers as well.

The idea that defective whale mothers (who are the dunyain's females) look like normal world born women makes no sense and is not suggested anywhere in the text.

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*shrug* I'm just speculating based on there only being a dozen of the mothers and Kellhus' ability to create two "normal" daughters.  Does the text state outright that all their female offspring resemble the mothers?  I do not remember that, but that doesn't really mean anything

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I brought up the idea that normal women exist among the Dunyain on Bakker's blog weeks ago cuz whale mother dimorphism are basically impossible without some crazy chromosome duplication shit in a 2000 year span, he said nah, and to chill cuz it's fantasy yo.

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1 hour ago, Dickwad Poster #3784 said:

It's not. The axolotl tanks in dune are women specifically bred and cloned to the purpose of acting as an artificial womb for others. They do not pass on their genes to their children and do not breed with the ghola or face dancers. They also have a separate gene line.

The whale mothers are what a female dunyain looks like. They breed with dunyain males, they share genes, they pass on their genes to their dunyain kids.

If the dunyain had been using IVF techniques and also had real women who provided fertilized eggs to be implanted it would be similar to dune. But it isn't that way, and as a result is stupid.

distinction without a difference, no?  both are horrible crimes, and the tleilaxu were extinguished by the honored matres because of it.  the tleilaxu women were horribly deformed in the process and were held in forced servitude, which are the salient points of comparison.  (idaho "saw a great mound of female flesh — monstrous in her almost immobile grossness ... a maze of dark tubes linked her body to giant metal containers," or so.)

the cetacean reference is mimara, though, yes?  that section is infused with her memory of whale bones washed up on shore while she was held in a similar forced servitude.  if it's silly, it's her silliness in designating the skeletons. it is slick, however, in demonstrating that the JE is thoroughly structured by her experience and accordingly is not credible.  we learn thereafter that she steps afoul of the injunction that

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Doubt begets understanding, and understanding begets compassion. Verily, it is conviction that kills.

by her insistence that the dunyain survivors are "already damned [...] irrevocably" (238).  she's accordingly worthless as a witness, and we should view the "whale" stuff through that lens.

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3 hours ago, WrathOfTinyKittens said:

Can I just say that I was very disappointed by the direction Dunyain society took with women?  Considering how readily Kellhus legitimized witchcraft, I was hoping that we would discover that Dunyain society was egalitarian.

I'm disappointed, too. I was thinking "why would the Dunyain, who obviously know enough of genetic inheritance to eugenically select and breed their men, just randomly use all of their women as breeding stock axolotl-tank style? It'd obviously be a shorter path to select the women for breeding as carefully as they do the men--there's no way Bakker would make the Dunyain women into axolotl tanks!". I mean, I know that I'm no geneticist and that I came up with that reasoning because I didn't like the alternative, but I thought it was sound anyway. For him to take the direction of the whale-mothers instead, while not surprising, was disappointing to me both emotionally and intellectually.

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1 hour ago, sologdin said:

the cetacean reference is mimara, though, yes?  that section is infused with her memory of whale bones washed up on shore while she was held in a similar forced servitude.  if it's silly, it's her silliness in designating the skeletons. it is slick, however, in demonstrating that the JE is thoroughly structured by her experience and accordingly is not credible.  we learn thereafter that she steps afoul of the injunction that

Nice. This plus the cultural context of Galian's damnation puts the bias of the JE into perspective.

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19 hours ago, R'hllors Red Lobster said:

Fairly certain their Akka and Cnaiurs ages are listed in the TDTCB appendix

Yup. As of 4110/ealry 4111:

Achamian - 47

Cnaiur - 44

Esmenet - 31

Kellhus - 33

Serwe - 19

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You really think Erikson has denser prose? I mean I love me my Malzan to death but I never found anything really dense about any of it.

Toll the Hounds is way heavier going than anything I've ever found in Bakker. Most of the latter books in the series have chunks of them in a similar vein, then Forge of Darkness dialled it back a little.

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am only halfway through volume VI so wtf do i know--but my pet half-serious theory is that sorwa-immy wins by popping an amiolas --"to parlay one must understand [...] to understand one must be" (210)--on the NG, thereby giving it an answer to WHAT AM I? it then happily buggers off to do what a sated eschaton normally does on its day off.

reserving all rights, as is traditional, to claim that this was totally serious if lightning strikes and it's correct.

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52 minutes ago, Sci-2 said:

Nice. This plus the cultural context of Galian's damnation puts the bias of the JE into perspective.

But she doesn't see them as literal whales. They remind her of that with their big ribcages. Her opinion of them being damned doesn't show the damnation. This is precisely the opposite evidence that you think it is.

She literally describes what she sees to us. Then she compares it to what she knows and gives it a nickname. She doesn't look and see literal whales.

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7 hours ago, sologdin said:

distinction without a difference, no?  both are horrible crimes, and the tleilaxu were extinguished by the honored matres because of it.  the tleilaxu women were horribly deformed in the process and were held in forced servitude, which are the salient points of comparison.  (idaho "saw a great mound of female flesh — monstrous in her almost immobile grossness ... a maze of dark tubes linked her body to giant metal containers," or so.)

The crime might be similar but that wasn't what I objected to. I objected to its plausibulity. Dune has 20 times longer history of tech and has tech greater than our current tech; dunyain barely have steel.

So it is a distinction with a difference - because while it was clearly attempting to evoke the same things, it does not work. It would be equally silly for the dunyain to be able to create and invent ballistic missiles to deliver biological WMDs, or for them to understand nuclear fission and the effects of a nuclear explosion on humans OWAIT

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the cetacean reference is mimara, though, yes?  that section is infused with her memory of whale bones washed up on shore while she was held in a similar forced servitude.  if it's silly, it's her silliness in designating the skeletons. it is slick, however, in demonstrating that the JE is thoroughly structured by her experience and accordingly is not credible.  we learn thereafter that she steps afoul of the injunction that

by her insistence that the dunyain survivors are "already damned [...] irrevocably" (238).  she's accordingly worthless as a witness, and we should view the "whale" stuff through that lens.

Yeah, I disagree entirely with this, especially since kellhus also believes this is a horrible part of their dread race. Furthermore, koringhus believes he is damned and is only saved when she forgives him.

And even further to that, the issue isn't that the description is silly or that they're these particular grotesque things that look odd. That's not at all what took me out of the moment. What took me out of the moment was that the Dunyain had sexual dimorphism to this obvious degree (while Mimara condemns it, Akka notices how deformed they are too) and how stupid that is from a genetic perspective. 

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On 7/21/2016 at 2:37 AM, Dickwad Poster #3784 said:

Where is it that Cnaiur is in love with Proyas?

I always got more of a paternal vibe around Cnaiur's regard for Proyas. Felt like a humanizing contrast to all his loathing & madness. Also showed how he refuses to *allow* himself to accept this respect: he rages at himself for it.

I'd have to revisit TWP to fish up exactly why I had this impression. But I do remember one line where he's considering Proyas and reflects how he's young enough to be his son, or something like that. Though who knows maybe that's just some weird Cnaiur sexual thing. 

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On 7/19/2016 at 6:41 PM, Claustrophobic Jurble said:
3 hours ago, crowganic said:

I always got more of a paternal vibe around Cnaiur's regard for Proyas. Felt like a humanizing contrast to all his loathing & madness. Also showed how he refuses to *allow* himself to accept this respect: he rages at himself for it.

I'd have to revisit TWP to fish up exactly why I had this impression. But I do remember one line where he's considering Proyas and reflects how he's young enough to be his son, or something like that. Though who knows maybe that's just some weird Cnaiur sexual thing. 

Sorry for the weird quoting error.  I agree with crowganic, I think Cnauir simply had some respect for Proyas, I think it was something about how practical he was about war, not living better than his soldiers in the desert, actually having some kind of code... He was the one major character who went to war out of righteousness in the first trilogy. Not that surprising Cnauir would have some appreciation for him out of all the other inrithi.

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Wat if Kel and Sammi were experiments by Kellhus in trying to grant the Judging Eye, but shit didn't go right.  Instead of two unsouled twins or whatever, he got a kid with like .1 soul and 1.9 souls.

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