The Unholy Consult Post-Release SPOILER THREAD

[kuenjato]

42 minutes ago, Hello World said:

That's all I'm taking from this. Maybe he expected Esmenet to free him, he also probably expected Achamian to free Proyas, and Mimara to have a baby, etc... none of these things mattered to him in the golden room, though. He did not expect Kelmomas to be there.

To me, there is no point really expending too much time thinking about theories that could go either way at this point (you could say Kellhuas said that last line to fool the other Dunyain...)  and you could come up with all sorts of crackpots about why he did that and wait 5 years for the next book to have no payoff whatsoever.

Kellhus left Achamian, Kelmomas, Inrilatas, etc alive because he loved Esmenet.

In the end, Kellhus' feelings for Esmenet were the only darkness that comes before that he couldn't fathom/conquer, and he failed because of it. Esmenet was probably god-entangled herself with the Whore of Fate.

yes, there's no point to try and "fool" the dunsalt, as they were going to take advantage of necessity and stuff lil kelly into the No-God shell the minute Kellhus is salt. Kellhus was genuinely surprised by the appearance of his son, and after the evil shit he did to Proyas and his whole save-himself-by-turning-Earwa-into-hell shtick, it's quite satisfactory to see him go out that way. I wish Enlightenment HK could have read this book, as that was one of his explicit wishes--to see Kellhus die horribly.

I suspect Kellhus will be back in series 3 as the 101st tapeworm god (loved that line by Mer), but he has no direct command of Earwa now and will be starving in the outside.

[kuenjato]

Also, extending this line of thought... because of the probability trance and the Dunyain mission, there has always been this strain of theorizing that falls into conspiracy theory--that everything is orchestrated, controlled by elite agencies. Big Moe pulling the strings, etc. What this ignores about the real world is that chaotic agencies exist that are difficult to predict; elites tend to muck it up when they attempt domination schemes (neo con adventures in the Mid East, for example); and no matter one's intellect, there will always be factors one cannot account for simply because the world is too big and too complex. Big Moe was a perfect example of this; despite his intellect, he screwed up by blinding himself and by not realizing that Kellhus went crazy under the tree / struck a bargain with a God. Kellhus, for his part, was saved twice by his son by factors he could not control (blind to the White Luck); Meppa was almost a match for him; the nuke was not expected (his dialogue with the dunsalt indicates this) etc. He barely slipped past death several times, but couldn't evade what he couldn't predict. His 'darkness' - (PTSD from the tree) - keeping Esme happy - screwed him in the end, which is pretty Bakkerish in itself.

This is where Ajolki figures in, as well, being basically a chaos/mischief god. It feels like Bakker subtly critiquing the "master of the universe"/puppet-master trope to which Kellhus personified for six volumes.

 

 

 

[MisterGuyMan]

Well for the Bootstrap Paradox theory, it doesn't really matter at all if Kellhus was surprised at Kelmomas' presence and didn't anticipate the salting.  The big player and orchestrater of events would be Outside-Kellhus who would be able to know events beyond mundane Kellhus' knowledge.  He's also be able to play his past self like a tool and that would be so badass IMO.

I'm looking through some of my highlighted kindle quotes and there's enough evidence there for me to retain this theory.  I'll post it up when I finish gathering everything.  

[jurble]

11 minutes ago, kuenjato said:

What this ignores about the real world is that chaotic agencies exist that are difficult to predict; elites tend to muck it up when they attempt domination schemes (neo con adventures in the Mid East, for example); and no matter one's intellect, there will always be factors one cannot account for simply because the world is too big and too complex.

The whole point of the series is free will doesn't exist and the universe is deterministic.  There is no such thing as chaos and everything is predictable given enough computational power.  You can account for every single factor (especially if you control a large portion of the priors and create Knowns).  The entire concept of Conditioned Ground is to take control of a large portion of the causal factors such that the Known Unknowns turn the determined into various probables (the Probability Trance).

[kuenjato]

4 minutes ago, Damned with the Wind said:

The whole point of the series is free will doesn't exist and the universe is deterministic.  There is no such thing as chaos and everything is predictable given enough computational power.  You can account for every single factor (especially if you control a large portion of the priors and create Knowns).  The entire concept of Conditioned Ground is to take control of a large portion of the causal factors such that the Known Unknowns and Unknown Unknowns turn the determined into various probables (the Probability Trance).

But that is a fallacy IMO, and it's the fallacy that turned Kellhus into salt. Only the concept of an omniscient God of Gods could have that much "computational power." In this series, the GoG is blind and broken, at least according to what the text has presented us.

But I would dig the bootstrap paradox theory, if that's what it turns out to be. Maybe Kellhus will become the God of Gods and puppet-string everything backwards.

[jurble]

How is it a fallacy?  You need to elaborate.  Action begets action in Earwa (either forwards or backwards, determinism or fatalism, both of which Kellhus can predict because he's a living supercomputer).  The only wrench is the degree to which Unknown Unknowns can affect Kellhus' probability trance.  And the question is whether Kelmomas-as-Invisible-to-Gods is an Unknown Unknown on the part of Kellhus.  Kellhus "struck treaties with the Pit."  Did he ask Ajokli to save his own family from damnation (for Esmenet's sake, let's say)?  

If then, during their conversation, Ajokli had no idea who Kelmomas was, then Kellhus would know something is up.  Just because Kelmomas is invisible to the Gods, doesn't affect Kellhus' ability to work him into the probability trance (unless the Probability Trance was supernatural all along).

[kuenjato]

8 minutes ago, Damned with the Wind said:

How is it a fallacy?  You need to elaborate.  Action begets action in Earwa (either forwards or backwards, determinism or fatalism, both of which Kellhus can predict because he's a living supercomputer).  The only wrench is the degree to which Unknown Unknowns can affect Kellhus' probability trance.  And the question is whether Kelmomas-as-Invisible-to-Gods is an Unknown Unknown on the part of Kellhus.  Kellhus "struck treaties with the Pit."  Did he ask Ajokli to save his own family from damnation (for Esmenet's sake, let's say)?  

If then, during their conversation, Ajokli had no idea who Kelmomas was, then Kellhus would know something is up.  Just because Kelmomas is invisible to the Gods, doesn't affect Kellhus' ability to work him into the probability trance.

There are always Unknown unknowns. There are always actions one cannot see or predict, unless one is an omnicent God and can see All actions All of the time. I understand the theory that Kellhus has been a God the entire series, just didn't know it, and that is influencing his probability trance to "always be right." 

I suppose I prefer the idea that Kellhus screwed up in the end, possibly due to my general distaste for conspiracy theory and puppet-master tropes, but certainly because it cheapens the narrative (deus ex machina all the time, every time) and subsequently destroys all tension or, really, desire to speculate onward (for me, anyway).

[jurble]

Speaking of conspiracy theories: I'm on-board with the Kellhus-God influencing the entire series up to this point theory.  All those coincidences that seemed to be outside the power of Moenghus to set up directly (Leweth, Cnaiur finding the wreckage of Kellhus' caravan), and to which we had previously attributed Anagke, was in fact Kellhus-God.  

Kellhus lets himself die before the No-God activates because it's the latest point in time that he can turn into the eternal Kellhus-God.  And, Kellhus has no goals going forward - his goal was to see the No-God activated.  Everything that happened in the series was to ensure the Second Apocalypse.  Kellhus himself might not have realized this himself at the time he killed Moe.

The Great Ordeal and the Empire were necessary up to Dagliash, because Kellhus thought the Consult were morons.  He didn't trust the Consult to revive the No-God.  Kellhus himself couldn't become the No-God, because that would destroy the careful shepherding he's done as a divinity to see the No-God rise (because his soul would never reach the Outside).  

But wait, you might ask, if Kellhus wanted the Second Apocalypse to occur, but thought the Consult were morons, why didn't he teleport to Ishual, grab Koringhus, teleport to Golgotterath, and tell the Consult to throw Korey into the Sarcophagus and then kill himself before it happened? Dunno.

[MisterGuyMan]

Well time doesn't matter in the outside.  The whiteluck pretty much guarantees a fixed outcome and we see prophecy is a fact.  The only exception is Kelmomas who can screw it all up but he's either entangled with Ajokli or immune to God sight as the No-God.  Even with him, his actual No-God-hood seems to be preordained.  Nau Cayuti was the only one that could activate the Sarcophagus because the Anasurimbur line has always been the only line that could do so.  I interprete this to mean that the entire blood requirement has been preordained.

So I'm on the camp that it's possible to brute force fate into submission depending on your perspective. Because even if you believe you accomplished your plan, it's also true that everything you did has happened before.  

[Hello World]

1 hour ago, Damned with the Wind said:

The whole point of the series is free will doesn't exist and the universe is deterministic.  There is no such thing as chaos and everything is predictable given enough computational power.  You can account for every single factor (especially if you control a large portion of the priors and create Knowns).  The entire concept of Conditioned Ground is to take control of a large portion of the causal factors such that the Known Unknowns turn the determined into various probables (the Probability Trance).

I think that's just the view of the Dunyain prior to leaving Ishual, which is wrong. Bakker has said outright that beings with souls have free will in Earwa.

[Kalbear]

22 hours ago, Damned with the Wind said:

The mark on the Ciphrang and the effectiveness on Chorae on them might have to do with the the nature of the Daimotic spells that pull them into the world, though.  How else should Kakaliol being the god of Carythusal's slums be interpreted then? 

Might be just a name. In the text, it's referred to as 'the Demon-godling of the diseased slums and gutters of Carythusal'. And usually referred to as 'Reaper-of-Heroes' over and over, which seems like another title rather than a specific description. 

It's not referred to in any of the other books or in any other god reference.

19 hours ago, MisterGuyMan said:

We're delving into metaphysics that either aren't completely understood or more open to interpretation for my liking.  If we assume that the various gods are splintered from a larger absolute god, then there are actually statements that say all men are connected to each other as well.  So fundamentally there's only a difference in quantity not quality.

I don't think that follows; you're assuming that the Zero-God that Koringhus follows is the same as the God that was splintered into the gods. I am not. 

But yeah, we're certainly talking about ambiguities. You're no different than me in that regard.

19 hours ago, MisterGuyMan said:

  As for intuition vs reason, I don't see the big difference for creatures that exist throughout time.  We're framing processes of thought on creatures that would fundamentally think differently.  If all they need to do is think about what happens to know what happens then that would be intuition.  There's actually little reason to think things through when you can just see what's true.  Also if Ajokli really did surmise the existence of the No-God then that would count as reasoning to me.

Again, we have explicitly in the text that both Kellhus and the DunSult think otherwise.

19 hours ago, MisterGuyMan said:

I'm also not following how Cnaur's swazond are relevant.  Yes, they represent the momentum of those he killed but is that more than symbolic?  The Kellhian Empire has been described as the soul of one man spread across nations or something like that.  To me that's symbolically makes Kellhus worse.  So its atrocities would also be his own.

We don't know if Cnaiur's swazond are more than symbolic, and when Mimara looked at him she saw the souls in the Swazond trapped and writhing around. For whatever reason, Cnaiur is bound to a lot of souls directly and we have some information about that. We have none about Kellhus, especially as how he pertains to those who worship him.

19 hours ago, MisterGuyMan said:

Is there evidence I'm not aware of for how Gods react to Chorae? 

All sorts of things. For instance, you can have a magic pouch given by the gods which hides a chorae. We have Sorweel holding chorae, and Kellhus still cannot see the glamour put on Sorweel. We have nothing stopping Yatwer's obliteration earlier. We have Ajokli literally using godpower to pull down 100 skin-spies with chorae. There is no sign that Psatma or Sorweel or the WLW are in any way marked by sorcery. No one ever detects them. 

19 hours ago, MisterGuyMan said:

I'd also like to add this mundane argument.  The 100 gods are really the hundred gods because the Inchoroi defined them as 100 gods in the tusk. 

This isn't accurate. The 100 existed prior to the Tusk. The Tusk was simply what the Inchoroi wrote down as a transcription of the stories and tales by the men. And the only thing they inserted into the Tusk that was different was that the God believes the false men to be damned. Everything else was there before.

19 hours ago, MisterGuyMan said:

Am I missing something or are there examples of how the Gods are viewed when in the mundane world?  As far as I know Ajokli/Kellhus is the only example we have.

There are so very many, starting as far back as Cnaiur in TTT that I'm aware of.

[jurble]

Saubon in TWP, I believe is before Cnaiur.

14 minutes ago, Hello World said:

 Bakker has said outright that beings with souls have free will in Earwa.

He's using the Dan Dennett definition of Free Will.

You can search Bakker's blog for more on this.

[Kalbear]

11 hours ago, PapushiSun said:

Question for Kalbear: A while back I asked you why the White-Luck Warrior failed and you said that there were two possible explanations in TUC. Having read the book (though not the encyclopedic glossary), I can only find one reason: that Kelmomas is invisible to the gods and the White-Luck Warrior. What's the second possible explanation?

The other is that Kelmomas was being ridden by Ajokli and Ajokli made him fail, made Kellhus fail, made Sorweel fail, etc. I like the explanation you gave better, but both could work. 

[Kalbear]

7 hours ago, kuenjato said:

I'm Almost Used To It Now. But yeah.

Kalbear & Werthead - are there any notable entries in the glossary that given particular insight into the ending / how Kelly might have survived? Or anything one should scroll to first? 

The big one is this completely fucked up description on the Decapitant section:

Quote

Decapitants—Name given to the two severed demon heads slung from the waist of Anasûrimbor Kellhus I. In 4121, following the installation of Nurbanu Soter as King-Regent of High Ainon, the Holy Aspect-Emperor famously stayed in Kiz as a guest of Heramari Iyokus, the famed Blind Necromancer, learning the most forbidden of the forbidden arts, the Daimos. He reappeared four months later with the heads of two demons bound to his waist by their hair. Whenever he was asked about them, he would demure, often, as Hilu Akamis, a one-time Mandate Court Advisor, reports in his journals, ignoring the question altogether.
Akamis recounts a tale told him by a Shigeki drover, Pim, pressed into Imperial service working the Aspect-Emperor’s baggage train. According to Akamis, Pim told of a trip across Gedea that took the Aspect-Emperor and his travel court across the legendary Plains of Mengedda. In the deep of the night, near the end of his watch, Pim found Anasûrimbor Kellhus alone and raving on the haunted plain, alternately removing his head and replacing it with one of the Decapitants. Akamis is rightly dismissive of the man’s lurid account, though the Schoolman readily admits being frightened by his sincerity. “He had the look of a Sempic simpleton to him, one who had left his brain with the fish to dry.”

 

[Kalbear]

4 hours ago, Hello World said:

Their mortal adversary here refers to Celmomas I think, not Seswatha, who is Kellhus's ancestor,

The mortal adversary of the Consult - and especially the Inchoroi - is Seswatha. No one else is imprinted into every single Inchoroi creation as something they recognize. No one else has a name that they all describe it as. Calling Celmomas their mortal adversary when he wasn't even alive throughout most of the first apocalypse seems incorrect. 

Quote

I'm ok with just taking the text at face value (ten years of believing Big Moe crackpots did that to me). Not everything was planned for. Neither Kellhus nor the DunSult knew about Kelmomas (Kellhus' final words prove as much). The Dunyain actually assumed that they could convince Kellhus that they were right, just like Moenghus did.

Then how on earth did the DunSult know to even bother looking for Kelmomas, much less disguise themselves as Esmi, potentially take his magical hiding god-pouch and bring him in to the Golden Room?

Why would you bring an insane 9-year old into the most important place in your entire world if they're not super important and you know it?

[Hello World]

One thing I didn't get is why some entries in the glossary were expanded upon with new information revealed in TUC, while others remained unchanged (like the Aurang/Aurax entries), and there are no entries for some new things like the Progenitors.

[Werthead]

Also still no entry for the skin spies.

[jurble]

2 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

The mortal adversary of the Consult - and especially the Inchoroi - is Seswatha. No one else is imprinted into every single Inchoroi creation as something they recognize. No one else has a name that they all describe it as. Calling Celmomas their mortal adversary when he wasn't even alive throughout most of the first apocalypse seems incorrect. 

 

And assuming Kellhus knows that, it makes his line nonsensical, since Ganrelka was born in 2104 and Nau-Cayuti in 2119.  There's no way that Seswatha is Kellhus' ancestor unless Nau-Cayuti sexed his brother/uncle/whatever's concubine. The only way that line makes sense is that Nau-cayuti is his father's son (hardly impossible) and that, for whatever, reason, they're willing to give Celmomas the title of mortal adversary, despite his relatively small role.

[Kalbear]

By the way, @MisterGuyMan, I'm not saying that you're wrong - one of the alternate ideas I had for the next series title is 'The God of Hate', following the pattern of  the series title being the thing that Kellhus is. That WOULD be a pretty giant spoiler, and would make some sense thematically and otherwise.

I just don't take it as absolute fact, and I think it can go a lot of different ways.

Just now, Damned with the Wind said:

And assuming Kellhus knows that, it makes his line nonsensical, since Ganrelka was born in 2104 and Nau-Cayuti in 2119.  There's no way that Seswatha is Kellhus' ancestor unless Nau-Cayuti sexed his brother/uncle/whatever's concubine. The only way that line makes sense is that Nau-cayuti is his father's son (hardly impossible) and that, for whatever, reason, they're willing to give Celmomas the title of mortal adversary, despite his relatively small role.

Note that almost no one actually knows that Nau-Cayuti is Seswatha's save Akka (it was rumored, but never known for sure) and it's still beyond unclear what the deal is with his dreams or even if they're true - or why he'd dream of Nau-Cayuti. Hell, almost no one thinks that Nau-Cayuti even survived past his descent into the Ark. 

It also makes much less sense in actually having those chapters in the book. Why bother seeing anything of how Nau-Cayuti was made if he's not special in that way? Why bother misleading Akka, since he does nothing with that information?

That doesn't make this interpretation wrong, just weird and odd as far as writing goes. Which...isn't exactly out of place given the weird holoKellhus bit that serves apparently as a means to entirely mislead the reader.

[Hello World]

On 7/7/2017 at 7:36 PM, odium said:

I can't remember the child of Ishual's situation at the end of TGO, but I kept wondering to myself if he would ever be mentioned at all throughout TUC. He is just a single example of so many characters whose arcs were either aborted or felt pointless from the very beginning. Moenghus (Jr), Sorweel (despite the fact that I felt like he had one of the better resolutions in the story), just to name a few... but far more vitally to the story, why the fuck did we get four books of Achamian and Mimara's dread journey to Golgotterath only for them to do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING?

I think you're missing something important that I haven't seen mentioned by any of the reviewers. That not only is TUC not a conclusion to the SA series, a large part of it is actually set up for the next sub-series. It did conclude the story of the Aspect-Emperor and the Great Ordeal, though, that much is true.

I think Bakker made a mistake by harping on the idea that TUC was supposed to be the end of the story when he first conceived it, because that gave a lot of readers some false expectations. I've seen comments here saying that in case the last two books aren't published TUC should be enough of a resolution to the whole series... how exactly would that be done? I mean, I haven't seen anyone saying that in case the 7th book in ASOIAF doesn't get published TWOW should be enough of an ending to satisfy fans.

I think Bakker actually knew many readers would ask what about Meppa, Crab-hand, Mimara, etc... so he pre-empted this by saying that he's hard working on the next book before this one got published, which, to me, sounded very similar to GRRM's note that fans should not worry the 4th books was going to be published a year after the 3rd.

My own problem however is that I think this book could have been a proper ending to the series. Kellhus is gone and we already know almost everything about the Consult. I have very little interest in reading a third series if it's just going to be a straight up battle with the Consult whoever ends up winning.