The Unholy Consult Post-Release SPOILER THREAD II

[Callan S.]

I can see it now : The Great Explain

[Castel]

2 hours ago, Kalbear said:

Well, Kellhus says that Saccarees was troubled by Akka telling HIM about the dreams, and Akka's all like 'fuck you'. 

I still don't see why we needed that lack of payoff about his dreams. 

 

I feel this way about just about everything.

The only payoff we got is what Kellhus was actually up to. now I'm hearing that Bakker has made that even more complicated in his AMA answers. 

I feel like we've headed back to 2009 with the finales of BSG and so on where writers were almost exuberant about confounding you with no answer in site and would tell you to your face that it's on you for not embracing the mystery. I haven't missed that shit.

[Hello World]

11 hours ago, Darth Richard II said:

I don't think its GOING to add up, which is why i agree with kuenjato, i wish Bakker had just not done these AMAs.

The more I think on it the more I sour on  it, too.

Exactly my thoughts. I was a lot more okay with TUC before I read the ama and second apocalypse thread. Granted, some of the stuff that he said makes no sense to me, but I'm still not sure how much of that I can unread and go back to my own theories and other people's theories that were discussed here and are a lot more interesting that Bakker's answers. 

[Doc Holliday]

9 hours ago, unJon said:

So is it Kellhus or Ajokli looking into the Inverse Fire and seeing a descending hunger? And how does it square with Ajokli not finding Kellhus at the end?

Ajokli? I think.

As Cnaiur? He's looking at the Carapace, which he can't see? Maybe Ajokli doesn't even know Kellhus got Salted?

 

[odium]

Congratulations to Westeros and TSA forum for writing a far more interesting series than Bakker himself! 

[odium]

Also, pardon my double post, but does it count as a new Moe crackpot to suspect Bakker for constantly saying Kellhus is dead but nothing else? At this point I dont know if he is trying to dispel that mystery or feed it. I also wonder if maybe he somehow hit Oblivion since Ajokli cant find him. 

[Sheep the Evicted]

5 hours ago, Hello World said:

Exactly my thoughts. I was a lot more okay with TUC before I read the ama and second apocalypse thread.

Oh Absolutely!

I said after I finished that im here for Bakker the Storyteller not Bakker the Philospher and that this book leans too much to the latter. I didn't know the fucking half of it. Turns out BtP has been haunting BtS the whole time making him get more and more irrational until in the end, under the pressure of having to produce a grand finale to his fantasy epic, BtP takes over and fucks up all of BtS's carefully laid plans.

I don't care how much Bakker signposts it, I smell a post-modernist rat. And this isn't what i signed up for.

[unJon]

4 hours ago, odium said:

Also, pardon my double post, but does it count as a new Moe crackpot to suspect Bakker for constantly saying Kellhus is dead but nothing else? At this point I dont know if he is trying to dispel that mystery or feed it. I also wonder if maybe he somehow hit Oblivion since Ajokli cant find him. 

Geberally agree. Bakker has carefully avoided saying that Kellhus is not in the next series. In Bakkerworld, souls exist so death is not the end of the story. Kellhus is out there somewhere and Ajokli can't find him. 

[Spring Bass]

Finally managed to get back, and just read the AMA. I though it was interesting:

1. Gin'Yursis was so powerful and intensely angry ("a certain intensity of ill-will is all that's required") that Bakker straight up confirmed that he's a Ciphrang in the Outside. Maybe he ate all of the souls of the other Non-men living in Cil-Aujas. 

2. It sounds like Ajokli more or less absorbed Kellhus's soul. Maybe that's why he couldn't find him in the Outside afterwards - Kellhus had effectively ceased to exist as something separate from Ajokli. 

3. Wherever the story is heading, it's apparently "semantic apocalypse" land given his comment about how Golgotterah is the point where the story climbs out of the World and on to our world. Maybe the ending will eventually be hopeful in that regard! I don't think he'd actually end it with "the humans are dead, Sranc inherit the Earth". 

4. Anything Eanna related is a big RAFO. Of course, if he's just in "discovery" mode, that might just be him leaving open possibilities for him to come up with new stuff in new settings. 

5. Sorcerers can apparently work out deals with Ciphrang/Gods if they know the right people to advocate on behalf of them. That's obvious from what Kellhus did with Ajokli, but it does suggest they kind of screw themselves by not bothering to care about the Gods or Outside while living. 

6. Maybe Esmenet is saved because she had her heart in the right place when she did bad stuff, and because the God liked the way she prayed. 

It's kind of fucked up that your best ways to not end up as soul food in the Outside is to either be insane and devoted to a God, or be incredibly evil and terrible to the point where you become a Ciphrang after death. 

 

[Darth Richard II]

7 hours ago, odium said:

Also, pardon my double post, but does it count as a new Moe crackpot to suspect Bakker for constantly saying Kellhus is dead but nothing else? At this point I dont know if he is trying to dispel that mystery or feed it. I also wonder if maybe he somehow hit Oblivion since Ajokli cant find him. 

Bakker also said repeatedly that Cnaiur was dead, so...*shrug*

[Darth Richard II]

1 hour ago, Summer Bass said:

5. Sorcerers can apparently work out deals with Ciphrang/Gods if they know the right people to advocate on behalf of them. That's obvious from what Kellhus did with Ajokli, but it does suggest they kind of screw themselves by not bothering to care about the Gods or Outside while living. 

\

 

Eh, from the AMA I was under the impression Kellhus had no idea he was possessed by Ajokli at all, not sure if there was ever a "deal".

[Kalbear]

Right - which really begs the question - what on earth was Kellhus' actual plan? At some point he had planned on doing something when he got to Golgotterath, and presumably when he got there those plans went out the window - but what were they before? 

I guess Kellhus could have simply planned on razing the entire Ark. That seems odd given the desire to storm the place; simply obliterating it with magic would appear to be more effective than even trying to get into it at all. We know (sorta) that the actual military plan was to destroy the magical barriers, attack in force and take the various fortresses, and get to the Ark to stop things - but Kellhus' role in all that seems a bit sketchy. 

It's interesting to me how thematically so much of the story hangs on the premise that all of this is by design. Akka and Mimara's quest, what happened with Momemn, the Ordeal, Sorweel and Ish - all of it has a lot of narrative value and promise only if the payoff makes sense and shows it working. With that payoff not happening - and with Bakker actively stating 'nope, none of this was planned, even the parts we think were' it makes the entire structure far weaker. It especially makes the weaker parts of the story (such as the Momemn chapters, or the Great Ordeal rapecannibal sequence) stand out for their lack of value. 

Compare this to LotR, where while the party splits and does their own thing, each ends up mattering quite a bit to the end, and each group makes a major difference to the outcome of the story. Almost precisely the opposite is true here; Akka and Mimara's story doesn't matter in the least to anything that happens anywhere else and serves only as a prolonged infodump. Sorweel's arc into Ish doesn't matter all that much - worldbuilding, but little else, especially given what happens with him and Serwa (and as pointed out, have him hang out with Serwa and Moe earlier!). Momemn ends up being almost comically impotent, with the only aspect that matters being Kellhus coming back and bringing Kel and Esme back, which means 3 books worth of story are relevant only to shoehorn Kelmomas to Golgotterath in a clumsy way. 

And still, people hope for more clarity and planning and intention, when they're told point blank that there is no intention and that's by design! And what intention people gleaned - like Kellhus having a plan with Ajokli - was entirely wrong and an accident!

I'm sad that I can't discuss this with Jeordhi yet, because he'd be so fucking pissed off.

[Hello World]

Stop, you're making me regret all the time I've spent reading, discussing the series and reading these threads. I feel massively trolled right now. And, oh God, all the people I recommended the series to... 

[Kalbear]

11 minutes ago, Hello World said:

Stop, you're making me regret all the time I've spent reading, discussing the series and reading these threads. I feel massively trolled right now. And, oh God, all the people I recommended the series to... 

Sorry  

For what it's worth, this is the reason that I continue to discuss the books and read them. I enjoy the community and the discussion far more than I enjoy the novels. I do have to admit that I've never experienced what just happened - where an author came on, explained parts of the book and made the book actively worse because of their explanations - but they're valuable too. Those experiences have value too.

And maybe the people that you recommended the books to won't read Bakker's stuff online? Maybe?

[odium]

I have also recommended the series many times to friends and family. Ironically, just before TUC finally dropped, my rabid anticipation of the last book convinced my girlfriend and three close friends to finally pick up TDTCB and check it out. Now I'm discovering that so much of what I expected didn't come through and that Bakker's online commentary has kinda ruined things for me. Luckily they won't see it.

That said, I think PoN still stands as some of the greatest fantasy of all time. Regardless of whether or not the intention was there, I would say the fact that until Bakker dispelled a lot of what we thought had been carefully designed as... well, not -- I was completely convinced (and remain uncertain?) of the incredible depth of this series. Reading through the backlog of Bakker threads, carefully combing through each theory spawned here, on the zombie three seas, on TSA, I was absolutely convinced that there was so much there that apparently wasn't. It was a very unique and interesting experience and I think a very thought-provoking social experiment if you choose to view it in those terms. Also the ultimate troll if it had all been deliberately engineered to build up our expectations.

TAE is where it starts to fall apart for me... but particularly these last two books, and at first I suspected it to be in great part a result of the poor editing, but to find that the conclusion leaves so many plot threads unresolved, so many questions unanswered, and that it was all devised from the very start! I found myself irritated reading over the AMA and seeing how Bakker simply decided some fans would be unsatisfied by the way he chose to conclude things and other would see his vision for what it is and has always been.

Yet here we have the most dedicated fans of his work (myself not even really included in this group, because I've only been on this train for awhile now, years and years after TTT dropped), those who have pored over the books longest and most thoroughly, analyzing and reanalyzing and debating passage upon passage upon passage trying to wrestle each kernel of meaning from every page - and almost universally in this topic there is some feeling that the conclusion was not what anyone expected it to be, that so much material was clumsily mishandled. Halfway up the page I made a sarcastic post congratulating TSA and Westeros for writing a more interesting series than Bakker, but obviously what I meant is that many of the theories and conclusions reached in these threads truly feel like they would have been more satisfying for me.

It's really a shame. I think his prose is absolutely beautiful too, but without a doubt far too ambiguous, apparently intentionally so. I could forgive that, but the execution of his master plan has just... kind of left me in awe. Is this why people wait until series are finished to read them?

Edit

I feel like an easy rebuttal to this would be that I poisoned my own well reading all the theories, but I think it made the overall experience of reading the series vastly more enjoyable for me.

[Kalbear]

5 minutes ago, odium said:

I feel like an easy rebuttal to this would be that I poisoned my own well reading all the theories, but I think it made the overall experience of reading the series vastly more enjoyable for me.

I think that's fair, but the counterpoint is that Bakker went out of his way to poison his own well. I'm known as the most hating hater in all of haterdom, but if I had said 'oh, well, Kellhus doesn't know shit and barely has any control and doesn't even know he's being possessed by Ajokli' as a theory y'all would have beaten me with pipes. 

But that's what Bakker said. 

And that would have been an interesting reveal if we had had Kellhus PoVs through the entire series, so we could go back and see where the corruption starts really happening - but we don't, and instead it makes the thematic lynchpin of the story - Kellhus' grand plan - go up in smoke entirely.

[Grizzly Mormont]

39 minutes ago, Hello World said:

Stop, you're making me regret all the time I've spent reading, discussing the series and reading these threads. I feel massively trolled right now. And, oh God, all the people I recommended the series to... 

Things unraveled at the end, but the first trilogy is still amazing. We also got to see Achamian and Cleric fight a dragon, and then fight each other, which turned out to be the best fight of the whole series. I don't regret reading this just because the end didn't live up to the beginning. 

[Callan S.]

1 hour ago, Darth Richard II said:

Bakker also said repeatedly that Cnaiur was dead, so...*shrug*

I think it was said that his arc was done? And that might be alluding to how he became possessed. If you get possessed full on, of course your arc is done.

[Darth Richard II]

Maybe, it's been a while. I mean honestly if an author wants to say a character is dead when he isn't for plot related/surprise reasons I have no problem with that. Everything else though. Jeez. I wonder what sales are like.

I'd also like to know what book Bakkerfans read when he made those teasers...cause I have no fucking clue what any of them meant.

[Hello World]

Quote

I'd also like to know what book Bakkerfans read when he made those teasers...cause I have no fucking clue what any of them meant.

It's about time that someone asked him directly to comment on this...