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Bakker LIII - Sranc and File


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50 minutes ago, Maithanet said:

You'll get no sympathy from me.  My favorite secondary character went out like a chump back in WLW. 

The entire Momenn plotline in TAE felt subpar and disappointing.  

 

I have no issue with a 'the bad guys win' ending.  I have an issue with the ending being unearned and hokey in execution.  

 

Of course the whole thing could be saved if Sarl stumbled upon the Heron Spear at Sauglish and the next book opens with him gunning down the No-God in a stroke of delusional luck.

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12 minutes ago, larrytheimp said:

The entire Momenn plotline in TAE felt subpar and disappointing. 

So many aspects of Aspect Emperor are worse the more you think about them.  Someone upthread mentioned that this series would have been better as a duology as originally intended, and I couldn't agree more.  Huge portions of Sorweel and Proyas's Great Ordeal plotlines could have been cut over the four books.  Much of the Momemn plot is development without any real payoff or importance.  The trip to Ishterebinth was interesting, but in the end the nonmen were totally irrelevant in TUC. 

In all, this second series desperately needed a strong editor to demand an outline of the books from the start, and ensure that the books were building towards something.  Because in the end it feels like most of the investment of four books went for nothing, and the things that were really important were given very little setup.  It leads to a very confused and unhappy fanbase. 

So many of the questions that were set up as THE BIG QUESTIONS of the series ended up either going unanswered or being totally irrelevant. 

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Yes to all of those issues, AND the unearned one. Especially that.

Because the Consult? Even the Dunsult? Would never have possibly succeeded but for insanely dumb luck. What did the Consult do, other than fail to stop Kellhus from coming to Golgotterath? Reminds me of that Watchmen line - all we did was fail to stop him from saving the world. 

And all sorts of other things start unraveling. Why are they following Mimara but using a nuke to possibly kill Kellhus? Sure, they think he'll survive it - but what's the actual point of it, and what if they're wrong and he fucks up? Why bother resisting Kellhus and the army when their goal is to get Kellhus there? Why didn't they go after any of the other Anasurimbors just to see if they ended up working out? 

Really, what was the Consult's actual plan? It wasn't playing for time, obviously, as they thought they needed Kellhus there. It wasn't to lure Kellhus into the room, as they could have figured he'd come no matter what. What was the actual strategic plan the Consult had?

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1 hour ago, Kalbear said:

Yes to all of those issues, AND the unearned one. Especially that.

Because the Consult? Even the Dunsult? Would never have possibly succeeded but for insanely dumb luck. What did the Consult do, other than fail to stop Kellhus from coming to Golgotterath? Reminds me of that Watchmen line - all we did was fail to stop him from saving the world. 

And all sorts of other things start unraveling. Why are they following Mimara but using a nuke to possibly kill Kellhus? Sure, they think he'll survive it - but what's the actual point of it, and what if they're wrong and he fucks up? Why bother resisting Kellhus and the army when their goal is to get Kellhus there? Why didn't they go after any of the other Anasurimbors just to see if they ended up working out? 

Really, what was the Consult's actual plan? It wasn't playing for time, obviously, as they thought they needed Kellhus there. It wasn't to lure Kellhus into the room, as they could have figured he'd come no matter what. What was the actual strategic plan the Consult had?

All of this and more. These questions seriously bugged me, and refuted the entire struggle of the entire series. And, what was the point of Mimara / The Judging Eye at all, if she doesn't judge Kellhus (even though we know he's an evil bastard long before she shows up per Proyas)? What was the point of Akka's dreams -- if Nau C. isn't an Anasurimbor, then how does he prime the pump for the NG? What was with the underlying metaphysical stuff hinted at in the first trilogy and TJE/WLW? 

It's so disappointing that I almost wish that old Big Moe theory had some validity. And I hated that theory from the beginning.

I will say this. RSB's world is so crapsack, the rise of the No-God is sort of a happy ending. At least the tapeworm Gods will starve, now.

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10 hours ago, Maithanet said:

What undermines the ending for me was the fact that it is presented as the Consult "winning".

Did it? To me it was borderline 'And the container with dinosaur eggs gets hidden in the mud' - ie, high sequel bait. Really I'd expect that to be the critique 'Oh, he left it like that so he could write more books and make more money writing!'. The ending certainly resolves a lot of things (as in the various personages dying!), and it sets off a world ender device to do its slow work. But what's really resolved? Reminds me of the sad ending of The empire strikes back.

And what strikes me with the 'What was the point?' critiques is how quickly peoples morale seems to snap if there isn't a happy ending? 'All hope is lost!' sooo quickly!

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15 hours ago, The Prince of Newcastle said:

What is the Zeumi ancestory thing?

The Zeumi keep extensive lists of their ancestors, and remember their names and honor them. It ties into something Bakker said in the AMA, about how people who have the favor of the Hundred (priests/priestesses or not) can intercede on behalf of folks to get them into a favorable spot in the Outside. In one of the books, the Zeumi Prince described it both as their ancestors getting them into the palace through the side gate, and their ancestor lists as metaphysical "nets" to catch souls of the recently deceased. 

As far as belief systems go, it's not bad. It might be the best one out of the lot, since an ancestor spirit with the favor of one of the Hundred is probably more likely to be favorable to a descendant who honored them than one of the Hundred themselves (who are described as picky "connoisseurs" of souls, something we definitely see with Yatwer). Assuming, of course, that said ancestor spirits care about their still-living relatives and even know whether or not said relatives are honoring them. 

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And, what was the point of Mimara / The Judging Eye at all, if she doesn't judge Kellhus (even though we know he's an evil bastard long before she shows up per Proyas)?

I guess it was ultimately just that she was carrying the Special Child/God Born/Whatever. Which is a disappointing end to her arc so far. 

To think I was hoping we would get Disenchantment. No dice. 

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Huge portions of Sorweel and Proyas's Great Ordeal plotlines could have been cut over the four books.  Much of the Momemn plot is development without any real payoff or importance.  The trip to Ishterebinth was interesting, but in the end the nonmen were totally irrelevant in TUC.

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what was the point of Mimara / The Judging Eye at all, if she doesn't judge Kellhus (even though we know he's an evil bastard long before she shows up per Proyas)? What was the point of Akka's dreams -- if Nau C. isn't an Anasurimbor, then how does he prime the pump for the NG? What was with the underlying metaphysical stuff hinted at in the first trilogy and TJE/WLW?

Bakker already answered all these questions, I think. In real life things don't necessarily have a point. In real life things don't have closure (or "cognitive closure", if you want to be pretentious). It's not Bakker's fault the human brain is hard wired in a faulty way that it can't appreciate his art. We want closure, we want answers, we want cunn- err, I mean a happy ending. Bakker is above all these things. The dude is just not on our level. 

Or maybe as was pointed out a few pages back, Bakker is just displaying symptoms of the semantic apocalypse with his reactions to readers who criticized his books. 

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20 hours ago, Dora Vee said:

You still have Shaeonanra. Some say that he possessed the Dunsult and I recently wondered if maybe he possessed Kellhus at some time. He could be possessing the No-God too. 

 

Hmm... I dunno... He seemed a scared little girl in the short story I read with him in it. I dunno if he is capable of that.

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On 1/16/2018 at 4:52 PM, kuenjato said:

Same. I barely even visit these threads anymore, and I have no desire to re-read the books at this point. It's surprising how TUC proved so disappointing, in hindsight. I didn't even mind the revelations that were given--they just weren't even close to what could have been, given the potential explored beforehand. 

I hardly even care about the third series, and I was a huge fan up to TGO. 

Word.  While reading TUC, I pictured Bakker as Dirk Diggler (played by Mark Wahlberg) in the last scene of Boogies Nights, on repeat.

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3 hours ago, Frey Filet said:

Word.  While reading TUC, I pictured Bakker as Dirk Diggler (played by Mark Wahlberg) in the last scene of Boogies Nights, on repeat.

You pictured him standing in a mirror staring at a fake dick?!!?

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7 hours ago, larrytheimp said:

Was there any evidence in the text that Shae is pulling puppetstrings with the Dunsult?  Or was that Bakker just trying to throw some mystery and possibility at an idea that someone suggested?

The little bit of evidence is that the DunSult talk in a very weird order. They go one after another, and for a while they go in a circle, much like Shae's talking was described. I think this is broken a couple places, but only a couple. 

If it's there, it is very, very subtle. 

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6 hours ago, Let's Get Kraken said:

Because that'd be so inconsistent with the rest of the story?

C'mon, all of the evidence for Shae possessing the Dunsult is that they kinda-sorta talk in order, until they don't. I find the Daario = Benjen theories more convincing.

Since we're on the 'what was the point' theme, what was the point of the flashback with Shae and the decapitants if not to hint at this? If he's going to die off-screen. 

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11 hours ago, Kalbear said:

The little bit of evidence is that the DunSult talk in a very weird order. They go one after another, and for a while they go in a circle, much like Shae's talking was described. I think this is broken a couple places, but only a couple. 

If it's there, it is very, very subtle. 

It is also how you would be forced to write a group of like minded dunyain. Funnily enough, a script I was working on for fun about four years ago while we were in the long wait between books, my second scene is a dunyain council, sending off kellhus (because in the book kellhus thinks the entire sets of reasons why he is leaving, but that’s easy to convert into dialogue, and the natural structure to create a dialogue would be a council speaking to kellhus) I literally had them all speak sequentially as though they were all speaking a single thought , because one, it fits thematically with the dunyain and communicates that idea via dialogue rather than internal commentary, and two, it’s creepy and ominous and makes a modernized western viewer uneasy about them, it triggers preexisting cultural scripts in viewers heads relating to cults, so it’s a shorthand way to create a more complex mental association for the viewer.

so yeah it could totally be a complex, buried layer of revelation about shae (layers like the layers Bakker denies writing in the first trilogy), or it could just be a natural way many writers would approach a dialogue scene with a group with these characteristics and background.

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