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Bakker and Women


Maia

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Mind... The Consult want to close the world to the Outside, yes?

But aren't there actually THREE groups who want to do this, all for their own reasons? Now that I think about it, aren't the Inchoroi the only ones who want to rape the universe to death? Does the former Mangaecca and/or Nonmen traitors have the same apetites? I don't think we have any evidence either way?
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[quote name='Kalbear' post='1680246' date='Feb 9 2009, 11.23']Like I said, go Consult! Choose Consult![/quote]

Ummm . . . yeah.

If the asshats in the real world were collectively responsible for determining who is damned and who is not, I'd have to look into joining some sort of super-villain union (world-ending branch).
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The Consult has hitched its wagons to the Inchoroi approach, it seems, no? Although they could always be planning a double-cross, I suppose, to prevent things from going quite so far.

That said, what seems to be presented is that Kellhus and the Dûnyain may be the only means of changing the balance through their supreme manipulation of men's souls. Concievably, Kellhus would be capable of changing the balance eventually, if he could hold it all together and control Earwä. But what would he want to change, one wonders?
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Well for starters you'd think he'd want to not be damned.
SPOILER: TJE
But it seems like he can't change this, right? I mean...Kellhus has stated that sorcerers aren't damned any more, and Mimara makes it clear that this is objectively incorrect. Most of the 3 seas certainly believes Kellhus and his prophets now as well, so it's not a matter of solely belief changing the metastructure.
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[quote name='Galactus' post='1680287' date='Feb 9 2009, 14.42']Mind... The Consult want to close the world to the Outside, yes?

But aren't there actually THREE groups who want to do this, all for their own reasons? Now that I think about it, aren't the Inchoroi the only ones who want to rape the universe to death? Does the former Mangaecca and/or Nonmen traitors have the same apetites? I don't think we have any evidence either way?[/quote]

The Consult came together because both groups, Inchoroi and Sorcerors, are damned. The Mangaecca went to the Ark to learn it's secrets, met/awoke the Inchoroi and the Inchoroi convinced them that their goal was the only way to save their souls.

But both groups are damned for different reasons. Sorcerors because, well, sorcery. Inchoroi because their culture, their way of living, is by the standards of Earwa, evil. Both feel they are damned just for being who they are.
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[quote]The Consult has hitched its wagons to the Inchoroi approach, it seems, no? Although they could always be planning a double-cross, I suppose, to prevent things from going quite so far.[/quote]

Well, I always assumed they were working together for the same goal (avoiding damnation) but didn't neccessarily have the same reasons (they were all damned for different reasons after all).
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Galactus,

Right. But we know the Inchoroi want to close all the "gates" to the outside (i.e. the souls of people), and it seems to me that Consult has agreed to this method if they're supporting the Inchoroi. And realistically, what other means do they have? They're not able to "rewrite the operating system" as the Dûnyain can.

Kalbear,

SPOILER: TJE
My own thought has been that just because people say they believe, it doesn't necessarily mean that they fully commit to Kellhus's vision. There's still an inertia to these ideas. I suspect it'd take time to change the objective realities ... but perhaps it's a sign that Kellhus [and the Inchoroi, too] are missing some part of the equation.
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Ran,
SPOILER: TJE
While I can see that with women, I can't see that with sorcerers. I don't see how most people can believe that he's a creation of God and damned at the same time. That they can venerate his word as holy and accept him as that, and yet also believe that he's going to hell. That's the part that I think no one has any inertia on.

But between Mimara and Bakker's interviews, I think it's pretty clear that it isn't human belief that shapes the Outside. Things didn't change significantly when the Cishaurim ruled, and as far as I know they weren't damned either (nor did the cish think that). There are plenty of religions out there, and they can't all have intersections of 'women suck', right? Yatwer doesn't think that, for example, and they've been around for millenia.

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[quote name='Dylanfanatic' post='1678986' date='Feb 8 2009, 10.36']In discussions such as this, I am often reminded of a comment Stendhal made in his famous novel, [i]The Red and the Black[/i]:

Sometimes, I wonder how much criticism the "mirror" deserves and how much we ourselves merit.[/quote]

Does that apply to the interpretation of posts on internet message boards as well? :P
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[quote name='Bastard of Godsgrace' post='1679960' date='Feb 9 2009, 16.59']This is really quite common in fantasy. Martin is equally guilty in this regard. Iron Islander are nothing but collections of cliches about Vikings, Dothraki are stereotyped portrait of stepoe nomads (as are Scylvendi, of course), and Summer Islander of happy, frolicking Southern Seas islanders.
In this particular department Erikson decidedly beats both Bakker and Martin, IMHO.[/quote]

I totally agree, and I don't think that the depiction of different cultures is Martin's strong point. The Dothraki are the worst offenders, imo, because they are really only a collection of stereotypes and very far away from the real life of nomadic groups, be they influenced by Asian or Native American groups. Regarding the PON, I just wanted to explain that the character of Istyria conflates two things I don't like about Bakker's premise (i. e. building a world in which all stereotypes are true).
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[quote name='Max the Mostly Mediocre' post='1681032' date='Feb 10 2009, 00.17']Does that apply to the interpretation of posts on internet message boards as well? :P[/quote]

Yes :P Which is why I always reserve the right to have my opinion changed by a compelling argument.
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[quote name='Kat' post='1679602' date='Feb 9 2009, 06.23']What's so interesting about "What if this stereotype which has been traditionally held as The Truth, were actually true? Wouldn't [i]that[/i] show those PC worldbuilders!"

I mean...[i]what[/i] PC worldbuilders? There really aren't that many of them as far as gender goes, who aren't explicitly feminist. (And many of them aren't writing by "PC" standards either wrt gender.) Just seems like a literary strawman. :dunno:[/quote]
I'm not so sure I agree with you (for once).

(Disclaimer to the below: I have only read TDTCB.)

My criticisms of Bakker in this particular area were fourfold:

1) The Frank Miller Test - not necessarily, as I said earlier, that one couldn't plead for an "exemption" for Bakker on particular story-related grounds, but due to the enduring difficulty of distinguishing between authors writing about whores for Very Speshul Reasons and authors writing about whores because they think their (male) readers'll like reading about sexually available women. In the end you just have to give up. Maybe Bakker isn't the place to give up; I'll let the actual feminist thinkers deal with that one.

2) The fact that I haven't seen [i]the female characters themselves [/i]within POV as much more than one-dimensional. Contrary to certain assumptions raised in this thread, I personally have absolutely zero problems with reading about misogynistic worlds, so long as the author himself shows evidence of treating the characters with equal respect - doing as much characterisation for females as for males, etc. (This is one of my beefs with Martin on race; he generally doesn't characterise his non-white secondary characters as thoroughly as he does his white secondary characters.) Tokenism, btw, generally does the opposite of this.

3) The knowledge gleaned from other people that he did similar things in [i]Neuropath[/i]. Once is happenstance, twice might just be coincidence...

4) The objectiveness thing.

Now, if Bakker were actually trying to extract the urine from both worldbuilders who tokenise in a faux-mediaeval setting and the default sexist ones, it's a different matter. The onus then falls upon the reader to avoid going, "Genuinely inferior women! Sweet!". My remaining problem would be the poor characterisation.
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This is an absolutely awesome thread. I sincerely doubt that debates of this sophistication break out regarding gender in Goodkind! Since my whole point was to write something that provoked debate, I feel as if I've succeeded, if only by my own, sometimes dim and flickering lights.

But tokenism? Poor characterization? That's a kick to the balls of my vanity, that.

The thing I've learned over the past several years is that if you give people the whiff of a rat they [i]will[/i] find one. All I can say is that the intentional subtexts I've layered through PoN - and remember, I spent twenty fricken years working on the thing - have been almost entirely missed in this thread. But I don't really see this as a problem so long as the text is strong enough to realize multiple, incompatible interpretations. And I feel confident that this is the case.

Here's a couple of compositional facts to help you all contextualize what I was trying to do: I actually had several arguments with my first editor, Michael Schellenberger, because he was convinced that I needed to make Conphas a women to broaden the appeal of the work. I needed, he insisted, an [i]empowered[/i] female character. The reason I fought that, despite all the insecurity of being a first time author, was that it smacked of tokenism. He told me I would regret it, that my points would go unappreciated, and that the majority of women would be alienated by my books.

Which sucks. We typically make judgments instantaneously - things 'strike us' this way or that. Once we have a schema of first impressions, we read everything through the lense of that. This is a sad fact about all humans, as is the unfortunate tendency to think we're somehow an exception to these kinds of observations.

If Esmenet is flat, then ALL my characters are flat. I certainly shed more tears writing her than any other of my characters. If there's anything I think I did wrong, I think it lies in soft-pedalling the brutality of a low-caste prostitute's life. Why does she start off as a prostitute? Because PoN is a book about belief, desire, and the role they play in abjection. Because I wanted to tell a bona fide 'rags to riches' story. And because PoN is a war story, and a substantial number of camp-followers in premodern campaigns were prostitutes. Because I wanted an ideologically unsanitary secondary world - for more reasons than I care to enumerate. I could go on.

Trust me. My character choices are over-motivated, if anything.

[i]Neuropath[/i] is a trickier story. The idea here was to write a story that operated on three levels: the mechanistic, the animal, and the human. The idea was to represent a world where traditional morality was fast boiling into aether, leaving only our shared animal imperatives as our primary organizational principle - consumerism. In other words, SEX is central to the story. Since the main viewpoint character is male, this means the story is refracted through the lense of male desire. The fact that there's no ideologically redeeming female character should serve as proof that I have no interest in tokenism (even though, again, I was urged to change the gender of certain characters - apparently women make up the bulk of psychothriller readers). And since the 'obligatory gender epiphany' that so many male authors seem to provide is almost as big a peeve to me as tokenism, I did not give my protagonist one to hoist [i]my[/i] petard out of critical water.

And just for the record, I AM a sexist. I genuinely believe that across the majority of modern social contexts, women have the biological edge. And that this is expressed in increasingly lopsided graduation and home ownership rates - let alone prison populations!

If this comes across as defensive, it's probably because I can't help but feel as though I'm the one being flattened and typecast, here. It seems to me the books are obviously 'deep' in the sense that they are thematically sophisticated and they seem to underwrite competing interpretations, and yet I feel as though [i]I'm[/i] being cast as yet one more in a long and sorry list of male fantasy authors who use ink rather than jergens to wank.

Truth is, I wouldn't have it any other way. After all, I was warned, wasn't I?

scott/
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Scott,

You realize that now people are going to have to kill the Author anew in order to get back on their pet themes now, right? ;)

I myself am but merely waiting to hear news of you being tarred and feathered for writing unsettling fictions :P
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I find it awkward to say, but...

[quote]I myself am but merely waiting to hear news of you being tarred and feathered for writing unsettling fictions[/quote]

He's in greater danger of being tarred and feathered for [url="http://asoiaf.westeros.org/index.php?act=findpost&hl=&pid=663655"]writing about himself[/url] in [url="http://asoiaf.westeros.org/index.php?act=findpost&hl=&pid=1677052"]third person[/url].

Hrm...
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