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Bakker XI: Spoilers for PoN and TJE


unJon

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Still doesn't need to be child rape. Still doesn't need to be in the prologue.

And I'm pretty sure that giving the argument that either you can kill everyone who disagrees with your point of view OR allow yourself to accept the fact that there are no crimes because crime is subjective and ultimately it is power over the world that determines right from wrong, therefore child rape can be okay in either situation is the best way to sell a book. People asked why the book didn't sell better or didn't have higher appeal (even in the fantasy group) - that's a pretty good reason.

The Dunyain point of view isn't that child rape is right/wrong. The Dunyain would view child rape as irrelevant. Sexual urges are part of the Darkness That Comes Before, the Dunyain strive to eliminate all urges and emotions. The "There are crimes only so long as men are deceived" does not mean that crimes cease being crimes when men see the truth, rather, that all crime would cease.

A Dunyain's sexuality is:

If (WomanCapableOfBearingDunyainChildren == True) {

Penis.boner(8); //INTELLECT ISN'T ALL THEY WERE BREEDING FOR, IF YOU CATCH MY DRIFT

}

Else {

probabilitytrance(FindWoman);

}

edit: turned boner++ into boner(). I think boner works better as the name of a method, rather than as a variable.

edit 2: Penis.boner() is even better imo.

But the idea that child rape ceases to be wrong when all men are dead, while unseemly to us, is an entirely accurate depiction of Earwan metaphysics. Morality is real there.

And on Earth it ceases to be wrong when in Ancient Greece, Rome, or the ancient Middle East and the child is a slave.

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This is ridiculous. No one flipping through the prologue in the book store is gonna pick up that idea and turn the book down because of it.
I've met at least 3 people who chose not to pick up the book because of that. The amazon comments have this quite a bit too. Sorry, but you're simply incorrect.

The Dunyain point of view isn't that child rape is right/wrong. The Dunyain would view child rape as irrelevant. Sexual urges are part of the Darkness That Comes Before, the Dunyain strive to eliminate all urges and emotions. The "There are crimes only so long as men are deceived" does not mean that crimes cease being crimes when men see the truth, rather, that all crime would cease.
Disagree completely. The concept of crime ceases when everyone stops being 'deceived' because at that point everyone acts in a necessary way and agrees completely with whatever action is taken. Child rape doesn't necessarily go away at that point; if everyone agreed that raping a child was the best way to prepare a child for Dunyain conditioning (or the best way they had), everyone would do it.

Kellhus (at least pre-TJE; who knows what he's like now) will commit any 'crime' he feels helps his cause. If for some reason he needed to rape all his children, he would. He wouldn't think twice about it. That's the Dunyain way. That's the whole point of the Dunyain - that actions are just actions, and they're not tied into some innate morality or thoughts about what is right or wrong. It is just cause and effect, and actions are only useful inasmuch as they forward a goal.

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*goes to wikipedia*

Great now I gotta teach myself Haskell.

Anyway, why does the Myunsai, the Scarlet Spires, Imperial Saik etc all still exist? You'd think that Kellhus would have integrated all the schools into a giant Gnostic school to churn out sorcerers for the fight against Golgotterath. Sure, the Deimos of the Scarlet Spires is probably the most useful non-Gnostic magic, but the Saik and the Myunsai have nothing going for them. It'd be neat to see Ciphrangs summoned by Deimos fighting dragons.

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Razorbear, with some edit (for clarity, I hope)

a) either you can kill everyone who disagrees with your point of view OR

B) there are no crimes because crime is subjective and ultimately it is power over the world that determines right from wrong

Interesting. Whose moralities are these supposed do be? Is (B) your view of the Dûnyain? I can’t really recognise anything here…

The Inchoroi view would be that crime is subjective, but still very real – as long as these subjective souls are still alive, so we better kill them (because we failed at making them like us). The Dûnyain view is that there is no right and wrong, full stop.

The Bardic Priest, interestingly, manages to get it completely wrong. He is very much ruled by the Darkness that Comes Before (a sexual urge), yet fails at hedomism, crying and excusing himself during the implied act. Epic fail, neither the Dûnyain nor the Inchoroi would be impressed.

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Kellhus (at least pre-TJE; who knows what he's like now) will commit any 'crime' he feels helps his cause. If for some reason he needed to rape all his children, he would. He wouldn't think twice about it. That's the Dunyain way. That's the whole point of the Dunyain - that actions are just actions, and they're not tied into some innate morality or thoughts about what is right or wrong. It is just cause and effect, and actions are only useful inasmuch as they forward a goal.

Ah, but you fail to see, Men are still Deceived. If the entire world was Dunyain, there would be no child-rape. But Kellhus is amongst the world-born, and if mass child-rape helped him, he would do it, true.

Are men still deceived? Yes. Ergo - crimes (including child-rape).

Now, if the Dunyain discover that child rape worked for conditioning Dunyain children, sure they'd do it, I guess. But the Dunyain children probably wouldn't even see it as rape. Or even sexually. They have no sex drive. But it doesn't, so it's irrelevant.

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Ah, but you fail to see, Men are still Deceived. If the entire world was Dunyain, there would be no child-rape. But Kellhus is amongst the world-born, and if mass child-rape helped him, he would do it, true.

Are men still deceived? Yes. Ergo - crimes (including child-rape).

Now, if the Dunyain discover that child rape worked for conditioning Dunyain children, sure they'd do it, I guess. But the Dunyain children probably wouldn't even see it as rape. Or even sexually. They have no sex drive. But it doesn't, so it's irrelevant.

The kids aren't perfectly conditioned, so they'd still see it as rape. Even if that weren't the case, the Dunyain wouldn't hesitate to commit whatever crimes or acts or sufferings on themselves or others for a gain.

Interesting. Whose moralities are these supposed do be? Is ( your view of the Dûnyain? I can’t really recognise anything here…
The inchoroi and the Dunyain. To the inchoroi, the criminal act is determined by the local metaphysical plane, whose strength is described as a function based on population density of sentient creatures.

To the Dunyain, crime is only a crime because you are conditioned to be a criminal and feel bad about something. If you have no motive but what you choose, child rape is as acceptable or not as eating an apple. The only moral reaction to a rape that a Dunyain might have is that the action was inefficient or some such.

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The kids aren't perfectly conditioned, so they'd still see it as rape. Even if that weren't the case, the Dunyain wouldn't hesitate to commit whatever crimes or acts or sufferings on themselves or others for a gain.

The inchoroi and the Dunyain. To the inchoroi, the criminal act is determined by the local metaphysical plane, whose strength is described as a function based on population density of sentient creatures.

To the Dunyain, crime is only a crime because you are conditioned to be a criminal and feel bad about something. If you have no motive but what you choose, child rape is as acceptable or not as eating an apple. The only moral reaction to a rape that a Dunyain might have is that the action was inefficient or some such.

No, it came up in like a Bakker thread a year ago, but speculatory-consensus was that all those kids who were with Kellhus who weren't acting very Dunyain-like, were all rejects (which goes to show you how intense the Dunyain selective-breeding program would be, if they culled a dozen children at once each generation), and probably ended up as lab experiments in the Thousand Thousand Halls. A child like Kellhus seemed to have been in his flashbacks, as he is being raped, would probably be busy running the permutations and probabilities through his head, to understand why he was being raped.

And as to inefficiency and rape, yeah, that probably would be the Dunyain reaction, if they had any problems with it at all. But they don't have moral problems with rape, they don't have moral problems with anything. Hence, Kellhus kills his father, because he knows his father would join the Consult since he's still Dunyain to the core. A Dunyain would have no problem with any "crime".

But the statement "Crimes exist so long as men are deceived" has nothing to do absence of morality, and has to do with men not knowing the agency behind their own actions - The Darkness that Comes Before. That old Dunyain man in the prologue was referring to the fact that, if we all lived in a world that totally understood our Darkness that Comes Before, we would not commit crimes, because crimes are born of passion. On both sides. The perpetrator acts out of passion, and the victim agonizes out of passion. A Dunyain does neither.

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Some of Kellhus' and Akka's campfire scenes are gold. And Conphas is funny most of the time.

Yeah, Kellhus WAS funny much of the time during the first book. And so was Conphas, but in a different way.

Actually, come to think of it, the only characters that don't seem to hate themselves are Kelhus and his brood. The most joy any character has shown is when in TJE

his youngest son slaughters the matron and her servants.

Well, I guess the skin spies show joy as they rape and kill people...

Well, I think Mimara shows a lot of joy at her first wielding of sorcery. But I take the point that there's not a whole lot of joy going on.

What kinds of books ARE big sellers? The Twilight series? Young girls/older women are the audience for that, I assume. What about the various murder/mutilation books that seem to find such a huge audience? I don't think we can blame Bakker's break-out popularity on the general ickiness of alien rape, et al. If people were turned off by THAT, then all the serial killer shit that seems to find such a big audience... wouldn't.

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That old Dunyain man in the prologue was referring to the fact that, if we all lived in a world that totally understood our Darkness that Comes Before, we would not commit crimes, because crimes are born of passion. On both sides. The perpetrator acts out of passion, and the victim agonizes out of passion. A Dunyain does neither.
No. Crimes can be passionless. That is a fallacy to think otherwise and a Dunyain would call you on it.

Crimes exist so long as there are people who believe there is such a concept as right and wrong. Those are shaped by subjective moralities that are complete fabrications; the whole point of the Dunyain was to go beyond such human creations and transcend them. Cnaiur sees this implicitly from Moe and comments on it often (the whole difference between a Scylvendi child and an Imperial one, the trackless path to take), and Kellhus comments on this all the time. Crimes aren't committed in a Dunyain society because no one believes in a right or wrong choice based on morality. All actions can be justified and should be justified, and you should completely understand why you're doing something.

That doesn't make the actions disappear, and it doesn't mean that things we call crimes (like premeditated murder or prostitution) wouldn't occur. It just means that the actual definition of a crime would cease to exist. Again, the closest you'd get would be something like 'inefficient' as a 'crime', meaning that you could have accomplished your goal with fewer resources.

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What kinds of books ARE big sellers? The Twilight series? Young girls/older women are the audience for that, I assume. What about the various murder/mutilation books that seem to find such a huge audience? I don't think we can blame Bakker's break-out popularity on the general ickiness of alien rape, et al. If people were turned off by THAT, then all the serial killer shit that seems to find such a big audience... wouldn't.
The serial killers are almost always brought to justice and the day is saved. It's a bit harder to say that the sociopath is the hero of the world as comparable to the sociopath is finally brought down by a smart detective and his tough sidekick.
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No. Crimes can be passionless. That is a fallacy to think otherwise and a Dunyain would call you on it.

I need an example of a passionless crime. A serial killer or a serial rapist is most definitely driven by passion, by the Darkness that Comes Before. There is no pure-uncaring logic behind their actions. The crime may be performed with cold logic, but that doesn't mean they don't enjoy it.

The best example of a passionless crime I can think of, is a of middle-ranking SS officer. Doesn't really care about Jews one way or another, and just sends them to the gas chambers as a matter of business.

But, in a Dunyain society, the SS would not exist.

Would murder still occur in a Dunyain society? Yes, they have to cull those who fail to keep the standards.

But rape? If the society were entirely composed of Dunyain, there would be no reason for rape at all. Or theft. Or a hundred other types of what we call crimes.

The Dunyain would have no reason to engage in any of it.

But what, what is this debate again? Whether Dunyain-society would what we call crimes? In terms of crimes, the only one we could lay at the feet of Ishual is murder (and euthanasia, depending on your local laws).

But the fact that the Dunyain do not believe in good or evil, is true. But it's irrelevant, we've never seen Kellhus rape a boy. Moenghus? Only in flashbacks.

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I've met at least 3 people who chose not to pick up the book because of that. The amazon comments have this quite a bit too. Sorry, but you're simply incorrect.

There's nothing like that on Amazon unless they are hiding in the 5 star reviews which would just be ... strange. "Hated this book, didn't even get past the prologue in the store. Too much endorsement of pedophilia. 5 stars." And then the joys of anecdotes. So "simply incorrect" might not be the words you are looking for.

It's a seriously silly silly reason to turn down a book. A very coy description of rape and a bit of philosophy.

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The serial killers are almost always brought to justice and the day is saved. It's a bit harder to say that the sociopath is the hero of the world as comparable to the sociopath is finally brought down by a smart detective and his tough sidekick.

So to be a best seller, you need to write something where there's a neat and comforting ending?

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So to be a best seller, you need to write something where there's a neat and comforting ending?
It's not a requirement, but it's certainly a helper.

Also, there's a bit of a reversing from type here. In the serial thriller book you either have books where you read about monsters and they succeed (and it's horrible) or they're caught. But in the fantasy books, in general everything is wrapped up safe and sound. The serial killer fans probably aren't fantasy fans, and a lot of the fantasy fans don't like their endings super sour or their children raped.

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I need an example of a passionless crime. A serial killer or a serial rapist is most definitely driven by passion, by the Darkness that Comes Before. There is no pure-uncaring logic behind their actions. The crime may be performed with cold logic, but that doesn't mean they don't enjoy it.
A hitman.

A prostitute.

Most war crimes.

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A hitman.

A prostitute.

Most war crimes.

Unless i am misunderstanding, you are saying a prostitute is a passionless crime? Really?

And war crimes? There is usually a high degree of hate involved in war crimes, there is a build of it, swelling all around people until they do terrible things.

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