Bakker - "You worship suffering."

[lokisnow]

I have to agree that Kellhus is something of a deconstruction or inversion of the genre's reliance on ubermensch heroes.

Kellhus, Ender, how are they different? Both are Jesus figures and make people Love them by talking to them, and because they're always morally right (and oh so smart), it's perfectly okay for them to kill, maim, murder and generally slaughter whomever stands in their way because good people can't do bad. http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm

Good people trying to do good usually find a way to muddle through. What worries me is when you have bad people trying to do good. Theyre not good at it, they dont have any instinct for it, and theyre willing to do a lot of damage along the way. The import of this statement is that there are some people who are good before they act, and some others who are bad before they act, and that goodness or badness is exhibited in their actions. These "bad" people cant do good, and good people cant do bad.

Card thus labors long and hard in Enders Game to create a situation where we are not allowed to judge any of his defined-as-good characters morality by their actions. The same destructive act that would condemn a bad person, when performed by a good person, does not implicate the actor, and in fact may be read as a sign of that persons virtue.

The doctrine that the morality of an action is solely determined by the actors motive rests on a significant assumption: that the good always know what their motives are, and are never moved to do things for selfish reasons while yet thinking themselves moved by virtue. Ender has perfect knowledge of his own motives and the motives of others. Ender never suspects himself of doing other than what he thinks himself to be doing, and indeed, in Speaker for the Dead he makes a career of delivering faultless moral judgments of other people.

The possibility that Stryka may have a legitimate reason to object to Enders behavior is never consideredher qualms are fashion. A page later, Ender identifies Strykas real motivation (which Ender knows but she does not) as a fear of the stranger. In this case the stranger is not the aliens exterminated by Ender, but Ender himself. Strykas concern for the genocide of the buggers, which might be interpreted as arising out of a concern for the humanity of the other, is presented instead as an example of scapegoating the otherbut in this case the other is redefined as the exterminator, not the exterminated. This is a very clever stratagem: those of us concerned about understanding the other are redirected from worrying about the alien to worrying about the killer of the alien, and thus our condemnation of genocide reemerges as a sign of our prejudice and small-mindedness. Ender is not the victimizer, but the misunderstood victim of others fear and prejudice.

This bait-and-switch stratagem prevails throughout these novels. In the extended ending of Enders Game and throughout Speaker for the Dead, Ender is presented as a victim of the extermination of the buggers rather than its perpetrator. Card bases much of Speaker on the irony that this most moral of humans (the founder of a new religion of understanding) is considered to be evil by people who are not as moral as he. Indeed, Enders notoriety as the Xenocide only works in Speaker for the Dead if he isnt really guilty of the crime of genocide.

I do not make the allusion to Christ casually. The figure of Christ, like that of Hitler, comes up briefly in Enders Game, and the associations it calls up are revealing. When Enders friend Alai points out that his habitual salute to Ender, salaam, means peace be unto you, an image immediately leaps into Enders mind. He recalls his mother quoting Jesus from the gospels.

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth. I came not to send peace, but a sword. Ender had pictured his mother piercing Peter the Terrible with a bloody rapier, and the words had stayed in his mind along with the image. (p. 187)

The word peace calls to Enders mind not the Prince of Peace, not the Jesus of turning the other cheek, not the Jesus who stayed his apostles hand when the apostle attacked the soldier who came to take Jesus in the garden. Peace be unto you evokes in Ender an image of murderous revenge against his personal tormenter: the savior as righteous killer.

[Aeternum]

I haven't read Ender's Game since I was about ten, but doesn't Kellhus have a son (the one who killed his twin, forgot the kid's name) who is basically the psychopath version of child-genius Ender?

[Sci-2]

Um, I think just because Esmi was enjoying Aurang's, uh, prowess doesn't mean it's supposed to be titillating. There is nothing arousing in these books.

If you remove the ickiness around the Esmi-Aurang scenes, both her rape and possession, they read like erotica.

This, as per my understanding, was Bakker's point. The acid in the male gaze that he's talked about. I think intent is established, the question is efficacy.

I think Lockesnow has a point - if Conphas had been raped on screen it would have been harsher acid. Though the author claims to bravely abandon regard for modern sensibilities, the text does seem to cop out of providing male readers with the same visceral experience female readers confront.

[Kalbear]

As for Istriya; we must ask: how many of the women kalbear or others would use as examples of powerful women had power in their own right? In a land with an absolute ruler power comes through his opinion, especially for Istriya. GRRM has powerful women, yet most of them are bound to their husbands. Cat can do fuck all when Ned wants his bastard around. Cersei depends on either her husband, father or son's legitimacy. Lysa also gets power through Jon Arryn, though she has to be shrewd to keep it. And these are people who had some prestige due to their fathers (it all goes back to the men). We don't really know if this is how it works in Nansur. It's quite possible the Imperial Family is much more authoritarian.

In real life? Most of the women mentioned had a fair amount of power on their own. Eleanor certainly did. Melisende ruled (kinda sorta) through her son but that was essentially for show; she was a pretty dominant force.

That being said, the complaint has rarely been about powerful women - it's been about the actual presence of women. That Bakker's women are sex workers or rape their sons is problematic but not unrealistic per se. The odder one that people claim is 'realistic' is his excision of women from the Crusades. In the real Crusades women accompanied their husbands on the 10-year journey until it was expressly forbidden in later Crusades by the pope - and even then they did it. Women occasionally fought in the Crusades. Back home, women were doing a lot of the running of daily operations while the men were away - ruling the local fiefdoms, hiring mercenaries to fight small battles, that sort of thing. Women were regularly designated to succeed their parents regardless of other children - sons or daughters (such as Eleanor).

As to GRRM, I see that you're leaving out Dany as an example of a woman with power in her own right. The queen of thorns is another example of a more minor character. Asha appears to be quite powerful and respected throughout the Iron Isles. It's not common, but it's certainly there.

[Shryke]

Is the Empress a great example of a powerful woman? Her influence comes from hand jobs she gave to her son.

She was Empress long before she had any sons. She manipulated her way to the top. Using sex among other things.

[lokisnow]

I haven't read Ender's Game since I was about ten, but doesn't Kellhus have a son (the one who killed his twin, forgot the kid's name) who is basically the psychopath version of child-genius Ender?

hmm, I hadn't directly compared Ender to Kelmomas, but it's an interesting thought. I'd primarily focused on Kellhus because he and Ender are both righteous killers, a warrior christ type of character.

Card is such an interesting counterpoint to Bakker. his good guy characters almost always do bad or really terrible things for the 'greater good'. and he likes to persuade the reader into complicity and agreement with these terrible things which are okay because the person doing the bad thing is a good person (so the bad thing can't be bad if its done for good).

Hart's Hope features righteous public rape and impregnation of a 12 year old girl (if the new king doesn't do consummate the marriage publicly, it's not valid, and he can only be a good king if he first rapes the princess (whose parents he just killed) to become king),

Wyrms features righteous tentacle rape of the protagonist (she hates it but decides its worth it because she'll give birth to the alien-hybrid Jesus.

Ender's game has righteous genocide, Ender's game has righteous murder,

numerous OSC books have homosexuals righteously setting aside their true feelings to marry and impregnate a woman because only progeny matter and the wives in question are okay with it because their little brains can't go beyond babiesbabiesbabies).

his biblical books have Jacob tricked into plural marriage, so it's righteous he has four wives because they are the ones to blame, not him.

Alvin Maker features righteous forced genetic engineering to make a black kid less black.

Homecoming features righteous incest.

If there's a major sin most humans try to avoid, Orson Scott Card has figured out a way to make that sin into a moral duty for his heroes and a laudable achievement and sacrifice on their part. Indeed their sinning 'for the greater good' is part of what makes them heroes.

[Callan S.]

These threads are probably the best PR machine Bakker has.

Creating dozens of PR opportunities! DOZENS!

[Callan S.]

Here's a question that may border on the absurdly sexist: If Conphas were a woman, would Cnaiur's rape have been as cringe worthy?

As I say, I readily admit a double standard there; but I think it is one that exists. Cnaiur spends most of the first book raping Serwe and it is "accepted" by the reader. The description of Cnaiur standing over Conphas covered in "blood and shit" (if I remember the quote correctly) felt like it was an even more demeaning act. (Rightly or wrongly...) So if Conphas had been a woman, would we as readers have thought any more of the rape than we did when he violated Serwe?

I'm not sure I accepted Serwe's rape. I almost put down the book at the her POV of it all and thinking of that going on for multiple chapters (of course it then veers away from that - whether that's acceptance or narrowly avoiding being put down, I leave to you)

I think Cnaiurs rape method is a reflection of where Kellhus held him over a cliff so as to demonstrate. Now Cnauir is adopting the Dunyain's methods. That's part of it.

Anyway, I probably swing the other way - I find the rape of male Conphas more acceptable. Which isn't that great, btw.

The thing though about male Conphas's conceit and humourings of godhood is that he is carried, unknowingly, by the pro male movement in the culture. A female Conphas, despite Conphas's psychopathic proportions, could never indulge that conceit quite so easily - not with the same intellect, anyway. Conphas is a reflection of pro male culture in that way - like some sort of immune system reaction, it would reject a female Conphas, so she could never take that narcisistic male self love all the way to the god throne.

Never mind such a rape would have nothing to do with a demonstration to that pro male culture.

[Callan S.]

If you remove the ickiness around the Esmi-Aurang scenes, both her rape and possession, they read like erotica.

This, as per my understanding, was Bakker's point. The acid in the male gaze that he's talked about. I think intent is established, the question is efficacy.

I think Lockesnow has a point - if Conphas had been raped on screen it would have been harsher acid. Though the author claims to bravely abandon regard for modern sensibilities, the text does seem to cop out of providing male readers with the same visceral experience female readers confront.

The Esmi-Aurang investigates manipulation of emotion - I mean, though swept away by her emotions, her emotions want what the 'rang got.

Granted the only male version we have is where Kellhus realises, post doing it, he's taken off his belt and is undoing his pants - which is a (granted, low level) sexual assault upon him.

[Madness]

I need to check this: everyone gets that Esmenet's perspective is the result of compulsion, right?

I really don't know what you're asking for, Madness. Or really what you're talking about.

...

As to the gendered vs. not rape - sex scenes with women in Bakker's world tend to be more meticulously described than sex scenes with men. Rape included. The one inversion of this is Xerius and Fauxstriya, but it's played up that way for the most part. Esme's rapes are all torrid descriptions of how much she enjoys it. It's an oddity that I think makes things less powerful and effective; if the goal as Bakker stated was to make his entirely heterosexual male readers discomfited by the scenes, it would have been significantly more profound and affecting for those heterosexual male readers to make the scenes with women happen entirely offscreen and have all the sequences with men be described in lurid detail.

You make all sorts of claim statements about the books and Bakker, yet rarely, if ever, provide actual evidence or argument for them and, to me, it amounts to simplifying a complex work and unfairly slandering an author as certain statistic of people just take your word for it and walk away.

Is this another case like Sam in Neuropath where nothing was even explicitly described because Tom has blood in his eyes and the reader substitutes the graphic from Sam's priming words? Or when we discussed the Kianene girl & mirror episode as, obviously, semantically reflected. Cnaiur's domination of Conphas is easily the most violent rape in the books, and it doesn't matter when you realize that that happened, because the whole episode makes it easy to play our readerly assumptions where "men don't get raped in Fantasy" - realizing what happened makes it impossible to dismiss. The few of Serwe's POVs with Cnaiur amount to rationalizations for staying with him because of Kellhus. Esmenet & Valrissa are subject of compulsions (and in Valrissa's case, pheromones).

They're all more uncomfortable for those complicating factors. Most of these amount to more horrific than sexual domination because of the emotional manipulations involved. It's far less likely that Esmenet enjoys it and far more that her emotional responses are substituted for the ones she experiences and then she's forced to internalize the episode, without a chance to realize she's a victim.

Ridiculous.

[Spring Bass]

She was Empress long before she had any sons. She manipulated her way to the top. Using sex among other things.

Off-screen, but on-screen? There's not much in the first trilogy. and very little mentioned in the camp of the Holy War even when Bakker goes into omniscient third-person narrative mode.

[Shryke]

Off-screen, but on-screen? There's not much in the first trilogy. and very little mentioned in the camp of the Holy War even when Bakker goes into omniscient third-person narrative mode.

No, but that's not what I was referencing.

On screen during the novel, she's certainly still powerful in her own right.

[Kalbear]

Madness, it ultimately doesn't matter whether or not esme actually enjoyed it; the point is that we get the description from both her pov and from others watching her about her fairly explicit acts.

What is described with conphas? Nothing of the act itself. Later we get that cnaiur woke up with blood and night soil on his crotch - a description so basic that many readers were surprised that conphas was raped at all! Are you really claiming that a one sentence description of the appearance of cnaiurs dick hours after the fact is more explicit than esme dipping a finger into herself or feeling a cock press against her as her body reacted with lust?

Sorry if I'm not quoting from the books directly. I am no longer able to. If I'm wrong about the description I'm happy to admit it and move on - but here's the thing, madness: this had already been discussed before. These are echoes of prior arguments that have been made. I'm sorry that you aren't privy to them or don't remember them, but it's not really that interesting to requote things for me. If you believe it slander, by all means - find the evidence. It shouldn't be hard for you given your position.

Or you might, maybe, question your own confirmation bias and ask why so many people who aren't me think that the rape of conphas was subtle but the rapes of esme were not.

[Shryke]

I don't think either were subtle.

I mean, sure, Conphas rape isn't described in all it's details, but it becomes quickly obvious afterwords what happened. Anyone missing it wasn't reading attentively.

The differing descriptions of the acts are less about subtlety and more a result of their differing purposes.

Conphas' rape is about Cnauir asserting dominance over him in a violent and intimate fashion. The way it's described starting conveys all this and the cut to Cnauir awaking later unsure of events is part of establishing Cnauir's fragmented mental state and dissent into insanity. The intervening parts are unneeded except to add gross and/or lurid and/or disturbing elements to the story and their inclusion would also detract from the way the scene conveys Cnauir's mental state.

Esme's rape is described more vividly because the way it happens is what's important. The way the synthese dominates her not just physically, but internally. It's even more of a rape and she is left at the end feeling violated and then the element of horror at the end with the black semen as a way of reinforcing that even though she was made to enjoy it, it was a violation and a horror. It's also different because of it's place in the series. It's much earlier, right as we are gaining hints at the Consult and their behaviours and the scene serves to help hint at and flesh out these things.

[Shryke]

Also, I've been rereading the Dune series this month as part of this year's reading project and the parallels between the Dune series and the SA series are really really obvious.

Except Bakker is a far better writer then Herbert.

[karaddin]

I've never managed to read anything of Dune other than the first book. Tried to read the second and got nowhere. Certainly different to Bakker in that his books improve :p

[Borque]

I've never managed to read anything of Dune other than the first book. Tried to read the second and got nowhere. Certainly different to Bakker in that his books improve :P

The first book is the best. The second is probably the worst one¹. The sequels after that get better.

¹ Barring the abominations by Anderson et al.

[Francis Buck]

Also, I've been rereading the Dune series this month as part of this year's reading project and the parallels between the Dune series and the SA series are really really obvious.

Except Bakker is a far better writer then Herbert.

I literally came in here to post a possible similarity that hadn't occurred to me before, in that Meppa being Moenghus would fit with the whole "Preacher" bit in Dune (the father of the more brilliant son goes out into the desert, comes back years later opposing him under a different guise, etc.). I don't know if this is old hat (probably is) but it's a pretty damn close parallel.

[Baztek]

I think the last thing these books need is more explicit rape scenes. I mean, I get what you guys are saying, but if you want to establish the Inchoroi's powers of compulsion, you need some POV for that. And the scene at TWP was to demonstrate just how horrific the Consult really are. After that, I think Bakker tones down on the detail.

[Sci-2]

Here's a new crackpot:

The Inchoroi are from another Earwa in a parallel universe. They pull a Sliders and keep shifting from Earwa to Earwa, hoping to find the means to forestall damnation.

Or maybe punching through the membrane between universes was a last ditch thing, and that's what caused them to crash.

I just think they had to know they were going to crash when they got to Earwa. Perhaps they never jumped through universes, but pushed Moya the Ark to its limit because it was already dying while they were in space.