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Messages - Duskweaver

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31
The Unholy Consult / Re: Big question about the consult's intentions.
« on: August 29, 2017, 01:13:25 pm »
I want Mimara's second child to have been the first victim of the second Death of Birth... but I also want Mimara looking upon the Carapace with the Judging Eye to be the event that completed the activation of the No-God and System Resumption. Those two things can't both be true, though. Or can they? Maybe an event so Reality-breaking as the birth of the No-God and the murder of meaning should arrive heralded by paradox?

That bit about "respecting the false Prophecies as well as the true" in whichever book it was keeps coming back to me. Seems like the Consult really wanted Mimara at Golgotterath for some reason.

32
The Unholy Consult / Re: We Are Proyas
« on: August 29, 2017, 12:44:57 pm »
I've wondered recently that Bakker's work might serve as a litmus test for needing cognitive closure.
I think this is something well-worth investigating. I certainly seem to fit your hypothesis. I have a ludicrously low NCS, and so far all the ambiguities people have held up as examples of Bakker being terrible are the things I enjoyed most about TSA. Part of me would quite like it if Bakker just kept on writing new instalments and never actually concluded the storyline at all. The journey is so fascinating and thought-provoking that I don't ultimately care where we end up. I guess it also fits in with my real-world philosophical/religious inclinations, in that I'm what I call an Inverse Buddhist: I believe the Buddha was mostly right, except that I don't see escaping the endless cycle of existence as a worthy goal. I'm quite content to go round and round the cycle forever. Existence is, for want of a better term, a hell of a lot of fun.

33
General Earwa / Re: Do All Skin-Spies Have Male Genitalia?
« on: August 28, 2017, 12:16:40 pm »
I won't claim to know exact what his point was,
If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say it's a deliberate association of the Consult with the real-world 'New Atheist' movement, who are overwhelmingly male and often quite misogynist. There's a strong undercurrent among New Atheists that associates rationality and objectivity with maleness and the irrationality of spirituality (especially 'New Age woo') with supposedly more female modes of thought.

An all-male clique that wants to use scientific-materialism to scrub the world of any hint of spirituality, because they see said spirituality as literally the worst thing ever? Sound familiar? ;)

There's more to it, of course. Bakker's also playing with our socially-conditioned notions of sexual agency - males as active initiators, females as passive, leading to the question of whether only males can commit rape, that sort of thing. A race of violent rapists feel somehow like they should all have penises, which ideally should cause us to question just why we feel that. Likewise, sranc raping male characters is somehow more shocking to our sensibilities than rape of female characters (which feels somehow 'normal' in war). Which, again, should lead to us asking ourselves why is the former more shocking and the latter just the default?

34
General Earwa / Re: [TUC Spoilers] Nascenti of Zaudunyanicon
« on: August 28, 2017, 11:33:07 am »
Is that Serwa just to the right, there? :P

35
The Unholy Consult / Re: TUC Jason Deem artwork (possible spoilers...?)
« on: August 28, 2017, 09:44:25 am »
She seems to just be singing Wards there, though. I want to see her carving through the Horde to rescue Akka, Mim and Esme, or something similarly badass.

36
The Unholy Consult / Re: TUC Jason Deem artwork (possible spoilers...?)
« on: August 27, 2017, 09:16:37 am »
Oh heck, if we're getting requests in, I just want artwork of Serwa fucking some motherfuckers up with the Gnosis.

37
The Unholy Consult / Re: [TUC Spoilers] Esmenet the Angelic Ciphrang
« on: August 26, 2017, 10:59:34 am »
So, if Cnaiur becomes Ajokli, maybe Esmenet becomes Yatwer?

On the one hand, I hate that idea, because it screws up Ajokli's long-hinted 'special status', as well as the theme of 99 stones plus 1, if he is not the only one of the Hundred who lived as a mortal.

But on the other hand, the idea that Esme spent years believing Yatwer hunted her and her children, when she was actually Yatwer all along... that's just too cool to dismiss.

There is definitely something special about Esmenet, anyway. I'd actually not really noticed the agelessness. But she also seems able to do things that would (supposedly) get anyone else damned (being a whore and using sorcerous birth-control; razing a big chunk of Carythusal in a rage; killing Naree even though she herself saw it as morally wrong; plotting to murder her own husband), and yet still shines with the "promise of Paradise".

38
First, can The Hundred see Kellhus' death, there in the Golden Room?  Aren't they blind to Golgotterath and everything inside it?  Does Yatwer even know he's dead?
From the conversation between Kellhus and the Mutilated, it seems the Gods can see him just fine. They just can't see where he stands. I agree that this is the weakest part of my theory, though.

But here's something to think about. The Consult are not content to just sit in Golgotterath until they die. Which implies that merely being there doesn't completely hide you from the Gods, at least after you've died. So I'm pretty sure Yatwer knows that Kellhus dies in there, even if she can't see the events that immediately surround it.

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Also, I'm pretty sure merely being soulless doesn't render one invisible in the sight of The Hundred.  Animals are soulless and they don't appear to be invisible to the gods.  I think the gods can see sranc, skin spies, etc. just fine.
It's possible the Gods can see them, but they don't attribute any agency to them. They are just machines as far as the Gods are concerned.

To Yatwer, the only visible souls/agencies involved with Kellhus' death are Sorweel and Esmenet. They both intended death to Kellhus, and Kellhus died in proximity to them, and with no other souls/agencies around that Yatwer could perceive. Hence she intuits (because she cannot reason) that they killed him. She sees the outcome and the intentions, and fills in the missing details of the causal chain in an intuitive and rather dim manner.

39
First, conventional use of the term hell/damnation and the associated smoke/fire as being bad would imply it is a place of suffering.
This isn't even an argument. You can call anything anything. The Fanim claim the 'Heavens' of the Hundred are really Hells.

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Second being essentially all dogma of the Three-Seas validate this view that people are tortured there. Literal prophets of the Gods preach them as unpleasant places for those who go there.
Various prophets and religions in Earwa claim all kinds of things. At least some of them are very wrong. All we actually know on this particular point is what we've been directly shown by PoV characters (which is almost nothing) and what Bakker has said extra-textually, which is basically that Ajencis and Memgowa are somewhat close to being right and that Fane was mostly wrong. The Scylvendi don't believe they get an afterlife at all (and are implied to be dead wrong about this). The Nonmen told the High Norsirai they could find Oblivion merely by "hiding their Voices" (and it is implied that it's actually much harder, or maybe just more random than that). The Tusk claims whores are damned, but Esme and Mimara seem to prove that isn't automatically true. Proyas' father (and the Mutilated) claim that being a ruler inevitably leads to Damnation, but again Esme seems to disprove that.

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Kellhus says it is a bad place (I can't find the scene where I think he is actually there, so one might quibble as to his experience, but it does point in agreement, especially for someone who has made a deal with the gods).
Because Kellhus always tells the absolute unvarnished truth, right? :)

Actually, Kellhus' visit to the Outside is probably the best evidence we have that you're right. But he still only sees what the Gods/Ciphrang appear to be doing to the souls of the dead from his own PoV. There's no evidence in those scenes that the souls are conscious.

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The Progenitors thought it was bad (supposedly), it seems like they would be very capable in verifying such a view and would do their best to (given the extremes they've gone to now avoid it).
We're back to "these guys believed X, therefore X is objectively true". For all we know, the Progenitors might have been really prone to jumping to conclusions based on little actual evidence.

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We have the dying moments of Saubon that seem pretty grim.
Could easily be his last impression of dying in a nuclear fireball. Or maybe souls retain consciousness for a few instants after death before being consumed. Still doesn't prove the suffering is eternal.

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The language Cnaur/Ajokli and Kellhus/Ajokli use. But most telling, the PoV chapters from Kakaliol's view made it seem like it was aware enough as to what inflicting torture was.
All these characters had a vested interest in being scary. Of course they're going to promise eternal punishment.

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As far as arbitrary not being the same as random/meaningless, it kind of does, not to get into semantics.
Nope. Especially not in the way Bakker seems to use it in this context. He says it depends on whether the God likes you and that he (Bakker) doesn't know what the rules are that determine whether the God likes you. He never claimed it was random. Just that even he doesn't know all the rules (because he wants it to seem unfair and arbitrary to the readers). Bakker does hint at some rules that seem to apply, though. Premeditation, for example.

Damnation also cannot be meaningless, because the whole point of the series is that Damnation is a result of things having meaning, and that stripping the World of meaning (via the No-God) makes Damnation go away.

For the record, I actually agree that Damnation is probably exactly what it looks like, and that the Consult are probably at least mostly right. My objection is to people claiming that the Consult are objectively the good-guys. You're making assumptions based on limited information and then using those assumptions to justify genocide.

I think you're point is since we don't really "know" what damnation will be like ( and in kind, neither The Consult/Mutilated ), then their approach HAS to be evil since their design is based on an assumption. Sounds like the logic of the "sane" to me  8)
No, I'm saying we the readers don't know enough yet to say whether the Consult are the good-guys or the bad-guys. I'm entirely open to the possibility that the Consult actually know more than we do.

I do find it slightly disturbing just how quick and eager people are to construct an interpretation that justifies genocide, though.

40
I dunno, the Inverse Fire seems pretty clear on it. You soul is shredded and devoured forever.
Yes, but what does that actually feel like, when you're a disembodied soul? It sure looks horrible to a living person seeing their soul's fate through the Inverse Fire... but that's why it's the Goad. What the IF shows could be both 100% accurate and completely misleading.

To an extent, I'm playing Ajokli's advocate here. If it were me looking into the IF, I'd probably join the Consult in a heartbeat. But that's not the point. As a dispassionate outside observer (as opposed to an observer of the Outside ;) ), I am not convinced of the moral rightness of the Consult's plan. As I said, there are a lot of ways they might be completely wrong, even assuming what the IF shows them (and what the JE shows Mimara) is accurate:

Souls might not be conscious, or might have no sense of self.
Damnation might not actually be painful. Being burned and eaten by Ciphrang might not hurt when you're a disembodied soul.
There might actually be good reasons why the Damned are Damned, even if we can't know what they are. 'Arbitrary' is not the same as 'random and meaningless'.
There might be other ways of preventing Damnation besides the global genocide one.
Finding Oblivion might be possible after all (bonus: we now know this one is true!)

41
To me this would imply that Yatwer, after the fact, would know they were always going to fail. That once they failed, she would have always thought (in her eternal mind) said plan wasn't going to work.
My point is that, as far as Yatwer is aware, Sorweel did not fail. In the branch of Reality in which Sorweel was head-stabbed by Kelmomas, Kellhus died (thanks to Kelmomas). So when Sorweel's soul reaches the Outside, Yatwer knows Kellhus was slain. It does not matter that, from Sorweel's PoV, Kellhus is not dead yet. To Yatwer, there is no 'yet'. It might not have worked out 100% as Yatwer foresaw, but the final result was the same, and that's all Yatwer cares about - because it is all she is capable of knowing.

Mortals are divided by increments of time. For us, Being is Becoming. Gods are instead divided by branches of Reality. Sorweel and the other WLW were sent by different Yatwers from different branches. That's what Kellhus was getting at with his "Eternity is transformed and the Hundred with it, oblivious to the transformation" bit. The No-God's approach shifts the metaphysics of Earwa from a singular path fixed by Divine Will to something more akin to the Many-Worlds interpretation of modern physics. We even get a hint of this in Malowebi's PoV sections in the Golden Room. He starts out observing the branch of Reality where Kellhus/Ajokli triumphs. Then Mimara looks upon the Carapace with the JE. Then we're back to Malowebi and he awakens to the branch of Reality where Kelmomas fucked it all up, and Kellhus is already salt. Only later do we get his observations of how we got to that point. The weird timey-wimey nature of all this is absolutely deliberate on Bakker's part, I think: he's telling us that Reality has divided, that Eternity has been transformed. Malowebi, being both dead and alive, perceives this both as a mortal (as a linear progression of moments in time) and as the Gods do (as one Reality winking out like a soon-forgotten dream, and a new Reality snapping him to wakefulness).

42
Assuming souls are conscious. Assuming damnation feels the same to the damned as it looks to an outside observer. Assuming it's not just a visual metaphor for the Gods and Ciphrang absorbing emotional content from the memories of mortals (i.e. it looks all fiery because fire consumes). Assuming there isn't some genuinely fair judgement behind who is Saved and who is Damned that we mere mortals are simply unaware of.

We flat-out do not know enough about Damnation (even after 7 books!) to make any moral judgements about whether global genocide is better or worse than leaving things as they are.

The Consult are basically like a government that becomes more and more brutally authoritarian in the name of fighting terrorism. The ends justifying the means, even though the ends are based on assumptions about what evil might occur, while the means are immediately and obviously evil.

43
The Unholy Consult / [TUC Spoilers] Why Sorweel and Esmenet are Saved
« on: August 25, 2017, 07:42:55 am »
I just realised something. Yatwer thinks Sorweel and Esmenet killed Kellhus.

We know that Yatwer cannot see Kelmomas (as he's the No-God) or the skin-spies (as they're soulless). We also know that, during the First Apocalypse, the Gods attributed the actions of the No-God and its soulless slaves to Men. The Multilated also tell us that the Gods cannot reason, only intuit. (I wonder if this is also why the Gods hate premeditation, and more generally people who think too much? Being incapable of reason, they hate and fear it. Perhaps reason looks the same as sorcery to them? A way of changing the World in ways the Gods cannot fathom.) It seems the Gods work around their unconscious blindnesses (their unknown unknowns) by linking what they can see together in the simplest possible causal chain. I would also argue that the passage of time must seem a little fuzzy to beings that see from the standpoint of Eternity, so gaps of a few hours or even days are ignored in constructing these causal chains. The Gods are basically none-too-bright conspiracy theorists, trying to construct models of what occurs in the World through their own cognitive biases. And that's even more the case the closer we come to the No-God walking. So, rather thick conspiracy theorists with Altzeimers and significant anosognosia.

So what does Yatwer see? She sees Esmenet recruiting the Narindar/WLW to kill Kellhus. She sees Sorweel coming right up to Kellhus with a Chorae. She sees Esmenet (still hating Kellhus, still wanting him dead) dropping a file in an act of motherly love and compassion to someone Yatwer cannot actually see (but she certainly can still feel Esme's motherly emotions). She sees that file and Sorweel's Chorae carried into the same place where Kellhus is (this one is a little speculative, but I think the theory works without this point anyway) by the one she cannot see. Then she sees Kellhus salted.

The most obvious explanation, from Yatwer's very limited PoV, is that Sorweel and Esmenet are responsible for killing Kellhus, for carrying out Yatwer's will. Even better, they did it filled with hatred towards Kellhus, but without any actual thought. That is the mark of the Righteous, after all, for there to be no interval of thought or reason between (Divine) Will and Action. (This is also why the Holca thane is Saved by Gilgaol, because he fights without thought, making the War God's Will manifest in the World without the filters of consciousness.)

So both Sorweel and Esme are Saved by Yatwer's Grace because Yatwer has convinced herself that they killed Kellhus. And indirectly, of course, they did. That's the hilarious thing: Yatwer is actually sort of right. Sorweel and Esmenet did set the chain of causality in motion that led to Kelmomas exorcising Ajokli, leaving Kellhus vulnerable to being salted in the Golden Room. Without Sorweel and Esmenet, Kellhus/Ajokli would almost certainly have succeeded in whatever he was planning.

(BTW, am I supposed to be putting that spoiler tag in the title? What's the policy now?)

44
The Unholy Consult / Re: We Are Proyas
« on: August 24, 2017, 09:37:40 am »
Maybe Bakker's flaw as an author is that he thinks his readers are as clever as he thinks he is?

45
The Unholy Consult / Re: [TUC spoilers] The visions - Not Ajokli?
« on: August 23, 2017, 01:40:40 pm »
+1 for the "most crocodilian of the Sons" being Ajokli, especially as it matches Cnaiur's swazond.

Even though the Gods cannot see the No-God, they can still identify those mortals who were most prominent in the world right before it all went dark from their PoV. So if, from Gilgaol's PoV, the final Apocalypse looks like Kellhus ruling the World, marching a huge army into the North and then *bang!* the Outside is shut off, he's going to make the assumption that Kellhus is to blame and try to avert it through Celmomas' dying vision. The similarities of the two situations (massive army called the Great Ordeal, led by an Anasurimbor, getting slaughtered in the North of Earwa) presumably made it easier for Gilgaol to get the message through at that precise moment.

The vision is not Gilgaol saying, "Here's the schmuck who will unleash/become the No-God." He's saying, "No-God? WTF is that? Everything is fine in your time period, so quit yer whining. Now listen, here's the guy you need to worry about. The real Apocalypse is something to do with him."

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