The Inchoroi

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« on: June 02, 2013, 04:20:55 pm »
Quote from: Auriga
This thread is for speculations about the Race of Lovers.

What sort of place do you think the Inchoroi came from, originally? What background might they have had, before they became a species obsessed with their own damnation in the afterlife and eventually landed on Eärwa? Were they always an all-male (in the human sense) species? How do you think the society of the Inchoroi looks like? 

How long has the Inverse Fire been with them, and how long have the Inchoroi known about the No-God (and these two are definitely connected)?

Feel free to speculate.

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« Reply #1 on: June 02, 2013, 04:21:04 pm »
Quote from: bbaztek
I find the Inchoroi one of the most fascinating (and revolting) aspects of the series. Given enough technological prowess, it's not far-fetched that a sapient species might go the way of the Inchoroi.

We are one of the few life forms on the planet that derive pleasure from sex. Think about it, for 99.99% of the planet's life reproduction is the biological equivalent of chores. You need to do it if you want to survive, but animals get as much pleasure from it as we do from drinking a glass of water. And there's us, whose conceptions of sex run the whole gamut: from beautiful and divine, to shameful and debased. What if one day our understanding of the human body will enable us to open a door to a dimension of pleasure as unfathomable to us as a one-night stand is to a frog? What if we could manufacture joy , and fulfillment, and yes, the greatest orgasm ever at the touch of a button? What will be the point of work if we could skip right to the chemical rewards?

I think Bakker's Inchoroi are the logical endpoint of a race that threw caution to the wind with their space age genetic engineering and eventually transformed into a malevolent race of pleasure-seekers.

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« Reply #2 on: June 02, 2013, 04:21:12 pm »
Quote from: Swense
I wonder if the malevolent aspect hasn't come from the Inverse Fire. After all, it's not as if the Consult were exceptionally brutal (by Earwan standards) before they saw the Inverse Fire - but afterwards they became violent simply for the sake of violence. The Inchoroi don't HAVE to hurt anyone to derive pleasure (that seems to be the way for the weapons races, but that's different) - they do so because they're seeking a greater goal than just pleasure, the abolition of damnation. And at some point they became convinced you have to kill to abolish damnation.

Which leads us back to all the questions we'll have to wait until the Unholy Consult for answers to.

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« Reply #3 on: June 02, 2013, 04:21:20 pm »
Quote from: bbaztek
yeah, we just don't know at this point. the idea of there being something so horrific to comprehend that you become instantly desensitized to the violence and torture is such a powerful and out-there plot device.

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« Reply #4 on: June 02, 2013, 04:21:27 pm »
Quote from: Callan S.
Quote from: bbaztek
We are one of the few life forms on the planet that derive pleasure from sex.

?

How do you know that?

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« Reply #5 on: June 02, 2013, 04:21:35 pm »
Quote from: Callan S.
Quote from: Swense
And at some point they became convinced you have to kill to abolish damnation.
To be fair, the no god just stopped people having kids.

Do that long enough and the Earwa population would drop below the magic number and the gods would be disconnected from the network. That's actually really quite a humane method! Their only humane method, I grant!

If they could just hold up on the damn raping and making rape murder species, they'd be the tragic good guys.

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« Reply #6 on: June 02, 2013, 04:21:43 pm »
Quote from: Auriga
I never thought of the Inchoroi as a decadent and amoral species, really. They seem to be moralistic crusaders in their own way, it's just that their moral values are totally alien and repulsive to us.

There's also the fact that Inchoroi are an all-male race, and obviously want to remain so. They could bio-engineer their own bodies and grow female parts, but they didn't. The idea that a whole species obsessed with pleasure would only have one cock doesn't make any sense at all, when you know anything about women’s orgasms. If they're really a "race of lovers", then having just a single cock seems rather pointless.

The only conclusion here is that the Inchoroi get their thrills from violent rape, not just any sexual acts. For that, they only need male genitals. Maybe they grew those alien phalluses when they also "birthed mouths"? Since we know that the Inchoroi have attacked several planets in the past, it's likely that they also underwent sex changes on each planet, to better get their torture-raping thrills with the native species.

(IIRC, Ridley Scott once touched on a similar topic: he said something about the Alien in the first movie having special twisted feelings for human women, because its host was a human man, and thus the newborn is the ultimate predator to its "host species". I imagine the Inchoroi's sexuality works along similar lines.)

Quote from: Swense
I wonder if the malevolent aspect hasn't come from the Inverse Fire. After all, it's not as if the Consult were exceptionally brutal (by Earwan standards) before they saw the Inverse Fire

Good answer. But I get the impression that the Inchoroi were a pretty depraved species even before the Inverse Fire revealed their fate to them - after all, they're destined to hell for a reason. The books imply that the Inchoroi are damned because they are monsters, not that they are monsters because they are damned. They weren't exactly "driven mad by the revelation", in the same way that Shaeönanra was.  However, us readers just don't know enough about the Inverse Fire yet, and it might not work at all in the way we think it does. For all we know, it might be a brainwashing device and not telling the truth at all. Only TUC will tell.

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« Reply #7 on: June 02, 2013, 04:21:51 pm »
Quote from: Madness
bbaztek highlighted much of what I might have. Further thoughts:

Do they leave their planet before or after the discovery of the Inverse Fire?

Is Earwa something of a binary universe - with only the Void and the Outside, with Earwa as the nested concentric centre? Is the Inverse Fire simply a portal or window?

What is the distinction between the Inverse Fire and the Inverse Flame, the skin-spies claim to carry?

What is the "mark of the void" that Esmenet mentions seeing in Men and Cnaiur mentions seeing in the skin-spies?

Does the Inchoroi's own immortality function no differently than the Nonmen, Womb-Plague, or are the Inchoroi simply a poorly - as Auriga mentioned - engineered homogenous species (a woman's pleasure is very easily arguably better than a man's)? It is also easier to derive pleasure at the expense of others with a penis than it is with a vagina... assuming there couldn't be other reproductive dualities.

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« Reply #8 on: June 02, 2013, 04:21:58 pm »
Quote from: Auriga
A few other comments on the Inchoroi:

- We don't know anything at all about their society, apart from them having a monarchy (Sil being the last king).

- They seem to have fixed roles (Aurang is military, Aurax is a tekne scientist), rather than tweaking their own DNA and brains to fit many different tasks.

- Dragons might be from the Inchoroi home planet, since Wutteät (who all the Eärwa-dragons were apparently cloned from) isn't native to Eärwa and has been with traveling with the rape-aliens for a very long time.

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« Reply #9 on: June 02, 2013, 04:22:07 pm »
Quote from: Anasurimbor Bob
The Ichorois are indeed a particular thing,so particular in fact that I have my doubts that the Ichorois we see in the books or those mentionned really are a species and not some kind of Living automatas created by their own ship,the real ones(as in the ones having created their tech and their ship)having died out a long time ago.

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« Reply #10 on: June 02, 2013, 04:22:15 pm »
Quote from: Madness
That, Anasurimbor Bob, is quite the worthy entree into the Second Apocalypse.

Space Golems... The Automata of Damnation, you say ;). Welcome.

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« Reply #11 on: June 02, 2013, 04:22:23 pm »
Quote from: Curethan
A few facts and some speculation on the Inchoroi.

Bakker has stated that they were moribund before they ever came to Earwa, and that they were already losing their mastery of the Tekne.
Add to this that they are immortal, and, as noted above, that all examples so far appear male - perhaps we can speculate that the nostrums tendered to the Cunoroi were derived from a similar treatment they administered to themselves.

Their forms are mutable (when first discovered by the Cunoroi, they were very different from the descriptions of the twins).

They prefer to clad themselves in the corpses of their foes as armour (!?) in battle.

They exhibit only desire, pleasure, hate and anger from the spectrum of emotions.

The ark isn't big enough to contain an entire planet full of Inchies.  It's the size of a large modern city, at best.

The weapon races are created (with the exception of the Wracu) from indigenous, souled creatures.  I speculate that the Wutteat was brought maily along because he could be cloned and because his ability to persist in the objective world beyond death interested the Inchoroi 'scientists'.
There is no weapon race created from the Inchie genome, despite the fact that they have souls.  They have not cloned themselves or grown new bodies.  The Inchies that did not survive graftings went into the Pits of the Aborted.

It's fairly safe to say that the Inchies were united by a common purpose, so much so that they were willing to risk their lives in their quest to 'save their souls'. 

I have specualted in another thread that the Inverse Fire was, in fact, developed as a neurological tweaker designed to remove certain inhibitions and tendencies - something to cure Bakker's Blind Brain condition, enable the ultimate warrior or get everyone behind the same socio-political mores, perhaps. 
In practice, it removes compassion and empathy and as a side effect it somehow allows one to glimpse/experience the fate that awaits them in the afterlife (and without compassion and empathy, you are DAMNED).  Faced by this, those who were subjected to the Inverse Fire had to show others in order to convince them.  Cue semantic apocalypse on the Inchoroi homeworld as the 'wicked' convert or destroy all opposition and then set about trying to evade their fate.

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« Reply #12 on: June 02, 2013, 04:22:31 pm »
Quote from: lockesnow
I disagree that the Inchoroi are necessarily male.  The description of them before they birthed mouths invoked Oyster.

To me that suggests: giant walking vagina, which makes sense for a race of pleasure seekers.

and the form we see Aurang take is a synthese or a much grafted version of the GWV.  There's no particular reason for an alien race to have a phallus that works with humans and nonmen unless it was grafted on.

Even calling them 'male' because they possess a grafted phallus may be incorrect and more indicative of the tendencies/limitations of the English language than anything else (speaking of the lack of a good gender neutral and the widespread cultural heritage of presuming maleness into situations, it's a bit like saying, "A new CEO, really? Who is He?"

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« Reply #13 on: June 02, 2013, 04:22:39 pm »
Quote from: Anasurimbor Bob
Quote from: Madness
That, Anasurimbor Bob, is quite the worthy entree into the Second Apocalypse.

Space Golems... The Automata of Damnation, you say ;). Welcome.
Well thank you,furthermore I would add that their being what they are(if I am right)is the very reason why they(and their creators) are damned:In a universe where believing the wrong thing gets you damned I only imagine what you get if a mortal has the gall to create souled beings and thus usurp the role and authority of the local deity.
Also Curethan's post conforts me in my(crackpot ?)theory on the Ichoroi's nature because what it describes to me is an autonomous probe/colonizing engine designed to find worlds to it's creators' specification and then either monitor it or conquer it.The whole thing with the capability to create drones needed for diffrent specified fonctions.
Oh and I saw this was not noticed yet:the term Ichoroi is very similar to the word"Ichor"which is the Blood of the gods in the Greek Myths.It is also funny to know that the same word,used in a medical context,describes a fetid watery discharge from an ulcer or an ugly wound.
As for the Ichoroi genders I do not think they have any originally,I think that all thair sexual organs are grafts that they can change whenever they like.

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« Reply #14 on: June 02, 2013, 04:22:49 pm »
Quote from: Madness
+1... So something worse than the Inchoroi is their creators lol...

lockesnow, I think the question is what the Inchoroi began as biologically? Definitely agree, and evidently the consensus is forming, that the Inchoroi are not currently limited to and are homogenous as modules, organized by successful generations of grafts.

Unless AB's whole Automata conception has any merit. That's a game changer, that one.