IIRC - wasnt there a souled skin spy or am i totally making that up? Or was it a skin spy who was part of the mandate?

Anyway, i think the inchies must have souls otherwise this is like 8-10000 years of bullshit and totally pointless. Then again that might make RSB giggle to do that to the readers. Who knows?

Definitely though, a concluding story would be most welcome, seeing as how we ended up with more loose ends at the end of TUC/TAE than one might be prone to expect. I hope some day we get that story.

ehhh...The longer i am away the more im glad im gone from the books. Still the best fantasy books ive read this century and maybe ever but...Bakker really just annoyed the shit out of me w/his intentional ambiguities.

Has he ever explained the, iirc, the panties coming off comment regarding TUC? Has he ever come back to what we all supposedly missed in the Golden Room scene?

Hes so insistent on being inscrutable and then claiming that our awareness of said inscrutability is actually showing us how well we understand him that it borders on open trolling. Imo.

My memory is hazy but decades ago in Dragon magazine there was a cartoon w/a dragon on top of a destroyed tower/castle with destruction all around w/the caption: Sometimes the Dragon Wins.

Thats basically my hope for these books - The dragon (consult) wins and the world is closed. I mean if there is another series i will find it basically wildly implausible if not outright fucking stupid if humanity can defeat the mutilated/shea/consult/hordes of sranc.

There are 8 figure sranc aimed straight at TTS and then Zeum. Zerg the shit out of everyone, eat them/kill them, the end. Consult rules forever. If there is some bullshit Kellhus in the Outside Deus Ex Machina move still to be played id prefer RSB just keep it to himself.

MSJ - i did not "attack" you. Words have meaning you know. I merely pointed out what i saw as some pretty amusing hypocrisy. You consistently demand canonical/textual support for any and all things anyone else supposes and then you throw in a "highly inferred" when you cant find the exact quote you want and move on.

I go way back also, to zombie three seas, maybe you do too, i dont know. I also dont know what difference that makes to anything.

Anyway, that is all.

I dont know what Slatepitch is.
I am fully aware that changing fundamental assumptions leads to different conclusions, and that yes its a fiction book so the main characters are special because they are the main characters.
What I'm not sure about though is if you know this is just for fun?
Yes of course we can all just say 'take book at face value, lets go home' - but I'd prefer to have a conversation, its much more entertaining for me. I've been around for much to long, so making new assumptions and looking for evidence to support it is how I get my fix . Sometimes something valuable comes from it, sometimes not.
"I'm right, you're wrong, agree to disagree" doesn't have the same interest to me as what just transpired here.

And, clearly, I still disagree that there are thousands of pages that say Kellhus is special. I have, as detailed at length above, an opposite opinion actually.

I'd love it if you'd elaborate on why you think and feel the way you do on the subject .
Which pages and words in particular make you believe so passionately? Which information from the books or elsewhere have you found supporting your opinion?
Also, are you big into baseball, or sports analytics (I assume slatepitch and  the other acronyms are derived from sports terminology)?
(btw, I'm glad my posts have moved you to post. Its not every day we get an appearance from Rots).

Slate.com is a news/opinion website that is (in)famous for its contrary for the sake of being contrary takes, and that is what i feel you are doing here. I am, thankfully, a former sport fanatic. I now more productively, and effectively spend my time doing other things then caring about sports but i can still speak the lingua franca.

I am not going to play the "pull a quote out of 7 books and defend a specific line reading" game here. Ill just say that, again, the scions of a single house throughout the 7 books are seen as special because the books are about those very people. You are asking me to prove a negative, imo. I think the character of Kellhus outran RSBs ability to contain him and thus we saw a dramatic reduction in Kellhus POV chapters in these books because of that. I remember RSB mentioning that writing the Kellhus chapters were especially difficult because obviously Kellhus can only be as smart as RSB but i think we can all agree book Kellhus >> intellect than his creator, no? I think RSB will limit Dunyain POVs in TNG also because of this.

If you dont think Kellhus is anything special then ok. I guess im not all that interested in non-canonical readings. As ive previously mentioned i hope the series ends with TUC. Ill certainly read TNG the second if/when it comes out but im fine with the series as is.

I wish that there was no TNG coming out. Im fine with where/how it all ended. Sometimes, the Dragon should win. I hope that there is no redemption. Id certainly welcome a bunch of atrocity tales and stuff like that but as far as another series, im good. I mean ill buy it if it comes out but i will not be longing for it.

So, i will not make any predictions other than there will be things that are clear to RSB but sadly all too ambiguous to the rest of us. And then RSB can tell us that we are missing something obvious and then cue lots of clueless speculation.

Just a couple of general notes here and i am curious as to whether anyone else has run across this. I have a couple of friends that i introduced to RSB years ago and they just finished TUC - and its fair to say that they are deeply confused. Deeply. They are more casual readers. They have never been on this board, or Westeros, or any reddit AMA for this, etc.

RSB can obviously write however and for whomever he wants, but, i think he overestimates his clarity. To that point - did the collective hive mind ever figure out the obvious thing RSB said we were all missing? If so, i havent seen it.

I feel like we are all experiencing a bit of epistemological closure and are falling down the rat hole of speculation. I love world building as much, if not more so than the next guy (you should have seen the D&D campaigns i made/illustrated/planned out) but when the character motivations/plot require so much post hoc parsing i worry that maybe we and RSB are getting a little lost in the forest for the trees.

in the end i think the GR is an event horizon and we effectively really dont know jack shit more after TUC than at the beginning of the book regarding Ajokli and Kellhus. I have this vague feeling that RSB is just screwing w/us and that TNG series will also end w/o remotely any sort of resolution. I am not really clear on why TNG is even being written tbh. Im fine w/the dunsult winning and TNG reaping humanity. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This might be a total nerdanel but do we have any sort of mechanistic understanding of the daimos? Cnauir is most certainly in the Outside as one ridiculously powerful Ciphrang, if Serwa is dead she will be one also, and what about Kellhus? He seems to have disappeared but since hes described as being a hunger if he is in the Outside somewhere hes a ciphrang. If there are any daimotic sorcerers still wandering the land and some dots get connected i wonder if there is a way to summon any of the new ciphrang?

Again, to my reading there is no real understanding of the metaphysics of the daimos and how the demons can be yoked and controlled but i could certainly be wrong..Anywho, just a thought that would be pretty interesting to see played out.