Generally speaking, I think most of everything Bakker has ever said is either purposefully misleading (recent stuff in the last few years), or unaware of the specifics (older info from way back) which is now irrelevant or largely misleading. Regarding Serwe, whatever she was supposed to be, I think it was intended to be very clear by now. Thus, I think Serwe's whole thing was being the sympathetic catalyst which ends up uniting all of humanity against the consult. Yes, that's mundane and uninteresting, but I think that's all there is too it - things aren't always as complicated as we make them out to be.
Keep in mind his Serwe comments were largely as a rebuttal to the online stuff happening surrounding him at the time. I think Bakker has shown time and again a pretty extreme misunderstanding of the people he's talking to or trying to reach out too, and most probably (imo) the serwe comment was worded very poorly to begin with and is now taken out of context in the Earwa online noosphere.
Cue FB's Earwa's Original Sin commentary. Though, I personally think "something something pure ignorance" is more her narrative antecedent and I've always liked that "the reader has Serwe in their hands and Kellhus in their heads" (badly paraphrased) quote, as per those aforementioned out of text contemporary commentaries.
@Wilshire - i agree w/your comments re: Bakker. At this point i find him to be an intentionally undependable narrator of his own story in a lot of ways. Im sure he would tell me that my loss of faith in him would be his goal and that i am now better off.
Ill buy whatever, if anything, comes next but im much more neutral towards the author and thus the work.
Nice to see you around again, Rots. It would be nice to communicate in The Agora sometime, given my lack of time to post in the past two years
(though, I'm working on it).
@Wilshire - i agree w/your comments re: Bakker. At this point i find him to be an intentionally undependable narrator of his own story in a lot of ways. Im sure he would tell me that my loss of faith in him would be his goal and that i am now better off.
Ill buy whatever, if anything, comes next but im much more neutral towards the author and thus the work.
This really resonates with me, Rots. Similarly, I no longer completely trust Bakker as a story-teller, and, as you note, that's probably the position in which he wants to place his readers. It's a very modern, or perhaps even a modernist approach to fiction.
He claims to have avoided the postmodernist pitfalls a la Gene Wolfe, BFK, but I'm never sure.