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Messages - The Great Scald

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16
Author Q&A / Re: Heraldry and banners
« on: June 26, 2016, 02:23:20 pm »
As for symbols and sigils in ancient Eärwa:

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The golden claws of twin Kyranean Lions arched above her, signifying the continuity of empires from the present back to the murk of Far Antiquity.

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Celmomas's long and leonine face lay blank, indifferent to the geography of pieces arranged between them. The family totem braided into his beard - a palm-sized wolf cast in gold

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As numerous as the reliefs were, Achamian found only one intact representation of Meöri's ancient crest: seven wolves arrayed like daisy petals about a shield.

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Three gashes hooked like scythes: the centre one the longest, the innermost curving within its compass, while the outermost arced away at an angle. Achamian immediately recognized the mark: any Man in the Three Seas would have. The Three Sickles had been a common heraldic device since Far Antiquity - the symbol adopted by Triamis the Great. The spoor of Dragons.

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Author Q&A / Re: Heraldry and banners
« on: June 26, 2016, 02:08:41 pm »
Will we ever hear about or see the banners of ancient nations like Kuniuri, Aorsi or Kyraneas?

Ancient nations didn't really have "heraldry" in the medieval sense we use - this stuff was put into system during the High Middle Ages, and was mostly a Western European thing (and according to some people like Spengler, medieval heraldry was an unique expression of the Western mind). The ancient empires and city-states of Greece, Rome, and the Middle-East, what Bakker is using as inspiration, didn't really have an equivalent to "Game of Thrones" heraldry.

Tribal symbols and totems existed before that, and in every human society, but those are a different thing, as are military symbols and national banners.

18
Author Q&A / Re: Creation myth in Eärwa?
« on: June 25, 2016, 04:25:48 am »
Ah, right, I just had a look at the two spoiler excerpts:

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And naught was known or unknown, and there was no hunger.
All was One in silence, and it was as Death.
Then the Word was spoken, and One became Many.
Doing was struck from the hip of Being.
And the Solitary God said, “Let there be Deceit.
Let there be Desire.”
——The Book of Fane

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The place of the woman is to give. So it has always been, since Omrain first climbed nude from the dust and bathed in the wind.

19
Author Q&A / Creation myth in Eärwa?
« on: June 22, 2016, 09:57:19 pm »
Reading the latest TSA books, it's clear that the Hundred Gods have a very limited perception when it comes to Eärwa (not only blind to the No-God, but presumably to all soulless creatures). Also, they obviously need earth-bound agents to enforce their will on the living.

And where is the creation myth? Your series is so full of religion and religious metaphysics, but so far there's no reference to how "it all began". Who created the human race? What is the equivalent of Adam and Eve, in a universe where religious scripture is an objective reality? It seems that the Hundred didn't create humanity after all, and they're more like extra-dimensional parasitic demons than "Gods" in any traditional sense...

20
Author Q&A / Nil'Giccas and Nin'Cilijiras
« on: June 22, 2016, 08:54:37 pm »
Which of them is the present-day King of Ishterebinth?

If you carefully go through the first trilogy, there's a couple references to the Nonmen of Ishterebinth being ruled by Nin'Cilijiras. From what I remember, we know nothing about him other than this - Aurang makes a comment to the effect that Ishterebinth is monitored and that Nin'Cilijiras can't take a dump without the Consult knowing about it.

In the second trilogy, he's not mentioned at all, and the Nonman messengers claim they're speaking for Nil'Giccas. Of course, there might have been a regime change in Ishterebinth, since Nil'Giccas turns out to be "Cleric" who's been in exile for god knows how long. But the Nonmen imply he's still the king, with no mention of the other guy.

Did the Nonmen lie? Or is this just a continuity error? 

Inquiring minds want to know.

21
The White-Luck Warrior / Re: The Consult and the Sranc
« on: September 23, 2015, 01:49:17 pm »
Man, I forgot about this. I remember the tribes going quiet and all, but the idea of a new, Consult-bolstered Horde storming into the Three Seas (just in time to fuck up everybody's shit, Fanayal included) sounds...awesome, in a horrible way.


This.

We hear a lot about the Scylvendi being the horsemen of the apocalypse, this unstoppable force of destruction, so I'd also like to see that happen on-page. Overrunning all of the Three Seas, wrecking both the Fanim and the Inrithi, and just storming in and burning down civilization. It'd be a great climax to the Momemn storyline, plus it makes the Consult look a lot smarter and Kellhus a lot more machiavellian if he knew this would happen.

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Also, I love the idea of the Scylvendi sending that one son to be a member of the Scions, even though we know for a fact that such a hostage would be utterly meaningless to the Scylvendi themselves

Even funnier is that the Scylvendi hostage was the only scion who survived the Sranc battle, apart from Sorweel and Tsoronga.

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Random tangential question: Did any of Cniaur's children (aside from Lil Moe) survive, that we know of?

No idea, because we don't know much about Cnaiür's children in the first place. He has a lot of them, though, so some of them should still be around. This is how we're introduced to him: "He owned eight wives, thirty slaves, and three hundred cattle. He had fathered thirty-seven sons, nineteen of the pure blood."

Cnaiür's pre-teen daughter Sanathi is the only one of his kids who's named in the text. He only really thinks about Sanathi and her mother Anissi - the rest of his family goes totally neglected.

(No idea if this is meant to show that Cnaiür's single-minded obsession with Kellhus/Moengus is so overwhelming that he forgets his family, or that the Scylvendi culture is extremely warlike and doesn't care about family sentiment. Or maybe just Bakker not being bothered with endless tertiary characters - while something like Game of Thrones would've named his entire family tree.)

22
General Earwa / Re: The Womb-Plague (A new theory, perhaps?)
« on: September 23, 2015, 11:44:55 am »
Bakker just likes to use "crushed" to describe facial movements. Sranc faces are repeatedly described that way, the same with Kelmomas' face when he's crying crocodile tears.

"Crushed into instants" is just a poetic Bakkerism, like when he writes "his agony was spread like milk over the endless ages" to describe the damned's fate in Hell, or "she was absurd with pounding girth" to describe a fat porker running for her life.

It doesn't mean anything more than that.



23
The Thousandfold Thought / Re: Favorite Scenes
« on: September 23, 2015, 11:36:03 am »
the final scenes between Cnaiur and Conphas are some of my favorites--Cnaiur losing it by degree and Conphas showing off an impenetrable egoism.  i've met people like Conphas and have wondered if some degree of violence could shatter their view of the world--Bakker made a plausible character survive with his illusion intact until the end?  i can't tell if Conphas is really seeing his world crumble or not, i could very well think that he thinks it's still going to end in his favor via miracle or something

Bakker's "pride is a defect from the womb" line does suggest that Conphas is a clinical sociopath from birth and can never have his ego shattered, no matter how many times Cnaiür ass-raped him. He's what criminal psychologists would call a pathological narcissist.

24
General Earwa / Re: Anasurimbor Pseudonymus
« on: September 23, 2015, 11:29:39 am »
1) There is at least a recurring pattern. Many of them are poetic lines of somehow similar size & vagueness.
2) There is at most a very suspicious dating & geotagging - second decade of New Imperial Year with lots of "Somewhere South of Gielgath". I recon it can be explained by Kellhus horizont-2-horizont teleportation & daily aspecty-emperatory stuff? He doesn't use roads and other mundane means of transport, he's unbound to pass through cities, so most of his locations are not precise but approximate.

Lol, the geographical location of the chapters doesn't have anything to do with the epigraphs.

25
General Earwa / Anasurimbor Pseudonymus
« on: September 22, 2015, 03:30:23 am »
Bakker mentioned once, in a bit of an off-hand remark, that some of the chapter epigraphs in TJE and WLW were supposed to be written by Kellhus under a pseudonym.

So, which ones?

26
The Thousandfold Thought / Re: Favorite Scenes
« on: September 22, 2015, 02:29:57 am »
Cnaiur makes me laugh a lot. Just viewed from outside the narrative.

I agree. The Darkness That Comes Before has a lot more comic relief when you reread the Steppe chapters the second time around. Some of it is pitch-black comedy, darker than Sranc sperm, but it still gets a few laughs out of me.

(The part where Cnaiür and Kellhus are squabbling and arguing about military strategy while they're on the run, and then Serwë butts in by yelling "Shut up, Cnaiür, do what he tells you!" is pretty funny. Cnaiür is so astonished that he almost forgets to get angry, as if an inanimate object just yelled at him.)



27
The Thousandfold Thought / Re: Favorite Scenes
« on: September 06, 2015, 09:47:27 pm »
Here's the passage I was talking about:

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Then, as though massacre possessed its own momentum, the Holy War’s occupation of Shigek degenerated into wanton carnage, though for what reason, no one knew. Perhaps it was the rumours of poisoned dates and pomegranates. Perhaps bloodshed simply begat more bloodshed. Perhaps their faith’s certainty was as terrifying as it was beautiful. What could be more true than destroying the false?

Word of the Inrithi atrocities spread among the Shigeki. Before the altar and in the streets the Priests of Fane claimed that the Solitary God punished them for welcoming the idolaters. The Shigeki began barricading themselves in their great, domed tabernacles. With their wives and children they gathered wailing on the soft carpets, crying out their sins, begging the God for forgiveness. The thunder of battering rams at the gates would be their only answer. Then the rush of iron-eyed swordsmen.

Every tabernacle across the North Bank witnessed a massacre. The Men of the Tusk hacked the screaming penitents into silence, then they kicked over the tripods, smashed the altars, tore the tapestries from the walls and the kneeling rugs from the floors. Anything carrying the taint of Fanimry they heaved into colossal fires. Beneath monstrous towers of smoke, dogs ate the heaped dead and licked blood from the broad steps.

None suffered more horribly than the Fanic priests. At night, the Inrithi used them for drunken sport, slicing open their bellies, leading them like mules by their own entrails. Some were blinded, some strangled, some were forced to watch their wives and daughters raped. Others were flayed alive. A great many were burned as witches.

In red-walled Nagogris, the maddened Men of the Tusk actually began slaughtering one another. Almost as soon as the Holy War had arrived at the city gates, the Shigeki governors remaining in the city sent emissaries to Ikurei Conphas, offering to surrender to the Empire in exchange for Imperial protection. Conphas immediately dispatched General Numemarius and a strong cohort of Kidruhil cavalry. Through some fatal mistake, however, the gates were thrown open to a large force of Thunyeri, who promptly began massacring and plundering the city. The Kidruhil attempted to intervene, and pitched battles broke out in the streets. When General Numemarius finally met with Yalgrota Sranchammer under flag of truce, the giant brained him.


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The Thousandfold Thought / Re: Favorite Scenes
« on: September 06, 2015, 01:50:06 pm »
When Skaurus isn't fazed at all and just pulls out a knife and starts filing his nails, I remember I was reading TWP in the University Law Library and I guffawed so loudly at the audacity of this Sapatishah, that I was asked to leave premises. Lol  I miss Skaurus, he deserved more page-time, oh well.

The Warrior-Prophet has a handful of funny moments in the middle of the grim seriousness - the narrators are all grim and gloomy and self-hating, but the omniscient POV has its moments of unintentional comedy.

I don't have the e-book at hand right now, but the omniscient passage of the Holy War's genocide in Shigek especially sticks out. It starts out describing how the Holy War spiraled out of control and started massacring civilians, and Bakker waxes poetically about bloodshed causing more bloodshed, goes into a grimdark litany about the raping and pillaging, and it all gets so over-the-top brutal that it starts being hilarious in a black-comedy way. Something along these lines:

"The Holy War descended into carnage and rape, for ever are all men deceived, and finally the Men of the Tusk began killing one another...General Phallus Majorus attempted to stop the madness, but they snapped him into tiny pieces."

I remember laughing at the deadpan ending of that part. Bakker's a lot better at unintentional jokes than intentional ones.

29
The White-Luck Warrior / Re: Nonmen Society
« on: August 27, 2015, 04:32:11 pm »
Also, I never really saw the Nonmen's worship of oblivion as actual "darkness-worship", but rather as a worship of endless Becoming (to use the Heidegger term) and infinite potential.

The Inchoroi and Nonmen both seem to have a worldview that Heidegger calls "Das Gestell" (translated into English stupidly as "framing"). It's the modernist attitude of viewing the universe as basically raw material that waits for us to rework or "perfect" it. The Inchoroi have a lot more in common with us modern Westerners than any of Bakker's human characters. They don't view anything as possessing any intrinsic "being" or "nature". They're all pure potential, waiting for us to pick them up. Trees are potential paper, a great river (Heidegger's own example) is a potential power source, AIDS victims are potential profits for medical companies, and the Inchoroi of today are, with the latest genetic rewirings, the new and improved Inchoroi of tomorrow. For modern people and Inchoroi, things have no real nature of their own - their nature is always something that we make real. So modern thinking always orients itself to the future.

In a lot of ways, Bakker's blind-brain philosophy is a criticism of this "Das Gestell" modernist view.

30
The White-Luck Warrior / Re: Nonmen Society
« on: August 27, 2015, 04:19:17 pm »
Not so much a temple as a large hadron collidor with the purpose of connecting heaven and hell, a structure like a sketch of a black hole, cleric even describes an event horizon in the above quoted.   And perhaps the LHC esque structures  like the vitiric well or great medial screw were meant to study heaven and hell or were meant to create singularities perhaps in the form of chorae.

The Chorae-as-singularities idea definitely makes sense - they're to magic in Eärwa what gravitational singularities are to the space-time fabric in our universe.

As for the Nonmen trying to probe Heaven and Hell through an "event horizon", it's possible. IIRC, Bakker said in the Helen Cruz interview that his fictional sorcery is just as empirical as real science, and that the Gnostic schools have their own "arcane Einsteins" who undertake empirical investigations into things like Hell. It's definitely possible that the topoi in Cil-Aujas, and the dead Nonmen leaking in from Hell, is a result of this. I actually don't think the Inverse Fire shows the real thing - given Bakker's obsession with neuroscience, it's just as likely to be a neurosurgical Tekne device that alters the brains (and, thus, the beliefs) of those who look at it.

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