Is anyone else keeping up with this? I'm curious on ya'll's opinions here...

I am, but the second season of True Detective has been so boring that I haven't really bothered to write any posts about it. By this point, I'm fast-forwarding through half the scenes.

Having an ensemble cast of four protagonists was definitely a bad idea; two of them are so dull they're almost unwatchable.

The ship being anything other than mechanical doesn't seem likely .I think we run afoul technology indistinguishable from magic. Except instead of magic, the ship is being describe in vague biological terms since the creatures that are describing it in most cases are unable to comprehend the technology, or in the Inchoroi's case, unable to convey meaning outside of the biological to the idiot species on Earwa.

It's described as a "dead womb" and the Inchoroi as "orphans". That's more than just metaphor.

And yeah, it's mechanical - after all, organic life forms are just mechanical processes created by random evolution instead of human craft. Biology is biomechanics.

For the rest, I think Bakker has alluded to some big switch regarding the importance or women, and I think the Inchoroi, Nonmen, and Dunyain women will all be a part of that.

The Inchoroi seem to be a single-gender race, if terms like "male" and "female" are even relevant to them - they're at the point where they can do genetic rewrites of their bodies to grow a vagina or twenty more phalluses.

The Nonmen are a single-gender race because their women are all dead (as far as we know, at least). We don't know much about the Nonwomen, other than what we saw in Bakker's short story with the Nonman's stream-of-consciousness narration.

The Dûnyain...well, they're the big mystery here.

How many mods do we even have on Second Apocalypse?

I honestly don't think we need more than one or two, given the small size of this forum.

The Dune analogues throughout make it seem like the Tanks are the way the Inchoroi or Dunyain women went.

We sorta know how Inchoroi reproduction works - they're a single-gender species and the Ark is their womb, hence Seswatha calling them "the orphans" and the Ark a "dead womb". So their mothership is literally their mother, the female of the species, while also being a self-sustained biosphere. Think of the Inchoroi as white blood-cells that can survive outside the body, or honeycomb produced by bees (the Ark being the bees, not the hive), or even the mitochondria born inside cells. 

I imagine their species works a lot like the aliens in Peter Watts' Blindsight, who are a part of their mothership's ecosystem and don't exist "independently" from the alien environment that birthed them.

But then again, me and you don't exist "independently" either.

Were do you draw the line between organism and environment? The thousands of mitochondria living in our cells are pretty much organisms in their own right; they just need the cell's environment to survive. The human body is the same; it's "self-contained", has its own reproductive ability, but needs an external biosphere to survive at all. How does that make us "individuals", while our mitochondria are just "organelles"? It's nesting circles all the way out. Any coherent definition of "self-reliant individual" will just keep receding to the horizon until you basically have to call the whole biosphere a single being.

Its not a huge stretch to imagine that the Dunyain women could possible be used for only breeding purposes, but I dont think so.

I have no idea either, and my guess is as good as yours. But from the evidence we've got, I think it's pretty likely that the Dunyain went that way.

Also, there are a few references to Dunyain women, at least tangentially.

But they're very tangential. Not a single reference to a female Dunyain individual back home. Not a single reference to Kellhus' mother. Does he even have one?

When speaking of world-born women baring his seed, its definitely implied, if not outright said, that only true Dunyain women care bare functional Dunyain children. There are women, we know they breed with the men.

Well, yeah. I don't doubt that females exist in Ishuäl, since the Dunyain clearly reproduce like we do. However, we have no idea if the women are just breeding stock, reduced to brain-dead Axolotl Tanks for maximum breeding efficiency, or if they're actually persons that the Dunyain think of as mothers and sisters.

I think its equally as likely that the women are the superiors running Ishual, the Bene Gesserits toying with their puny minded men, sending them out into the world to die, rather than the opposite Tlelaxu analogue.

Bakker-world being what it is, the most misogynistic path will usually be taken...

On a semi-related note, Cnaiur's mother was impregnated by Moenghus and gave birth to a daughter.  It's not mentioned whether the child was a mutant but the mother definitely survived... to get killed for her infidelity.

Well, yeah, both Moenghus and Kellhus had daughters when they impregnated normal women in the outside world.

I'm talking about Dûnyain women in present-day Ishuäl; there doesn't seem to be any. All the elders and teachers are men, all the kids are boys. What happens to the women?

I like your choices, Francis.

I also picked Fassbender for Kellhus - the guy is a human chameleon, and there's something slightly eerie about those Ken-Doll features and perfect white teeth, almost too good-looking and symmetrical. Casting Fassbender as the android in "Prometheus" was a stroke of genius, and that's pretty much how I imagined Kellhus.

I agree that Oscar Isaac would be a really good Conphas, he has those classical looks and that smug shit-eating smirk down perfectly. He looks even more smug without the beard:



Serwë...no one really comes to mind here, although your choice of actor was a bit too mannish-looking. Serwë's main traits in the books are vulnerability and childlike weakness, so the actor should look the part. Not sure who looks both childlike and classically beautiful, while also having a slightly "weird" face. The girl who played Stephen Hawking's sister, maybe:



The Captain is definitely a Viggo Mortensen role. He needs actor who can look convincingly brutal and hardened. A man of violence, with a hollow thousand-yard stare that has seen countless murders. At the same time, he's a leader of men and a hero figure (very much a Classical Hero, not anything we moderns would call a hero), so his actor should convey that "heroic sociopath" look:



Aurang: in his human disguise, he'd have to be a bald guy with a disturbing look to him. French director Gaspar Noé is actually who I'd cast as Aurang in human shape - I've met the guy in real life and he's a really brilliant director (one of my personal favorites) and all-around fascinating person, but damn if he doesn't look like he belongs on some sex-offender list:



(The face of extraterrestial anal rape)

Affleck doesn't have the right gravitas for the role, IMO.

The perfect casting would be a young Rutger Hauer, as he appeared in Blade Runner. Out of actors today, I dunno...probably Fassbender, he's got that eugenic ubermensch look that the Dunyain need.

The Dunyain really are a species apart from baseline humans, and the casting should show that. They're superior in every way, to the point of being inhuman, a bit like Tolkien's Elves or the androids in Blade Runner.

Why can't she have both of these as her motivations?

Maybe she was desperately looking for a way to save her soul for a long time, and then along comes the Consult bird-man and gives her a deal with the devil - she'll be saved from damnation if she poisons her husband and hands him over to Golgotterath. Maybe she's ambivalent about this whole thing at first...but when Nau-Cayuti comes home with his troo luv that he just rescued, totally neglecting his wife, it gives Ieva that final push.