Or, maybe I am just off on a tangent...

No, it makes perfect sense and is exactly what I was talking about!

Its called "Fantasy of Manners" and/or "Slice of Life", which are 'sub-genres' or classifications of fantasy wherein little happens - the focus being on the characters/relationships rather than anything actually happening.

Unfortunately, there is also very little characterization happening. All of the relationships have almost no progression, and are themselves rather milquetoast. It's realistic (real life is short on serious drama), but this is the less often encountered sort of realism that's in fact bad for fiction. It's simply boring, and one of the things people try to escape by reading entirely made up books.

It is, though, done by choice in JS&MN, of this I have no doubt. The book is just too well-written for Susanna Clarke not seeing it. In the end, it's what she wants to write, which is the best point of view an author can have. Writing should first be for whoever's writing, and only after that for others, that's how we actually get good books. It's also why even very good books will never be for everybody.

I still can't download a database from SMF and I noticed it takes quite a bit of time to clear after we've rejected Spam-Sranc before the pending users notation disappears.

Thanks again for all you guys have done.

I've left a possible explanation for this and other such errors and peculiarities in the quorum channel of the Discord server. It's not super secret or anything, but I don't wanna leave a permanent visible record of it all the same.

Quote from: The Spaces Between on July 23, 2020, 12:09:53 pm

This makes Mim a bit of an inversion of the JE and its criteria. Where pregnant women get the JE and have stillbirths, Mim is an intended abortion that possesses the JE. Or at least that was my impression when i read the above statement and tried to resolve the paradox of Mim possessing the JE all her life.

Well, in my current Hegelian paradigm, I tend to think of this mainly in terms of the sort of "reconciliation" the seems to run all through TAE.  Namely the notion of how the Eternal (the unchanging in Hegelian terms) could or would intersect with the temporal (the individual).

I don't know that there is a resolution to that paradox though, really.  The fact seemingly just is, more so, something self-consciousness has to sublate (overcome) and possibly that is part of the Dasein spirit (in essence, what it means to have a soul).  Or maybe that is the whole thing really.

Putting it in more straightforward (albeit simplified), plot-related terms, the Judging Eye is an atemporal phenomenon. If it exists at one point in time, it exists always. Since Mimara will have it in the future, she does have it for all her life.

To clarify, my comment about the No-God wasn't meant as a contradiction. Myself, I saw it more as corroboration, but other interpretations have every right to exist.

Welcome, welcome!

@Cyx
Now I see your lines of thinking better. And you certainly shouldn't be worrying about not being educated enough or the like! This stuff is not rocket science (also, rocket science is not rocket science).

But so, there is a number of weaknesses in your arguments, and the most obvious ones are extratextual. For example, if we consider the way Bakker himself talks about the Gods, he ascribes them agency by default:
http://www.second-apocalypse.com/index.php?topic=2278.msg36488#msg36488

Of course, it's not only that:

Madness is described by Akka as the outside leaking in, and that squares up well with what happens to a WLW, they "see" from an Outside perspective.

Here, you confuse definitions. What Akka means by madness is what we mean by madness - acting irrationally, without grounds, with little to no correlation with reality. A human condition.

What's happening with WLW is much more than that. He possesses real power, that has him acting completely rationally and allows for feats way beyond human capacity (like correctly seeing the future and besting Maithanet). He is not mad, he demonstrates agency. Later, we even find out that this agency is not his own, since nothing in his previous life would suggest that he is completely focused on killing Kellhus by using a power that can't be explained and, in fact, is never attributed to agencies of the Inside. Rather, the person that WLW had been before at some point ceased to exist, changed (was displaced) instantly and completely.

Essentially, the Outside leaking in and leading to madness doesn't turn agencies of the Inside into agencies of the Outside. To be of the Outside, completely atemporal, you need to die first.

Another weakness of your argument is the Ciphrang. They talk, they act, they have their own agendas and desires. And what they are is essentially Gods-lite - Outside agencies of a smaller caliber. We even get a Ciphrang POV in TUC.

Next weakness would be the Dunyain (be it Kellhus or the Mutilated) ascribing agency to the Gods. Their "intuit" comments don't mean lack of agency, they describe, the way I understand it, the difference between temporal and atemporal perspectives.

A person living in Earwa (in the Inside) thinks, reasons - they see time happening moment by moment. They watch events unfold gradually, being connected to each other, influenced by a variety of forces, etc. This leads to logic, categorization, theoretical models, you name it. But most importantly it means that knowledge is always emerging, it can change, it can be gained, it can even be lost. There is never anyone in the Inside who possesses total knowledge of anything. New data changes conclusions, leads to other theories, different acts and views.

Now compare and contrast the Outside perspective. An Outside agency is total in itself, it possesses complete knowledge of itself and its acts. Those are done, they were always done, they will be always done. There is no need for logic or reason, an Outside agency "knows" what it must do, because it has already done it, this knowledge is implicit, a kind of intuition. This is how the Gods act and see the world. But what's important to note here is, while each Outside agency is total in itself, it's not absolute. They have limits, they are bound by their own nature, and they compete among themselves. This competition (atemporal, already done in its entirety, always done in its entirety) is one of the things that define the Outside and its agencies - the God is fractured, broken into a thousand pieces.

Now, here I must note that there is a variety of issues with what I describe above in relation to how it's used in TSA. I do at least attempt to wrap my head around spacetime physics and math, and it very well might be that my understanding of this field exceeds Bakker's. Or he had a very bright idea that goes over my head, that's a distinct possibility, too. The end result is, I simply can't tell whether it's me not understanding Bakker or Bakker not working out the atemporal nature of the Outside to the point of me not seeing flaws in the concept. So I can only operate with my understanding in these matters.

Back on track, though. Another example of the Gods expressing agency would be Gilgaol giving Anasurimbor Celmomas the Celmomian Prophecy. Which is a real prophecy that Celmomas couldn't have spontaneously concocted at the moment of his death.

Then you can remember the Nonmen of Ishterebinth being afraid of Sorweel. They see him being marked by Yatwer and are scared of her infiltrating their sanctum so easily. It's not them being delusional, it's them seeing the signs of power wielded with agenda, in an unprecedented way. They see agency.

Saying "that was an Act of Yatwer" seems almost like the opposite of a p-zombie argument, doing so is potentialy anthropomorphizing & attributing consciousness and an action to what may essentially be a primal aspect of nature (Birth, fertility et al)

The weakness of this argument is in the fact that from that moment on Sorweel is protected from the scrutiny of Kellhus and his half-Dunyain children by means that do not occur naturally and are time and again ascribed to strictly Outside agencies, the Gods. This power is never attributed to agencies of the Inside.

Following your argument further, denying that it was an act of Yatwer means it was done by the slave. Which, in turn, means that the Gods simply do not exist beyond the categorization of this new power. But this contradicts everything everyone who at any point wields a power like this says. Their collective experience is, the power was granted by a God (they even agree on what their respective God is, to an extremely coherent extent). This kind of corroboration simply can't be refuted. Sure, anything can be anything, but here, there is no reason to consider every character wrong.

That being said, I completely agree that the Gods are anthropomorphized. In fact, they are anthropomorphized by the narrative so deliberately and blatantly that I can only conclude that this is the intended perception telling the reader that yes, in the context of TSA the Gods are anthropomorphic. It shouldn't come as a surprise, though, since Bakker wanted to have arbitrary (but absolutely enforced) anthropomorphic morality in the series.

Obviously we aren't provided any perspective from the Hundred; rightly so if they are NOT conscious; sneaky of Bakker if they are.

Lastly, here are a few more Bakker quotes:
http://www.second-apocalypse.com/index.php?topic=1755.msg27801#msg27801

Note how he describes the No-God as a perfectly nonconscious god. This is in contrast with the Hundred, and that contrast is represented by the way the No-God acts every time we see it. It is a p-zombie, it expresses agency without being conscious (and likely without truly being an agency, even, though that's a topic for another discussion), and this is where its odd properties originate. Since it has no connection to the Outside, the Gods can't see it, for them, it doesn't exist. But it also means that it cannot see itself - hence its litany of questions (WHAT DO YOU SEE? WHAT AM I?).

All of this stems from the No-God being nonconscious. None of the Gods act in such a way.

In conclusion I would also say that we are given the perspective of the Gods, in part. The White Luck itself is a fraction of Yatwer's perspective (a fragment of a tapestry that she is). It's always the same, centered on the same result, even though it's expressed through two different hosts - the first WLW and Sorweel. I don't think there is any question that Sorweel-as-WLW is not Sorweel as we had seen him before.