Earwa > The Almanac: TAE Edition
The Slog TJE - Chapters 1-3 [Spoilers]
H:
--- Quote from: Odium on March 08, 2016, 02:49:25 am ---I was not very loquacious throughout the PoN half of the slog. I'll try to put forward more thoughts as we advance through this one.
--- Quote ---Eyes rolling, they stared in lust and apprehension...
Men.
--- End quote ---
Perhaps it's the amount of Michael Haneke's cinema I've been consuming lately, but something about the very beginning of TJE gives me the initial impression that the Sranc are, in many ways, a grotesque distortion of the negative qualities in Men. Afterwards, the anonymous traveler reflects on how the scalpers are like animals. I feel the passage I've quoted and what immediately follows, including the tone throughout the scene with the traveler, do suggest that there are many parallels between the Skin Eaters and their prey. I'll even stick my fingers into the pot of wild speculation and say that afterwards, Bakker might be deliberately mentioning other typical conceits of violent men when he states that Ironsoul is as jealous of his voice as he is of his women and his blood.
(edit: to clean up my thoughts there a bit, what I mean here is that re: the feminism threads, another key concept in the series is Bakker's portrayal of this objectively, metaphysically hypermasculine world and all the terrible shit that involves, which would be the reason behind a juxtaposition of Men and Sranc to begin with)
--- End quote ---
I think it runs deeper than that. I presented the idea back somewhere (probably based off someone else's idea that I can't recall) that both the Inchoroi and the Nonmen are actually allegories to the dangers of trans-humanism. Indeed, this doesn't end there though, since the Sranc are even further debased Nonmen, I think what you say is essentially true. The Sranc are basically the worst of Nonmen and Men put together.
--- Quote from: Odium on March 08, 2016, 02:49:25 am ---
--- Quote ---As you know, I'm of the opinion that Akka's dream are unfiltered truths straight from Seswatha. I believe Nayu is Ses's son and this is merely Seswatha providing Akka with little truths to get him to follow the dreams. Akka is the direct hand of Seswatha in these events. I also don't see where this makes him at odds with Kellhus.
--- End quote ---
Later on, we receive in-universe confirmation that all of Akka's dreams have secondary interpretations relating to their contexts and other secondary meanings. Here I believe we are glimpsing the suggestion that not only did Seswatha father Nau-Cayuti, but potentially that he created the Dunyain and consequently Kellhus.
--- End quote ---
While I do think that Akka's "new" Dreams are truthful, I think that what Scott has done to essentially "throw us off" is to mix the truth with still more propaganda, so that we can never be sure, really, of how to square any of them off with the others. We are left to try to piece together the truthful aspects with what is really just more window-dressing and misdirection.
Made it through Chapter 1:
--- Quote ---upon the high wall the husbands slept,
while 'round the hearth their women wept,
and fugitives murmured tales of woe,
of greater cities lost to Mog-Pharau...
—"The Refugee's Song," The Sagas
--- End quote ---
This is the quote from the beginning. What way to beging the chapter that sees Sakarpus conquered. The parallel is obvious, showing us that Kellhus has done what the No-God (and Consult) could not. The implication seems clear, Kellhus is more. What remains to be seen is, what does the more entail?
MSJ:
--- Quote ---Made it through Chapter 1:
Quote
upon the high wall the husbands slept,
while 'round the hearth their women wept,
and fugitives murmured tales of woe,
of greater cities lost to Mog-Pharau...
—"The Refugee's Song," The Sagas
This is the quote from the beginning. What way to beging the chapter that sees Sakarpus conquered. The parallel is obvious, showing us that Kellhus has done what the No-God (and Consult) could not. The implication seems clear, Kellhus is more. What remains to be seen is, what does the more entail?
--- End quote ---
Tell me, why couldn't the Consult conquer Sarkapus? The chorae hoard? Is this why Kellhus hand is salting when he meets Sorweel?
H:
--- Quote from: MSJ on March 08, 2016, 03:32:49 pm ---
--- Quote ---Made it through Chapter 1:
Quote
upon the high wall the husbands slept,
while 'round the hearth their women wept,
and fugitives murmured tales of woe,
of greater cities lost to Mog-Pharau...
—"The Refugee's Song," The Sagas
This is the quote from the beginning. What way to beging the chapter that sees Sakarpus conquered. The parallel is obvious, showing us that Kellhus has done what the No-God (and Consult) could not. The implication seems clear, Kellhus is more. What remains to be seen is, what does the more entail?
--- End quote ---
Tell me, why couldn't the Consult conquer Sarkapus? The chorae hoard? Is this why Kellhus hand is salting when he meets Sorweel?
--- End quote ---
Yeah, we've talked about it before and the two places spared the Apocalypse were Sakarpus and Atrithau.
Sakarpus has the Chorae Hoard and Atrithau is on Anarcane Ground. My speculation was that the No-God could be blind to these places, because of this. An alternative theory could be that without being able to use sorcery, it was not worth the effort for the Consult to take these places.
Both seem pretty plausible. Kellhus demonstates that neither of these things effect him particularly (but yeah, he probably is salting from all the Chorae that are around but more probably Sorweel's).
Odium:
I can't imagine conventional strategy applying much to the armies of the Weapon Races. Just judging from the Sranc/Bashrag it seems they kind of war with overwhelming numbers. I have a hard time imagining that the Consult would just spare two cities because of the resources necessary to conquer them. I'm sure there is some deeper significance to Atrithau and Sakarpus enduring the No-God, and what we know of them strongly suggests it has something to do with the disadvantages for sorcery at both locations. The Consult employed sorcery to create the No-God - maybe, paradoxically, it depends on it in some way.
H:
--- Quote from: Odium on March 09, 2016, 12:23:59 am ---I can't imagine conventional strategy applying much to the armies of the Weapon Races. Just judging from the Sranc/Bashrag it seems they kind of war with overwhelming numbers. I have a hard time imagining that the Consult would just spare two cities because of the resources necessary to conquer them. I'm sure there is some deeper significance to Atrithau and Sakarpus enduring the No-God, and what we know of them strongly suggests it has something to do with the disadvantages for sorcery at both locations. The Consult employed sorcery to create the No-God - maybe, paradoxically, it depends on it in some way.
--- End quote ---
Well, I had a theory that the Carapace was made so that the No-God could not see itself, but even more so that it is appart from it's own nature. In other words, it is not only blind to itself, but it is unaware of the very nature of it's existence. It knows nothing of it's own boundaries, it knows nothing of what it is even doing.
I liken it to awaking up with your memory wiped in a sensory derivation tank. You can't see, you can't feel anything, you can't even know if you are really moving, or where to even if you were. We know what the No-God is doing in Earwa, but it doesn't. We know that it can unify the will of Sranc, but I would venture that the No-God knows nothing of it. It simply does this by existing.
In this way, the fact that Sakarpus and Atrithau are blind spots makes sense, just as it is it's own blind spot.
Made it through chapters 2 and 3 today:
--- Quote ---Not all facts are equal. Some hang like leaves from the branching of more substantial truths. Others stand like trunks, shouldering the beliefs of entire nations. And a few—a desperate few—are seeds.
--- End quote ---
The mention of seeds in relation to Celmomas. Coincidence? Doubtful. Implication though? That is less clear. Perhaps drawing us forward to the Slog and for Ishual, the place of seeds.
--- Quote ---Theliopa, her eldest daughter by Kellhus, bowed in a stiff curtsy as they approached. Perhaps she was the strangest of her children, even moreso than Inrilatas, but curiously all the more safe for it. Theliopa was a woman with an unearthly hollow where human sentiment should be. Even as an infant she had never cried, never gurgled with laughter, never reached out to finger the image of her mother's face. Esmenet had once overheard her nursemaids whispering that she would happily starve rather than call out for food, and even now she was thin in the extreme, tall and angular like the God-her-father, but emaciated, to the point where her skin seemed tented over the woodwork of her bones. The clothes she wore were ridiculously elaborate—despite her godlike intellect, the subtleties of style and fashion utterly eluded her—a gold-brocaded gown fairly armoured in black pearls.
--- End quote ---
Am I the only one who thinks of her name as Theliopia? I know it's wrong, but it has a better ring to it to me. Anyway, she is probably my favorite of all Kellhus' kids, Inrilatas aside. She is weird and creepy, but like my enjoyment of Aurang, she never pulls punches. Just the facts mam, just the facts.
--- Quote ---Twenty years ago, Fanayal had ranked among the most cunning and committed foes of the First Holy War. Though the heathen Empire of Kian had been the first to topple at the Aspect-Emperor's feet, Fanayal had somehow managed to avoid his nation's fate.
--- End quote ---
It is pretty interesting that will all of Kellhus' power, he still lets Fanayal live. Certainly this was a full choice. Perhaps because he knew that while he was gone, an external enemy was needed to keep the empire together?
--- Quote ---His name was Hagitatas, famed among the Conriyan caste-nobility as a healer of troubled souls. Somehow, through tenderness, wisdom, and incalculable patience, he managed to pry her two little darlings apart, to give them the interval they required to draw their own breath, and so raise the frame of individual identities. Such was her relief that even the subsequent discovery of Samarmas's idiocy seemed cause for celebration.
--- End quote ---
I wonder if this separation is somehow the source of Kel's voice?
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