There are a lot of things I really liked about the movie but a lot of things about it I really hated, which kinda compounded with my general dislike for what Disney has done to the film franchise.

I liked TFA when it first came out but it really lost favor for me on rewatches, so I liked how TFA kinda threw a lot of it out. As Knee that Bends wrote, Snoke mocking Ren's helmet felt like a big middle finger to the slavish imitation of TFA and its uninspiring new contributions. Luke throwing the lightsaber over his shoulder and Rey's parents being nobody were both such bold subversions of peoples expectations that they had been building up for years. I liked the length of the movie, the action, and the drama, it just felt like the really big operatic science fantasy film that I've been waiting for from this new trilogy.

That said, the villains are trash. The forced campy humor is irredeemably bad. Holdo standing around Resistance soldiers with her pink hair and flowing dress is the most out of place character in the entirety of the series, and that's saying a lot for a space drama with aliens.  I don't think clueless creepy Uncle Luke really works or does justice to what this character means to American culture. I feel so bad for Mark Hamill because he's probably been looking forward to reprising this role for the majority of his life and in interviews he said that this is basically an alternate universe version of Luke that does not capture his understanding of the character at all. It's just incredibly sad to me.

Ultimately, my larger problems are with the way this series was positioned at large. Instead of showing the rebuilding of the Republic, they just did a rehash that would pander to the nostalgia of fans of the original trilogy. It's just more Empire vs. Rebels, more X-Wings and Tie Fighters, another Darth Vader. Starting with Empire, these were essentially the biggest independent films but now their creative purpose has been discarded to instead play it safe and reestablish the good will of the brand, so the corporation that now owns it can continue making money off of it.

Like Athorn "FB" Gallizur, I was the perfect age for the prequels when they first came out but as I grew older I saw the flaws and more or less wrote them off like everybody else. This new sequel trilogy really made me appreciate what George was trying to do with them, to tell a new story, with new characters, planets, and starships, with different themes and plot lines in a largely different setting. I also think they have much better action, too!

I've spent too much time reading these books to take a remark like, "the people who don't like it are the ones who get it!" as anything other than rationalization.

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I would want to see the consequences of the closing off of the Outside resulting in the death of meaning, leading to a loss of consciousness and self-awareness in human beings. First people begin acting more bold without realizing it, especially timid characters, since they are no longer inhibited by their self-consciousness. Next people begin losing their faculty for language, our ability to express meaning, with characters starting to say a coherent sentence but ending in nonsense, severely hindering the communication necessary to resist the No-God. Next the norms of conduct of society completely fall apart because people can no longer process abstractions and they revert to looting and tearing eachother apart in the face of the apocalypse. By the end of the saga, humanity is reduced to an ape-like state, where they can do nothing but carry out simple biological functions and their only response to the coming of the No-God is to flee howling in terror.

While this is happening, the confluence of unlikely miracles it takes to sustain life, let alone an entire planet of biodiverse multi-celled organisms or even intelligent life, begin to break down. The grass and plants are withering rapidly, the climate becomes highly erratic, and water begins to dry up almost everywhere. Domesticated animals just drop dead because they no longer have the milennia of intentional programming that artificially evolved them into what they are. More and more poisonous gasses are released into the atmosphere, natural disasters are becoming common occurrences and comets and other space objects begin colliding into Earwa. As the planet can't take much more, everything is consumed by a major black hole event that negates all existence. With a POV in the outside of the gods watching all of this helplessly, the Outside blinks out of existence as well, as it cannot exist if it's mirror image does not.

Aurax tales off the VR headset and chastises Aurang for not making it to the end. The whole thing was a simulation, an open world game where you travel the galaxy trying to find the correct planet and end damnation by activating System Initialization. They committed such insane atrocities on an absurd scale because there were no consequences, much like any teenager blowing off steam in Grand Theft Auto. The game is populated with NPCs created using something like Bethesda's Radiant AI system, where characters can make their own decisions according to programmed behaviors and inclinations. Everything you read about what they said, thought, and felt was entirely meaningless. This challenges the readers perception about the significance of what they feel about struggles and achievements - that you can feel such powerful attachment to experiences that are not real, both in the in-world narrative of the book and your own reading experience outside of it.

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The more I think about it, the angrier I become.

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That specific foreshadowing, Bolivar, as well as Kellhus' speech in Shikol's Court are made even more interesting as Bakker talked at Zaudunyanicon about how when he began writing TAE he wasn't yet sure who would take Ajokli's position in TUC, Gilgaol or Ajokli.

That's amazing. Did he mean that it was meant to be ambiguous up to that point, that Gilgaol could have taken over Kellhus in the Ark? It seems like he could have gone either way even after the Celmomas POV in TGO.

Wish I could've been there. I hope maybe you guys could move it just south of the border next year !!! 

I've always felt this way about the title. I can't believe we saw more of the Ark proper in TTT than we did in TUC. Maybe it's unfair to hold him to this standard but when you build it up for years that the final book is The Unholy Consult and the way it was described in interviews in the years leading up to it, you're expecting some crazy shit. Then The Great Ordeal raised the anticipation further with the nuke, Ishterebinth, the Survivor's Son, and the head on the pole. Aurax should've been an insane encounter. We're told about the Mangeacca existing during the First Holy War now we're supposed to believe they all died out.

I expect it was intended to be frustrating and maybe it was a stroke of genius, that eery feeling that Golgotterath was abandoned, the horn coming down (holy shit), Kellhus decimating Aurang and subduing the Dunsult, only for it all to turn on them in the end. But I agree The Horns of Golgotterath would've been a better title.

The creak of bronze hinges. They both yanked their gazes to the shadows that concealed the entrance. The fires pulled and twirled in the tripods set to either side of the game-table. Achamian heard the scuff of little feet, then suddenly Nau-Cayûti hurtled into his father’s arms and lap.
  “Whoopa!” Celmomas cried. “What warrior leaps blindly into the arms of his foe?”
  The boy chortled in the grinding way of children fending fingers that tickle. “You’re not my foe, Da!”
  “Wait till you get older!”

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Pictures!

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