I could spend all day with this...

The biggest ones for me are character "deaths" and the nature of the afterlife, simply because it leaves an open-ended sense to...basically every major character death. We know there is an afterlife. We know there's more than one type of afterlife. We know that a soul can be -- if not resurrected -- then at least "brought back" in one form or another.

We also "know" that all of the above could be false, or at least highly obfuscated. If this turns out to have a narrative pay off down the road, that's fine -- it makes sense to leave those threads slack until the ending of the series, given the subject matter and nature of the worldbuilding and story. But if the series ends without some hard-ish answers on those things, it'd be a tough pill for me to swallow barring some serious literary gymnastics.

Most other things (most, not at all) are less of an issue, and I do think that this series will never have a clear cut "hey here's how everything works" type of scene. The fact that the question of "what is real and/or true" is a rather prominent theme in the stories makes this okay on paper, but it definitely requires a certain handling of the narrative and characters which, as of yet, has not appeared IMO.

Fuckin' badass.

2001: A Space Odyssey OST for the music? Yeah, this dude knows what's up. 

Didn't know where to put this, but during my reread of TGO last night, I saw mention of Ioyukus. When they were preparing for battle at Dagliash. I just thought I'd mention it because so many have been asking about the man. Wrong thread I know, didn't really think any place would be better.
“The Blind Necromancer Heramari Iyokus followed in the van with the Scarlet Spires.”

Excerpt From: R. Scott Bakker. “The Great Ordeal.” The Overlook Press, 2016-07-12T04:00:00+00:00. iBooks.
This material may be protected by copyright.

Very nice catch. The way Iyokus has been teased for literally all of TAE series just makes his eventual reappearance in TUC all the more likely (I'd be stunned if he didn't at least appear on-screen). Though the function he will ultimately play is interestingly varied. He seems ripe for turning over to the Consult, but that's based on his characterization 20 years ago. Since it's clear that Kellhus has at least three Ciphrang in his control, and we know that Iyokus helped Kellhus in his ventures to the Outside, I could see his POV having been withheld so long because of the insights he must have gleaned. Plus, given our new understanding of Ciphrang from TGO, the title of "Necromancer" makes a bit more sense while simultaneously producing a bunch of new questions.

Quote from:  Madness

Indeed. Not-so-smart Kelmomas. You courted the trickster and are upset that you've been deceived, despite all your learning to that exact effect. Irony !

Right, which many of us believed. But, what's Ajokli's endgame here? It seems as if his goals coincide with Kellhus, but that's not a definite. I think its important that Ajokli is mentioned as a companion to the Gods in the Glossary. I think that could be a clue.

To the bolded, I'm beginning to think Ajokli has no end-game - or rather, his end-game is nothing more than to continually undermine the actions of the Gods. This fits in with the trickster quality, and even perhaps the trickster-hero archetype (the most popular Western example of this is probably Loki, and I doubt the similarity in names are a coincidence).

However, Ajokli's association with hatred makes this more complex, and lends him a more Satanic quality, at least in the broad sense of "The Adversary" in Judeo-Christian myth.

While many characters in the series (really all of them to a certain degree) display hatred, the ones which first come to mind for me are Cnaiur, Kelmomas, and Aurang. But of the three, it's Aurang who seems the most purely hate-driven. Cniaur's hatred is targeted at Moenghus, and thereby Dunyain in general, and while he's not exactly friendly, he does make human connections, often in spite of himself. More importantly, the core of his hatred comes from a hatred of himself, which I think must end up being an essential part of his arc.

Kelmomas hates almost everyone aside from Esmenet (whom he arguably just hates in different way), but so much about that character's nature is a mystery that it's effectively impossible to figure out without new material.

Aurang, on the other hand, is characterized almost exclusively by hatred. His POV is consistently drawn as spiteful and contemptuous of literally everything other than those directly associated with the Consult (though we NEVER see him actually thinking about any individual members of the Consult, instead he thinks only of "Golgotterath" in general).

No idea if these ruminations are even relevant since we still don't even have a firm idea of what the Gods are, so personality traits may just be character's having "aspects" of different gods, which pretty much all of them do regardless (no character perfectly aligns into the same qualities of the Gods we have seen, aside from perhaps the No-God and Kellhus).

It may be worth noting though that Shauriatas is described almost purely through hatred, but again the sheer lack of knowledge makes it wide open.

Also, it's funny. In the AMA Bakker seemed surprised that (some) people didn't realize that Momas was the cause of the earthquake, rather than Yatwer. I wonder Kellhus's line here is meant to clarify that, which indicates not only that Momas is sending the tsunami, but also that he was responsible for the earthquake as well.

Maybe the Gods are so tricky to figure out partially because the World is seemingly a separate entity, or perhaps an amalgamation of all the Gods. Affixing "earth powers" to Yatwer felt straightforward given all the symbolism, but then she isn't an earth goddess, rather a fertility one. A subtle but important distinction. Of course, it also makes sense in retrospect that Momas and the sea would be responsible (if such a word can even be applied to the Gods) for the quake/tsunami, but it does make me re-think my view of the Gods in general.

And if the World is a separate entity, have we observed its presence? Is it the Zero-God Koringhus apprehends? Is it the Darkness that comes before? Shauriatas? Or just the God of Gods itself -- and if so, what the hell is the Zero-God then? Let alone the No-God.

Many great forces are in play to some degree, most of which we know little to nothing about, and that's excluding the regular old Gods and Ciphrang and Wights and so on. I feel like some these things are the same entity under different names/interpretations (the Zero-God certainly seems like the "expression" of the Darkness, in some sense), but who can say?

I love Geraus as a spy. That being said, I feel the identity of the Traveler is very wide open. What if it was Cleric? Or even an agent of the Consult...

Here's the scene of Howard from BCS, I'm not even sure how to describe how he is moving but it cracks me up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QP4mTNam5Bw

I gotta check out The Americans someday, it's on my list. I enjoyed the first season of Homeland but it kinda lost me after that, I've heard mixed things about how it goes as the show progresses.

Interested in your thoughts on Fargo when you finish! Seasons Two is one of my favorite seasons of any show ever TBH.

Quote from: Second Apocalypse on April 19, 2013, 02:16:32 pm

Quote from: Curethan

This is a speculation that I have raised before.
There are other points that I feel may be relevant.

Did the dunyain refugees discover Ishual by blind luck?  Where else would they have been headed in the ruined north under shadow of Golgotteroth?
It's possible that the unnamed old man who led them knew Seswatha, perhaps it even was Seswatha.
More likely than them finding the map at Sauglish and then just leaving it there.  (Although  Kellhus could have recently planted it there for Akka, I guess.)

When the Dunyain discover the last scion of the Anasurimbor, it is described as a fortuitous correspondence of cause.  What is the correspondence between the objectives of the Consult's greatest latter-day opponents and the dunyain's quest for the transcendent self moving soul? 
It doesn't seem like an appropriate way to exclaim that they found some excellent genetic stock anyway.

And then Moeghus leaves Ishual and enters the three seas in accordance with an ancient prophecy that only Seswatha and his gnostic heirs have perpetuated for reasons that seem extremely untenable.  Divine or engineered coincidence?

So many apparent coincidences suggest that its either all a part of some ancient plan of the dunyain founders that Kellhus is ignorant of, or the Whore or the solitary god manipulating fate on a massive scale.

If we take the interpretation of the white luck as a manipulation of causality, could we interpret the dunyain quest as one to obtain mastery of the power of the gods?  Could the no-god itself be important to the dunyain objectives?

THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS

I'm starting to think that maybe I ought to doubt Kellhus' entire perception of Ishual as fabricated.  The Dunyain are quite capable of conditioning this guy from infancy.  What are the Dunyain really like?   No one knooooooooooowwwwsssss

Thirded. We have very, very little knowledge of how the Dunyain actually operate on an administrative level, if such a thing even exists.

One nerdanel I have about the Dunyain actually came from writing my own epic science-fantasy thing:

In my story, time travel is possible both forward and backward, but you can't CHANGE history or the future. It's Harry Potter rules basically (which ironically make the most sense of all time traveling rules IMO, but of course Harry Potter didn't start this notion by any means).

To put it as simply as I can off the top of my head: In my story various competing forces have traveled back in time to Earth's prehistory, attempting to stop and/or alter the course of human development (because in the future humanity turns into a seemingly tyrannically evil galactic empire, etc.).

Yet all of it is futile. No matter how absurd or distorted prehistory becomes from these "invasions", the future -- our history as we know it today -- must happen. It already happened and was always going to happen. It's one of the relatively few hard laws of my world-building -- the universe is not a changing thing per se, but one , infinite thing which exists across all of time, eternally. It only appears to change due to restrictions on our own, human, mortal consciousness.

So, the idea is that the universe, literally Reality itself, is constantly working to make things "line up" if you will. Whether the universe does this consciously or unconsciously is basically irrelevant and deliberately ambiguous.

The point is, whenever there's some sort of timespace-distortion bottleneck occurring, the reaction from the universe must inherently be more and more extreme (or shall we say, miraculous). Under what might be called stable circumstances, these universal self-correcting manifestations are virtually invisible -- like idea often used in Synchronicity, where the butterfly that beats its wings creates a tornado half-way across the world.

But, when the things do become too disorderly, the universe must (by natural law) manifest a way untangle the knot. Sometimes, veeeeeery rarely, this results in the form of a person. These people are called the Unchosen, or the Mythraz. These are seemingly real-deal superhero/deities/etc., yet it's important to remember that:

A: The Unchosen never realize they are Unchosen, at least not until the "mission" is completed.

B: The Unchosen are ultimately just regular human beings, and all their powers come from (what appears to be) luck, self-determination, and/or straight up plot armor.

I have no clue if this is even tangentially related to what Dunyain are, but it's a thought!