I feel this more acutely with my kindle than reading a regular book, I think. Seeing a number instead of feeling in my hands how many pages are left is different somehow.
I’m reminded of a section in GEB where a character (Achilles?) is saying how the author can’t hide how much of a story is left - the reader can see how many pages are left. They wish there was a way to signal to the reader the story is done. Maybe something so bizarre or incongruous with the rest of the story it’s obvious the story is over.
And then all of a sudden cops bust into the room and arrest everyone.
It really isn’t worth it but if you want to see for yourself skip to the end of the book and read the last two pages. What comes in between isn’t satisfying and how Bakker sets up and justifies the ending is a real let down. If you are still interested in finishing, jump to Golgotterath or inside the Ark if you want to skip the fluff.
If you’re really jonesing for a Bakker fix, Thomas Ligotti might help? Just heard of him:
Thomas Ligotti is a contemporary American horror writer. [His writings] have been described by many critics as works of philosophical horror, often formed into short stories and novellas in the tradition of gothic fiction. The worldview espoused by Ligotti in his fiction and non-fiction is pessimistic and nihilistic.
I, finally, finished the Thousand Fold Thought. A couple of years ago I got most way through The Warrior Prophet and got distracted with life. When I got back to reading a lot, I’ve got an hour commute so audio books for the win, I figured I should chew through my back log.
That was a wild ride, I’m going to buckle up for the second trilogy and finish this out in the next few weeks!
I want to say that thinking about the books in terms of a fantasy series not a whole lot happened. In some sense all of that which transpired only amounted to getting to the premise before the story that kept repeating in Seswatha’s memories.
In the first trilogy it felt like all the characters were in constant flux. You might have a scene featuring Conphas, Achamian and Cnaiur. Or you might have a scene with Serwe meeting Proyas and Khellus. The possibilities were endless.
In the second series you’ve got your Esme focussed story, your Achamian story and your Sorweel story. Nothing mixes up until the denouement. I found that frustrating.
Found this image on reddit. Apparently this is somewhere in the Austrian alps. All I could think was “yeah, that leads directly to Cil-Aujas. Directly to damnation.”
I’ve been wanting to make a video ranting about two lines of dialogue brought up in World of Warcraft where they brought up “Free Will.” I want to go full nuts into R. Scott Bakker territory, the darkness that came before, etc. I need more motivation though to do it. I have references to Star Trek, Captain N the Game Master, Sylvanas fanfiction where she escapes the game and usurps Activision-Blizzard. I think my biggest failing is I have no idea how you would condense this whole thing into something serving sized for Youtube.
Seeing as the popularity of long form videos has been increasing (Contrapoints’ Cringe is 1:23:19, Canceling is 1:40:28; Lindsay Ellis’ videos are not quite as long, Sarah Z just released a video on Supernatural that’s 1:45:35) why compress it?
Because nobody knows who I am or has reason to care… and the TLDR of the entire theoretical rant is like two sentences. “They probably just mean like… agency or something.”
Assuming nobody knows anything about wow or bakker or any of this, the dialogue that made my eyes go beady was basically:
Anduin Wrynn: “Don’t you believe we have free will?”
Sylvanas: “We never have. AND I’M GOING TO BREAK THE WHEEL.”
But to explain why this sounds so weird to me you have to unpack way more than it’s worth. Well first of all definitions, and historical references that free will is basically a Christian “patch” to the whole omnipotent, omnicient, but also all good deity… that isn’t really necessary in most other philosophies or systems of law or justice, etc. The whole dialogue is taking place in the shadowlands, which is the afterlife, which is apparently real… and characters you have met throughout the entire game have been there and back, but there’s seemingly no religions in the “real” universe or anything that seems to match back to it, and there’s also a whole lot of other kinds of hell we’re already somewhat aware of, but yeah I guess some of the time people go here. And maybe they live forever, or maybe they die. And someone turned off the robot that decides where souls go, so they all are going to prison. And the character that said she’s going to change things and that they never had free will was part of the plot to make everyone go to prison, but her whole MO is betraying people so yeah I guess she’s going to do that… but even if she does… “free will” as it’s used in philosophy is kind of not going to change it’s value from “off” to “on” simply because she changed the way the souls flow… and introducing this shadowlands thing has made the whole setting closer to being warhammer 40k or Prince of Nothing where hey maybe if you’re uber powerful you’ll get to be a demon in hell instead of some magic wine for hell vampires to drink, but you’re probably wine, but the whole cool thing about Prince of Nothing is that it actually did introduce a possibility for a character to go from “not free willed” to “free willed” and it required introducing something outside the outside. Bunch of ranting about what that entails and why Bakkar thought that was necessary for Free Will to exist (the whole not being observable at all to the non-linear always existing outsiders). And if Sylvanas WAS trying to do that, that’d be a whole lot more interesting, insert jokes about her breaking out of the game and becoming “real”, plus some ranting about the whole hey maybe our universe is a simulation and planck lengths are pixels and quantum observation changing things is just the system only rendering what it has to… etc. Oh, and also “free will” in the setting of wow could legitimately be an important term… for like “not actively mind controlled by a hostile priest/demon/etc”, but doesn’t fit here. Like I’m sure you don’t get charged for murdering the orphanage when it was the priest that made you do it by literally controlling you to do it… but that’s not really what they’re talking about here. Also it has now become clear wow has a prison problem. When you sit down and look at the list of prison based dungeons, worlds, gods, etc… and now the entire afterlife is itself a prison? There’s a bunch to unpack there too… in a universe where at least some people seem to know exactly what happens in the afterlife, and you will be judged by an omniscient viewer, who can send you to any degree of heaven/hell where you can repent, or straight to the maw to be forever imprisoned… there sure are a lot of people being imprisoned for 10,000 years in the “mortal” world… when death is apparently kind of just fine, and hey you might even come back anyway.
At the moment it’s obvious five hundred little ideas that all go together in my head in some way… but even if it could be in a long format… it needs some thorough processing and cleaning up…
