Ruthan Good, on 28 November 2012 - 10:23 PM, said:
Ah. Well. I need to go and rethink my life I think. I suppose that agrees with some of the Old Guard achieving varying levels of ascension while living at the Deadhouse for a while since they used that as a base to take down Mock and beyond, i.e. Nok, the napans, maybe Dassem and the others too. And so then it makes sense as the DHD were travelling around the Azath and gathering knowledge and power they approached closer and closer to it. And i suppose with becoming ST and Cots they have just reached the next stage, most likely not the last stage as they continue to capitalise on what happened with the rest of the gods losing the juicebox that was Kaminsod. I guess what I wanted to know was at which point did the two stop just being crafty buggers wanting to form the best human empire ever (so that ST's mum would approve of him) and begin moving in on the ascendancy path.
I guess they settled in Malaz, then moved to the Deadhouse, they still had earthly designs and initially made out to accomplish them, but in parallel they began to slowly discover things about the Azath and all that shedongle (another technical term). In their travels they witnessed a chaining, among other things, and realised that many of the younger ascendants were douches.
I can live with that.
I will flip it the other way and say that at the time after Kellanved/Ammanas and Dancer/Cotillion left the empire and before Returning to become Shadowthrone and The Rope, they were also young ascendants and douches. Kellanved was the sort of mage-emperor who buried thousands of his own soldiers just to strike at the Crimson Guard. Dancer teleported into people's inner chambers to assassinate them for a living. These guys were probably not nice people. And thus when we see them a few years after they have claimed the Shadow Warren they are still thinking about petty revenge on Laseen. That doesn't mean they weren't also plotting to usurp the power source of the other gods at the same time, but it was probably for petty reasons, too.
Over the course of the series these two do change - they regain their humanity. Not in the mortal sense but in the emphatic sense. By the end of it they are releasing the Crippled God for compassion, not for vengefulness. Ammanas will always be manipulative and deceitful, and Cotillion will always be coldly pragmatic, but it is still a big shift in character for them across the 10 novels.
(and yeah I'm rephrasing a bunch of what SE has discussed in interviews with this post)
Sinisdar Toste, on 29 November 2012 - 04:54 AM, said:
i think another interesting question is at what point did tavore realize what ST and Cot were trying to do? since kellenved is freaking out to ganoes paran in the beginning of the last book, i'm guessing that he didn't approach her as a young woman, since he'd have a better idea of what she's like. the fact he doesn't makes me think that tavore was the one doing all the mental leg-work.
Well she was among the foremost (still-living) scholars of Kellanved and Dancer, but we don't know when she started studying them.
We basically know so little of Tavore's childhood and adolescence in Unta that the relationship could be almost anything and we can't really know when it began. Which is, of course, the point. And young Ganoes having been stationed at the Kanese coast but also having trained Tavore when she was younger makes it all the more adaptable to these possibilities.
This post has been edited by D'rek: 30 November 2012 - 10:11 PM