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Posts I've Made
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In Topic: Are Email Notifications from Messenger Conversations broken?
20 November 2023 - 01:55 PM
I have left a message to our web gurus about it. Now we wait... -
In Topic: Maybe I'm too dumb to understand but...
08 October 2023 - 12:28 AM
Abyss, on 07 October 2023 - 04:17 AM, said:
The Liosan weren't the main obstacle. They were allied w the FA, sure, and a general pain in the butt, but their goal was Kharkanas. It wasn't the Liosan that the Bonehunters and co faced in the finale(s), it was the Assail, and they had been an 'on screen' problem since DoD, arguably HoC, the Nah'Ruk too.
From a logic standpoint or from the Bonehunters' storyline standpoint they are not the main obstacle indeed, I absolutely agree. But then why do they get so much screentime in the final book as if the Liosan invasion was some big secondary final confrontation that was built up over the course of the series the way the real main obstacle was? (That's the premise of this thread - not claiming they were an equal final enemy)
Abyss, on 07 October 2023 - 04:17 AM, said:
But your point seems to be that the FA/Liosan/Nah'Ruk/Grey Helms alliance of eco-evil isn't front and center from the beginning. You're right. There are hints, sometimes big ones like Kalam finding the Nah'Ruk army hiding in the Imperial Warren, but the threat isn't clear until DoD.
Honestly I've always hated the argument that there even was "plenty of hints" about the Nah'ruk or Liosan in the earlier books. Yes, QB and Kalam happened upon an army of Nah'ruk in the Imperial Warren, but there wasn't any connection drawn from that to... anything. (Yes, other K'Chain appeared in MoI and RG, too, but I don't feel there was ever a connection established between those K'Chain events and the Nah'ruk event in DoD aside from their shared ancient history.)
So, like, if the Bonehunters had run into a legion of Korvalahrai demons in DoD instead would we be like "ah, the hints were there ever since Midnight Tides" ? If instead of either of those a portal opened up and the Deragoth charged into the Bonehunters would we think the hints were there all along for *that*?! Just seeing something before doesn't make it a "hint" when the series is full of seeing things that don't necessarily come back up later.
With that in mind, turning back to the Andii/Mother Dark storyline... I think there's a pretty clear buildup towards the events and resolutions in this particular storyline that occur in the climax of TtH. The Tiste Andii being lost without a cause, the absence of Mother Dark, how Dragnipur works and why destroying it would be a potential solution to this but also the huge problems it would cause - these things are all talked about by characters in earlier books before the events of TtH change or resolve a lot of them. I wouldn't say the same about the Liosan invasion - characters briefly mention that the Tiste Liosan as a whole exist, but the idea that there is a large militant Liosan kingdom who will invade with a dozen dragons if Rake were to die and/or reconcile with Mother Dark is never talked about or even hinted at, not even once, in the way that shattering Dragnipur will release all the beings within it is brought up multiple times. And yes, I believe that contributes to it feeling like it "comes out of nowhere" so to speak. -
In Topic: Maybe I'm too dumb to understand but...
07 October 2023 - 02:09 AM
Gorefest, on 02 October 2023 - 11:51 AM, said:
But that was the intention. Every book in the series has its convergences and it uses the concept of convergence throughout to explain/justify why all these seemingly coincidental things all come together in a resolution. So the reader should be familiar with the concept by the time we get to the finale. And the final book (or really two books, as DoD and tCG should really be seen as one novel cut in two) has the mother of all convergences. But every strand of it has been built up by the preceding books, whether we recognise it directly or not. This is one of the reasons why the series is so hugely rewarding on a reread.
I dunno, I kinda feel this sort of reasoning starts to become a weird circular logic. 4 Liosan on a sidequest showed up in House of Chains and then suddenly an entire army of them invading was a massive screentime-consumer and secondary climax to the whole series in book 10. Ya, sure, "it's all part of the convergence" but, like, the Bonehunters army showing up in Kolanse was also "part of the convergence". Would the climactic fight against the Forkrul feel just as satisfying if the entire screentime of the Bonehunters army before the last book was just one squad briefly appearing in a couple chapters of House of Chains? "Man, this Malaz army defeated the Raraku rebellion, sailed across the world and invaded Lether entirely off-screen, but that's fine because I understand the concept of convergences so I don't care about actually seeing any of that?".
Abyss, on 04 October 2023 - 01:58 PM, said:
Moreso because while ST and Tavore having a bigger picture is one possible interp, the flipside is that they do not, they're just going based on an equally incomplete picture and a firm vision of the outcome they want to see... ST wants the gods punished and denied their slave power source, Tavore wants the god freed and the world saved from the impact of his slavery, and they both PUSH for their goals while other events happen around them and force changes of plans. W the benefit of ICE's PoA, it seems that ST created the Empire to have the power base to figure out what was going on in the world, determined that some things were fundamentally wrong and went about correcting them. The Malazan Empire was just a step for him, and eventually Cots, that they came to care about. For Surly and others it became EVERYTHING, and that obsession almost derails the plan towards freeing the CG. Leth was 'just' another instance of the CG lashing out and other gods messing about, but it placed an obstacle in Tavore's path and a threat to the Malazan Empire, so it had to be taken out. 7C was a complication, but if the CG had seized the Whirlwind it may have been impossible to free him... throw in the threat to the Empire, again, and 7C has to be dealt with. Same for the Seer and Genbackis, and the FA on Kolanse, and to a less clear extent, the Stormwall and the Lady... my brain hurts.
I agree with all this but the thing for me is that all these other "obstacles" got a ton more development and screentime. Lether had a whole book of its own before the Bonehunters invaded it as "just another obstacle". We got to see many insides and outsides of the Whirlwind Rebellion before it was crushed. Etc. The Pures and the Liosan invasion army didn't get that same treatment, they were kept almost entirely off-screen until pulled out to be antagonists at the very end. It's all a bit backwards - the first "obstacles" should be the ones that need the least development and the big final climactic ones should be the ones with the most, right? -
In Topic: Maybe I'm too dumb to understand but...
01 October 2023 - 12:32 AM
It is kind of weird from a story structure standpoint, isn't it? I mean, I agree with Abyss that there are many stories told across the MBotF series and the Tiste legacy is part of that... but also that story did not exactly get much screentime/pagetime between Memories of Ice and The Crippled God, and so I do agree that it feels weird structurally to have the big finale of the Bonehunters' story, who have been a primary focus of five entire books, put right alongside the finale of the Shake story which was rather small so far and is also kind of but not exactly a continuation of the Tiste Andii stories from GotM/MoI/TtH but those weren't even the biggest focus of those books either.
I could imagine an alternate version of the MBotF telling the same stories that instead of being 10 huge books which simultaneously tell many stories within the same book is a larger number of smaller books with each book focused on just a single story. So like there's be a three-book mini-trilogy that are the Bridgeburner books, and separate from that would be a mini-series of four or five Tiste Andii books which start off overlapping with the events from the Bridgeburner books in Darujhistan and the Pannion Domin, and then continue following Rake and other Andii characters to other storylines until they end up connecting with the Shake story and the Liosan invasion is the big finale of that mini-series. And so on with a Bonehunters mini-series and a Letherii mini-series and a Barghast mini-series and a Toc the Younger duology, etc - it would be kinda like Discworld. -
In Topic: Guilty Pleasure Reads
21 September 2023 - 03:53 AM
Comments
Tsundoku
26 Jul 2021 - 13:09I have spoken.
LinearPhilosopher
24 Mar 2015 - 01:35King Lear
09 May 2014 - 13:26Gust Hubb
18 Feb 2012 - 17:04Gust Hubb
29 May 2011 - 02:44foolio
18 Aug 2010 - 19:31hmqb
09 Jul 2010 - 02:34theirs a life lesson for you in that.
MiMo
09 Feb 2010 - 09:15*stomps through the jungle, sees a jaghut charging* "Oh, look at that, what a beauty!" *grabs her cheeks and wriggles her in the camera* *gets head ripped off* lol
Obdigore
04 Feb 2010 - 22:54Path-Shaper
15 Jul 2009 - 10:17Assail
21 Apr 2009 - 03:18