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Number Ten Cocks posted:I bow before the collective horror of SA before too much reality, but I did predict something like the whale mothers role for female dunyain because it seemed the logical outgrowth of their philosophy applied to our current reality. It's faster to breed your super race if you divide roles like that, I just wasn't sure Bakker would have the balls to do it. Kudos for that, even if the physical sexual dimorphism went into WTF LOL territory. If you predicted this wet dream of perversity, you are one sick motherfucker. I was incredibly disappointed by Bakker, my respect for his knowledge went down by like 75% by this one plot point alone. I mean, he is obviously showing the Dunyain as flawed and ultimatively stupid shitheads, so I didn't lose all respect, but that klunker of pseudo-science was hard to swallow. I rolled my eyes so hard I got a headache and had to stop reading for the rest of the day.
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Jan 21, 2017 00:02
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Boing posted:As for the 'men are objectively better than women' thing - Bakker clearly doesn't think this. The metaphysics of Earwa is basically "what if all that proscriptive bullshit in the Bible was real" and seeing the kind of hosed up world it produces. If you do certain things you get sent straight to hell and, welp, that sucks for you and it's not fair, but that's the way the world works. Women should shut up and know their place because only men have pure souls. Like us, the people of Earwa followed the scriptures and believed these things for a while, but gradually began to think of those concepts as unfair - unlike us, that poo poo is all real and men really are better and you can go to hell for being a slut. Which is a chilling existence. It's also ultimately self-defeating and doomed, since the people in Earwa are basically trapped between being exterminated by the consult (or worse) and being send to hell for effectively resisting.
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Jan 21, 2017 00:05
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What happens if you decide to keep your women pregnant all the time so you can toss out the babies you don't want: your eugenics program doesn't go any faster and you lose half your effective labor and half your candidates for intellectual greatness. Eugenics is difficult because of generation times and limited gene pools - producing more babies at a given stage doesn't do you very much good, because progress happens by selecting for the traits you want and breeding towards them, and you can't speed up the process of sexual maturity. You can (as in many premodern societies) have women always pregnant to compensate for (in this case artificially) high infant mortality. But how in the world would that lead to axolotl tanks? Pregnant women are surprisingly active, and most importantly, they model lessons for human infants - who, thanks to gene/culture coevolution; are wired to mimic the competent and confident. Why rip them from their mothers and raise them separately? You're wasting half your population'a labor. Even a constantly pregnant female population can and should be educated to the same standard as the males, because this is net better for your breeding program! They can do useful things! And how the gently caress do you identify the smart women to breed if they're all caged in a rape room? Even in an underground maze there's a ton of work to be done. Crops to raise, maintenance, cleaning, food and textile preparatiom, teaching, calculation - pregnant women can do all this poo poo without slowing down their birth rate. It makes no sense in the real world. It's purely done for artistic effect. If Bakker really wanted to be clever he'd realize that the Dunyain should enforce selective infanticide! Keep only the cream of your men, but keep all the women. Maintain a 1:10 gender ratio, evolve into an ant colony. Bakker couldn't write that, though.
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Jan 21, 2017 00:11
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I gave Bakker about four to five books long the benefit of the doubt, but I'm now fully convinced he is only writing like this for pure shockvalue. Basically the fantasy equivalent of slasher movies. Edit: This means after a certain point thinking about this is just wasting time. It's like wondering why there are no Trolls in Troll II.
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Jan 21, 2017 00:21
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General Battuta posted:It's not faster at all. Let me be clear: the reason it works for the Dunyain is because Bakker wanted it to work. That's it. Im not talking about physical breeding into whale mothers. I'm talking about generational size and the undesirability of grating right that reduce birth rates. The advanced sexual dimorphism is absurd, I agree with that. You'd pick a cutoff age for assessment, keep the smartest and strongest and keep them constantly pregnant, kill the rest. Same for the men, but they spend their time in training and thought not hindered by pregnancy or infant rearing. You're better off with 15 kids per generation and women doing no meaningful training than 3 kids per generation and something closer to equality. Two 140 IQ parents need to have A KOT of kids to get a yield of 130+ and start moving that mean you're regressing to. General Battuta posted:But first let's take a step back here: you aren't talking about a eugenics program. You said that the objective moral inferiority and subjugation of women was justified in the real world due to the (again) objective superiority of men. Do you stand by that? I didn't say that.
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Jan 21, 2017 00:22
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Number Ten Cocks posted:Im not talking about physical breeding into whale mothers. I'm talking about generational size and the undesirability of grating right that reduce birth rates. The advanced sexual dimorphism is absurd, I agree with that. You'd pick a cutoff age for assessment, keep the smartest and strongest and keep them constantly pregnant, kill the rest. Same for the men, but they spend their time in training and thought not hindered by pregnancy or infant rearing. You're better off with 15 kids per generation and women doing no meaningful training than 3 kids per generation and something closer to equality. Two 140 IQ parents need to have A KOT of kids to get a yield of 130+ and start moving that mean you're regressing to. This is impossible, won't work and if you find a Dr. Mengele to implement this it will end like all Nazi science: An absolute disaster.
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Jan 21, 2017 00:25
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Number Ten Cocks posted:Im not talking about physical breeding into whale mothers. I'm talking about generational size and the undesirability of grating right that reduce birth rates. The advanced sexual dimorphism is absurd, I agree with that. You'd pick a cutoff age for assessment, keep the smartest and strongest and keep them constantly pregnant, kill the rest. Same for the men, but they spend their time in training and thought not hindered by pregnancy or infant rearing. You're better off with 15 kids per generation and women doing no meaningful training than 3 kids per generation and something closer to equality. Two 140 IQ parents need to have A KOT of kids to get a yield of 130+ and start moving that mean you're regressing to. I'm guessing you don't have any math to back this up: you're just guessing? If you're right, why hasn't natural selection pushed humans this way over our millions of years of culture-gene coevolution? Spoiler: because you're wrong. Extra kids per generation will not improve heterozygosity and will not make generation times any faster. You did in fact say the moral inferiority of Earwan women was due to the objective superiority of men in the real world. This is pretty far off right. If you want a preview of where your ideas are headed, check out some purebred dogs!
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Jan 21, 2017 00:45
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I assumed the Whale Mothers were just Bakker aping the axlotl tanks the Tleilaxu use. An actual look at relations between Dunyain would have been vastly more interesting.
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Jan 21, 2017 01:10
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Libluini posted:I gave Bakker about four to five books long the benefit of the doubt, but I'm now fully convinced he is only writing like this for pure shockvalue. Basically the fantasy equivalent of slasher movies. There are no trolls in troll 2 because someone decided it would sell better as a sequel after it was already made
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Jan 21, 2017 01:27
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Whale mothers are termite queens.
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Jan 21, 2017 03:03
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Can someone explain the whale mothers in detail because they sound absolutely hilarious and I'm not reading any more of these books
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Jan 21, 2017 16:25
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Let's be honest. They exist in Bakkerverse because they were in Dune. Edit: Beaten. genericnick fucked around with this message at 16:41 on Jan 21, 2017 |
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Jan 21, 2017 16:37
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Lunchmeat Larry posted:Can someone explain the whale mothers in detail because they sound absolutely hilarious and I'm not reading any more of these books The Dunyain women are restrained in beds and kept constantly pregnant and are sort of mutated to have giant torsos and stunted limbs. It's meant to be a visceral look at just how hosed up the Dunyain are, but it's not a very well done scene and is much less shocking than Esmenet's spider baby It also presents two options: A)Kelhus is a virgin with no idea about sex or even sexual dimorphism, or b)Kellhus shagged a whale mother. Either way, his seduction of Serwe and Esme becomes hilarious in retrospect. Strom Cuzewon fucked around with this message at 16:57 on Jan 21, 2017 |
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Jan 21, 2017 16:54
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Kelhus had a Dunyain son so that kind of narrows it down.
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Jan 21, 2017 17:10
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There's a flashback to his training in the original three where he compares a glacier to a beautiful woman so I guess he likes some whale mothers more than others?
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Jan 21, 2017 17:38
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General Battuta posted:There's a flashback to his training in the original three where he compares a glacier to a beautiful woman so I guess he likes some whale mothers more than others? I thought it was Erikson that had a thing for big-boned women? Also, do we know how much Bakker had planned from the start and how much he made up as he wrote? The second series contain a lot more of "this sounds cool, let's try it" where for example The Judging Eye is basically Bakkers version of LOTR Moria.
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Jan 21, 2017 18:11
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Kuiperdolin posted:Kelhus had a Dunyain son so that kind of narrows it down. Oh I completely forgot that the Survivor was his kid. Guess that makes him even more super special.
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Jan 21, 2017 19:02
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Weird question, but, are all the Atrocity Tales prequels from before Darkness That Comes Before?
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Jan 22, 2017 16:48
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Dienes posted:Weird question, but, are all the Atrocity Tales prequels from before Darkness That Comes Before? They seem to both take place in the distant past before the First Apocalypse, so they are technically prequels, although not directly so.
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Jan 22, 2017 16:53
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Boing posted:They seem to both take place in the distant past before the First Apocalypse, so they are technically prequels, although not directly so. The one told from the Non Man stream of consciousness POV has Conphus(yay!) make an appearance in it, so that one could be considered more of a direct prequel I guess, although it is probably one of the weirdest prequels ever
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Jan 22, 2017 23:09
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Dienes posted:Weird question, but, are all the Atrocity Tales prequels from before Darkness That Comes Before? Are these out already?
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Jan 23, 2017 03:50
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Libluini posted:I gave Bakker about four to five books long the benefit of the doubt, but I'm now fully convinced he is only writing like this for pure shockvalue. Basically the fantasy equivalent of slasher movies. I've been interpreting it as the overwrought prose of HP Lovecraft narrating a tentacle rape anime for a while now so whatever, let's go all in on the black demon seed.
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Jan 23, 2017 21:18
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various cheeses posted:Are these out already? As far as I know, there's just the two short stories he has up on his website and the one that was published in Grimdark Magazine.
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Jan 23, 2017 21:28
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Boing posted:I suspect that what Bakker is trying to hammer home is that the Dunyain simply aren't human anymore. They can barely hybridise with regular humans, they've developed some much greater sexual dimorphism, they're wired in completely different ways. The unrealistic part of that is that it's only been 2000 years of breeding and actual speciation probably takes much longer (without genetic engineering or some Earwean Lamarck crap). We've bred some pretty weird fuckin dogs over the course of human civilisation but I think they're still one species, even if the logistics of a chihuahua loving a great dane are prohibitive. And then there's the no god, which just wants an afterllife for itself!
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Jan 23, 2017 22:56
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P-Mack posted:I've been interpreting it as the overwrought prose of HP Lovecraft narrating a tentacle rape anime for a while now so whatever, let's go all in on the black demon seed. Yeah, this may be the healthier approach. I find it annoying because Bakker can be surprisingly interesting with his story elements. The Indara-Kisaurim, Maithanet, the Nonmen, the Mandate, the Chorae. Hell, his curmudgeony gently caress-everything dragon was the coolest I've seen in ages. I often feel there is a much better, more compelling story going on at the margin of all the grimdark poo poo, never catching more than a second worth of spotlight. Worse, even his dark stuff is getting lazy. The wincest and cannibalism of WLH already felt trite, and now this just takes me right out of the narrative just as I was getting back into things. I really think it was a hastily added thing, too: there is no mention or hint of it anywhere before. Kellhus is stupefied by blades of grass after first leaving his fastness, but not by regular, non-broodmare women. His daughters are not half-broodmare, or even close. I wonder if George R. Martin is going to have an "Alan Moore post-Watchmen" moment at some point and look back at all the cesspool of edgy misery he unleashed by adding some grapgic rapes and skinning to fantasy. In Bakker's defense, though, he is not the equivalent of Rob Liefeld yet.
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Jan 24, 2017 00:52
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Sephyr posted:Kellhus is stupefied by blades of grass after first leaving his fastness, but not by regular, non-broodmare women. His daughters are not half-broodmare, or even close. There was the question of why a lot of his kids were monsters.
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Jan 24, 2017 01:01
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genericnick posted:There was the question of why a lot of his kids were monsters. Which makes the whale mothers doubly unnecessary - we've already established the hosed up genetics of the Dunyain. The whale mothers aren't even unusual enough to be worth the shock factor, it's just generic body horror.
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Jan 24, 2017 01:33
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genericnick posted:There was the question of why a lot of his kids were monsters. Which this only adds to, and does not explain. His sons and daughters with Esment all were hosed in the mind to variable degrees, not aberrations. Those with concubines were freaky, but not in an indicative way. They implied quite clearly that he and his order were inbreding and apart for so long they were poor matches for most regular humans, and that Esmenet was important because her 'intellect' made her a viable mother. None of that really pointed to "Oh, the females are, like, an entirely different phenotype now!" I'm betting Bakker just felt the need to stomp on the point of their inhumanity some more and went "Well, we already know they cultivate sociopathy, capture humans as guinea pigs to teach neuropuncture and facial analysis to their young, are emotionally dead and able to take any action without ever feeling guilt or shame...I'm running out of options here. Rape gorelust? Already did that with the Inchoroi. Let's head back to the wellspirng...huh. I'll be damned, Axolotl tanks! That's the ticket!"
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Jan 24, 2017 01:46
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Au contraire, Bakker probably had this planned since the start of the second trilogy! (I don't think he figured it out in the first, because there are no hints and Kellhus' reactions to women don't make sense for a guy who has only banged sessile wombsacks.) Part of Bakker's thesis is that posthumanism and accelerating human control over the mind and body will make the future more 'pornographic' — he sees men imposing their desires on womens' bodies and minds (he does not see women using any of this expanded somatic access for self-liberation, because he thinks that's naive, much like the idea of a prostitute becoming a successful empress, or women fighting on the front lines even in highly patriarchal cultures, or much else that, weirdly enough, actually happened on Earth!) So the whale mothers are part of his effort to say that the logical endpoint of transhumanist Dunyain thought is also deeply misogynistic. In much the same way that the cybernetic and Gigeresque inchoroi are, to him, inevitably misogynistic: they're phallic and they love to rape stuff, a task that, to Bakker, can't be achieved by space vaginas. There are no female inchoroi (or, if there are, they're not marked: all inchoroi we see have clamshell heads and giant space penises). There are no female Dunyain. There can't be, because Bakker thinks men will reduce women to sex objects. There are no female nonmen because the inchoroi struck at their reproductive ability and they all died of womb plague. You see the same thing in Neuropath (which I loving despise): the neuropaths are transhumans modified to be amoral and pragmatic. What does the male neuropath do? He runs the whole book's plot with a complex scheme of kidnappings designed to impart a lesson about the phenomenology of the mind. What does the female neuropath do? She seduces the protagonist, manipulates him with sex, attempts to interrogate the male neuropath by loving him, becomes overwhelmed by how awesome it is to have uninhibited sex, crashes, and dies. Again, a theme in Bakker's work: women are overwhelmed by lust, men resist and analyze it. Esmenet mourns that she's always reduced to the whore, and, unfortunately, it's because that's Bakker's plan for her: even when she's Empress of the Three Seas she can only think about her kids and fumble her way back into a brothel. Bakker's somewhat unfortunate illustrative example was "in some cultures, women are circumcised to control their sexuality. Now, in the west, women volunteer to get labiaplasty to make their genitals more appealing! Culture is driving women to obey men's pornographic desires!" Dude, uh, must have missed the bit where the plastic surgeon leaves you your clitoris. Like I mentioned above, dude should have thought about eusocial insects while figuring out the Dunyain. Kellhus could have been one of only a few breeding males in a population of almost wholly women — sensible if you're gonna strongly select for traits each generation, since for purposes of grasping the absolute a male mind is just as good as a female mind, but you're limited by uteruses more than you are by sperm. You want to keep only the cream of the male crop. Once he's done his duty, Kellhus is disposable and could be sent off to find Dad without much risk to the breeding plan. This post makes me feel gross
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Jan 24, 2017 08:11
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Dunyain should have huge belly buttons.
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Jan 24, 2017 14:17
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Sephyr posted:Yeah, this may be the healthier approach. I find it annoying because Bakker can be surprisingly interesting with his story elements. The Indara-Kisaurim, Maithanet, the Nonmen, the Mandate, the Chorae. Hell, his curmudgeony gently caress-everything dragon was the coolest I've seen in ages. I often feel there is a much better, more compelling story going on at the margin of all the grimdark poo poo, never catching more than a second worth of spotlight. If you want more curmudgeony gently caress-everything dragons, read Grendel by John Gardner Love that dragon that talks like the kind of 50 something philosophy professor who has tenure and no longer has to respect anyone's feelings
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Jan 24, 2017 18:34
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I'll keep that in mind, thanks! I'm a bit burned out on fantasy after TGO, to be honest. Now this has been the Slog of Slogs. Gonna go work out and listen to ADB's 'Betrayer' audiobook to destress with some grimdark that embraces its silliness.
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Jan 25, 2017 02:33
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This is an excellent post. I struggle to recommend this series to many, because frankly Bakkers overarching philosophy of misogyny is tiresome at the least and outright offensively juvenile to most. There were so many interesting ways he could have explored the nature of humanity through a dark and gritty sci-fi-fantasy world, but after 6 books it's become so ridiculous that it's honestly lost all shock value and entered into tedium. Which is disappointing, because his worldbuilding is still bar none and descriptions of places and events such as the "Larder of Men" or the bowels of Ishterebinth bestow a much richer sense of eldritch horror than his endless blabbering about throbbing cocks and body horror.
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Jan 25, 2017 02:39
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lol at acting like a "overarching theme of misogyny" is the two series' exclusive prism through which it explores humanity's shittiness, or that a single horror element in a scene that lasts only a few pages invalidates everything else in the novels, and the books that were once a great groundbreaking series have actually sucked all along. Reminds me of the PSP meme when dudes lose for the first time.
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Jan 25, 2017 07:11
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Rime posted:This is an excellent post. I struggle to recommend this series to many, because frankly Bakkers overarching philosophy of misogyny is tiresome at the least and outright offensively juvenile to most. There were so many interesting ways he could have explored the nature of humanity through a dark and gritty sci-fi-fantasy world, but after 6 books it's become so ridiculous that it's honestly lost all shock value and entered into tedium. I too am upset that a fantasy series doesn't reflect real life.
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Jan 25, 2017 08:45
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Sephyr posted:Which this only adds to, and does not explain. His sons and daughters with Esment all were hosed in the mind to variable degrees, not aberrations. Those with concubines were freaky, but not in an indicative way. They implied quite clearly that he and his order were inbreding and apart for so long they were poor matches for most regular humans, and that Esmenet was important because her 'intellect' made her a viable mother. There was Esmenet reminiscing about her kids with "And then came the nameless one, with eight limbs and no eyes. The physician priests had drowned it, according to Nansur tradition, in unwatered wine" I was cool with vagina-heads, but that bit made me wince.
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Jan 25, 2017 11:44
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Strom Cuzewon posted:There was Esmenet reminiscing about her kids with "And then came the nameless one, with eight limbs and no eyes. The physician priests had drowned it, according to Nansur tradition, in unwatered wine"
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Jan 25, 2017 11:54
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Lunchmeat Larry posted:I can imagine it did. after all, if they had that tradition these days, your mum would never have survived childhood Your mum's so ugly she's the reason Cishaurim gouge out their eyes.
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Jan 25, 2017 13:29
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Strom Cuzewon posted:Your mum's so ugly she's the reason Cishaurim gouge out their eyes.
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Jan 25, 2017 13:48
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Your mom's so dumb, she studied water magic when she had a dry spell.
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Jan 25, 2017 15:06
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