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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2749 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 25, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Characters have no consistent values. Sex is post-Sexual Revolution casual but look out oh no there's the medieval patriarchy, but also characters don't actually do anything interesting when confronted with it they just kind of shrivel. The women are too open and powerful and feminist, but supposedly acknowledged to be exceptional but we don't see any other women so... He wants to create complex characters that do bad things sometimes but also have heroic qualities, but misses the mark, the sins don't have much weight and the struggles feel fake as a result. The best books that use grimdark settings present us with likeable characters that we identify with, that act according to their own internal sense of right and wrong with a consistent moral compass, then deliver a result that is so brutal and discordant that it creates psychic discomfort in the reader and makes you think.

How do you feel about Scott Bakker's work? Because I think he makes a real effort at this (he explicitly said he refused to make certain characters female because it'd under the patriarchy in the worldbuilding) and has subsequently been vastly more criticized than Abercrombie (the bleakness at best turns people off, at worst annoys them) and vastly less successful.

I did not enjoy The Prince of Nothing. Pretty much every female character in the first half of the first book gets raped and exists to be a sex slave or prostitute. I don't think all men are that shitty. And one of the men is a huge Marty Stu.

I personally think the series is worth it and better than the bleakness on its face, but this is a common reaction (the gender bleakness, not the Marty Stu, not sure which character you mean there), which is why I asked how he felt about Bakker. He's...less uneven on how modern/irenic the gender and religious politics are, but too much for many.

Maybe it gets better but I got to the part where the woman who was taken as a sex slave by the Mongol horde stand ins was rescued only to be raped by I forget who. And I felt that I was just reading the author's barely disguised fetish (though women are usually the ones who write stuff like that...)

The guy who was a monk and mastered himself and then was able to get anyone to do anything he wanted by psychological manipulation, able to learn other languages in hours of listening to someone speak it. That guy. Who then also psychologically manipulated the rape victim. It was too much.

The guy who was a monk and mastered himself and then was able to get anyone to do anything he wanted by psychological manipulation, able to learn other languages in hours of listening to someone speak it. That guy. Who then also psychologically manipulated the rape victim.

He's essentially a strong AGI in a human body. Essentially a conception of the Ubermench or the Kwisatz Haderach but laudered through a very bleak and dark philosophy about human's blindness to cognitive functions and innate biases. I wouldn't go so far as to say he's not a person but he is very close to a plot device + philosophical exploration than a real character.

The second series makes this even more clear by completely removing him as a POV character.

Edit:

I felt that I was just reading the author's barely disguised fetish

Bakker is on record for deliberately doing this to target the moral convictions of the modern reader in a way that grates. Not entirely for edge-lordism but to push the reader to consider their own moral blindspots. If anything his fetish is being a contrarian (tho apparently his politics are super normie boomercon by some recent blog posts of his).

very close to a plot device + philosophical exploration than a real character

Agreed, and that's why 2 books was enough for me. I don't think I even started the third.

Fair enough. Different strokes for different folks and all. Second Apocalypse is probably a top 5 fantasy series for me and I consider Bakker to be a great author.

It's possible I read the third book and simply don't remember, but plot summaries online aren't ringing a bell. I just know I reached a point where the only character I kinda liked/was interested to follow was Achamian and the point of the novels seemed to be shitting on him as much as possible, so I finally had enough.

Yeah Akka is my favorite character too, as evidenced by the user name. I guess I considered it more like "putting him through the ringer". I never really saw it as singling him out or as gratuitous. He lives in a very hard and unfair world, and at times feels like only sane one. Sanity in an insane world is a curse.

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