>>24100950
He has perfect recall, but he's an uneducated clod so he doesn't really know what he's seeing and is sort of mystified by mundane things or not impressed by fantastic things, just like how there are sometimes funny obscure words we don't know and leave the reader stumped for very pedestrian things like horses or forts. That's the gimmick.

>>24100953
Oh that's it? He just doesn't understand stuff sometimes? People were making it out like he was some evil amoral liar purposefully deceiving the reader.

>>24100959
Redditors think he raped that girl on the boat and lied about it to the readers. No idea why they think that but there you go.

>>24100967
Which boat? The boat that is a spaceship and he meets that woman sailor that becomes his lover for a bit?

>>24100971
The fact you don't even know which boat sex might be the rape really does hammer it in.

>>24100971
jolenta on the boat in the gardens of the house absolute. Dont buy into the unreliable narrator gimmick, theres so much more both to the book and to severian as a narrator.

>>24100950
All non-omniscient narrators are unreliable, they are going off of limited information and what information they do have is colored by their own limited perspective.

>>24100987
Doesn't he say later on that some people could consider it rape?

>>24100967
>this woman wants to have sex with me
>i want to have sex with her
>this is somehow rape

>>24101015
Welcome to feminism.

>>24101001
Severian does have a line about it in Urth where he says some have considered it rape after reading the book of the new sun but he himself doesn't believe it was. it is still left somewhat ambiguous in that way and it definitely felt to me that that line in particular was Wolfe himself responding directly to criticism he received over the supposed rape. I don't think his intention for the scene on the boat was to imply that severian raped jolenta but that is seemingly how a lot of readers interpreted it so he put that line in Urth later to try to exonerate himself/severian

>>24101001
Source?

>>24100950
Because he's constantly revising earlier parts of the story.

>>24101134
Example?

>>24100950
I think it comes down to how he's characterized as a narrator. He doesn't always narrate things the way an onmniscient narrator would, he often leaves things unclear, comes up with multiple possible interpretations, or just leaves important details scattered among the prose where they're easy to miss if you aren't paying close attention.
He never outright lies (despite Redditors constantly claiming he does but never giving examples), but he doesn't have the full story and therefore can't give it to you.

>>24100950
There's one part where he very clearly mistakes something that his first waifu did for something he did because he has her memories. This wasn't like some small thing either it was horrific ultraviolence.

Why is Silk such a cuck? He's a terrible MC compared to Severian.

Yes, he raped the girl.

He raped his sister, Phoebe.

>>24101501
He doesn't have a sister. He's called Severian because that's the name of the kid. Time fuckery changed his original name along the way of the infinite iterations.

>>24100950
he raped his sister, phoebe

>>24101015
basically this. jolenta sold her soul to talos to become a bimbo fuck doll and was even gloating about it and the power she wields on the way to the boat. redditors can't help but to immediately shut down with emotion and fail to see how many things are at play here. they fail to even understand that in this perverse and lawless society that "rape" wouldn't even be wrong even if severian did this. the wolfe reddit threads on jolenta are hilarious with half of the comments, probably bots, not even reading the book and still casting judgement on gene being misogynist.

>>24100959
the midwit reader like jg keely thinks the "unreliable narrator" means liar when it actually means what that anon said. severian has no frame of reference to many things as he's grown up in an insulated boys club of the torturers. he'll see satellite dishes and describe them as statues in the atrium of time. he'll describe office building cubicles and decomissioned rocket ships in a way that might fly over your head if you aren't paying attention.

>>24101564
Better question is why is that lone office building surviving standing millions of years after society collapsed?

>>24101623
have you read the book and even know what i'm referencing? not trying to be rude.

>>24101323
Sometimes he fucked Thecla in her cell, sometimes he did not.

>>24101775
>What Thecla remember isn't right therefore Severain is an unreliable narrator
????

>>24101504
lurk moar nigger

>>24101798
theres so many layers of uncertainty with him literally being thecla, severian and every single autarch that came before him, that its just not nonsense to call him an unreliable narrator. every single instance of him "lying" can be chalked up to this fact.

>>24101826
*just nonsense

>>24101826
Doesn't he say repeatedly "I did not know this at the time" and see >>24100997

>>24100950
It's mostly people calling out contradictions in the story and going "Severian, I thought you had a perfect memory!!". Only some of the examples give serious occasion for doubt. The rest is nitpicking. Also, the fact that you might miss the true nature of some things described because Sev doesn't know what a lightbulb is and says there were luminous flowers on the ceiling. That sort of thing. He's unreliable insofar as he might contradict himself and you'll have to jump through hoops to figure out what he's describing at times.

>>24100953
He also omits a lot of things which you might not realize upon first reading and you realize that he is very likely trying to paint a certain picture of himself. Like the fact that he cried when Thecla called him a sweet boy. The only way to arrive at this conclusion is to note how the comment seems to clearly affect him in some way because he starts off on a melancholic monologue only to mention afterwards that his friend told him that he looked tired because of his eyes. His eyes were clearly red. He was clearly crying.
>>24100953
>he has perfect recall
>I would have hidden, but Roche held me waiting, saying, "Wait, I see pikes."
Next page:
>The men had no armor, as I could see by the sickly yellow light of the lanterns; but they had pikes, as Drotte had said.

This is in the first chapter.

>>24101564
It's more that Severian may as well be lying. We likewise do not have much reference for his world other than him. There are moments where he might be clearly embellishing and there are definitely things that he is omitting, as pointed out here >>24102484
What makes JG Keely's review so embarrasing is that there are examples of these things. Keely just isn't used to reading extremely subtle stuff like Nabakov, but Wolfe is. Wolfe is like a baseball pitcher who occasionally throws a ball so fast that you miss it if you blink.

>>24102457
Severian literally says in the second book that "umm... ackshually, there is no auch thing as a super perfect memory but mine is still pretty good."
If his unreliability was merely because of ignorance, then that just makes him a completely inconsequential character and Wolfe a completely different person. Wolfe has on record said that we are all unreliable narrators and that's why he likes them. Severian is ignorant on many things, yes, but he is unreliable in more things than one, like us. He doesn't want to tell people absolutwly everything, the whole truth. He wants to present a certain impression of himself to others, just like us, in a way.

>>24102154
He does. Most people don't really notice this on their first reading. You get the feeling that the reason why Wolfe has him bring up his perfect recall is to tell the reader "pay attention". It literally took a very specific phrase for him to realize that the guy he was sailing with was the same guy he saw with Vodalus at the beginning.

>>24100950
Because the writer isn't "fully/actually" Severian, which the reader isn't aware of until later when he consumes Thecla's meat and gains her memories or something. Haven't read it in a while.

>>24102509
It is not Wolff telling you to pay attention, it is a somewhat hamfisted (on Wolff's part) bit of Severian attempting to validate his story and come across as objective, attempting to manipulate the reader. Unreliable narrator does not mean they lie to you, it means they are subject to the failings of humans and have motives and will pussyfoot around things which are difficult for them to admit and so on. When an unreliable narrator lies they are lying to themselves, reader is just caught in the crossfire. Always treat the narrator as a full fledged character, consider their motives and failings, the only time doing so will penalize you is when the author actually thinks an unreliable narrator is one which lies merely to obfuscate or uses it to obfuscate their failings as a writer.

Wolff is not great at this stuff, but he makes an honest effort and is trying and from what I managed to suffer through (really not my thing) I would say part of the reason it often ends up hamfisted is he knew that much of his audience would not know the finer points of this stuff so a certain bluntness is required.

Why is TBOTNS only popular on here? I never see it mentioned anywhere else, although I randomly met someone who had read it at church once

Who the fuck is Valeria and why does she suddenly become important enough to be his wife in Urth?

Severian is a crypto-jew

>>24102710
he's the first girl he fell in love with. bonus: she's not his grandmother

>>24102965
I wish I'd been able to read it like a standard fantasy book. Very tiring keeping track of every little detail for when he inevitably calls back to it.

>>24100953
>he's an uneducated clod
Is he though? I remember him talking extensively about how they trained and educated him. He’s literate and intimately learned in biology for his profession. I’d call him more of a naive idiot who never touched grass before getting exiled.

>>24102632
Because it’s cool as shit nigga and being Catholic ain’t hurting

>>24103001
Ye that's a fair point. He knows plenty. Just very little of life outside the guild.

>>24101323
Basically everytime he refers back to something it's different. For example his rescue of Vodalus was self-defense but becomes cold blooded murder, his relationship with Thecla was chaste but became sexual, Thecla was calm and collected but became paniced and abusive, Severian was triumphant and boastful during his first exection but became a shaking and puking mess, Thecla and Jolenta barely spoke but became lesbian lovers... and dozens of trivial but factually contradicting things.

"Severian not only remembers what's happened but he remembers how he used to remember—so he can see the difference between the way he used to remember things and the way he remembers them now." - Gene Wolfe
>https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews/wolfe46interview.htm

i believe he says similar things in his sit down interview in the early 80s you can find on youtube.

>>24102484
>drotte and roche mix up
this is a problem with someone like Gene. he's a trickster and sometimes it's hard to distinguish between intention and a mistake not caught by editors. in long sun there are a handful of things that could be mistakes by him or editors and then you have the infamous line in exodus changed by an editor. i don't think we'll ever really know if roche/drotte was human error or his intention.

>>24103707
>actually, Wolfe just messed up
I refuse to believe this.

>>24102604
>it's not
>proceeds to say that it actually is
Ok

>>24103723
It is most likely an editing error, not the confusing of the names but in cutting the scene down to just what was important and forgetting to change a name. This sort of error is very easy to do for both author and editor.
>>24103727
>still can't separate author from narrator
Even worse in this case since narrator is also character.

>>24103640
Again, this is chalked up to being /his/ frame of reference, at the time which Severain points out several times. It's not that he's intentionally being deceptive. It's just muddied by the fact he gets other people's memories, and people harp that Sev has the unreliable POV and not, say, Thecla.

>>24103730
I can do that perfectly fine. I can also recognize that Wolfe is still the person writing it. Besides, you just took something I said off-handedly and ran with it for no real reason.

>>24103730
>It is most likely an editing error
What really makes you say that? It's more likely Severian misremembering timelines.

>>24102604
Nah, you got this backwards. It is absolutely no coincidence that almost every time Sev states that he has perfect memory, something happens to contradict it.
>As I have said, I remember everything;[...]It was only when he said, I'll take THESE females to safety," that my memory closed upon his voice.
In short, Severian is right now describing how normally functioning memories work. But this all gets muddied once you realize that Severian is more than one person and timelines exist

>>24100950
1) the memories he’s absorbed from other people seem to actively fuck with his recall alongside time travel shenanigans. The literal first page of shadow has him misremember who was talking and some other things
2) he was raised with an awful education which messes up his perfect recall because he remembers things how he understood them. At one point really early on, he misunderstands what animal husbandry means and thinks another guild in the citadel marries and fucks bears and never thinks to reexamine this


Really it comes down to redditors sucking off the alzabo soup podcast despite them being retards. Seriously, they try to pass off severian ordering the execution of thecla as a legitimate theory because they’re neckbeard atheists who can’t examine a book thematically or subtextually at all and have to make weird moral judgements all the time

>>24103872
i think it lacks the normal wolfe subtlety which is why i try not to factor it in so much when thinking about the story more broadly. like, clearly editors can make mistakes; i referenced them in long sun and the big glaring one, a reveal, in exodus. if you didn't know, an editor changed a line near the end that outs Horn as being the writer; something along the lines of "then i went in" changed to "then he went in" which doesn't make sense on the page.

>>24103640
>Thecla and Jolenta barely spoke but became lesbian lovers
They never met?

>>24100987
>>24101028
I don't understand how you could interpret it as that unless you were looking for it. She was clearly "seducing" him and the fact they fucked several times and she never seemed to have a problem with him before or after that seems to make it explicit it wasn't nonconsensual.

And it all seemed like a bit of the mystique of the house absolute driving them both beyond their normal inhibitions, like they were on ecstasy.

>>24105370
sjw redditors amiright? search jolenta on the gene wolfe subreddit.

>>24105370
I don't believe it but Urth does have a line where Severian reflects on it and passingly mentions some could consider it rape. So while I don't think it is rape I do think there is something in looking into why Severian says some would consider it.
Personally I think it is because all the Talos mods altered her mind so sleeping with her might be akin to sleeping with a drunk or drugged up woman which at the time he didn't know but at the time of writing he reflects knowing that it might be.

>>24105358
They did, they interact before the play in shadow, and spend all of claw working together until jolentas death. She almost certainly got hit by the sexual glamour that jolenta has at some point

>>24105370
Yeah the only morally ambiguous part of that encounter was that sev likely beat her due to him being so angry at Mr roboto. People misunderstand his guilt over that encounter putting a wedge between him and Dorcas as him feeling guilt over rape which is weird since he literally spends a part of that section describing how he was trained to rape clients

>>24105404
likely pressure from the outside world like the old wives tale of ursula le guin popping off about it. point in short is that jolenta orchestrated the entire rendezvous and was even bloviating about the power she wields being a sexual bimbo. it could be any number of motives, one of which involves seducing severian as some sort of protective figure since talos abandoned her. you could even tie in thecla being a sadist if you want. the moral relativism of rape even being wrong in the first place in this dark and perverse world is another point to think about. Jolenta loves no one and does not want to be loved, she desires no one and wants only to be desired; which is her cautionary tale in this book.

>>24105398
People do the same for Susan with CS Lewis. Blow it out of proportion

>>24105451
I thought Thecla died before he joined the play group.

>>24105971
Fuck misread it, og commenter meant Dorcas and I read it as Dorcas

>>24105737
>point in short is that jolenta orchestrated the entire rendezvous and was even bloviating about the power she wields being a sexual bimbo
I meant something a little different. "Jolenta" is eager and willing to have sex but "Tavern Girl" is hinted as having undergone so much surgery and maybe mental/mind alteration so that "Tavern Girl" is no longer in control of her body so that when "Jolenta" pursued sex it was out of "tavern girl" control and Severian looking back feels some compassion that it might have been rape of "tavern girl" his now he can identify with another person controlling a body himself.

>>24100950
probably because of the way all the books end with a massive cliff hanger and then the next book just ignores what happened.

>>24106052
Yeah. I always read it as a Faustian bargain. You get literally unmatchable beauty that most read as supernatural but you live in a husk of a body that dies the second talos leaves you, and you’re hollowed out into the Lilith of his play.

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>DUDE HE'S LIKE A LYING RAPIST
>DUDE ITS ALL POLITICAL PROPAGANDA
>IT JUST IS OK

He's not an unreliable narrator and anyone who says so is a pseud and was filtered
Sev, himself, admits that while his memory is perfect, they may often be tainted by his personal interpretation of what happened at the time. But he is NEVER willfully deceptive towards the reader and almost never unwillfully deceptive. In the times where you can claim he was lying about something, it's more apt to say that he was lying to himself, but even then, that's a stretch. The story unfolds basically exactly the way he tells it. Jolenta consented btw.

>>24102632
Because it's fucking based
It's a cool story with a cool protag who doesn't afraid of anything
It has depth to the ideas and "philosophies" presented (if you want to call them that) and has cool and esoteric worldbuilding that invites multiple reads and interperations and discussion.
The passage where severian was justifying his work as a torturer to dorcas is one of my favorites in literature

I assumed Jolenta was mogging Dorcas to prove a point. If anything she raped Severian.

I'll ask here. What exactly was the deal with Abia and the Undines and the water giants? Was Baldanders being a giant too and going to them a coincidence or was he always with them? And is Abia connected to Erebus and his slave army in the north?

>>24106417
Jolenta should have sex with me, personally

I love first person perspective sff so much bros

>>24106428
Thematically they’re demons who need to prevent severian in some way so that the new sun cannot form. If it does they die. Each of them try to find their own way to prevent their own deaths. Baldanders got tricked by them into becoming an anti autarch/ new typhon who would never choose to bring in the new sun and would likely fight with the heiros due to his wish for a technological golden age instead of a reset. It’s the same reason they constantly fuck with sev. The ascians are their slaves and are one of their attempts to prevent any human from bringing in the new sun. Only weird part about their story is that we don’t know how they have access to the future/past like the heiros. Perhaps literal demonic influence that I missed

An important detail to keep in mind about Severian's memory and reliability is that he does not have some special ability to immediately select whatever he wants from it. There is a part in the story (I don't recall when, maybe in Claw when he's zoning out in the tavern in Saltus) when he says he has to pick a point in his memory and work his way forward or backward to access what happened. In a sense he then lives it again.

>>24106984
>Only weird part about their story is that we don’t know how they have access to the future/past like the heiros.
In Urth, Juturna has access to the corridors of time and sends Severian down them. It seems rather casual for her- all she does is point. So they seem on a par with the Hierogrammates and the green man and also eventually Severian in their ease at accessing the corridors.

I just like the stories.

>>24106391
>He's not an unreliable narrator, he just happens to be an unreliable narrator (and I'm ANGRY)
Absolutely brilliant. May I suggest an english dictionary for your next read?

>>24107507
Completely forgot about that bit in urth. That makes a lot more sense especially with how often she specifically shows up

>>24106406
>The passage where severian was justifying his work

And when he gets rid of the guild in the end. Kino.

>>24101001
If a woman regrets fucking someone the next day it is considered rape.
That's one of the many different criteria that caused that 1 in 3 college women are raped statistic to get started. Another is "Did you have ANY alcohol within 24 hours of having sex before".

>>24107685
What an unreliable post

I feel as though Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust is the closest film equivalent of TBOTNS

>>24106984
>Thematically they’re demons
Sure. But literally what are they? An actual giant snake? Aliens? Humans that modded their body like Typhon?

>>24108705
Anons say the answer is in the Long and Short Sun books. I'm almost finishing Long Sun and nothing about them yet.

>>24108705
>>24108725
You learn a little more in Long and Short, but not much. It's open to interpretation.

>>24108753
From the BotNS alone I always thought they were kaiju, that is to say gigantic monsters that had invaded earth and lived under the ground or in the water. Lovecraftian if you will. It is implied they're gigantic and monstrous so they can live forever and Baldanders is a very early stages one.

>>24108755
Well, if you read Urth, there are some interesting parallels between them and the hierogrammates. Both are large, have budding abilities, and can access the corridors of time. This has led some people to believe that hierogrammates are like angels and megatherians are akin to fallen angels. With some pushing so far as to say they are the same species.

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What was his fucking problem?

>>24108923
He just wanted to bring humanity back to its zenith and then bring them even higher (while have orgies).

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>>24108923
Thinking of Solar Cycle art and spoiler for Long and Short Sun:
I'm surprised that not a single artist has ever gotten the Whorl right. They always make the skylands into a ceiling of technology when it's clear that the land really does wrap around entirely. They also make the Whorl way too small.

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>>24108944

>>24108923
Gee typhon, why do you get TWO penises?

>>24108923
the statue's head was basically just a tourist trap right? it even has vending machines for snacks and such

>>24108923
This art is kino as fuck. I should really reread BotNS, it's been around a decade.

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>>24109036
It's from some dude called Finn Matthews on xitter I think

>>24109108
>ayy lmao let me in bro :DD
What do?

>>24109108
Real talk, who got dibs on Thecla's pussy, tits, and ass?

Do you guys think Jonas made it out ok?

>>24109590
Gene talked about it in an interview, Jonas died on the way back to his home planet.

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>>24108944
the cover of litany gets close

>>24109621
I remember Sam Hyde passively recommending Gene Wolfe passively in one of his streams. Also really cool he's into R.A. Lafferty, loved him in first year of high school even before Sam mentioned him and recommended past master in that car Hyde wars

>>24108944
Yeah I always imagined the ship was just a cilinder and the long sun is a ray of light at the very center. The shade covers half of it so that for one side it's day and the other is night, and the lands themselves spin around it. Even Silk describes the skylands have forests, lakes, and rivers.

So who's Abaia? Silk?

>>24109621
It is fucking retarded that these books happen in like three weeks.

Do you anons know of any series with similar prose?

>>24109774
Taco Bell Menu

>>24109769
less than that iirc. i think it's been a little more than a week in exodus when the trivigaunte show up. why do you not like this?

>>24109862
It's way too quickly, things don't happen so fast, people don't change at this rate. Silk goes from a fanatic to an atheist in less than a week.

>>24109913
it's all explained though. [spoilers]silk is shown the technology of how the man made gods of the 9 were simply the scanned minds of the humans living in mainframe and interacting with the whorl through mirrors. with all that, he still has his faith, it's just now with the most high, the outsider.[/spoiler]

>>24109774
Mine

>>24100950
Reliably shit

>>24109774
proust

>>24109615
Was it a written interview or a video? Do you have the source?

>severian is stupid
>is manipulative
>is lying

Why do people have such uncharitable views?

SHE WAS ASLEEP YOU SICK FUCK>>24110392

>>24109621
>>24109931
so the Outsider is God, right?

>>24110392
Calling him stupid because he was raised in a cloister is pretty obscene.

>>24110577
yes. the increate or pancreator from new sun. revisit his conversation with horn in the airship in exodus.

>>24109913
Why do people think their own poor reading comprehension is the fault of the author

>>24101564
My favorite is when he is looking at the picture of Neil Armstrong in Apollo 11 and assumes he was a knight carrying a battle standard of some kind in exotic armor.

Funny because it's totally wrong, but also completely correct.

>>24110392
Literally because of people like alzabo soup that are edgy atheists with the moral fiber of wet toilet paper. “Media literacy” doesn’t work with gene Wolfe because you actually have to engage with his writing which is why you see absolutely retarded takes like severian falsified theclas execution order and he only kept triskele to torture him more

>>24110577
Yes, silk gets a vision of a carpenter being executed by soldiers as a part of his initial awakening

>>24100953
Yeah exactly. Faulkner does that sort of thing often as well. But Faulker sucks and is boring as hell.

Latro is a good example of another Gene Wolf "unreliable narrator" who is probably a lot closer to how most people conceive of the term. Although still, not because he's being deliberately deceptive but because his noggin got rocked and now he has no long-term memory and frequently trips balls into auto hallucinations. Which might be real.

I wish Nolan was making the Latro series into a movie instead of The Odyssey. The Odyssey is turbo based but Latro fits Nolans style and conceits much better.

>>24100967
>he's an asocial monk learning to interact with people for the first time
>she's a cyborg whore
That's what's going on in the scene. It's not like he knows he did something bad, and is lying to protect his own image. If it was that, he wouldn't tell that part of the story.

Who is right about newspeak/correct thought, Oswell or Gene Wolfe?

>>24111068
gene takes it to it's conclusion. ascians can't even understand their own children due to their propaganda conditioning.

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>>24108313
Agreed. The setting seems very close to what I picture reading the books.

Interestingly, the legendary author/artist of Vampire Hunter D, Yoshitaka Amano also illustrated the covers for the original Japanese release of BOTNS. I'm sure that the books influenced the setting of that series and Final Fantasy, Angel's Egg, etc etc. Apparently Wolfe is somewhat popular in Japan

>>24111171
He disagreed though, he said humans can use anything to express themselves, they'll invent the language if it needs be.

>>24100950
>Open a thread
>It doesn't provide context
Kill yourself, do you think we all know who the fuck that thing is ?

>>24111647
lurk more

Is The Wizard Knight good?

>>24100959
No he literally omits things at times, such as his sexual relationship with Thecla

>>24102632
It's a great read

>>24103999
>and thinks another guild in the citadel marries and fucks bears
Well... they might

>>24112045
Yes, very
Lesser in scope for better and worse, but still nearly as dense as the new sun
I got really filtered by the wizard and need to reread it

>>24110343
Not him but that is an old Simpsons joke.

These retards would call Moby Dick an unreliable narrator if they first read it today. They'd start with some dumb sentence like how Ishmael calls whales a type of fish then say aktchually we know science says whales are mammals so now we know he isn't telling he truth and the whale expert he claims. Then they'd huff their farts and echo chamber to increasingly dumb claims eventually reaching something like He says Call me Ismael not that his name is Ishmael. This is because he doesn't want us to know his real name and call him by an alias. But why is he hiding his identify? It is because people are pursuing him he hides his identity and in the story Moby Dick is being pursued and Ishmael isn't the only survivor Moby Dick survives this we can conclude Moby Dick is the narrator.

>>24111515
I didn't know that. No wonder I had that thought

>>24112172
kek

Basically, he's autistic.

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>TFW no BOTLS JRPG

>>24113828
Hyacinth has dark hair

I had in the Long Sun that by the end everybody is either Silk or a seductive woman. I hate what happened to Marble and how the original character was erased.

>>24114536
Yeah, and Potto has long hair and Silk has blue eyes.

>>24100953
Not the fact that, as King, he's got the memories and insight of thousands of other Kings that drank the Alcebo drip?

>>24109112
Masturbate profusely. What is little Alzebo gon do?!

>>24102484
What would be the point of the Drotte/Roche switch? I can understand why an error could happen, but not why these characters would be purposefully switched around.

So is it explained what/why his magic powers are? Like is it real magic, or is it some weird technology thing going on behind the scenes and I just missed the hints to it?

>>24114754
He genuinely has divine powers from his Sun.

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>tfw no siren gf

Spoiler because its a passage from Short Sun:
Let me say this. Once when I was swimming underwater in imitation of her, I
saw her swimming toward me, and she was swift and graceful beyond all
telling. There are no words for that, as there are none for her beauty. She
caught my hand, and we broke the surface, up from the divine radiance of the
sea into the blinding glare of the Short Sun, and the droplets on her eyelashes
were diamonds.
You that read of all this in a year that I will never see will think me
wretched, perhaps—certainly I was wretched enough fighting the inhumi and
their slaves on Green, fighting the settlers, and before the end even fighting my
own son.
Or possibly you may envy me this big white house that we in Gaon are
pleased to call a palace, my gems and gold and racks of arms, and my dozen-
odd wives.
But know this: The best and happiest of my hours you know nothing about.
I have seen days like gold.

>>24114824
It reads like he's legitimately seething, makes me doubt these "best and happiest hours" of his life actually exist.

>>24114754
**as a servant of the increate, severian is given time powers from his role as the conciliator. He basically is a stronger version of one of inires mirrors which is why he can accidentally throw robobros being into the soldiers corpse. It also lets him make eidolons which probably means he’s accidentally dying an leaving corpses all over the place before his future self drops another eidolon right after the spot where he dies**

>>24114843
He has a lot of reasons to be unhappy.

>>24114844
Severian never makes an eidolon. He genuinely is able to revive himself and resurrect the dead. This is directly talked about in the end of Urth when Barbatus, Ossipago, and Famulimus make an eidolon of him after he's been killed because his Sun is momentarily too far away to give him powers and as his Sun approaches is able to witness his own corpse revive.

Any theories about what 1st Severian did?

>>24114824
on blue's water's is a fucking masterpiece. many people consider botns his best work but short sun is his magnum opus in my opinion.

>>24100950
I don't know what people mean by unreliable narrator anymore. Severian is just recalling the story as he remembers it (perfectly), he's not trying to deceive the reader.

>>24100967
I read through all of BotNS before looking more into the book to avoid any spoiling, kept hearing about a rape scene and had no fucking idea what people were talking about. How the fuck could that scene be interpreted as rape?

>>24100953
>he's an uneducated clod
Extremely wrong, he even sort of mocks Gurloes for not knowing perfectly ordinary words (such as syrinx, urticate and bordereau). As noted, he's just unfamiliar with life outside the Guild when first exiled; e.g. all his relations to women before Dorcas have been with prostitutes.

>>24103640
A number of these are about him justifying himself when he has to describe an event in detail, then accidentally telling the right version later in referring back to it, or vice versa. (The clearest example of the reverse is probably when he executed the woman who has been framed; he later refers to her as guilty, almost certainly because he's deeply unsettled by having knowingly executed an innocent woman.)

>>24105737
>Jolenta loves no one and does not want to be loved, she desires no one and wants only to be desired; which is her cautionary tale in this book.
Severian thinks she both loves and desires Dr. Talos (who, of course, is the only person besides Baldanders who is totally immune to her charms and uninterested). Admittedly because he's the means whereby she becomes beautiful and her happiness and gratitude become love, but still.

>>24106428
Erebus, Abaia and the others are the equivalent of biblical Satan, an accuser created by God to test man. It's not a coincidence that they're sea monsters, like Behemoth and Leviathan, the beasts God exemplifies to Job as being wholly beyond the control of mankind. They may be created by the Hierogrammates as a necessary part of keeping the loop intact, or they may be extraterrestrial beings imported due to the wars in Earth's past, or both. (Similarly it's implied that the decay of the Sun is itself a consequence of war in the previous high-tech spacefaring era, with either aliens or an Earth faction dropping a tiny black hole into it; the New Sun connected/identical to Severian is a white-fountain singularity, the proposed inverse of a black hole, which counteracts it, refueling the Sun)

>>24108923
Don't like that this artist has drawn the Typhon head as the clearly original/main one with the powerless head attached off to the side. It should obviously be the other way around, since Typhon has stolen that poor faggot's body by having his own head attached to it.

>>24115069
That woman was definitely guilty of murder, but she was convicted for bullshit reasons. He was conflicted at the time, but later reassess and realises this.

>>24114969
If you completely ignore the context, it looks like Severian has sex with an intoxicated/sleeping woman. That is my best guess.

>>24115082
I don't read it that way, I think the implication is that as he matures morally he becomes deeply distraught by his guilt in this which conflicts directly with the Torturers' code that has been drilled into him from childhood that they don't judge, just carry out the orders of their masters and this all ties into his abolition of the Guild when he attains the throne.

>>24115091
Actually I should add to this for clarity: he never seems to question the social importance or validity of the Guild (c.f. his justification to Dorcas), what he finally comes to realize is that it's an unacceptable moral mutilation *of the Torturers themselves* and that's why he shuts it down.

>>24114864
It’s debatable what can actually be attributed to him, versus being attributed to the heiros, megatherians etc… as far as I can tell, he went to war with baldanders, and while he couldn’t become the conciliator, he drew the attention of the heiros enough that it was worth it to reset the timeline

>>24101499
You are a faggot. What would you know?

>>24101499
If anything he was raped by Theccla. But he liked it.

Why does the Alzabo Soup guys hate Severian?

>>24115708
Who?

>>24115708
They’re media literacy retards who can’t engage with the text lmao.

>>24115718
A podcast with hot takes like severian tortured triskele and he falsified an execution order for thecla

>>24115730
i've never understood this thecla thing feels that they hate Severian and just try to push that shit every occasion

>>24115730
>>24115898
Unreliable podcasters

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>>24115708
>>24115730
Have they shit talked my boy Silk?, They better not.

And what of the dead? I own that I thought of myself, at times, almost
as dead. Are they not locked below ground in chambers smaller than mine
was, in their millions of millions? There is no category of human activity
in which the dead do not outnumber the living many times over. Most
beautiful children are dead. Most soldiers, most cowards. The fairest
women and the most learned men—all are dead. Their bodies repose in
caskets, in sarcophagi, beneath arches of rude stone, everywhere under
the earth. Their spirits haunt our minds, ears pressed to the bones of our
foreheads. Who can say how intently they listen as we speak, or for what
word?

>>24115948
I fucking hate Silk. Bug fucking faggot, everybody wants to defeat the robots and he wants to surrender. Plus, he's a cuck.

>>24114843
I'm sorry you don't take this at face value, I think it's beautiful and you're missing something when you look for an obscured Wolfeian something behind every sentence.
That's what happens when we reread these books over and over again, I guess.

>>24100950
Him being an unreliable narrator is just a theory. Most of the popular interpretations of these books are really just unfounded theories.

Gene Wolfe is basically catnip designed to capture schizos who like to read too much into things, and the theories that the schizos come up with are taken as gospel.

>in Urth, Severian is literally Jesus and still manages to get cucked
Why is women's betrayal such a prevalent theme in Wolfe's works?

>>24117593
sky is blue, water is wet, women have secrets. gunnie's betrayal is understandable and also necessary for that final bit of empathy sev needs, i think is the point of it.

>>24117593
I mean, one of women readers' most common complaints about BotNS is Severian's irresistibility to women which is due to him embodying the generative force of the New Sun. Even the Hierogrammates want to fuck Severian. The flipside of this is that the attraction doesn't need to be sincere or connect to any loyalty; Agia is another example of the same principle. Quite simply, his supernatural appeal makes him *more* prone to getting cucked, not less.

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>>24117593
>Why is women's betrayal such a prevalent theme in Wolfe's works?
Because it's the prevalent theme in christianity

>>24117925
>however, in an earlier editorial in Plant Manager magazine, (Wolfe) revealed the startling source of his high output of finished works. "At the moment of climax, I simply fix my thumb over the meatus, thus reserving my fluids and their generative powers for my own use. I recall once going out to mow the lawn, sitting down at my desk to dash off 20,000 words for F&SF, and sending my astral body to spy on an old college girlfriend. When I glanced up at the clock, I found that only 30 minutes had elapsed."
LMFAO at all these midwits thinking Wolfe was any sort of Christian and BOTNS is just a big Chick pamphlet

>>24117723
>irresistibility to women
That makes sense though. He looks like an exultant, is fairly handsome, and is a torturer. In the words of GRRM's own female readers "Dangerous IS sexy." Despite his attractiveness no woman really ever falls in love with him. Thecla was bored, Dorcas eventually leaves him, Agia loved her brother, Jolenta the doctor and herself, Cyriaca was admitted a slut, Gunnie betrayed him. Maybe only Valeria loved him and that's why he left her out of his tale.

>>24118101
I think Dorcas pretty inarguably loves him, note how she's hurt by his callousness at times (e.g. when he fucks Jolenta in the nenuphar boat) for example. She leaves him only after realizing that he had accidentally revived her from the dead which traumatizes the everliving fuck out of her. Because he's the instrument of the trauma, albeit unwittingly, he becomes horrible to her which is a terrible irony parallel to how he later rejuvenates Urth with the consequence of destroying everything and everyone he cared about, with the exception of Eata apparently.

>>24118235
>he had accidentally revived her from the dead
I was a little confused by this explanation desu. How did she somehow manage to end up back on land and help Severian out of the water? Especially since she presumably would have been lower in the water than him and had lead weights in her. Tbh, I am confused how did she get out at all with said lead weights in her?

>>24118598
It's not *that* much lead, plus the vigor of the Claw restores her to perfect health presumably. It's not even cleaer that they weighed her down with enough lead to really sink her in the first place since her corpse was close to the surface and her husband the Boatman has been searching for it all these years. Anyway, not any weirder than the power of the Claw undoing the embalmment of the lake's waters.

>>24108923
Typhon was the oddest part of the story to me. He felt like some kind of outside context problem with no foreshadowing or explanation. That he used a Latin term (imperator) instead of the Greek terms that had been used before felt like a clue... but I have no idea to what.
Currently reading Urth.

>>24111025
>But Faulker sucks and is boring as hell.
Back to hell with you, cornfather.

>>24118701
Faulkner was unironically a CIA plant. They wanted to prevent Communist-affiliated writers from becoming ascendant in US culture and promoted him as the Great American Writer because he wasn't that.

>>24118692
he was the last monarch, aggressively pioneering the universe, before the commonwealth changed to the autarchy model. he represents what vodalus wants to go back to; an age where mankind explored. there is more about him in long/short sun but i can understand why he sticks out a little in new sun. his role is important though as a biblical allegory.

>>24118692
Typhon functions as Satan tempting Jesus in the New Testament. Remember how Satan takes Christ up to a high place and offers to make him lord over these kingdoms that extend below him?

>>24118685
I hoenslty thought he had hallucinationed Typhon.

>>24108923
Did he have two dicks in the story?

>>24119243
One in New Sun. Spoiler for Long Sun: Silk encounters a painting of Typhon/Pas with two penises, but the painting is basically the in-world equivalent of smut. That is what the artist is likely referencing.

I read it a while ago but there was one moment I truly couldn't comprehend the significance of. It was when Severian and the group did some weird ritual to get a vision of the past, but then they someone started interacting with the vision and attacking some dude doing a ceremony. I went over it a few times but I couldn't come to any conclusions so just kept reading.

>>24119549
What happens is that Severian begins to harmonize with Apu-Punchau and becomes confused from seeing the scene from both perspectives at once, his and Apu-Punchau's. This implies that Severian IS Apu-Punchau, or will become him, in the distant past, at some point in the future. This would be disturbing to say the least, only Severian doesn't fully grasp the situation or its implications at the time. IIRC the witches do appear to get it, but I honestly don't remember their part in it very well. The younger of the two witche sis also the one some people theorize is Severian's sister or female equivalent, due to some stuff Severian says early in Shadow about where his orphan sister would have ended up if he'd had one.