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Great video. I came back and watched it for a second time when I started my re-read of The Black Company. I noticed something else about the numbers passage Erikson mentioned on the first page. Spoilers for the first novel below: . . . . . . "For nine evenings running, ten black vultures circled the Bastion. Then one evicted the eagle which lived atop the Paper Tower." This has to be a reference to the ten who were taken. Then the one vulture mentioned evicting the eagle from the tower is Soulcatcher showing up to depose the Syndic. So was that one of the portents that came true? Or one that was seen in hindsight.

Kettles death really really rattled me, it was the most brutal thing in this book😢😢😢

This book is such a harrowing tale and to have laseen be the voice of reason made me feel so conflicted! And the mines were a very depressing place

I will be reading in publication order I am on Book 2 .

I gotta start wearing a tux

Damn, and all this time I thought the point of the chapter was how sexy Tattersail looked being extra thicc in her dress

Not a gender swap (as far as I'm aware) but just another Tilda Swinton male role that I didn't even realise was her until reading reviews and it GAGGED ME, she is seriously talented: In Luca Guadagnino's 2018 remake of Suspiria, she plays multiple roles and one of them is this mysterious old man which she underwent an entire prosthetic/makeup change for when she filmed his scenes and they were also mysterious about it behind the scenes by having a fake "actor" made up for the role and I believe she even walked around in that guise in public lol. She is dedicated and I respect it!

For WhiskeyJack's defense at 24:00ish, There is a revealing line where WhiskeyJack bites his cheek and spits blood onto the cobbles saying 'see that aint so bad' when contemplating his duty to blow up Darujistan at the end. makes it so clear that from the beginning at Pale when Quick Ben says he has to heal him again that much like Lorn, he's been giving himself up to duty and doing what he can to hold it together. In offense to WhiskeyJack he was still gonna do it despite his disgust.

Thank you for blowing my fucking mind

Fascinating discussion :-) Your comment about mobile phones being pulled out and shown to someone…when it was only 1973, less than 50 years ago, such a short time for an immense change in peoples lives. There’s one thing though you both talked about and that’s the assumption that we live in an objective reality when in fact, although we just assume that, we actually live in a relative reality. The twin cameras in our face send electrical signals to our brain and our brain constructs the picture that we ‘see’. There was a series of talks on the BBC Home Service ( yes it was that long ago:-)) about strange unexplainable experiences people had had. I remember one told by a Consultant Surgeon, I think at Manchester Hospital, who customarily, when the weather was fine, took his luncheon sandwiches to eat in a local park. One day he was sitting there, on a bench, when he got the feeling that he was being watched: he turned round and was shocked to see a small green figure sitting on the grassy hill behind him watching him. Lost for words the surgeon just stared at this figure until the little green man said, ‘Can you see me?!’ The surgeon nodded and the little green man vanished. Now; our natural instinct is to burst out laughing, make some comment about just what was in our good doctors sandwiches, and dismiss it entirely as a joke. But here’s the thing, the surgeon swore it was true; he was prepared to go on the radio and potentially open himself up to ridicule. Was it ‘magic’, was it a slipping of reality? I know this is a long post so my apologies! But one more strange event and this one happened to me. Late in October in 1972 I was walking home with a friend through a wood in Surrey. It was after 11pm but also a full moon and there was plenty of light to see the path. Halfway through the wood we both began to get tinnitus in our ears and had hardly started to talk to each other about it than the air became sharply cold as if it were a very frosty morning. Again we’d just began to discuss what on earth was going on when we saw lights ahead between some trees probably about 100 yards away. At first I thought they were glowworms but glowworms emit a soft yellow light and these were red, blue, yellow and white. We tiptoed towards these little lights that were moving around several old oak and ash trees and realised that in actuality they resembled in size the stars you see in the night sky but their light was intensely bright and each was contained in what looked like a ball of ionised air. As we got near them we became aware, I can’t explain how, that they were sentient, purposeful, conscious…looking back I realise that’s why we panicked and ran past them to my parents house on the far side of the wood. The point of the story is that our reality isn’t objective and when things don’t fit the narrative it has an intense effect on human beings. You might say that we live in a partially unknowable reality under an unknown, to us, rule that states that nothing must interfere with the human experience: when it does, we explain it to ourselves as magic or myth…we need to put it safely away in a box and keep it shut :-) Thanks for all your discussions once again

This series has been such a useful introduction to analyzing stories. Thank you both very much for putting it together and even more for pressing Post! I’m looking forward to checking out the archetypevideos, the rest of your channels, and your forthcoming 13 part thematic analysis of the Witcher I’m willing into existence at this moment. Also thanks to Dr Erin Keating for responding to my cold email and recommending this series to me.

Geralt mentioned🚨🚨🚨🚨

Wow that was a particularly enlightening one! I was also wondering about the link between symbols and theme, but “symbols can serve as nexuses (nexi?) of a theme or themes” was about as far as I got before this video. Also, I really appreciate the practical advice here: I was really eager to see that addressed. I have a collection of short stories (AP’s training grounds of choice) by Ken Liu sitting on my shelf that I feel very excited to open all of a sudden! Lastly, the observation that you can never achieve a 100% comprehensive analysis of a text coupled with the advice to consider the purpose/audience of an analysis has answered a bunch of downstream questions I had swirling in my head.

Love how you two alternate between analyze and analyse for the video titles❤

Well! Again my thanks for your comment, on my comments. Yes of course there were inequities I don’t deny the signs on hostels saying ‘No dogs or Irish’ for example; but I can attest that my family, for example, had Africans staying with us every summer. We grew up, sitting on the knees of these wonderful black men with amazing smiles who told us African children’s stories; a lot of the propaganda put out by populists like Enoch Powell created a myth that subsequently became ‘truth’. I’d also add that this was the time that both Conservative and Labour Governments built hundreds of thousands of Council houses both to clear the slims and to house people who’d been bombed out during the war. No golden age was ever pure gold…Pax Romana had its’ slaves after all.

No my friend; they were a privileged and entire community who lived for generations on the site adjacent to the Pyramids. There’s plenty of written and archaeological evidence available. I’m not saying there weren’t slaves in Pharaonic Egypt but that the building of tombs and the decorating of them were the exclusive responsibility of professional native builders :-) Happy New Year by the way!

Oops more comments! The Pyramids were not built by slaves AP; they were built by professional builders employed by the Pharaoh of the time. The difference between the US and the UK is that we live in history. My street was laid out as part of a new town at the beginning of the 11th Century, my house was built nearly 200 years before the American War of Independence.I find it hard to conceive of the USA being anything but a bunch of immigrants who’ve systematically destroyed the indigenous peoples who lived in a ‘golden age’ before the greedy white guys took it away from them :-) My apologies for being so rude .

I know this is an old vid! Our two heroes talking about ‘the Golden Time’ and casually referring to the Pax Romana, the golden era of the Roman Empire where it was said that a woman could travel from Hadrians Wall in Britannia to Alexandria in Egypt or Jerusalem in perfect safety. It’s a very potent memory, true or not…and to look to more recent times; my generation (I was born in 1948) was the first generation in many to grow up free ‘from the scourge of war’. My father and Uncles all fought in the 2nd World War, my grandfather was in the trenches of the dreadful 1st World War: before that the Boer war, the Crimea. We were the golden children :-) and it was a special time, for us privileged youngsters in many ways. We were free in so many subtle ways that you wouldn’t understand easily too; the all pervasive internet and social media, no knowledge of Climate Change; a political system where, by and large, governments were centrist and believed in public service; a health system that was properly funded by both parties in the UK; when the average CEO pay was 25 times the average pay of the employees, not the 250 times and more that it is now, before the corrosive infection of Thatcherism and ‘greed is good’ and ‘there is no such thing as Society, only individuals’. Look at today, at the atomisation of the community, the evils of highly processed food etc etc. Is it really unrealistic to look back at a ‘golden age’?

Thanks for review! Just started my GotM journey for the first time a few days ago. It’s been a ride like no other.

Really enjoyable to listen to! When you were talking about the series of champions facing down Icarium I was momentarily confused thinking you were talking about a parallel arc from Reaper's Gale

Very fun to see Children of Time front faced on the shelf there! I just finished TTH not an hour ago and CoT just before that.

I'm watching this after going straight to Assail after finishing Blood and Bone. Great video, as always. And Blood and Bone was really good. OST had been a big step up from Stonewielder imo, and I was worried that it might be just because I already cared about the characters in it. But no, Esslemont really became much more of my taste, and Blood and Bone (and even more Assail, I can say now) was awesome. I really enjoyed seeing Kallor and Murk and Sour's storylines in this book, great stuff. Golan and Thorn were very funny, too. And YES, Ina staying with Lek was more emotional than I was expecting it to be. I really liked that, very beautiful stuff. The Crimson Guard storyline, though... I was already going to read Assail right after Blood and Bone, but man, after all the setup in this book for what we eventually go through in the next book, I was VERY hooked. Cowl coming back and bowing to Kazz is so interesting, and Kazz being so secretive about what the fuck is going on and what the fuck Cowl is talking about. Then the revelation that they need to go to Assail in order to get their answers. Very cool. Also, yeah, Himatan was such a good setting. I really liked it. How it fucks up every equipment, so much that even the Crimson Guard ends up in tatters. The different beings that inhabit it, the heavy references to Latin America (Eldorado is a big one, as you said, and I also think some of the epigraphs are based on the Hans Staden logs, maybe? not sure). How Ardata's children, which were very much portrayed as at least not good in the previous books (mainly because she is "Queen of Monsters" and because of her alliance with Skinner, I guess, but also they are othered from Jacuruku and from society in general). I feel like it was one of the strongest settings in the Malazan universe, and that is really saying something

I think it's safe to say he wasn't the king of evil he is introduced as. Thats not really how characters are in this series but I have a really hard time believing he is a fallen benevolent figure. We see him do pretty despicable things in both RotCG and BaB and he might be the most prideful character in the series.

I’ve been looking for a series like this for a while: I never got this kind of thing in school (STEM guy), so thank you! It has been very enlightening so far. However, I’m afraid i’m not quite grasping the distinction between the technical definitions of narrative and story. In my head what I’ve got is that Narrative is “event happens therefore event happens therefore event happens” and some events can be more load-bearing than other others for whether or not the causality is preserved. Story is related to a series of events often considered chronologically and is about what is being communicated by these events. What’s tripping me up a bit is how “events and the causal links between them” is spoken during the Story section of this video. Story = “event happens therefore event happens therefore event happens, which sum to this message/thing the author wants to tell the reader” (i think?) And that thing being communicated could be “this character changed in this way” or “through the power of friendship anything is possible” (?) If this was school I would love a worksheet where I write P, S, or C in the answer space for practice haha. I shall continue on with the series and try to pay attention to how these terms are used in context. If anyone reads this ramble, thank you!

I wish we could have had a scene between Beak and Sinn.

Abominable show. An insult to intelligence and a spit in the face of dignity. Rings of power belongs in the closest garbage can, along with its mummery

I never understand the people that say theres no characterisation. Some of the best I have read

Please help clear this up if you can! So bellurdan was sent to capture tattersail by… who? Still tayschrenn? Would the mage actually order the brute to kill tattersail if she didn’t comply? Or was this somehow nightchill as well even though she’s in pieces?

Thanks for all these great videos. I just finished Deadhouse Gates, but have not gone beyond. Are you talking spoilers just for for Gardens/Deadhouse or the whole ten book series?

The Malazan marines way of doing things and the leeway they get feels a lot like special forces in modern armies. Correct me if I'm wrong but we almost never (if at all) get a sense of how the so called regular army, which will be the balk of the army, operates.

I understood Felisin's death differently. I got the feeling that she was just tired of it all and decided to put an end to it. Suicide by sister, so to speak.