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Foreshadowing about the Amyr
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Amber, Master Sympathist
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Jan 02, 2014 05:08PM
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I had never gotten a disdainful vibe from Kote about Skarpi. I went back and read through ch. 6 and I think I see what you mean. He calls Skarpi and Devan "rumormongers". I wonder what-if anything-we will see of Skarpi in the next book. Skarpi does in some ways help Kvothe in NOTW, so I wonder what happens later or if Kote is being tongue in cheek here. I always saw his stories as more neutral in its portrayal of Lanre and his grief. It's definitely worth considering. Seeing the signs we've seen from the jar and his encounter and the Mauthen farm, I can't imagine the Chandrian being any shade of good. Maybe they started with good intentions, but they've shown from first hand scenes in the book that they are mass murderers, at best. I'm not saying the Amyr are much better, but isn't it "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." ;)
But then again, "history is written by the victors."
Felurian says there were never human Amyr, right? So either she doesn't know about the later human Amyr (from the Tehlins? Help me here?) since she hadn't heard of Taborlin, either, or the human Amyr are really wanna be whippersnappers calling themselves Amyr but nothing like the true Amyr, so we have really two groups to consider when we discuss them. Felurian says: "there were never any human amyr," she said, dismissing the idea out of hand. "those you speak of sound like children dressing in their parents' clothes."
Sorry about the Fae bit, I accidentally added that into the wrong post. :p Felurian did say that she will not speak of the seven. I can only guess that by the seriousness in her blunt reply (p. 652/653 of the 1st ed hardback WMF).
I'm going to go out on a limb and assume Denna is not working with the Amyr, too. From the song she wrote as well as the Cthaeh's words about her master. For the Greater Good doesn't seem to line up to the level of malignant behavior the Cthaeh brings up-it's not something you can really stretch like medical research but a personal and psychopathic behavior that would remind you more of what you hear about the Chandrian (not saying her master is one, though), or any number of other crazy people like Ambrose (obv not him, either). Felurian says the Cthaeh does not lie-supposing Felurian isn't lying herself.
In fact, the Sithe seem to parallel the Amyr, in a way, too. Bast says in WMF: "You don't understand them if you use the term 'good intentions.' But if ay of the Fae can be said to work for the good, it's them. Their oldest and most important charge is to keep the Cthaeh from having any contact with anyone. With anyone."
So how then do people come into contact with the Cthaeh? Kvothe's way by going to Felurian, supposedly other ways of entering the Fae...We know Lanre saw the Cthaeh. I wonder if any of the Amyr and Cthaeh have ever met.
Just pondering here. I'm sure everything I hypothesize will be wrong and Rothfuss will have a more kick ass story than I could begin to conceive.
Amber wrote: "Yes, but what caused the racism in the first place?Generally, people have reasons for hunting down and killing people, even if those reasons are incorrect, invalid, or misappropriated."
It reminds me of the Tinkers in WoT. Minus the pacifism, that I can tell. It could be just that they are foreign-no "real" homeland or base that we know of, they travel, they're accused of stealing children (gypsies?), etc. We fear what we don't know. And then they could be mistaken for the road rabble that we've seen in WMF have impersonated them.
Zach wrote: "So why would the girl that saw the jar say the Amyr was the worst of them all?If Lanre and Selodin, if that's the correct spelling I listen to audiobooks a lot, were great men and Selodin is Amyr..."
I'm curious about this, too. She says that his face was "terrible grim...He looked so angry. He looked like he was ready to burn down the world." That's pretty damning. But then the first time they spoke, she mentioned Cinder giving her "the all overs", but no mention of the Amyr being super creepy. In fact she said she couldn't even remember any of the others (including the Ciridae, assumingly). Why the change? Lots of time pondering and remembering, or something more suspicious? I mean, seeing it suddenly in her dream? What if it was planted there by one of the two "sides" or someone else? Maybe she's making it up-how did she manage to find Kvothe? It doesn't say he told her and he seemed suprised and confused as to how she found him in Ch. 36 WMF.
It's not hard to find him. Sorry, scratch that. It's hard to find him, but it's not hard to know where he is.He's the only red-haired arcane hero god in the neighborhood. His rumors caught up to Trebon and people realized that their savior was a student in the University, she could just ask her way to the Fishery once she got there.
And I don't think she would have lied about the dream at all, from what we know of her. If you think that more powerful beings made her dream about that, maybe the angels/watchers? They do seem to be watching Kvothe closely to me.
Btw, her description of the Ciridae do look too close to Dagon's to be just coincidential...
I've always assumed that what Cthaeh said about the Maer was related to the Lackless Doors of Stone, but maybe he's actually talking about him? Probably both though.
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The revenge-driven hero.
Any character endlessly agonizing over some event in their past.
etc.
One could argue these very things are important to the series. So while he probably is aiming to avoid them as main motifs, I would not say any of these things can not be in the book. He has shown us good vs. evil already, though it's looking to be less black and white (thankfully).
Plus, Rothfuss never states specifically that these things are not in his book, but that: "Before I started writing, I made a list of all the things that I was really tired of seeing in fantasy novels. I wish I still had that list." They were things he was tired of seeing, but that doesn't mean he did not include any of them (from the obvious above evidence)."
I sorta feel like I've addressed the "revenge driven hero" thing to the extent that it's valuable to the discussion. I could go sorting around for other interviews and whatnot, but I doubt it's gonna change anyone's opinion.
Instead I'll agree that some of the things in that interview and others are, in one way or another, part of the story. Kvothe might get some revenge, for example, but after half a million words it's fairly clear that he's got other challenges to overcome and other motivations. Speaking to the Los Angeles Times, he said, "fantasy needs to move past dragons." But we get the draccus anyway.
If I have a point here, it's that we shouldn 't see the motif and think we know the story. In fact, we should look closely at how it functions in the story.
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Hard to say. But rumormonger has a malicious connotation to it, certainly it isn't a compliment. Hard to say what, if anything, will happen with the two of them.
I definitely don't mean to imply this boils down to the Chandrian being good, just that they're no more evil than any of the other groups and that likely they have reasons for their actions.
I believe Felurian suggests there were no ORIGINAL human amyr. The founding group was not made of mortals. The extended group does include them though, it would have too as mortals proliferated the world after the creation war, but this would be after Felurian was primarily locked in fae, so not surprising she doesn't know about them, I don't think she spends much time out of the Eld, however the human Amyr seem to have broadened the mission from what we presume Selitos had truly intended.
Your guess is as good as mine on how people get close to Ctheah. We know for certain of at least 3 people who spoke with it. Lanre, the boy who started the Fastingway War, and Kvothe. I personally believe it is safe to assume Cinder has spoken with it too, as it seemed moderately obsessed with him in my opinion.
Amber wrote: "Does Skarpi help Kvothe in NoTW or does he just plant unverified biased information in his head that leads him to his downfall?Hard to say. But rumormonger has a malicious connotation to it, cert..."
Sorry, I was trying to refer to comments by several people. I find the quote function difficult on my phone!
Felurian says: "there were never any human amyr." But like I pondered and you stated, she also didn't know of Taborlin and a few other things, so she might just be outdated on that knowledge. And then the human ones very well could be official human Amyr or possibly just wanna bes using the name. It's hard to say if they really did what Selitos had in mind. Their original purpose was set against evil and the Chandrian, but we see Amyr acting as judges of sort, etc. so they seem very different than originally.
Good point about Cinder. Cthaeh could be focused on him just to rile Kvothe, or it's entirely possible that Cthaeh and Cinder had "met". I hadn't thought about that one.
Mod
It would be interesting to know where that break came in though.
Vinícius wrote: "I wonder what happened before all this, why the Tehlin church, the Amyr and the Chandrian are trying to hide something. Amyr and Chandrian hiding themselves and the church something that has past, ..."You would figure the Amyr would be powerful enough to tell the Tehlin church to bite it if they were so powerful. I wonder if they wanted to go into hiding or what larger things were involved to pull down such a strong institution.
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Zach - He does attend the Univeristy to learn. But he has focused on the Chandrian pretty heavily. The first thing he did was to look up books regarding the seven.
Why are some of these topics frozen? I am not much of an internet person, so can someone tell me how this works?Thanks!
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Amber wrote: "They are only frozen if it is closed to replies. There shouldn't be very many like that."But I can't even read the past replies.... Is there some link I have to click on?
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