>>86848I suppose to explain my opinion on Orb and religion it'd be best to look at the Prince of Nothing trilogy and its take on women.
Bakker, the author, wanted to write a dark gritty medieval world, with all the ugliness of the crusades, and he wanted to show what happens to women under oppression, specifically looking to counter the girlboss character who rises above it all as if it weren't such a heavy thing. But the way he goes about this is by making all women into whores. The main FemMC is an actual prostitute, another is the concubine of her successive kidnappers, and a third is an aging incestuous palace crone. The priestesses are sacred whores, each has sex with several soldiers as a ritual, and random unnamed women delight when being raped by orcs and men alike. There's one point where the actual prostitute, already cheating on her lover with a separate guy, gets possessed by a villain's hentai pheromones and the two have spontaneously sex in an alley. She climaxes as soon as the guy enters her, so powerful is his manliness. It's written pornographically because Bakker believes this creates greater impact, and they are called whores/bitches/prostitutes/etc and womanish is repeated as an insult literally hundreds of times to reflect how much in contempt they're held by the characters and their unreliable narration.
The problem is that he puts women in a position that is much worse than what they actually had in history, he degrades them also compared to his sources (Dune/LotR/Blood Meridian(yes, really)), and Bakker doesn't do well at portraying himself as a feminist when he also argues that men are inevitably hardwired for rape. It makes some parts painful to read, in a cringeworthy way. It's perfectly possible to defend this as fans of the series do, there is most certainly a logic to it, but it shouldn't be a surprise to see a huge amount of readers thinking its message is akin to that of an ota post. Even so, I mostly enjoyed reading the trilogy's 1500 or so pages.
Orb has a schizophrenic approach to the church and Christianity. It starts off with the classic trope of anti-science zealotry, of being forced to choose between theology and astronomy, and builds a fake world that has nothing to do with reality while throwing in elements of actual history, real thinkers, real tools and methods, but it remains deeply flawed even as it tri
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