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[–]capslessdespiser of hpmor 28 points29 points  (1 child)

now who was it that recommended unsong as a story without major darkness? WHO DID IT

[–]appropriate-username 21 points22 points  (0 children)

Me :(

Sorry, everyone.

[–]SvalbardCaretaker 17 points18 points  (6 children)

Just to give a dissenting voice: usually I am very susceptible to fictional suffering. Prepared for the worst since I expected Scott to give his considerable best, and it still was absolutely tolerable.

[–]Arancaytar 23 points24 points  (2 children)

Yeah, I feel like the unrealism and the exaggerated descriptions mercifully created some distance. It didn't have the impact of something like the Red Wedding, which had characters I already cared about getting murdered due to simple real-world human evil rather than ontological Evil perpetrated by an Evil Maximizer.

That said... shudder.

Edit: Actually, "Evil Maximizer" made me realize that Thamiel seems less like a capricious evil entity than an optimizer whose objective is to maximize suffering in the universe. Thamiel does not hate you, nor does he love you, but you contain a soul that he can use to generate more suffering.

Okay, now I'm shuddering.

[–]callmebrothergnow posting as /u/callmesalticidae 12 points13 points  (1 child)

Can you imagine if one of the side plots this whole time had been for the sole purpose of getting us attached to a character who then died pre-Broadcast so as to appear in this Interlude? >.>

[–]Iconochasm 11 points12 points  (0 children)

That would have been vastly more brutal. Reading these descriptions was easy with some mental discipline. Of course, lacking utterly a real frame of reference for "a thousand years of being pressed against thousand degree metal bars, stuffed in a cage with the people I'd dislike most out of all bad humans who have ever died", I think that even if I unleashed by brain entirely that I'd fail to terrify myself properly. Yay for scope insensitivity?

[–][deleted] 10 points11 points  (1 child)

Yeah, I usually let fiction play with my heart, but I just found this darkly comic.

[–]Blackdutchie 13 points14 points  (0 children)

It's the documentary format that did it for me. It sets a sort of oddly comical tone to the whole thing.

[–]AmeteurOpinionsFinally, everyone was working together. 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I feel like Dave in City of Angles. After a bout of depression, nothing scares you.

[–]LiteralHeadCannon 18 points19 points  (1 child)

A singer is someone who tries to be good.

[–][deleted] 15 points16 points  (1 child)

Haha, come for the whale puns, stay for the...

hahaha

This is sick. This is weird. This is very, very wrong. On one hand, you effectively communicated some of that sense of ontological wrongness that Sohu felt. On the other, Scott, I really hope none of your patients make the connection between "man who wrote this" and "my medical professional".

[–]HotGrilledSpaec 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I'm bipolar! He's definitely a psychiatrist. No harm done. After all, I didn't do it and it's not my job to fix it, as my true love says :p

[–]Arancaytar 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Oh good, I wasn't planning on sleeping tonight anyway.

[–]floordeliqour 13 points14 points  (15 children)

The worldbuilding of Unsong ... is starting to get to me.

TV broadcasting stops working sometime in the mid-80s, televisions and VCRs fall out of favor and eventually become relics. San Francisco gets flooded with LSD and blocked off from civilized society. The United States no longer appears to be a functional government, at least in the heartland, following some apparently quite violent war between the Comet King and the Other King. Russia has been overrun by demons.

And yet, Kim Jong-Un is apparently still the leader of North Korea, there are Apple MacBooks, the Internet is still functional, almost all the major companies are still around (per Erica's pitch), BART is still functional, Silicon Valley is still a tech mecha, etc.

Unsong does not aspire to rationality, I get that, but ... is there some explanation that will help me here? In Spite of a Nail is not normally a trope that bothers me, but the worldbuilding seems to go off in absolutely wild directions and then end up right back where it is in the real world. Is the answer just "don't think about it too hard" or "Uriel did it for reasons"? I'm otherwise enjoying the story, but hearing that broadcast television is no longer a thing might be the thing that permanently breaks my suspension of disbelief, simply because of how radically different the world should be.

[–]traversedaWith dread but cautious optimism[S] 29 points30 points  (0 children)

Those things are fated to happen. That's literally it, as far as I can tell. If you take a biblical view of reality, san-fransisco isn't a tech-mecca because of the economics, or anything so mundane. It's because it has the right resonance, and it's fated to be.

That's the big difference between a world that runs on math and a world that runs on the kabbalah.

[–]ulyssessword 18 points19 points  (2 children)

Silicon Valley is still a tech mecha,

This typo is surprisingly plausible.

[–]Chronophiliasci-fi ≠ futurology 4 points5 points  (1 child)

*makes a pilgrimage to Gurren Lagann*

[–]Xectre 0 points1 point  (0 children)

may i join you on this pilgrimage? i have a tale to tell i once heard from a woman of Bath.

[–]gbear605history’s greatest story 5 points6 points  (2 children)

Also: audio can't be communicated using computers but computer speech is good enough for the program that Aaron runs on his computer to be able to say names.

[–]bassicallyboss 6 points7 points  (1 child)

Audio can't be communicated using computers but they have working cell phones. Analog cell phones, maybe? How does any of anything work?

[–]ShannahM 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Kabbalah.

[–]thecommexokid 1 point2 points  (7 children)

*Untied States

[–]floordeliqour 0 points1 point  (6 children)

But it's not actually called that officially, right? That's just a nickname? I find it difficult to believe that any government would choose that for themselves if the wanted legitimacy.

[–]thecommexokid 2 points3 points  (4 children)

Chapter 2:

And Erica spoke about this, and she spoke well. She hit all the stops. She talked about how grief-stricken we were as part of the global body of Unitarians, and how enraged we were as Untied States citizens.

Chapter 5:

And Serpens, the biggest, with $174 billion in assets. Its CEO has a net worth of $9 billion, five beach houses scattered across the Untied States, and her own private 12-seater jet.

Chapter 14:

The Keller-Stern Act of 1988 states that anyone who discovers a Divine Name of potential military value is legally obligated to turn it over to the Untied States government in exchange for fair monetary compensation.

Chapter 15:

Ithaca wasn't safe, her parents' house wasn't safe, nowhere in the Untied States or the global community was safe for her.

Chapter 24:

Of all the Untied States, it had been least damaged by the sudden shattering of the neat physical laws of reality into a half-coherent delirium.

[–]floordeliqour 0 points1 point  (3 children)

I know that's what Aaron calls it, but in-universe is that it's name, or is it still officially the United States?

Same with Erica name-checking Gogmagog, which probably isn't the proper name of a company unless they had some reason to invoke bad associations. I cannot imagine what sort of brand meeting would have to go down for a company to name itself Gogmagog in the real world, let alone in a world where the Bible is true and Hell has been broadcast on all the major channels.

[–]thecommexokid 3 points4 points  (1 child)

Let me provide slightly more context on the quote from chapter 14 in particular:

“Mr. Smith-Teller,” [Director-General Malia Ngo] said. “I’m sorry you’re in this situation, but as you can tell from my presence here we do have to take this very seriously, and I have to ask you a few questions. The Keller-Stern Act of 1988 states that anyone who discovers a Divine Name of potential military value is legally obligated to turn it over to the Untied States government in exchange for fair monetary compensation. Most people aren’t aware of the Act, and we have no interest in punishing them for refusing to follow a law they never heard of. But now you know. So, Mr. Teller-Smith, and please tell me the truth, do you know any Names that might be covered under the law?”

It's not just Aaron who calls it that.

[–]NeverSitFellowWombat 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Maybe it's like Evil Corp in Mr. Robot: a joke so thoroughly kept that it's substituted by the narrator(s) to replace something else that's actually being said.

(note: I find this unlikely, but I still felt the need to provide an alternative hypothesis)

[–]LiteralHeadCannon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Gogmagog has been confirmed real in chapter five.

[–]Muskwalker 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I find it difficult to believe that any government would choose that for themselves if the wanted legitimacy.

I don't think it is a unified government. Besides Colorado being under royalty, etc., this interlude strongly suggests that the US broke apart after Nixon released the Broadcast. (At the very least, this would have more than legitimized people's uneasiness with the concept of their government having allied with Hell.)

Edit: never mind,

The Keller-Stern Act of 1988 states that anyone who discovers a Divine Name of potential military value is legally obligated to turn it over to the Untied States government in exchange for fair monetary compensation.

[–]awesomeideasDai stiho, cousin. 13 points14 points  (1 child)

Perhaps evil is not the absence of good. Instead, good is the absence of evil, which explains why God is missing and we have not seen a good afterlife.

[–]scruiserCYOA 4 points5 points  (0 children)

When I was a believer (Southern Baptist, a fundamentalist, evangelical, the-biblical-is-inerrant, young-earth-creationist denomination) I got annoyed at fellow believers who would treat semantic games about good and evil as a knock-down argument against the problem of evil.

Their favorite analogy was that cold was merely the absence of heat, and evil merely the absence of God (not a typo, they viewed God and good as perfectly equivalent). But seeing your comment and recalling that analogy... "evil" has a much larger solution space than "good". Evil would be the more energetic particles whizzing about, while "good" is a single stable state.

Of course, Thamiel has taken it one step further and actualized the literal opposite of people's values, so I think the reversed analogy falls apart.

[–]AlphanosThe Bright Powers 14 points15 points  (5 children)

While I expect this plays an important role in the story's plot, it's unfortunate that I can no longer recommend this to anyone as what would otherwise be a fairly light-hearted and interesting story.

[–]appropriate-username 3 points4 points  (4 children)

I don't. It's an interlude, I don't remember any of them being important before.

[–]thebishop8 0 points1 point  (3 children)

I disagree with that, but even if I agreed, you can't say for sure which interludes are important and which aren't until you've read the entire finished story.

[–]appropriate-username 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I didn't say I was sure, I said I wasn't expecting it to be based on my previous experience.

[–]sir_pirriplin 0 points1 point  (1 child)

The author outright said in that interlude that part II can be skipped without missing any plot.

[–]thebishop8 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm talking about whole interludes, not parts of interludes. Even then, I wasn't talking about any specific interlude, I was talking in general.

[–]holomanga 12 points13 points  (0 children)

I heard about this in the dark rational fic thread, and my reaction was "oh come on, how could one chapter suddenly change the whole tone?" So, I read all of Unsong, and now I'm here.

FUCK.

[–][deleted] 11 points12 points  (1 child)

TBH, I don't get what's so bad about this chapter. I mean yeah, it's kinda dark, but people are talking about skin crawling, not wanting sleep, and seriously considering Pascal's wager. All this seems like a massive exaggeration from my perspective. Am I just a special snowflake?

[–]alexanderwalesTime flies like an arrow 12 points13 points  (0 children)

The people most likely to post comments are the ones who had a strong reaction to the chapter, so there's a sampling bias.

[–]FeepingCreatureGCV Literally The Entire Culture 12 points13 points  (8 children)

[Reposting from /r/slatestarcodex]

I don't understand how this solves the question of the Cainites.

If anything, having a shitty GM justifies munchkinry.

I don't agree with the Cainites but doesn't the existence of hell make their project more, not less, important? We're given a yardstick for the amount of evil that is already instantiated in the world; frankly, don't their minor human sins pale in comparison?

Omelas looks a lot better if the rest of the world is W40k.

Shit, is that the "compromise with sin"? I mean, I've never understood that quote. Compromise is good. Humans are all about compromise. Not compromising increases, not reduces, evil. And frankly, this hell is not hugely worse than the Babyeaters were. The "sin" metric is similar to, but does not match human evil.

There's opportunities for trade here, is what I'm saying.

[–]scruiserCYOA 16 points17 points  (0 children)

Compromise is good. Humans are all about compromise. Not compromising increases, not reduces, evil.

I think this is a critical point. The divine is harmful to humans in both its "pure" form and "evil" form. Being turned into an empty minded shell repeating praises over and over is no more inline with actual human values than being turned into a empty shell of pain and torture. I think Uriel had the right idea in the first place, render the whole mess nonexistent via mathematics. So yeah, forcing the absolutely pure divineity to compromise with absolute evil is the only way to make something habitable to humans

I am worried that we will get to see heaven in an interlude and that it is going to be worse than San Francisco.

[–]LiteralHeadCannon 0 points1 point  (6 children)

And frankly, this hell is not hugely worse than the Babyeaters were.

Shut up and multiply.

[–]FeepingCreatureGCV Literally The Entire Culture 9 points10 points  (4 children)

Yes? I mean, you get a duration bonus due to the whole "eternal torment" thing, but the Babyeaters are an interstellar empire. And human population only really exploded recently, so Unsong Hell hasn't really had a chance to come into its own yet. (And probably won't have, if it gets abolished somehow in the end, which I can only assume will happen. Which would probably leave the Babyeaters as the greater sum-evil.)

Time-limited O(n) can easily outstrip time-limited O(n²) with sufficiently big multiplicative factors.

[–]UltraRedSpectrum 3 points4 points  (3 children)

Well, I mean, we could do the math on it, but I'm pretty sure that the recent human population explosion doesn't matter much. There've been something like 100,000,000,000 humans since the species first began, and even if you cut that down to conform to a history that begins in 4000 BC you're still looking at billions of people being tortured for thousands of years. Plus, I sort of get the impression that time runs faster in Hell, since they're talking about doing things for millennia at a time as though it ain't no big thing, when the apocalypse seems to be right around the corner.

[–]FeepingCreatureGCV Literally The Entire Culture 4 points5 points  (2 children)

Okay, so let's look at the Babyeaters.

They're an interstellar civilization. Since we only have one case I'm gonna assume that they have a population of about seven billion per planet, like us. They're r-type...

"I know," said the Lord Pilot. "A lot of Babyeaters will die at first, but they're killing ten times more children than their whole adult population, every year -"

So if we're looking at a, say, twenty-planets interstellar empire, and a month of digestion, and a five-hundred-year history, even ignoring historic deaths, that that gives you 7 billion (babyeaters/planet)*(10 children/babyeater year)*20 planets*500 years*(1/12 years of suffering) = 58,333,333,333,333 babyeater children years of hell-equivalent.

Also you sort of added an additional 1000 to the number of humans ever, it's only 100,000,000,000 according to here, which gives you about 100,000,000,000,000 person-years of hell which is only a factor of two off with the Babyeater number. Assume that half of humanity goes to hell, and it matches perfectly.

[–]UltraRedSpectrum 8 points9 points  (1 child)

Edited for the correct number. Yeah, you're right, I screwed up the number of zeroes.

But each person in Hell suffers for an eternity, not just a really really long time. There really does seem to be a time dilation effect. Quote:

"Or maybe we’ll take him up on it, let him torture his mother for two millennia, and then not give him anything in return, just to see his face when he realizes it was all for nothing. Or maybe we’ll take him up on it and give him a couple hours reprieve from his tortures – because why not – and then back here for another millennium.”

They talk about millennia as though they're meaningless, just another featureless stretch of time in the eternity to be suffered. For that matter, the person Thamiel is describing was speaking modern English. Given that the apocalypse seems to be more-or-less imminent, it kinda takes the kick out of it if they run out of time midway through the first decade.

[–]FeepingCreatureGCV Literally The Entire Culture 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I think that's just their plan. I don't think it's good evidence for a time dilation effect. Thamiel doesn't seem like the sort of person who would worry overmuch about humans interfering with his work.

I don't think Thamiel, as part-of-the-system-that-the-accident-created, is really viscerally anticipating the apocalypse. I think on some level he believes he will just keep going like this, forever.

[–]scruiserCYOA 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I would agree that this hell is worse, but by simple arithmetic, the Babyeaters are. However, Thamiel is putting in extra effort to make the punishment as uniquely horrible and horrible in meaning into the punishment, so if you are weighting the suffering by it philosophical depth and metaphysical horror, Thamiel pulls ahead.

[–]traversedaWith dread but cautious optimism[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Confirmed for talking ship.

[–]UltraRedSpectrum 7 points8 points  (35 children)

Why?

[–]traversedaWith dread but cautious optimism[S] 7 points8 points  (34 children)

Because nothing is ever a coincidence.

(also, why what? You're not responding to a particular comment)

[–]appropriate-username 7 points8 points  (33 children)

Perhaps /u/ultraredspectrum was asking why the chapter was written.

[–]ScottAlexander 75 points76 points  (14 children)

I'm going to take this question seriously. It was written so that this matters.

This is going to be a book about good and evil. How do people react to evil? How do they understand it? Do they tolerate it? Compromise with it? Try to fight it? Curse God for creating it? What if twenty years ago the Messiah called for the greatest crusade in all of history in order to conquer Hell itself, failed, died, and now the world is just sort of limping through the aftermath of that without really ever having processed it? Nobody's noticed it yet, but underneath the facade of puns and stuff this book is really dark, and it's going to get way darker.

I don't think I can do any of this without having first established evil as a concrete and horrible presence in this world. It's like Ana said. Without the Broadcast, we'd be tempted to view evil as just a funny divine quirk, like creating the platypus. It's not until evil gets flung at you in the most graphic way possible that you actually start thinking about it in Near Mode. This is why she made Aaron watch the Broadcast, and it's why I'm making you read about the Broadcast, and when I start telling you the story of the Comet King I hope that you remember that everything he does, he does because he lives in this universe and not in the Care Bears universe or something.

But actually, another part of why I wrote this was the opposite of that. I hope that people who think "How can someone possibly live in this universe without freaking out?" has the sense to notice that our own universe has a lot of suffering, and to wonder how anyone can live in our universe without freaking out. Extremism in thought experiment is no vice, and when extreme cases are sufficiently pure and intense, they help us understand principles that we can apply to less extreme cases.

Well, here's your extreme case. Let's see what happens with it.

[–]DaystarEldPokémon Professor 13 points14 points  (0 children)

As someone who was waiting for this chapter (or one similar to it), I absolutely agree with everything you said, and don't particularly mourn the fun-and-pun adventure romp the first few chapters indicated Unsong would be, as great as a whole story of that would have been.

If anything, it's a testament to how well you can marry the two types of stories that so many people (far more than I predicted) seem to be so upset with the dark turn in the narrative. In any other moderately dark fiction this kind of chapter is actually fairly tame (we don't know any of the people in Hell, we don't care about them, they're just names and abstract horror made a statistic by the absurd numbers involved both in population and duration of torture). Things like this actually happen to characters we know and love in other stories, and that's when the real tears and gnashing of teeth tends to occur in the majority of the audience. I'll be interested to see if Ana or Erica or Aaron (probably not Aaron what with the POV narration, but who knows) end up dying and going to hell.

In any case, thanks so far for the wonderful story!

[–]CariyagaKyubey did nothing wrong 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Whoa. Um. Under that lens, this chapter -- and the story as a whole -- is a lot more impressive.

[–]Darth_HobbesAnkh-Morpork Guild of Assassins 3 points4 points  (8 children)

Well congrats, I'm now extremely invested in seeing Aaron stick Thamiel with his own Bident.

[–]sir_pirriplin 2 points3 points  (7 children)

Is that a good idea? Thamiel struck Satan with that bident and a bunch of Torture Experts (and a Bioethicist!) came out.

[–]UltraRedSpectrum 2 points3 points  (1 child)

But every other angel killed by the bident dies a true death, so maybe it has to do with intent? It probably boils down to Kabbalah and whether or not Aaron is some variation on the Messiah and/or Antichrist.

[–]sir_pirriplin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I thought it had something to do with how evil the person struck is. A normal angel would just disappear because they are incapable of evil, but a fallen angel will produce a bunch of demons.

[–]Fredlage 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Actually, Michael killed Satan, then Thamiel used his power to convert his remains into demons before he could reconstitute.

[–]whywhisperwhy 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Depends... Would you rather have Thamiel, or a bunch of demons? I'd take the malevolent but limited demons over the leader of Evil who's versed in the universe's mysteries and who has already essentially taken over the universe once...

[–]LiteralHeadCannon 7 points8 points  (1 child)

Would you rather fight six hundred and sixty six goat-sized leviathans, or one leviathan-sized goat?

[–]MugaSofer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No, he struck Satan's corpse; he had already been killed by Michael.

[–]___ratanon___Holy, holy is the lord of /etc/hosts 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Evil brought into being by a supervillain who specifically set out to do it for its own sake is something very different from evil that arises as a by-product of thoughtlessness, perverse incentives and impersonal natural laws that are orthogonal to (or at least linearly independent from) any morality. By focusing so much on capital-E Evil, you might have destroyed the applicability of any conclusions drawn about it to the real world.

The suffering of souls in Unsong's Hell seems strikingly gratuitous and avoidable compared to any suffering in the real world. Thamiel doesn't seem to gain anything by it; he already seems to be an incredibly powerful being. Stopping him looks completely hopeless, given that even archangels cannot get rid of him (though Uriel nearly succeeded once by turning him into metaphor; so perhaps part of the solution is "in order to conquer evil, you need to stop personifying it"?). Contrast that with the real world, where evil often cannot be avoided completely; where a person who commits evil acts can be often brought under society's control to an extent, and commits them in order to satisfy some desire; where collective evil arises for example from performing en masse actions that would be otherwise individually justifiable. And where we might think how to redesign society so that perverse incentives don't arise, or so that people's desires can be denied or satisfied in a way that avoids suffering. Meditating on Evil Deeds done by Bad Guys doesn't seem to help much with that.

(For the same reason I don't like superhero stories, save for Watchmen.)

[–]Ninmesara 2 points3 points  (1 child)

underneath the facade of puns and stuff this book is really dark, and it's going to get way darker.

Of course the book is extremely dark, and it amazes me continually that people call it "light hearted" that after reading about:

  • an eagle gouging out one of the Pope's eyes
  • babies being born with extra eyes
  • fetuses forming unspeakable and blood-curdling messages in Morse code
  • a copyright enforcement agency that is said to kill people for copyright infringement
  • Uriel killing the firstborns in Egypt (and all the other plagues) so they would stop building pyramids
  • people's skeletal diseases being randomly reassigned
  • great massacres in Siberia
  • deadly revolutions in China
  • major territories in the South China Sea disappearing
  • the collapse of the US into a bunch of states ruled by warlords who crucify their enemies
  • an Archangel who is bullied by his brothers and chooses suicide (and the death of all Angels) as a way of stopping Thamiel's victory

This book is very dark pitch black comedy at best, and I wonder why people needed the broadcast chapter to start complaining about darkness. I guess the items above might be seen as distant (far-mode?), while the Broadcast rubs people's suffering in your face (near-mode?), but I'm really really surprised by peoples reactions...

[–]PlacidPlatypus 3 points4 points  (0 children)

How lighthearted/dark a story feels tends to have less to do with what actually happens in it and more with the tone it's written in.

[–]-main 16 points17 points  (17 children)

Given the rest of the worldbuilding, it makes perfect sense that Hell (which is already confirmed to exist) works like that, and in fact it would be strange if this wasn't the case. Given that it exists, it is hugely important to the characters (and their motivations) and should probably come up at some point. It would be especially important to Ana, who has a PHD in Theodicy.

“You tried to dismiss the problem of evil!” she said. “You tried to just say ‘God does lots of weird stuff’, as if this – ” she gestured at the screen, “was of the same magnitude as the platypus. You want to see why theodicy is a hard problem? Watch!”

That isn't just being said by Ana to Aaron, it's also a message from Scott to the readers. You can't just dismiss Theodicy within Unsong as being simple or trivial -- that should be clear just from the way it's mentioned as a field of study, but that point is made more visibly here. If you, or anyone in your life, thinks that Hell is real? You have to engage with the implications of that belief. And they include Theodicy getting a lot more difficult. (I mean, you should do that for everything you believe, but beliefs involving the eternal torture of yourself and everyone you care about should probably be a priority.)

As to why it had to be so graphic and detailed?

Personally, I feel that when it comes to concepts like "horrific eternal torture", the imagination fails. (Other concepts that are difficult to imagine include anything with infinity or very very big numbers, something you should all be familiar with.) It's too easy to gloss over. Those three words don't hit you like that 1/3rd of a chapter did. But when it's horrific eternal torture, it should hit you. It should have an emotional impact. The idea that Aaron and Ana live in the same universe as Hell itself -- if you care for the characters at all, then becoming a bit (or more than a bit) upset is reasonable. But it's far to easy to overlook over the words, when there's no fuel for your imagination provided with them. It's too easy to miss the implications, to refuse to emotionally engage with it. Well, you don't get that option here. Scott demands that you look, at least at this tiny fragment of it.

People have said (over in the comments on the Unsong page more than here, tbh) that it's sick and wrong and makes them feel ill, etc, but here's the thing: this was totally predictable. This is perfectly in line for everything else you've been shown in Unsong! Thamiel has shown up several times, been mentioned even more, the thing about unsong!Singer and his views on Hell was a while back in another interlude. Given all those.... did you realise what that meant? Did you figure out that Unsong contained this? If you did, would you have felt ill, been horrified, etc? Because if the detail makes you sick when the idea containing that detail didn't, then that's a kind of bias. By including the detail, Scott got people past that bias and into realising just how horrific Hell truly is.

... The only reason anyone can deal with it at all is because they never really think about it, they keep it off in their peripheral vision where it never really shows up clearly. It’s like how everybody knew Hell existed, but nobody freaked out until they saw the Broadcast.”

Again, parallels between the general public in-world and the readers. Everyone reading should have known hell existed, but they weren't overly bothered until this chapter, "The Broadcast".

Plus, I think Scott just liked the idea of a National Geographic Special about Hell.

EDIT: well, the author himself answered it, which makes anything I say pretty irrelevant. I'll leave this comment up anyway, just so you can see what I thought of it at the time.

[–]alexanderwalesTime flies like an arrow 8 points9 points  (6 children)

My only problem was that it didn't feel like it was in line tonally. As a description of literal Hell and what that means, it mostly worked, but the book so far as been dominated by silly things like whale puns and kabbalistic jokes, which made this feel out of place (to me).

[–]ArisKatsarisSidebar Contender 8 points9 points  (5 children)

We'd already gotten that section where Sohu is briefly tormented and then threatened by Thamiel -- which to me was where it was made clear that this isn't a cutesy story where evil is to shoved under a rug.

As such this interlude felt to me perfectly in tone with that, and if this interlude (or something like it) was missing, then that Sohu/Thamiel portion we'd already seen would have been the one strangely out of place...

[–]alexanderwalesTime flies like an arrow 13 points14 points  (4 children)

This is a matter of aesthetic preference. Thamiel didn't do anything worse than a Disney villain - came in, made some threats, overwhelming despair, etc. That was my initial impression, and on reread it didn't really change. (It probably doesn't help that the preceding battle is pun-based, which for me sapped the entire confrontation of its seriousness - but I'd thought that was just Unsong being intentionally silly rather than a failure in tone shift.)

For me, the problem is the tonal dissonance, not necessarily the setting of expectations. Unsong wants to have Hell be a big, serious thing that the reader viscerally feels, but it also wants to have a chapter about the kabbalistic implications of "There's a Hole in my Bucket" and make a bunch of whale puns. If I come into future chapters with the mindset of "Hell is literal here" then I'm going to be less inclined to laugh at the jokes, and if I come in looking for jokes, I'm apparently going to get stuff about eternal rape and torture.

Part of my problem might be that I already took Hell seriously in the real world. For quite a long time, I was one of those angry atheist keyboard warriors, and it was always the problem of evil and the existence of Hell that got my blood boiling. There are people who believed in Hell who just ... talked about it casually, like it was this natural thing. There were people who believed that God was going torture people for eternity and those colossal assholes still fucking worshiped him. I never believed in Hell, but the fact that other people did and did virtually nothing about it fueled a lot of my anger. Unsong is doing its best to dredge up those feelings, or create them in readers who didn't already have them, while still wanting to spend most of its time being a silly story.

[–]Klosterheim 10 points11 points  (0 children)

I completely understand where you're coming from, but weirdly I didn't feel the same about the chapter. I feel like that tone of usual silliness where you laugh at the jokes and get familiar with characters punctuated by very serious and sad moments is a trope that's having a lot of success these days (thinking Rick & Morty and Bojack Horseman as the pinnacle of the genre, but I see gritty movie reboots of superhero stories as similar) and I love it most of the time.

Your post got me thinking so after 5 minutes of introspection I came to that : there's an element of realism to it because nobody's just happy or sad all the time, so I can relate to that, but it's also a fantasy in that it's almost always completely carefree or unabashedly wallowing in misery, and I enjoy both.

[–]legendofdrag 3 points4 points  (1 child)

Thank you for putting in to words exactly my issues with this chapter. Yes, I understood what the author was doing and why he was doing it. But it didn't feel like it fit with the rest of the story.

It's as if I were reading discworld and then Death has to go collect the souls of some dead children killed by their parents. Sure, it's something that might happen in universe, but it clashes with the tone of the story. Anything lighthearted afterwards will just feel hollow.

[–]Arandur 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That can be an end unto itself. Mood whiplash is a thing that some people do on purpose. I enjoy it, myself.

[–]holomanga 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Unsong is actually just an elaborate ploy to instill a fear of puns in all of us.

[–]scruiserCYOA 4 points5 points  (9 children)

You can't just dismiss Theodicy within Unsong as being simple or trivial -- that should be clear just from the way it's mentioned as a field of study, but that point is made more visibly here.

I still can actually. God is not good, or if he is "good" in some fundamental semantic kind of way, then he is not "good" in anykind of way corresponding to the human meaning of "good". Theodicy solved.

Funny story, in the process of losing my fundamentalist beliefs, I went through a several months period where I still believed God existed but that the concept of good as defined by God's existence was completely beyond human meanings of "good" or "evil", and that much of God's actions could be described as evil. I think I can understand how the characters in this story just adjust and keep on living their lives.

Also I think I empathize with Ana less in this chapter... sometimes the most logical conclusion is that your premise is wrong. In the case of theodicy, clearly God is not all good, all powerful, or all knowing, or some combination of these three. Since kabbalistic magic has words for the last two, I think the all good is the odd one out. Also, if Thamiel's plan was to manipulate Nixon into distributing the videos, or distribute them himself slowly (and Nixon accidentally messed that up) why does Ana think sharing the video around is a remotely good idea?

Personally, I feel that when it comes to concepts like "horrific eternal torture", the imagination fails.

Totally agree with you here though. So many fundamentalists fail to actually seriously grok the idea of God torturing people forever. Those that do tend to either leave or make excuse about how hell is really just the absence of God. The few that both internalize the idea and keep believing it... well it puts a lot of fundamentalist actions and words into context, doesn't it?

[–]callmebrothergnow posting as /u/callmesalticidae 1 point2 points  (8 children)

Funny story, in the process of losing my fundamentalist beliefs, I went through a several months period where I still believed God existed but that the concept of good as defined by God's existence was completely beyond human meanings of "good" or "evil", and that much of God's actions could be described as evil.

Huh. Seconded. I wonder how often this happens.

[–]GrecklePrime 1 point2 points  (7 children)

I'll add my name to this list. Thought the same thing for a few years.

[–]callmebrothergnow posting as /u/callmesalticidae 2 points3 points  (6 children)

Would you be interested in chatting about the systems you thought about? I thought that God valued, for lack of a better word, complexity; that a universe with 10 hedons and 0 dolors was inferior to a universe with 10 hedons and 10 dolors, and the only tricky thing about dolors was that you didn't want to distribute so many to someone that they permanently destroyed some of that person's capacity to produce or experience further complexity (and obviously, in the eternal perspective, there's very little that does so*).

. * In Mormonism, the only people who really go to Hell are the ones who, essentially, refuse to enter Heaven because they just won't admit that they did anything wrong. Other people may suffer for a time, but eventually almost everyone goes to one level of Heaven or another, and even the version of Heaven that Hitler will go to is so good that, according to the religion's founder, if you saw it then you would kill yourself just to get there faster.

[–]whywhisperwhy 1 point2 points  (5 children)

It's got potential as a thought exercise, but wouldn't you expect an omniscient, omnipotent being with an entirely different frame of reference to have a utility function that's nigh-inscrutable to humans? It seems like an "out of context" problem to me.

That having been said, what always confused me was what business such a god would have in creating a universe in the first place- assuming omniscience, you can essentially simulate anything and get the same experience as if you'd actually created it. So what's the value in creating the universe?

Edit: As stated above, I think a possible solution is that god wouldn't actually be omniscient/omnipotent, the above question relies on the standard Christian view.

[–]scruiserCYOA 6 points7 points  (3 children)

you can essentially simulate anything and get the same experience as if you'd actually created it. So what's the value in creating the universe?

Simulating a universe may be equivalent to creating it.

Also, as a kid, before I had quite heard of simulationist views of reality, I wondered if God's omniscience and omnipotence worked by viewing all the possible futures and then picking the one he wanted... and then it occurred to me to wonder if suffering existed and the rapture hadn't happened yet and miracles were uncommon was because this world was one of the futures he wasn't going to pick as real but he wanted to/need to know what happened in it anyway.

I didn't think of it quite that coherently but remembering it with my current reductionist mindset, that is about what I meant.

[–]callmebrothergnow posting as /u/callmesalticidae 1 point2 points  (0 children)

As /u/scruiser says, any sufficiently detailed simulation would feature self-aware agents; we might very well be the product of such a simulation.

[–]t3tsubo 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Granted platypuses are pretty weird.

[–]75thTrombone 3 points4 points  (1 child)

So, this chapter was gut-wrenching and also amazing.

The most disturbing and interesting part is the children. Children in hell for eternity. Are there any Judeo-Christian sects that allow this other than traditional/fundamentalist Catholicism? And does this mean anything significant for the rules of the universe, other than "Hell is really really really really really really really really really bad"?

[–]dmorg18 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm not sure Catholics are more likely to believe in "hell for children" than other denominations. Baptists care a lot more about baptism than non-baptists.

Roman Catholics invented the concept of limbo for unbaptized infants born with original sin.

[–]awesomeideasDai stiho, cousin. 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I'm surprised at the surprise about this chapter coming from this subreddit: we were already told Hell exists, obviously it's a bad place!

[–]ArgentStonecutterEmergency Mustelid Hologram 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Talking ship on the way.

Also, definitely creepier than Niven's.