Refresh my memory. Where did we learn about this 'Dis' part of the CK? Is that in a book, or speculation? I can dig the idea that the White is trapped with the forces of the Darkness in the Tower. Dark and White is in every level of the Tower.
Refresh my memory. Where did we learn about this 'Dis' part of the CK? Is that in a book, or speculation? I can dig the idea that the White is trapped with the forces of the Darkness in the Tower. Dark and White is in every level of the Tower.
Dis is mentioned in the later books but the idea that it is part of the Crimson King is speculation.
If anything I'd say the CK is part of Dis rather than the other way around. What actually is Dis isn't really clarified in the books. I'm not clear if it's just an arbitrary thing, the force of chaos and DIScordance, or if it's one of the Mid-world pantheon... or both.
The name Dis is mentioned in the 6th book. It's in the scene where Stephen King is talking about how the Crimson King tried to convert him into his pet writer. During this conversation King seems to substitute the title "Crimson King" with "Dis" at certain points.
I'm 100% convinced that there are two forms the the Crimson King. For one thing, Black House explicitely states this. For another, even the Dark Tower series itself suggests it. In book 5 we see a flashback of Father Callhan seeing the Red King looking down at him from the Dark Tower through Black 13 yet this is years before he killed everyone at Le Cassie Roi Russe and decamped for the Tower. The King in book 5 is in two places at once, the Tower and his Castle (exactly as outlined in Black House). Then theres that scene in book 7 which states the Crimson King is Gans crazy side. And when Patrick Danville is drawing the Red King he states that the King isn't entirely there.
For a more indepth explaination, backed up with quotes and evidence, see the spoiler tag in my first post in this thread (found on the first page).
so dis and los?
if the worlds gonna end then let's get it over with, i got shit to do
As this thread is, and has been, so character specific, I'm merging with the CK thread in The Villagers subforum
"It's his eyes, Roland thought. They were wide and terrible, the eyes of a dragon in human form" - Roland seeing the Crimson King for the first time.
"When the King comes and the Tower falls, sai, all such pretty things as yours will be broken. Then there will be darkness and nothing but the howl of Discordia and the cries of the can toi" - From Song of Susannah
Well, it strikes me that such is the point of this exercise: we all rate experiences (be they books, movies, vacations, sky-divimg, food, what-have-you) based upon our expectations. Higher marks go to those experiences that exceed the expectations, whilst lower marks go to those which fall flat. For DT7, the build up to the Crimson King, which started with INSOMNIA, exceeded the actual manifestation of what was supposed to be the ultimate villain. And in this respect, I refer back to the movie BROADCAST NEWS where Aaron, in describing the Devil, asks (somewhat rhetorically): How will the Devil show himself? With a tail, and horns, and fangs? Surely not. The Devil will appear as a nice guy -- a friend, who only will ask you to compromise your values just a little bit. And then a little more. And then more still.
That, I guess, is what I was expecting with the Crimson King: a seducer, who was well-versed and familiar in the inherently fragile nature of humanity, and who would (quietly, but gleefully) exploit it.
Now, I agree that having a dead, insane king at the center of the universe is a frightening proposition. That proposition, however, doesn't convey the inherent evil that I was looking for: i.e., the ultimate antithesis to (borrowing King's terminology) "the White."
but what if what we have exceeds our expectations, so to speak, sideways?
I mean, there is a quantitative and qualitative aspects to expectation. We expect something to be awesome, and it isn't; or we expect it to be average, and it's awesome - this is the quantitative aspect, and very much the experience I had with the whole of, say, Dr.Sleep and Cell respectively.
The qualitative aspect in its mild form is, we expected it to be round, and it is square. This can be more or less reduced to previous case, because we can argue that round is more appropriate and give some valid arguments in favor of this opinion.
In its pure form it is: we expected it to be round, and it is pink.
(sorry I have to hurry to work now, I didn't address all of your post and haven't developed what I wanted to say, but you see the poiint! please do go on, God knows bears missed such discussions!!!)
Ask not what bears can do for you, but what you can do for bears. (razz)
When one is in agreement with bears one is always correct. (mae)
bears are back!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
My point is two-fold. First, while bat-shit crazy (as was presented by the Crimson King in DT7) is scary, it is not necessarily evil. Sure, he's lobbing hand-grenades like Tom Seaver, but he's irrational, unthinking and -- thus -- somewhat random. Which brings me to the second part: that is not how SK initially set up the Crimson King. He first appears in INSOMNIA. Specifically, he appears to young Patrick Danville in dreams. Now, someone who can do that is focused, purposeful, and single-minded to a goal. In a word: cognitive. In INSOMNIA, the Crimson King has an agenda. We don't know what it is, or why he inhabits Danville's dreams, but we surmise that there is a reason and goal for doing so. And it is because of that implicit understanding, that Patrick Danville can not die, regardless of the price. That is (for me) the whole point of INSOMNIA: to present that all matters dealing with The Dark Tower are conscious and purposeful, and that there are two immense forces (the White and the Dark) that are locked in a struggle and contest for ultmate control. Indeed, when Ralph Roberts strikes his deal with Clotho and Lachesis to substitute his own life for that of Natalie Deepneau, Ralph senses great cosmic wheels -- at levels far higher than his plane of existence -- turning and rebalancing as his proposal is considered and -- ultimately -- accepted.
That is the stage (and the expectation) King sets in INSOMNIA, which he really does nowhere else in any of the DT novels: i.e., that, while "all things serve the Beam," there is a conscious, calculating, and focused purpose in why things happen. If nothing else, Ronald Deschain is purposeful in everything he does, and everything he does is focused on the singular goal of attaining the Tower. The "yin" to his "yang" is the Crimson King, who is . . . what? . . . a gibbering, incoherent primate with a wicked fastfall? That's not how he was established when he first made the scene in INSOMNIA, which is why to me his final climactic appearance was a let down.
Wow. Well stated, I agree with just about everything you said. I haven't thought about the CK aspect of the story in quite some time but now that the memory has been rekindled; yes, he was a massive disappointment as both a character and as the anti thesis to 'The White'.
the four posts above are copied from a CRA thread
Ask not what bears can do for you, but what you can do for bears. (razz)
When one is in agreement with bears one is always correct. (mae)
bears are back!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Andrew: this is exactly why I think CK was a perfect adversary, and the exact opposite to everything Roland stands for
They are not yin/yang, because they do not represent the sides of a unity, the heads and tails of one coin, nothing like that. Their difference is way too essential. It is order versus chaos, and a random insane undead King is the epitome of chaos. It's not even good vs. evil - that is why, as you correctly said, we can hardly say CK is evil. Evil implies a design; it also implies knowledge of good; it thrives on good and is, thus, its counterpart. Random isn't counterpart of anything, not even of order; an order regroups or crumbles and falls, and still the crumbled parts are vestiges of past order - random doesn't know even its basic rudiments, because its principle is random (sorry for the tautology).
I agree, however, that it's not how CK was presented to us in other, earlier books. I think it's because human mind (the author's in this case) didn't quite grasp the concept of the absolute adversary, - one that is beyond not only good or evil, but also the whole scheme of things, - and tried to rationalize his intents and behavior.
Ask not what bears can do for you, but what you can do for bears. (razz)
When one is in agreement with bears one is always correct. (mae)
bears are back!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I have to admit that I'm at a severe disadvantage in this debate because 1) I read DTVII for the first and only time in 2004 and the constant battering of time has eroded most of its contents from my memory, and 2) what little I do manage to remember is filtered across time by my 18 year old self (how old I was when I read it) and as such some of the heavier philosophical implications went right over my head.
Having said that, wasn't it stated explicitly somewhere in the series that CK was the personification of evil?
even if it was - it was said by someone. The book is outstandingly complex (sometimes, maybe, independently from the author's intentions). It may have been said, for example, by Roland, whose mind is rather simple and straightforward, and totally influenced by the lore of his land(s) and time(s), which he accepts uncritically (like, for example, the concept of ka).
Ask not what bears can do for you, but what you can do for bears. (razz)
When one is in agreement with bears one is always correct. (mae)
bears are back!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I risk being pedantic here. However, fiction -- in my opinion -- is a machine: a novel (or a series of novels) establishes rules, defines its own logic, and moves within them. When there are changes to the logic or infrastructure to a novel, the changes themselves must be explainable within the confines of the novel's system. King, in fact, recognizes this, and I come to realize that this discussion is akin to the argument between Annie Wilkes and Paul Sheldon in MISERY. Recall: Sheldon kills off Misery Chastain in "Misery's Child" and is forced by Annie The-Number-One-Fan to bring Misery back. So, he half-heartedly writes "Misery's Return." Wilkes reads it, and tells Sheldon that he's totally screwed it up, because there is a plot line disconnect between Misery's death and her resurrection. Simply put, the "machine" of the novel broke down because of a continuity error.
That was how I felt about the CK. We were provided foreshadowing in INSOMNIA as to what to expect (via the omnicient third-person narrative style) and were presented with something entirely different in DT7. And I remember thinking, as I was reading, "Is this the guy that we all were supposed to be afraid of?" That the DT7 CK bore no resemblance to what had been foreshadowed shocked me out of the narrative.
And I will agree, that Chaos is the pure opposite of Order. But Chaos is not necessarily the opposite of White; nor, is Order necessarily White. And "White" is what the DT series is about. Indeed, the symbolism of Christianity saturates much of the storyline. Roland, a descendent of Arthur the Eld, is a knight on a quest. When he receives the cross of the Jesus-man, he takes on the role of Perceval and his quest becomes THE Quest -- except it is the Tower he seeks, not the Holy Grail. In that respect, one looks for the opposite of the knight-errant: the antithesis of "good". And as Jean observes, evil has "design"; evil has "knowledge"; and evil has an appetite. Chaos, on the other hand, is mindless and random.
(And even though my thoughts in this respect follow those of Annie Wilkes, I'm really not like her at all. Really.)
Yes, Annie Wilkes was the best critic. But the adventures of Misery Chastain wasn't the best literature. It was exactly the kind of literature Wilkes was the best critic for.
Whenever we have to do with something that transcends the boundaries of genre - or, rather, with anything that is really good - I believe we could use a little humility, like, asking ourselves: what if the author did exactly what he intended to do? What if what he did is better - or just different - than what I had in mind? Then we step inside the novel, accept the rules the author imposed, whether or not we agree with them or deem them consistent, and as a reward may get a novel entirely different from what we thought it was, and a whole lot of revelations.
I am all for inner logic of a piece of literature. I am very sensitive to anything that sounds false (like the totally implausible intrigue of The Eyes of the Dragon). The question is, what exactly does or doesn't sound false, and why.
My opinion (I apologize to everyone who've read it many times before over these years) is that what King did (especially, but not only) in the Dark Tower is greater than logic and better than consistency.
I am arguing that TDT surpasses fiction. I am arguing that it was exactly as described in Song of Susannah: story dictated by the Tower and creating the Tower at the same time. I have to assume, consequently, that the material surpassed the author's ability to describe it, just for the simple reason that it transcended human experience and the joint experience of a single separate universe.
Hence the inconsistencies. Hence the bad logic. The author is trying to fit into his head, and then convey to us through little black letters on a sheet of paper, that which can't be imagined or described.
I also believe that this is exactly what he consistently does in his best works. That is why, first, the "explanations" he gives are so pathetic, comparing to the picture we see (we can't really believe that
It
and next, it makes him an unreliable narrator. We can't go by what he explicitly "said"; only by his visions. He describes the events honestly, as he sees them; whether he can draw the right conclusions is dubious.
I'll address the question why I firmly believe the gunslingers usurped the idea of "white" later (also, when I have found the proper thread)
Ask not what bears can do for you, but what you can do for bears. (razz)
When one is in agreement with bears one is always correct. (mae)
bears are back!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It might be worth pointing out that the Crimson King was a seducer at various points in the series. Even in DT7, where his mindset is arguably at it's most unhinged, the Red King lulls Patrick to sleep and tries to reason with Roland. The Eye of the King, looking out from Black 13, also whispers to and manipulates the minds of people nearby. The Red King's more intelligent, exploitative side of his character can also be found in the prequel comics.
I would have to disagree with various points here. Firstly, the King's random side was well known from the off. In Insomnia, the Red King is explicitly portrayed as the head of the Random side of cosmological things. Likewise the Red King's insanity was brought up at least as early as Black House (by Parkus), if not before.My point is two-fold. First, while bat-shit crazy (as was presented by the Crimson King in DT7) is scary, it is not necessarily evil. Sure, he's lobbing hand-grenades like Tom Seaver, but he's irrational, unthinking and -- thus -- somewhat random. Which brings me to the second part: that is not how SK initially set up the Crimson King. He first appears in INSOMNIA. Specifically, he appears to young Patrick Danville in dreams. Now, someone who can do that is focused, purposeful, and single-minded to a goal. In a word: cognitive. In INSOMNIA, the Crimson King has an agenda. We don't know what it is, or why he inhabits Danville's dreams, but we surmise that there is a reason and goal for doing so. And it is because of that implicit understanding, that Patrick Danville can not die, regardless of the price. That is (for me) the whole point of INSOMNIA: to present that all matters dealing with The Dark Tower are conscious and purposeful, and that there are two immense forces (the White and the Dark) that are locked in a struggle and contest for ultmate control. Indeed, when Ralph Roberts strikes his deal with Clotho and Lachesis to substitute his own life for that of Natalie Deepneau, Ralph senses great cosmic wheels -- at levels far higher than his plane of existence -- turning and rebalancing as his proposal is considered and -- ultimately -- accepted.
That is the stage (and the expectation) King sets in INSOMNIA, which he really does nowhere else in any of the DT novels: i.e., that, while "all things serve the Beam," there is a conscious, calculating, and focused purpose in why things happen. If nothing else, Ronald Deschain is purposeful in everything he does, and everything he does is focused on the singular goal of attaining the Tower. The "yin" to his "yang" is the Crimson King, who is . . . what? . . . a gibbering, incoherent primate with a wicked fastfall? That's not how he was established when he first made the scene in INSOMNIA, which is why to me his final climactic appearance was a let down.
In fact, I've just remembered that it was alluded to in Insomnia by Dor - "Random is crazy. Purpose is sane." So right from the get go we should expect a certain degree of insanity from a being that personifies the Random.
Now, just because the Red King is insane/Random doesn't mean he's not evil nor that he's an unthinking creature. It's pretty obvious he is. After all, it's his plan (thousands of years in the making, if not longer) to destroy the Tower via the Beams. It's the King who sets the anti-ka in motion. It's the King who sent Marten and Farson to destroy the gunslingers/Affiliation. It's the King who tries to convert Stephen King into writing for him. Etc.
You've also got to remember that by the time Roland encounters the Red King at the Tower, all of the Crimson King's plans have been foiled by this point. All his planning has come to naught, which is stated to be a contributing factor for his mind state at this time. The King was already defeated before Roland got to him.
To me, the foreshadowing of the Crimson King is quite good actually.I risk being pedantic here. However, fiction -- in my opinion -- is a machine: a novel (or a series of novels) establishes rules, defines its own logic, and moves within them. When there are changes to the logic or infrastructure to a novel, the changes themselves must be explainable within the confines of the novel's system. King, in fact, recognizes this, and I come to realize that this discussion is akin to the argument between Annie Wilkes and Paul Sheldon in MISERY. Recall: Sheldon kills off Misery Chastain in "Misery's Child" and is forced by Annie The-Number-One-Fan to bring Misery back. So, he half-heartedly writes "Misery's Return." Wilkes reads it, and tells Sheldon that he's totally screwed it up, because there is a plot line disconnect between Misery's death and her resurrection. Simply put, the "machine" of the novel broke down because of a continuity error.
That was how I felt about the CK. We were provided foreshadowing in INSOMNIA as to what to expect (via the omnicient third-person narrative style) and were presented with something entirely different in DT7. And I remember thinking, as I was reading, "Is this the guy that we all were supposed to be afraid of?" That the DT7 CK bore no resemblance to what had been foreshadowed shocked me out of the narrative.
And I will agree, that Chaos is the pure opposite of Order. But Chaos is not necessarily the opposite of White; nor, is Order necessarily White. And "White" is what the DT series is about. Indeed, the symbolism of Christianity saturates much of the storyline. Roland, a descendent of Arthur the Eld, is a knight on a quest. When he receives the cross of the Jesus-man, he takes on the role of Perceval and his quest becomes THE Quest -- except it is the Tower he seeks, not the Holy Grail. In that respect, one looks for the opposite of the knight-errant: the antithesis of "good". And as Jean observes, evil has "design"; evil has "knowledge"; and evil has an appetite. Chaos, on the other hand, is mindless and random.
(And even though my thoughts in this respect follow those of Annie Wilkes, I'm really not like her at all. Really.)
Firstly in Insomnia we are treated to a god-like entity and it's place in cosmological terms. We learn that it's this entity that Roland opposes. Then in Black House we learn that it has two manifestations - it's true form locked in a prison near the top of the Tower and it's second manifestation at the Court and Castle of the King. This goes some way to foreshadowing how Roland may defeat it - Roland will never face it's true form but may confront this second manifestation (Stephen King foreshadowing a way how Roland can defeat a god by basically having him defeat it's avatar).
By this point as well the Red King's insanity is also being foreshadowed, by the Crimson King being head guy of the Random and by Parkus' belief that the Red King is probably insane.
In DT3 the Beast-like form of the Crimson King Eddie sees in his dream is likened to a cancer of creation. In DT7 Patrick erases Susannah's cancerous sore from her face, which is nice foreshadowing for the King's defeat.
Again, the Red King's worsening insanity is constantly alluded to throughout the last DT book. This includes the scene where we learn that the Crimson King knows he's lost and kills all his followers. For me, by this point, I was expecting a somewhat unhinged Red King. And I know some people rolled their eyes at it and thought it silly, but when I first read that first scream I did get a little chill.
why did i read this. legit spolied it ahah
Even if it's an interesting decision in certain ways, I do find the final battle to be a huge letdown, compared to the expectations set forth by The (original) Gunslinger. It didn't need to be a bang-bang action battle, a metaphysical psycho-battle would have worked, but no, sadly. Just a silly old man throwin' sneetches.
28 in 23 (?)!!!!
63 in '23!!!!!!!!!!
My Collection: https://www.thedarktower.org/palaver...ion-Merlin1958
The Houston Astros cheated Major League Baseball from 2017-18!!!! Is that how we teach our kids to play the game now?????
Plus he was an old fucker.
All that's left of what we were is what we have become.
28 in 23 (?)!!!!
63 in '23!!!!!!!!!!
My Collection: https://www.thedarktower.org/palaver...ion-Merlin1958
The Houston Astros cheated Major League Baseball from 2017-18!!!! Is that how we teach our kids to play the game now?????
Yes. There where thoseof uswho waited 25+ years for the end and I suspect seeing seeing SK going doing down like that was kind of a relief for the "older" readers like Bill.
But we *cough/younger/cough* readers wanted blood!
All that's left of what we were is what we have become.
It was a ridiculously disappointing ending.
On Roland going up against a deity like opponent - King could have neutered the CK's powers a bit with the explanation that being so close to the Tower for so long had hindered his abilities. A metaphysical battle as mentioned by the user^ above would have worked wonderfully too.
Pretty much anything but what we got. I'm hoping the films rectify that.