u/PeaceBeUntoEarth

This is the best place I know of to try to have a discussion about this, so please be respectful and just ignore this post if you just disliked TRF or its ending specifically and have nothing to say except "I didn't like it".

I understand a lot of people didn't like it, OK, good for you.

I've gotten quite a few replies on a previous post however from people who did love it, so I know you are out there and I'm hoping to hear from those people.

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To me, the best part of the ending was how many mysteries and questions it left open ended and up to the reader's imagination. It's left me replaying through the ending chapters in my head for weeks since finishing it, in a (good) way no other book I've read ever has. That said, I think it would be fun to hear some other people's speculations on what potential answers to some of those questions might be.

Feel free to share any thoughts or speculations, or responses to mine below.

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Having read a few discussions of this, I haven't seen any mention anywhere of the idea that the alkahest is literally the material of the subtle knife and the alethiometer needle, which is strange to me. To me this connection seems obvious and clearly intended by Pullman. Of course we're also supposed to understand that "nothing is just what it is", but still.

When the voices in the Blue Hotel tell Lyra that the alkahest destroys everything, the immediate following scene is her discovering that the needle can cut through anything. My speculation is that the angels were correct/truthful that cutting openings between worlds creates spectres/mental illnesses, and furthermore that the entities "from between the good numbers" (hinting that they're from a bad place), may in fact be spectres.

The idea that the doorways are "good" is supported by the witches and gryphons saying that the air has been turning bad as they have been being "destroyed", but the witches also say that the winds have been changing for the worse for a much longer time... That makes no sense if the doorways are the source of the good air. It does make sense if doorways are the source of bad air, and they have been being created over thousands of years, and if the explosions are in fact creating hundreds of tiny doorways, letting hundreds of spectres into the world, where before there was only one.

This all fits perfectly with the HDM trilogy; rather than creating a contradiction and undermining the original trilogy, the metaphysics remains consistent. From HDM we have vague explanations that dust and angels can pass between worlds without needing doorways; if this is true, Lyra's hypothesis that the doorways are needed for dust to flow to fuel imaginations etc. falls flat.

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Another unanswered question at the end of TRF regards what is going on with the ailment afflicting Dr. Strauss, with the people with dead or mostly dead daemons, including the lady who took over Mustafa Bey's business, etc.

One thing that seems apparent is that what happened to Strauss has nothing to do with having traveled there specifically. Strauss's daemon is still alive, despite his illness, while people in the rose world seem physically fine even though their daemons are dead. Also, there are people in Lyra's world afflicted with the same "dying daemon" disease without necessarily having spent time in any other worlds.

That tells me two separate things are happening. Strauss may have been trying to warn people about the daemon death disease, he may have believed it was coming from the rose world like a plague, but that wasn't what was wrong with him. What was wrong with him IMHO is that it matches perfectly with being attacked by a spectre directly.

The daemon death disease, on the other hand, to me is not the direct result of spectre attack. It's also not the result of exactly what happened to Lyra and others whose daemons ran away or who ran away from their daemons, those daemons didn't die, so it's something else.

To me the most significant scene to understanding this is when Dilyara shows Pan that dust won't go near the dead daemon. So the question is, for afflicted people whose daemons aren't quite dead yet, does dust also struggle to go near those daemons? Or does dust only have an aversion to fully dead daemons? My theory is that the disease has to with the daemons themselves, not so much the people, though technically they're the same person.

My theory is that dust does avoid afflicted daemons that are only "infected"/partly dead - the disease is defined by dust avoiding daemons. The reason their people are ignoring them is that the connection is already cut off. So where does it come from?

Well imagine the reverse of Lyra's situation. Imagine if the daemon loses its imagination, imagine if the daemon stops believing in itself... I think that's what's going on with this "disease". That's what seems heavily implied when Pan speaks with the daemons at the research facility.

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I think I'll stop there for now, I have other thoughts and ideas but I'm really curious what people might have to say about my interpretation of the story or their own versions of what was meant.

Thanks to anyone who read this far respectfully, hope to get replies from people who actually want to deal with the material and talk about what Pullman may have meant/intended with the story.

I am a new visitor/member and I absolutely LOVED these books the second trilogy especially, read all 3 in the last week. I had some questions about what people thought was being alluded to since it's obviously a very philosophical series/book, but I wanted to clarify the rules and how I'm supposed to nomenclate things. I wanted to make a post asking about what people thought about the ending of the sixth book and some of the things going on there, but I want to make sure I would do the spoiler tagging correctly.

One thing I think doesn't really give any spoilers but was the main thrust of my question, answers can give the proper spoiler tags, is what do people think of Lyra's answer to the mystery presented to the reader at the end? Is it what it's presented as, seen through her eyes? Or are we to see it through the perspective of M., as clearly alluded to in at least one line of the final chapters? That it's somehow more maturely complicated?

And what about the literal meaning? There is obviously one thing in the story literally doing the thing that is being literally described, it is not a secret, though its origins are in every world.

Are they the same? Is this some allusion to the trinity, or something different? I'd love to go into more detail about my own thoughts but I don't want to break the rules and get on the wrong side of the CCD... : )

Much love to all.

Absolutely absurd. I didn't have a strong opinion on the DA race until now that it's too late, now I have less than zero respect for Sartoris.

The current law ABSOLUTELY covers this as Gross SA.

17-A 253.2.M ABSOLUTELY covers this. Throwing semen on someone is a sexual act without consent.

It may be the lowest level of SA as a class C crime, but it is still very clearly SA.

Sartoris go to hell. We fucked up electing you.

If you were a person whose sister asked you to go to a wedding with a full on Trump apologist, how would you react? I want to do right by my sister and my family, but also, this guy is an absolute shitbag (my uncle, initials M.G. out of southern Maine). What should I do?

So I have a question about labor law in Maine. My understanding of the tip sharing law is that only people who "regularly and customarily" receive tips can be part of any tip pool.

I hope to remain anonymous with this post and just have this sorted out in a sensible way by adults, I want to understand what the law truly means.

I thought that this law means that only people who regularly and customarily receive tips from customers can be part of a tip pool, with it being clear to the customers who the tips are going to.

I thought that this law was designed to prevent employers taking advantage of servers who are on the tipped minimum (AKA the restaurant is using the tip credit), taking from their tips to supplement BOH wages.

Now I may be wrong, and that's where I hope for some input from some informed lawyers. Does the law actually mean that anyone who is "regularly and customarily" receiving tips from their employer as part of their wages is OK to receive that tip income, because it is a regular part of the pay structure at the restaurant?

I personally started working at a restaurant recently where they are doing the tip share thing with me personally, and I don't want to overreact if it's not illegal, but regardless personally I just don't like it. I'd prefer to just be payed a living wage for my hours worked in the first place.

As a person who has in the past had interactions with the MBOL and state legislatures surrounding this issue and have gotten conflicting answers, and who has had fights with other restaurants in the past regarding these issues, I want to clarify this because I don't want to be hypocritical working where I do now when I was upset with other restaurants for doing the same thing in the past.

Thanks for any help or explanation anyone can give.

What am I missing?

The law is clearly established that in order to have probable cause to initiate the traffic stop, they had to know that the specific person they were targeting (who did have a valid immediate removal order or whatever you call it) was in the car.

They didn't have that, so the whole traffic stop was illegal, no?

And they knew it, and qualified immunity shouldn't cover it, because this is clearly established.

So unless they want to claim mistaken identity which isn't anything I've heard yet, then the entire thing is a criminal enterprise to commit wanton kidnappings on random people just because they're leaving a building in a car.

As such, everyone provably involved in the criminal enterprise is guilty of murder by normal criminal justice laws, correct? The classic example being the getaway driver when a store clerk is murdered in a robbery, who still gets charged with murder as an accessory to the crime.

Unless they are claiming mistaken identity, which maybe they will, why is this not an open and shut case that everyone involved is a murderer?

If they are just admitting that they just attempted to kidnap and falsely imprison any random (ethnic) person who left the property in a car, how is that not an open and shut case that all of these people conspired to commit a crime, in the process of which, someone got murdered, so they should all get charged with murder?

Bunch of teenage idiots yelling in the middle of the night at the Washington Ave. 7/11 for like 30 minutes before the good dude working there told them to get the hell out of there. It's just really sad to see people raised this wrong.

Just put up the temporary rubber/plastic stuff. It's ridiculous. Or else put it back to a traffic light.

I was crossing in the crosswalk when you rolled right through the stop sign staring at your phone at at least 15 mph. I could have reached out and touched your car as you drove through the intersection without looking at the road or stopping for the stop sign at all.

You're lucky you didn't cause an accident or kill a pedestrian and you have no business behind the wheel.

The license plate was something similar to 202K0K, slate grey Mini Cooper. Anyone who knows this woman should strongly encourage her to quit driving or get some kind of treatment for screen addiction before she kills someone.

I thought this energy level input might help... Love to everyone around here trying to find the right way to get tf up out of this hellhole.

When the other galaxy with Thrawn comes back to the first galaxy, what will happen with the space divergence?

There will be the story in the second galaxy, with the beta Baylan going after whatever the f in the other galaxy, which is the lame story, nobody cares even though it could be all about Abeloth the mother goddess... lame...

But of course Thrawn is the smartest so it will be awesome whatever happens because he's gonna be super smart but then in the end somehow a jedi is gonna be so much love that good prevails... awesome...

I love Star Wars so much.

Just thought this might be a safe space to ask a question, where I am a dabbler in many fields yet expert in none.

What is the Zizekian perspective on welfare and policies around welfare?

I just thought it was interesting, I only recently learned about the Dibao system in China.

I know Zizek has praised (in some ways) the Chinese system, and I'm curious if there are perspectives on welfare specifically.

So I personally can see this multiple ways, it's clear the Dibao system stigmatizes poverty in some ways, but yet it provides basics for everyone who will suffer the indignation basically no matter what (although I'm sure there are some gaps).

There are various ways of looking at the conversation around welfare, actually existing communism, etc., and I'm just curious for some intelligent takes on what makes sense.

Thanks in advance!