Yes, people are discontented with the bad storytelling, but it doesn't necessarily mean that if you give them good stories, they're going to live good lives.

The proof in the pudding is that if you listen to all these people, people like the critical drinker and his ilk that have been critiquing the new Lord of the Rings series, even before they managed to see it, their reference point or their relationship with the show is almost one of

religious awe. For them, the experience of the story has become akin to a religious experience.

And so when it's wrong, they react to it not as frustrated artists, but as people who

walked into a heretical church. Right.

And I'm saying this not to make fun of them.

I understand what's going on, I think.

And it's a function of where we are in this civilization.

It's a function of the decadence of Western Christendom and the level that it is.

This is Jonathan Peugeot.

Welcome to the symbolic world. Thank you. So hello, everyone. I'm really excited to be back with Nicholas Kotar, for those who follow the channel,

you've seen him a few times, having discussions about all kinds of things. He is a writer himself.

He just published a novella called The Son of the Deathless in his

Raven Son series. But we're also going to talk about this particular culture moment of what

kind of stories we can tell in the strange times that we are living. So Nicholas, first of all,

congratulations on the new book. Thank you. It's the pandemic killed storytelling for me, or at least the act of storytelling. So this is the first thing I've written in, first long thing I've written in almost two years. Yeah. Well, the idea people seem to think that they said, you're locked in your house. You know, this is a good time to do, but not always because it was such an

oppressive, we're in such an oppressive state. It's not easy to get those creative juices

flowing, let's say. No, I mean, creative juices don't come out of a vacuum. They come out of,

out of a craft, a ritual. When the ritual is destroyed, because everything about your life is no

longer ritualized and you're stuck in this massive, I mean, it's the doom, right? It's just

around you all the time and you can't hide from it. And that's not conducive. So no, yeah,

it didn't help. And so, yeah, tell us, first of all, maybe tell us a little bit about what the premise of this new novella is.

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