ooooo summarize the one where tarl gets called bosk by a mean lady and it rewrites his brain chemistry
Oh, Telima! The Mean Domme! LMAO it's so funny.
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So Tarl is boating down the Big Fuckass River to Port Kar where a dude he wants to meet up with lives. Port Kar is a notorious hive of scum and villainy but has far fewer Han Solos to shoot douchebags in the face unfortunately.
We get like, ten pages of Tarl talking about how longbows are good at killing people, because duh of course they are. However, for some fuckass reason Goreans usually consider it a low class and disgraceful weapon, and Tarl is considered weird for liking it. I will give Norm credit for Tarl, raised an Englishman, having a favorable view of the longbow even in a society that views them as dishonorable. Reluctantly. Anyway.
He's in the Vosk delta, which is a vast labyrinth of swamp mostly covered in a reed called Rence, which is used to make paper and also parts are edible. It's inhabited by Rence Growers, who are actually kinda cool?
They make like, floating boat towns, and hunt and fish the marshes, and they take in fled slaves sometimes and let them live as free women. Like. They kinda rock actually?
Instead of any actual plot for a bit, we get like twenty pages here of Norm outlining Rence, how it grows, how it's harvested, how things are made from it, ect ect. This completely derails the story for a jarring length of time, and it will not be the last time such a thing happens. Norm loves his annoying and dumb infodumps.
Anyway, Tarl is in their territory, and happens upon a free woman fishing in the marshes. He is, predictably, what he thinks is polite but from her POV is intrusive and annoying, and her village takes him captive.
THEN we get to the wild shit.
A Sorp is a turtle, btw. And legit this is like, one of the 3 reasonable dudes we get on Gor. Ho Hak you're a king love you bro.
Champion shit.
ANYWAY.
This, in the hands of a better writer, could have been the moment when Tarl realized that, oh, shit, yeah okay in this situation he will act just like the women he's enslaved before who complied rather than be beaten or killed. It could have been a watershed moment.
It will not be.
ANYWAY, Tarl is taken slave, and Telima absolutely rearranges his whole brain with ONE SINGLE NIGHT OF BEING A MEAN DOMME.
He will go by this name FOR THE ENTIRE NEXT THIRTY BOOKS LIKE GIRL JESUS CHRIST.
He's chasing this high for the entire rest of the series. He never gets over this. Like holy shit. Fuck.
Anyway so some Port Kar slavers raid the place and take some people captive, whatever, there's not actually any plot in this book it's just here to get Tarl topped and get him to Port Kar. He fights the knowledge that he can be enslaved like he's enslaved women this whole time, and again somehow manages to do no actual growth or introspection. It's really incredible.
The only thing of note here is that there is a dude named Clitus, which is inexpressibly funny to me. I bet no one can find him.
Tarl becomes a Captain of Port Kar by killing one of the other Captains. There's like, a war with Cos and Tyros, which are also naval powers, and we are supposed to root for Port Kar but honestly I do not give a single shit. It's mostly so that Norm can jerk himself off to pictures of Greek war galleys and Charlton Heston as Ben Hur, tbh.
How TF Tarl knows without trying how to captain a war galley, you ask? And is somehow so good at it that all the other captains are in awe? Well because he's a Speshul Boy, of course.
Of course Tarl wins the war and shit, it's pointless, I don't give a single shit about Port Kar vs Cos Vs Tyros and I want Tarl dead.
Anyway, Tarl hooks up with Samos, but not the way Tarl would really like. Stupid PK vs Kurii plot shit is droned on about for like fifty pages. It's all stupid, the end.
SO. We open with Cow of House Cow, formerly known as Tarl Cabot. He got poisoned at the end of the last book and this paralyzed him. Should have upped the dose and killed him
(Bosk. He took the name Bosk because in book five he got taken slave by a lady who mean dommed him once and it fundamentally rewired his brain chemistry. He spends the rest of the books...all TWENTY SEVEN MORE OF THEM...going by the name Kind Mistress gave her pretty slave.)
ANYWAY. There's some dumb bullshit about a plot by the Kurii to conquer Gor. The Kurii are giant werewolf aliens who eat people, and I think Tarl bottomed for one once but that's a different book. They're the enemy of the Priest Kings.
Tarl then fixes the depression he's sunk into because he is Utterly Useless And Pathetic since his legs don't work. This somehow also fixes his legs? Who the fuck knows. He decides to go investigate. This whole baffling intro takes seventy pages.
Anyway.
This takes him to the north, where we find him in a Not!Catholic church. As in, it is exactly like a catholic church except it's to the PK's and not God. The head priest is the most overblown caricature of a greedy evil priest ever set to paper. Calling him one dimensional would be adding a dimension.
Naturally, the Shitty Terrible Vikings attack and loot the place.
Now, they don't attack at FIRST. Norm, thinking himself terribly clever, rips off a move from a saga written by actual good writers and steals the 'smuggle weapons into a church in a coffin with a viking leader who is totally dead you guys, we pinky promise' scheme. Our co hero with Tarl for the book, Ivar Forkbeard, is naturally not dead.
Ivar and his crew promptly loot the place, and also take slave all the pretty women they can find. Tarl, of course, impresses Ivar with his immense fighting ability (dodges a thrown spear) and Ivar decides to take him along with his crew, because Tarl has the thickest plot armor ever seen. They burn the church down and fuck off with their loot. We find out here that the Shit Vikings still follow their gods. Odin and Thor are the only two mentioned. They use a salute that would be very familiar to anyone who has watched WW2 documentaries or, more recently, Elon Musk.
On the longship, we learn a few things. One, that John Norman doesn't know shit about longships, because he gives them rigged sails. Two, that the shitty vikings eat snails raw out of the bilges, which seems like it would give you ten different diseases. Three, that they break slaves by tying them to the oars and dunking them into the north sea repeatedly for several hours, in a move that would totally not kill someone.
At Ivar's holdings, we see more slaves, and the new slaves are branded. Norm spends an immense amount of time and loving detail on this. Tarl is still having a great time. He happily feasts and drinks and rapes...his words, not mine...slaves left and right.
At one point, to discipline a woman, Ivar has her tied naked to a block of ice. For hours. This somehow doesn't kill her, and yet we are told women are weak.
They capture the daughter of a Jarl and enslave her, because she told Ivar to fuck off once and Norm is convinced that this means a woman is burning with a secret passion to literally lick a man's feet. Seriously. There's so much foot licking. In every book. It's in every book. Naturally she falls in love with Ivar and becomes his happy slave. This takes hundreds of pages and it's all horrible. All the poor women get names like Honey Cake, Pudding, ect.
Tarl and his new bestie and their slaves go to what is clearly an Althing, except worse. Ivar is an outlaw, see, and he wants to shove his dick in people's faces that he raised enough money to pay his fine but isn't gonna pay it anyway, because Real Men Don't Do Shit Like Participate Constructively In Society. Norm is INTENSELY culturally WASP, even though he claims to be an atheist. The whole rugged individualism he admires more than anything oozes like slime off most of these books. No, Ivar is clearly supposed to be someone we should aspire to be like, As Men, and Tarl has a huge crush on him I'm pretty sure. And he's a total piece of rat shit.
Ivar and Tarl win a bunch of contests because of course they do, and we see Free Women being unpleasant as Norm writes all free women. Namely, not taking any shit and talking back to men, which Norm calls 'haughty arrogance'. Ivar shows he has the cash to pay his fine, but refuses to. This amuses everyone enough though that they lift his sentence rather than just chucking him off a cliff for some reason.
The head of the Kurii on Gor comes to treat with the jarls. They all decide clearly this is a trick, because of course it is it's not subtle. The Kurii say that they have an army and will take Shitty Viking Land and also the south of Gor. The Shitty Vikings are like fuckit let's fight.
They do. It's somehow boring, in a way that vikings fighting space werewolves should actually find impossible to be. The vikings win by stampeding a herd of cattle over the space werewolves and also maybe some 800 year old legendary figure shows up?
Tarl, having reassured himself that he is a True Man, heads back to Port Kar.
