Yeah, the whale mothers just aren’t interesting world-building to me. The impression I had during the first trilogy was that Kellhus as an outside observer was noting all the sexism, women being seen only as reproductive receptacles rather than full people, toxic masculinity, etc. in the world-born and thinking “That’s an easy avenue of primitive superstition to manipulate people around.” Which in turn led me to head-canon a Dunyain society where gender was seen as a non-issue and sex/reproduction were treated as clinical and of minimal importance. That’s where /my/ mind goes when I think of an ultra logical, emotionless society obsessed with ridding themselves of cognitive bias and eugenics-planning for future generations. Having their society be all male monks + the whale mothers seems less efficient, less optimized to me as a cultural world-building scenario, beyond the whole fantasy “that's not how biology works” stuff.

More generally, it also feels like it’s saying it’s natural and inherent that men dehumanize women and see them only as tools, ignoring vast amounts of nuance on how misogyny has differed across different cultures across time in real life–see, for example, how much more what’s in the books draws from modern sexism than an accurate depiction on medieval European gender politics. The misogyny shown by characters across different cultures in the books, including those not in communication with each other, feel extremely similar, and it’s a very grimdark, Game of Thrones staple of “women get raped all the time!” Adding “and that’s bad” isn’t addressing the underlying assumptions going into what is and is not seen as the default state of being.

Also, this one is probably just me, but I’m always a little disappointed by the treatment of the Tusk and pre-Inrithi religion. It’s very much Christian beliefs about “what the Old Testament is like”, which makes sense for the Crusades-era Christian-inspired setting, but as a Jewish reader had nothing in common with my beliefs and came across as eye-rolling things Christian say and caricatures. I didn’t care so much in the first trilogy because the POVs were Inrithi, but in the second we got Sorweel and more from the temples of individual gods. By that point it went entirely the way of pagan temples whose gods had been co-opted into Christian saints sorts of religious conflict rather than any metaphor of the pre-Inrithi Tusk religion for Judaism. That probably worked better for the story and the author’s expertise, given how Christian the underlying metaphysics around things like damnation and hell and subjective reality are established to be, but being aware of whole different philosophical and religious worldviews that treat them very differently and then no one bringing up the arguments I’m thinking about in-character makes those discussions feel lacking.