“‘What have they done to me, Fitz? Gods, what have they done to you, to mark you so? What has become of me, that I did not know you though I carried you in my arms?’ His cool fingers moved tentatively down my face, tracing the scar and the broken nose. He leaned down suddenly to rest his brow against mine. ‘When I recall how beautiful you were,’ he whispered brokenly, and then fell silent. The warm drip of his tears against my face felt scalding.”
I’m frurstrated at the ROTE fandom’s frustration regarding the absence of a sexual component to the Fitz/Fool relationship.
Whenever Fitz puts into words what Beloved is to him, he could not be any clearer - he loves him with all that he is, his entire life and canonical fate is clearly wrapped around the Fool’s, they are inseperable in a way that he is only with one other person, and that’s Nighteyes.
However, he very much does not want to bang him (nor does he want to bang Nighteyes!), even when he finds out that the fool presents as female in other parts of the world because he simply is not attracted to him that way, even though he would die for him, live for him, they have a child together, and he very clearly is the love of his life. They are inseperable even in the very end, beyond their mortal existence.
How much closer can you get to a person and why do people read all of that and still think that things would just be better if they had banged at some point?
We’ve got this beautiful, complex, genderbending masterpiece of a character and he’s in love with his childhood friend and it’s so inconceivable to everyone that said childhood friend can place such value on a friendship though Fitz is not sexually attracted to the Fool? Some relationships just are THAT important without sex being involved. It’s extremely tragic that this relationship is so mismatched in its expectations, but such things do happen.
It’s just so frustrating to always have this expectation that for any relationship to be considered valid and close, sex must occur, ESPECIALLY in this one, because there is ALL of these other things going on.
<3
OP is absolutely right and even Robin Hobb said something along these lines.
But I think some of the frustation from the fans comes from a different place, not just from placing weight on the sex component: parts for the Tawny Man trilogy can be easily read in a way that Fitz is attracted to the Fool and he is definitely jealous of the Fool’s potential bedpartners. Fitz lies all the time, especially to himself, so it’s easy to be skeptical when he says he wouldn’t sleep with the Fool. I’m not arguing that it should have happened tho. Their relationship is the most beautiful and heartbreaking lovestory I’ve ever read, and sex is not needed for this.
I reread Assasin’s Fate recently and got inspiration to draw Fitz and the Fool (and Nighteyes) again. That’s a pretty young looking Fool though. I guess it’s kinda their ideal selves.
Okay so I’ve been thinking a lot about queerbaiting and - consequently - Realm of the Elderlings in that context. I knew while reading it that some people would consider it queerbaiting, and I couldn’t quite articulate why I wholeheartedly believed it wasn’t. But since I half-wake several times a night thinking about RotE because my brain is a fucking nightmare I woke up this morning with a bit of an epiphany.
Now obviously you can disagree with this, but here’s the biggest reason why I personally don’t see Fitz/Fool as queerbaiting: because if the Fool was femme-presenting, the story wouldn’t have been any different.
Imagine that Fitz had grown up thinking that the Fool was a girl. Every single thing the same, except Fitz grows up assuming that this friend of his is female. Apart from the accusatory stuff about his “unnatural” relationship with Lord Golden, nothing would be different. They still would have the same dynamic because the Fool was never defined by masculinity.
Now, I hear you saying, “But all those cold nights in the mountains! All those cuddles, and hand-holding and declarations of love! If the Fool was a woman, that would have gone further.”
But would it? I emphatically believe not. Not once does Fitz think, “Well gee, if only the Fool were a woman we could be together.” Nor does he think, “Well maybe if I had met Amber first…” Because it’s not about that. Also, we see evidence that Fitz can have a physically affectionate friendship with a woman while still having no doubts at all that it’s totally platonic. He and Kettricken share a bed and even kiss on the lips and it is NEVER portrayed as anything more than friendly.
“But it’s different with the Fool! The Fool is canonically in love with Fitz, and there is romantic tension between them.” I’m not arguing that at all. Fitz loves the Fool with all his lil heart and that’s what is so fucking devastating. Because he loves him more than anything, but he can’t give himself to him. And I’m not talking about sexually.
Here’s the thing: Fitz’s story - when considering the full scope of it including the ending - is basically a nine-book-long metaphor for the fear of vulnerability and then the beauty of letting people in fully. Fitz was not incapable of embracing the Fool’s love for him because he was too straight. He was too fucking scared. He didn’t know what to do with a love that really truly accepted him for who he was. For all he was, and not just parts of it. Male or not, do you think he would have paid any romantic attention to the Fool when he could go off chasing Molly Redskirts instead? Fitz justified his lying to Molly in a myriad of ways, but those lies were just extensions of the ones he told himself. He wanted - even in adulthood - to be with someone whose idea of him he could shape. The Fool always saw Fitz far too clearly; that in itself made Fitz uncomfortable, but to be truly seen and still loved fiercely? That was too much.
And speaking of “too much,” the Skill-link stuff is also a metaphor for the love and deep knowing that Fitz cannot face. Was it really “too much” or was it just too much for Fitz? The way he describes it leads you to think it’s dangerous, as if they would both lose themselves if they explored that link. So then why wasn’t the Fool afraid? The Fool knew they still had work to do. He wasn’t willing right there and then to give up his physical form and merge with Fitz in the Skill river. He wasn’t afraid because that’s not what was going to happen. I think all that was going to happen was that Fitz was going to have to feel the depth of the Fool’s unwavering love and acceptance, and that was too much.
This is why the ending is fucking beautiful. It’s the culmination of nine books’ worth of build-up - but is it plot? Action? Intrigue? No. It’s all character. Like holy shit. The ending is literally just our protagonist finally allowing himself to be known, to be loved, and to return that knowing and loving just as freely. No limits. Fuck I’m crying.
Don’t get me wrong, I was internally screaming at Fitz to just fucking kiss the Fool already the entire series. A part of me really wanted them to be together, but the storyteller in me knew it would never happen. And NOT because they were two males, but because it just wouldn’t have been right. The entire story would have had to change around them for them to be together. As devastating as it is, I’m much more satisfied with a haunting, symbolic ending than I would have been with a blatantly happy one. Their relationship was beautiful, intense, profound and… Indefinable. And I truly believe that defining it in any way would have undone so much of the intricate weaving that made us love them so much in the first place. Even Fitz’s own question of “what were we” goes unanswered. There is no answer. We don’t have a word for it. Lovers? Friends? Soulmates? It doesn’t do it justice.
No matter the Fool’s gender, a romance between Fitz and the Fool would have cheapened if not totally destroyed the larger meaning of the story. It would have made Fitz… Not Fitz. His inability to believe himself loved is so integral to his character. He could only surrender to it when he had literally nothing left to lose.
*crying intermission - damn you Hobb you brilliant bastard*
So. What it comes down to really is that where other authors cheapen their stories by dangling “gay moments” that never amount to anything for the sake of attempting to sate both queer and conservative audiences, Hobb stayed true to the real story the entire way through. The moments between Fitz and the Fool we love so much were not for us, the readers. They were for them, the characters. And that makes all the difference.
I know that when I inevitably read this series over and over, the Fitz/Fool scenes that tugged at my heart the first time will be no less powerful for knowing it never goes further (sexually or romantically). Those scenes don’t lose their meaning because they don’t lead to sex. An issue I have in general is the idea that romantic relationships are somehow superior to platonic or familial ones. And yes, I will continue to joke about Fitz “No-Homo” Farseer because his self-deception is extreme and hilarious and yes, a character flaw. But a believable and integral one. When I make those jokes I’m not implying that Robin should not have written him that way. I’m just ripping on Fitz because he’s a beautiful, precious little idiot.
This is - as I said - open for debate. This is just where I stand on the issue and I’m genuinely curious as to what other people think about this.
Agreed.
Reading their relationship at a very superficial level does it a great disservice. Equating a lack of physical romantic expression to a lack of gratification in a loving relationship that has spanned decades despite innumerable harsh obstacles is a mediocre conclusion to draw.
I agree but I also don’t?
So I think you’re absolutely correct about that analysis of Fitz. But the viewpoint you’re countering (that it is queerbaiting) - I don’t think the two perspectives are actually mutually exclusive. I think both things are happening at once and that’s what I find so difficult about the books.
You’re right: there is a beautiful, beautiful relationship happening there. A nuanced, wonderful examination of vulnerability and trust and openness and fear. Both characters are written extremely well, and their progression feels (for the most part) believable and powerful.
In addition to that… it’s also queerbaity. Not necessarily because of anything that Hobb has done or not done. If this series was written and read in a culture where queerbaiting, homophobia, etc, did not exist? Then sure, I could take just the first version. It’s beautiful. But within the culture we actually have… it inevitably will read as queerbaiting. It’s a case of “maybe it technically isn’t the Thing, but it smells and tastes and looks like the Thing and it is having a similar impact on me as the Thing”.
Now, not everyone is going to react to it that way, and that’s okay. One of the coolest things about art is everybody’s interpretation is valid. Art is an experience. Reading is an experience. But that does mean that most things contain multitudes, some of which seem contradictory.
You make a point there about “Imagine that Fitz had grown up thinking that the Fool was a girl”, and you’re not wrong in that extrapolation. But that’s not actually what happened. Fool is expressly non-binary, and Fitz expresses discomfort with that, and that has an entirely different context to if Fool had been female/believed to be female throughout.
My thoughts are a little fragmented on this, but I hope I’m making sense!
I think there’s also a value in breaking this into Watsonian and Doylist perspectives, but my brain isn’t quite awake enough to do it right now.
I second all the points hermitknut made here! I’ve got a few points of my own to add, though.
Saying that making a relationship between a man and someone that man perceives to be a man (the Fool pretty explicitly identifies as something other than cis dude so he’s also not ‘a male’) romantic would be ‘cheapening’ it kinda strikes a wrong chord for me? Especially since I’m pretty sure that the reason Hobb shied away from making Fitz/the Fool official was because of that perception of the Fool as a man, as masculine, at least from the perspective we’re reading. That they’re also Fitz’s hangups doesn’t mean they’re not hers, too, because she doesn’t shy away from explicitly pairing him with several women. An ending where they end up together and end up happy maybe sounds boring because when it happens to straight characters, it’s usually trite and overdone. For queer characters, it’s still desperately rare.
Not to mention I think it would have been theoppositeof cheapening their relationship, not necessarily because of anything in the book, but because of the impact it would have had on readers of the books. Queer readers of the books, especially. I’ve been reading fantasy of this genre for a damn long time and there isn’t a single book I can name off the top of my head that has the main character of like nine books in an explicitly queer relationship. It would have meant the worldto me if Fitz and the Fool had ended up together, and I think the same goes for many other queer readers. Obviously Hobb isn’t obligated to think of us, but it would have meant a lot if she had.
And also…what hermitknut said about the way our society is…that is in the end, my real problem. You can’t actually say ‘this is just the way Fitz is’. The way Fitz is is the way Hobb wrote him. And she made the conscious choice to back away from making him actually queer while still liberally dangling the possibility in front of the reader. Queerbaiting is queerbaiting long before you get to the way Fitz and the Fool were acting towards each other in the last book.
I’d like to provide another perspective on Fitz and the Fool and queerness.
(Caveat: I haven’t yet read the last 3 books and it’s been a long time since I’ve done a proper re-read of the Assassins and Tawny Man trilogy. I’m going off of memory.)
These books, and the Fool in particular, helped me realize and understand a part of myself before I even had the words to understand what that was. Specifically, the Fool taught be about asexuality a full year before I knew that was even a thing one could be. All those scenes in Golden Fool andFool’s Fate where the Fool over and over again tries to explain that he sets no limits on his love for Fitz and Fitz keeps blundering around thinking that means the Fool wants to have sex with him and obsessing about how he doesn’t fuck men? The fact that the Fool kept drawing that distinction between love and sex, and that he did so with Fitz, someone he loved deeply and unreservedly, felt to 17-year-old me like one of the the most revolutionary things I’d read at the time.
While I don’t and will never think Robin Hobb was deliberately writing any kind of queerness into these books with this relationship, homosexual or otherwise, to me, their relationship is so goddamn queer because the Fool refuses to define their relationship or his love by “conventional” standards of love. Which, as an ace-spectrum person who is also aromantic, is also so goddamn queer for me, and was similarly revolutionary to a 17-year-old-me. What even is “love”? The Fool knows he loves Fitz and many of his actions follow from his love. He doesn’t define it, put boxes or labels on it, say “up to here and no more” - he sets no limits. And Fitz can’t stand that - to him love means something very specific - what he had with Molly, which involved yearning and heartache and freedom from self-imposed and outwardly imposed duties. And normality (the Fool is anything but normal). Also sex.
And because Fitz sets limits on the Fool as well as his idea of love - sees him only as “male”, has his world rocked when he realizes Amber is the Fool and the Fool is Amber, he can’t begin to understand at first where the Fool is coming from when he says he loves Fitz. Fitz has always had trouble with the Fool’s gender, or lack thereof, ever since Assassin’s Quest. He gets hung up on his assumption that the Fool is ~male~ and that because the Fool said he loves him, that the Fool wants to ~have sex~ with him, and they’re both ~men~, and ~Fitz doesn’t want to fuck men~. The Fool? Doesn’t care about or give a shit about gender, acts as though the idea of labelling himself under one gender (or a gender at all) is abhorrent, and thinks the fact that humans in the Six Duchies and everywhere else he’s been are obsessed with it and defining what gender each person is and what that means for who they are as a person is one big mysterious load of bullshit.
I’m also agender. (Seriously, just call me Triple-A (ace-spectrum, aromantic, agender - yes it’s a bad joke.) And so the Fool has said that sex plays no part in his love for Fitz, that gender plays no role in his love for Fitz, and that his love for Fitz is the love he has and it has no clear or understandable definition on Fitz’s part (i.e. not “traditional” romantic love”).
I see myself in every single part of this. I can’t see their relationship as queerbaiting when to me their relationship itself is a fundamental grappling of what it means to form relationships that are not “normal”, either in terms of gender, sexuality, or romance. Which is what makes their relationship so beautiful and deliciously chewy to me as a reader. If we’re talking about representation in fiction, in the ten years since I first read RoTE, aside from a couple YA books with ace characters that have come out in the last two years (that I’ve tended to have major issues with), I have never seen myself in fiction in terms of my asexuality, aromanticism, or agender-ness. Ever. I saw myself in the Fool, and I continue to see myself to this day.
Like I said, I don’t think Robin Hobb ever intentionally set out to write *anything* queer into this relationship (and the fact that the one time she did write a same-sex relationship in the Rain Wild Chronicles was an abusive relationship and one of the characters was the series’ no-good-or-relatable-qualities-whatsoever bad guy, I kind of never want her to deliberately write anything queer every again.) But I do think with Fitz and the Fool she wrote a relationship that at its core asks Fitz especially to grapple with what it means to form a connection with someone you can’t define using words or the concepts you’ve relied upon your whole life and built your entire world around. For me, Fitz and the Fool’s relationship is a destruction of commonly understood concepts and categories, and that can never be anything but queer to me.
As another person somewhere on an undefineable place of the ace spectrum and with a fluid gender presentation I wholeheartedly relate to the latest post.
The undefineable and non-sexual nature of Fitz and the Fool’s relationship was incredibly affirming to me in my teenage years and still is now, in a way few other portrayals of relationships have come close to, because it’s the closest to my own feelings I’ve seen. It’s the kind of relationships I am hoping for, indefinable but extremely deep, and somewhere outside the conventional norm of what the relationship to your most beloved (no pun intended) person should be like. Because the feelings I have for other people don’t match the conventional narrative.
I really do wish Fitz would have gotten over his homophobia and transphobia more though, and acknowledge his feelings better. And I find it sad that Fitz needs to distance himself from that way of thinking about them, instead of realising that a queer romantic and/or sexual relationship too is perfectly fine and possible, just not exactly what they have. Fitz’s heteronormativity is really frustrating, and if I had gotten to choose, I’d have let him get over it. Actually, I consider that a huge tonal shift between Fool’s fate and Fool’s assassin. Because the Fitz at the end of Fool’s Fate seemed to have accepted Beloved’s undefineable nature completely, but the Fitz in Fool’s Assassin has gone back to putting the Fool and their relationship in a rigid heteronormative box.
I don’t think it is in any way perfect, but I wouldn’t call their relationship queer baiting either. Not without erasing my own kind of queerness and feelings about the relationships I want to have and calling it invalid and false and non-queer. My feelings about relationships are not more profound, nor deeper, it’s just a little bit different. And makes my queer representation needs slightly different. And I’ve actually never heard queer baiting being used when one of the characters involved is so openly and profoundly queer? Surely sexual and romantic relationships aren’t the end all of genuine queer representation?
For me, the Fool and Fitz kinda did end up together, by acknowledging they were both the most important human beings in each other’s life, even more important than the sexual romantic relationship Fitz also once had. It gives me comfort that perhaps I too can be the most important person for someone even if the relationship is not sexual and maybe not even romantic. I do however feel sad that this often has to come at the expense of romantic sexual queer and/or same-sex relationships. Because it is usually those relationships that gets to be undefineable in fiction while opposite sex non-queer couples always gets to be easily defineable. In a world where romantic same-sex relationships still are all too rare in fiction, it is a problem. But I don’t want the undefinable relationships I identify with to disappear, just get better. The solution I see is more representation overall, of all kinds of queer relationships.
I also think that I’d rather not see Robin Hobb write queer relationships or characters intentionally. Even though I really love her writing, she’s not that good on writing LGBTQ characters even if it’s obvious she tried to incorporate them more in later novels. I consider the Fool a one-time lucky exception. Probably because they wasn’t planned, but just happened to grow into the story. And even there I can find things a bit jarring in certain passages. I feel like Robin Hobb herself tried to put the Fool back in a more defineable box in the last trilogy.
Overall this is a really interesting discussion with food for thoughts and different perspectives. I wanted to add my two cents because I’ve wrestled with this a lot, since I love these books.
So I rarely paint AUs for anything, it’s usually not my thing. But then I found this old sketch, and I just thought that modern AU Fool with the undercut was so cool so I decided to actually colour it.
Fitz: “I totally didn’t get what you just said about your gender.”
Fool: “You don’t have to immediately, as long as you get that I do.”
Oh man this is the last book in The Realm of the Elderlings series! It’s gonna be hard to say goodbye to these characters. I’ve been reading through this fantasy series since 2018!
Fool’s Quest was written by Robin Hobb and published in 2015. It is the second book in the Fitz and the Fool trilogy, which is the last sub series in The Realm of the Elderlings series. This book pretty much leaves off where the last one did, so I can’t say too much. Fitz needs to go off on a journey and the Fool follows him as well as a couple other characters. For most of the book Fitz is at Buckkeep and then closer to the end he takes off on his journey. We also get a few sections from his daughter Bee’s perspective.
Did I Like It?:
As with pretty much the whole series I did indeed love this one! I’m really liking this conclusion to The Realm of the Elderlings. A lot of my favorite characters were in a lot of this book. Most notably we get a lot of the Fool, but then also Chade and Kettriken. As well as some new characters that I’m really liking. I suppose some would say Robin Hobb’s books can be slow, but they’re so engrossing. This book really built up the pressure until Fitz and the Fool take off on their journey . At the end they end up in Kelsingra, which brings together characters from The Liveship TradersandThe Rain Wild Chronicles. All of the series seemed to come to a meeting point I felt like they hadn’t quite done in the other books, so that was exciting! I can’t wait to read the last book!
Do I Recommend This?:
If you’ve read this far in The Realm of the Elderlings series, yes keep going it’s amazing! If you haven’t read this series I highly recommend it for those that want a fantasy series with fabulous characters that you can’t stop reading about.
“What is a secret? It is much more than knowledge shared with only a few, or perhaps only one other. It is power. It is a bond. It may be a sign of deep trust, or the darkest threat possible.”
I really wish there was more art of the fool with darker skin. I know he’s on the lighter side for the majority of the series but still, it’d be cool to see some interpretations of him post aslevjal when he was “as brown as an apple seed”
