Every so often I see posts saying things like “Molly was the most important relationship in Fitz’s life” “Beloved was the most important relationship in Fitz’s life”
NO. WRONG. YOU’RE WRONG.
Fitz was taught “a horse cannot wear two saddles” and that was WRONG. and he spent his life tearing himself apart over which calling was the real one - the Wit or the Skill, the wolf or the prince, Badgerlock or Farseer, assassin or scribe, straight or queer, Molly or the Fool - because he cannot accept for most of the books that all those things are equally part of him. the man who taught him that, Burrich, tore his own life apart by being unable to accept that he loved both Chivalry and Patience and they both loved him and each other.
The Fool, Molly and Nighteyes all call him out on this consistently. he’s cutting off parts of himself and then they come back suddenly and hard and break things because it’s not honest. he doesn’t love Molly and the Fool in totally different ways or at different times or one more than the other. He loves both of them in every way that matters, they are boththe love of his life, you don’t have to pick which prevails bc as long as he’s having to choose parts of himself to deny he’s continuing to make terrible self-destructive decisions.
“Unharvested apricots had fallen and were fermenting on the ant-covered ground. The heady smell and the buzzing of bees and wasps filled the air. Ample fruit still hung on the tree, and I was not slow to fill my hands-“
Happy Thursday everyone! It’s officially ‘curl up next to the fire with a good book’ season here in the northern hemisphere, and with some people lucky enough to have time off of school or work for the holiday season, they’ll need some books to read.
I’d love everyone to give a recommendation (or two, or three) of the next book people should read and why! Make sure to include author and genre so people know what they’re getting into! This won’t be the last time I do one of these book rec type questions, so don’t worry if you can’t fit all your favorites in this time.
All you have to do is reblog, comment, or send an ask with your book recommendations! Anyone and everyone is free to participate.
Ooo! I can’t wait to go through the other notes and get some more books to read (as if I need more books to read)!
I would recommend basically anything by Robin Hobb. Her Realm of the Elderlings books are fantasy at its finest. To start at the beginning, you read the Farseer Trilogy which starts with Assassin’s Apprentice. It’s the story of an individual, but also of dragons and prophets and people and relationships and love. There are a lot of books in that universe now (I think 16?) but nine are my favorites: a trilogy of trilogies about Fitzchivalry Farseer.
I also highly highly recommend Kate Elliot’s Crossroads Trilogy, which starts with Spirit Gate. I picked the first two books up randomly from a used bookstore and suffered before getting my hands on the third and finally finishing reading the trilogy. (I tell you so you won’t make my mistake.) The world Elliott builds is strange and beautiful and vast but the stories are personal and human. And there are giant eagles. (Thank me later.)
Now and then we get asked for advice on creating a book collection. Most of our collectors know exactly what they want to collect and how to go about it, but for new collectors it can be a difficult task.
One of the biggest sticking points, particularly over the last decade or so, is concern about getting the key titles. We were recently offered a collection of Ian Rankin books, it was a nice collection, mostly in decent shape, but lacked the key title, Knots and Crosses. The collector was looking to sell because he couldn’t justify spending £1000 or so on a nice copy, and an ex-library copy just didn’t seem right. So he planned on selling the rest of the set to finance a purchase of Knots and Crosses and taking it from there.
This is something we see increasingly; the price of collection highlights has increase hugely over the last couple of decades as the true scarcity of these items is better known through improved information access and the demand is similarly increased as their prices become more visible. We’re going to talk below about various strategies to deal with this.
Accept that Goalposts Move
Now, it’s important to note that the vast majority of collectors don’t have a goal in mind when collecting. At first, yes, most do, but as that collection grows, the goalposts move - nearly always. Sometimes this is manifest through a sell-off, where the collection is sold to finance a new one. Sometimes the completed collection becomes part of a collection and other interests take precedence (I’ve got a full set of Heinlein’sUK hardbacks, I’m going to get the US hardbacks now or I’ve got all BernardCornwell’sbooks, I might move onto Patrick O’Brian now). Most often though, the side collections and diversions take seed much earlier on, particularly when opportunity offers.
The best thing about this though, is that this is good and almost vital.
Accepting this leads to accepting the fact that collecting is about the journey not the result.
Accepting this lessens the impact of completion; the collection will never be complete so that missing volume isn’t asvital (tenuous point in some cases)
Accepting this vastly improves the chances of finding books for the collection. The joy is in the chase of course not the capture.
How to Pick a Starting Point
A lot of people specialise, we have collectors who just buy Stephen King proofs, others who just buy Nebula award winners. These kind of collectors have often been through the process of deciding what they want and are acceptant of the limitations and costs. But if you don’t have a specific definition, or even if you do, our recommendations are as follows.
Build on your Interests
IfHaruki Murakamiis your favourite author, then perhaps that would be a good place to start. Write his name on a piece of paper, but nothing further. If you like modernism, write that on the piece of paper. Books with high production values, write it on the paper. Books you’ve read, write it down. The Vietnam War, write it down. Significant moments in the history of literature, write it down.
Perhaps your interests aren’t as clearly defined and you’re interested in curious inscriptions, true rarities or forgotten books. Still, write it down, but take a moment to think how those rules are defined. Books with curious inscriptions - does the inscription have to be by the author? What defines curious? True rarities - What defines a true rarity? No copies on the market, unrecorded in bibliographies? Forgotten books - Are these books that have been out of print for fifty years? Perhaps they don’t have an entry in Wikipedia? Perhaps there’s no reference online? Once you’ve produced the definition, write it down.
Maybe you want to just collection books that take your fancy - then you don’t need this list. You’re happy, your horizon is wide and distant. Guard you secret jealously.
Think About your Budget
This is one of the most important things to consider. Try not to think about what you might be able to afford in the future (it will never be enough), think about how much and how often you want to be able to able to invest (invest in the enjoyment not the financial return). Here at Hyraxia Books we have collectors who know the books they want and will pay for them over a number of months. That’s fine, and they’ve usually accepted that that means fewer purchases. Others don’t like to do that, they enjoy the buzz of the chase so would rather spend £100 one week, £50 the next, £250 a month later. They might spend £1000 over a year, and think that they could’ve got one really nice book, but generally it’s more about the chase.
For many, this is just an as-and-when - you know how much you’re willing (or able) to spend on your collection. It’s just useful sometimes to take a step back and realise that many of the expensive books aren’t out of your reach, it might just take a bit of planning.
So with that in mind, pick a handful of prices, or better still, a range of prices you’re willing to pay. It might be wide £25-£2000, or it you might have thought that you’d like to buy a book every fortnight, so your range is £50-£100. Alternatively, you might have an idea from shopping the kind of prices that you consider: £500, £750, £2000, £1500. Write them down on your paper. The range isn’t as vital as understanding budget constraints, but it helps keep your collection in check. If you’re looking around the £500 mark, £10 books might lessen the collection, and similarly, if you limit yourself to £10, then the £500 book might tower over all the others.
Vitally though, the prices are secondary to the collection. This is important. If you want to get every book written by John Steinbeck then you still might need to plan, but your range should reflect the requirements of the definition.
Think About The Books
So, on your paper you have your budget and your interests. You have to now decide how they are going to reconcile. So if you’re interest is George Orwell and your budget is £500-£2000, you are not going to get a full set of first editions in dustjackets. If your interest is Magic Realism, and your budget is £25-£250, then you’re not going to get a first Argentinian edition of 100 Years of Solitude. So how do you reconcile that?
Let’s be practical here. If-you-try-hard-you-can-achieve-anything doesn’t apply. The majority of people will to spend a couple of hundred on a book every now and then will never spend a few thousand. So to reconcile you have to add a little further detail to your piece of paper. So, if you wrote T.S. Eliot as your interest, and your budget doesn’t allow for the first edition of The Waste Land, then you need to think of alternatives, for example:
Later editions
First editions from other countries
Limited editions
Signed copies
Copies in lesser condition
Interesting copies
Magazine printings
Write those things below the list, and now those editions apply to T.S. Eliot. You now don’t have a problem, well, you do, you still can’t have that first edition of the Waste Land, but even if you could, you might not be able to have a signed First Edition, and even then, you ain’t getting the manuscript.
Of course, this is entirely unacceptable for some, perhaps even for most. Later editions, second impressions, jacketless copies are simply unacceptable to some. In that case, you need to think about payment plans or be incredibly diligent in your searches.
Think About the Scope
So, you’ve written down your list of editions to satisfy your interest in Iain Banks, but your conclusion is that you wouldn’t be happy with a US first edition of The Wasp Factory where the others are all UK first editions, and your wife or husband won’t let you spend £50 a month for the next six months. This is when you start to widen the scope. If you collect all the other books, but are lacking The Wasp Factory, then you’ll be sitting with an incomplete collection until finances improve, a bargain comes along or the spouse is silenced. So widen the scope a little from the off. Perhaps it’ll include Banks’ science ficiton novels, perhaps it’ll include proofs, or interesting signed copies. Maybe you’ll increase the scope to include other Scottish writers, or similar books / authors you’re interested in. Having a larger set of books that would fit in your collection means that you’ll always be further from completion, which sounds bad, but it means that you can always improve your collection and you’ll be happier with it.
Our own personal collection approaches the scope from two sides to try and approximate a good plan. It’s essentially a cross-section of Speculative Fiction. I love Haruki Murakami, I’ve had all his first editions, all his limited editions, all his deluxe editions. I got a copy of Sleep, one of 45 copies only to read on the colophon that there 15 additional reserved copies that I was very unlikely to get hold of. It’s also a £3000-£4000 book. These two facts told me that I would not be in a position to complete a Murakamicollection, not for a while anyway. So I would be looking at an incomplete collection, but not incomplete in a good way, incomplete in an irritating way. So I sold some of it as our first catalogue.
I still like Murakamithough, and he still needs a place in our collection. So we restricted ourselves to four of his books. And as our collection is a cross-section of Speculative Fiction, they have to be speculative. So for us personally, four is key. I don’t know why four, it just seemed right for us. So I got my piece of paper and wrote Speculative Fiction on it (actually a spreadsheet). Then I created a dozen boxes with four entries. The first box said Murakamiin it, the second said Robin Hobb, the third said Magic Realism. At that point, the collection had blown wide open. The cross-section wasn’t just authors any more, it was genres and categories. The next box was Edwardian Weird Tales. Now we were getting specific, but to me the definition of our collection was coming into focus; it was a description of speculative fiction right across the board, from the earliest stories to the most recent. Each area of the genre was to be represented by either four key or interesting titles, authors or oeuvres. Once the oeuvres were included the scope was enormous. I wrote Greek Myths in one box. Now the scope was ridiculous, but completion was in sight, and could even be surpassed. Take one section for example, Cyberpunk. Not a huge fan of Cyberpunk, but I like it in our collection. I need to pick four books, not even key titles; there are more than four key titles so it’s just a representative selection. We added a signed copy of Neuromancer, UK first edition. The key title, as good as it gets (actually not, a proof would be nicer, or a copy inscribed to Bruce Sterling…manuscript?). Book number two hasn’t been bought yet or decided. It could be the Nov 1983 issue of Amazing Science Fiction Stories (though that doesn’t fit with our budget requirements). Snow Crash? Yep, it has to be Snowcrash, maybe I won’t get the Bantam first edition at the price I want, so maybe we’ll go for the Subterranean Press edition from a couple of years ago. The point is, the books that could make it into our collection are many more than there is room for. And maybe in a few years I’ll upgrade that Sub Press edition, maybe I’ll stretch it to five books.
A final word on scope, is that as the boundaries of your definition become more and more vague, your collecting becomes much more fun. Start to include ephemera, prints, meta-works, anthologies etc.
Think About Condition
You will hear it from everyone condition, condition, condition. It’s the collector’s equivalent of location, location, location. I’m sure if we had some tedious, uninspired TV show that’s what it would be called. But as anyone who’s moved house knows, location is just one factor. Condition’s important, always go for the best that you can afford…no always go for the best that works within your budget. Yes, a fine copy will increase in value a little quicker than a very good copy, and may be easier to sell. But I wouldn’t worry too much if it’s so restrictive that it affects the balance of your collection and collecting. Does that copy of Dr. No have to be fine? Are you happy spending a little less and getting a copy of Thunderballas well?
Learn When to Say No
Even if your funds are limitless, and some essentially are, you still just don’t want to amass. Amassing dilutes the collection, it lessens the highlights and achievements. If you find yourself in the position of buying 200 books from a friend who has lost interest in collecting books and has moved on to coins (I shudder at the thought). Then buy them, treat yourself to those you really like, those that fit in with your definition or those that offer a new branch that you really like. Get rid of the others. Sell them to a dealer, take them to auction, or just put them in a box in the loft.
If you don’t, you’ll end up losing sight of the (ever changing) definition. It will lessen the impact of your own collection, particularly if some of those books surpass your treasures in terms of value and / or prestige. Of course, like I say above, this might be an opportunity to expand your definition and that’s fine, but you need to think it through.
Collections Can Shrink
Book collecting is a long game, it takes years, a lifetime, several lifetimes. Your tastes will change, as will your budget, as will the market. Keep this in mind because some of your treasures will lose their appeal, some will lose their value. There’s nothing wrong with trimming off the fat now and then. Similarly, if you have a copy that’s a little poorer than you’d like, maybe missing a jacket or even an ex-library copy. Maybe you loved Colin Dexter when you were forty and it was on the TV. When the time is right, sell it. You might make a loss, you might make a profit.
The important thing is that you don’t let books stick around when they no longer fit the definition, or if they just don’t suit. I do this as a dealer, I usually price faded copies quite low because it’s my bug bear. They stare at me on the shelves - they have to go.
Don’t take this too lightly though. If you have a nice Brighton Rock in dust jacket, that just no longer appeals to you, bear in mind that it might take a couple of decades to get another copy.
Ignore the Above
Ok, that works for me, it works for a lot of our collectors. But for many people, increasing the scope, or removing edition restrictions totally undermines their collection. In that case, keep your definition tight, buy just exactly what fits that definition and ignore what I’ve said.
A Word About Investments
If you look at the selling prices of many books from 20 years ago, and compare to now, you will immediately be aware of how wealthy you could’ve been. Similarly, if you look at the results of the last 20 FA Cup Finals, you will be immediately aware of how wealthy you could’ve been. Don’t collect with a view to getting a decent return. It might happen, it might not, some books will go up in value, some will go down. Collect for the chase, even if that chase is for a bargain.
Having said that, do bear in mind that the vast majority of books will be worth much less than retail price in the future. Salman Rushdie’sFury will never be worth more than £10-£20. Even if his next book is better than the Divine Comedy,Fury, will always be a cheap books. There are thousands of them. Having this in your collection might be necessary, but understand it’s value - it’s not a financial investment, it’s part of a collection.
Midnight’s Children on the other hand, the Booker of Bookers. It’s already expensive, but surely it’ll go up in value? Right? Maybe. The Booker prize might cease in 2025, and fade into obscurity. But it’s still a good book, a great book, it’ll always be remembered, right? Maybe. Lots of great books have been forgotten, lots of great books are cheap.
If you’re concerned about a return on investment, take into account the scarcity, market values, copies on the market, time on the market, quality of the writing, significance of the author to literature in general, significance of the book specifically, anything unique?
Conclusion
So, what’s the conclusion? Well, this isn’t a cover-all type of situation. It’s more of a way of mitigating the concern that you’ll never get exactly what you want. Every collection is different, every collector has their own method and motivation and most collectors probably accept this already. Sometimes it can be fun to relax your definition a little, or to have a think about approaching your collection from a different angle. For us personally, we started many moons ago with the notion of being completists; it was never as fun as it is now.
I read a list recently of the 25 greatest fantasy novels. The vast majority of books on the list were first published in the last 20 years. Now while it’s unlikely that the fantasy published in the last two decades represents 90% or more of the best fantasy of all time, it is understandable why this list appeared as it did; most of the stuff readers buy is new stuff, so there’s a bias toward that. There is of course the angle that the literature that is published now builds upon all that has come before it so has the advantage of a good palette of colours. However, fantasy, being the oldest form of literature is an incredibly rich and varied canon, and it would be a shame to think that not enough people are digging deeper.
As rare booksellers we generally look for books that have contributed to the cultural landscape. It helps us feel that our job is more than just buying and selling. Most books from the last couple of decades haven’t had the chance to contribute fully, or rather their contribution hasn’t yet been fully realised. So the majority of our stock is pre-21st-century. There are some exceptions where the cultural impact is undeniable (Pratchett, Martin, King, Rowling) or where the books have helped progress the variety and strength of the canon (Hobb, Mieville, Abercrombie), but on the whole the fantasy literature we deem ‘important’ has had at least a generation to permeate the cultural membrane.
Of course, important and great aren’t necessarily the same and it takes a lifetime to reconcile the two. A lot of the time we read what we feel is entertaining, because we aren’t always interested in how it impacted the canon. There’s nothing wrong with that. But at the same time, there is a lot of important writing out there that is great (there is also important writing that’s bloody boring). I’m thinking of writers like William Morris, E.T.A. Hoffman, E.R. Eddison, Edmund Spenser, Thomas Malory, and pieces such as Beowulf, Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, The Mabinogion. These are writers and works that have had an incalculable influence on the books of the last 20 years, and continue to do so.
I am slightly biased toward this area of fantasy because these are the scarcer items and these are the items that collectors buy because of their importance within the canon, so they are good stock. But at the same time, in my research and reading I’ve found these to be great and entertaining reads. So I thought I’d write some pieces based around rare books and important works of speculative fiction (i.e. fantasy, science fiction and horror) that are more often seen in university libraries than in the Waterstone’s fantasy section.
I’ll be looking at publication history, cultural impact, various rarities, reading strategies and I encourage you to comment too because I imagine many of you have much more experience in these areas than I do. Many of the books will be new books we’ve just acquired, and many we’ll have little knowledge of, so it will be a learning experience. And if just one of you picks up We’ll start by looking at S. Fowler Wright's The Riding of Lancelot.
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.
![[XII] Fitz.](https://64.media.tumblr.com/e52cfff5161eaebcd0378b1049d9792f/tumblr_of27tsomN91td30h9o1_1280.jpg "[XII] Fitz.")
![[XI] Lord Golden.](https://64.media.tumblr.com/2a537f1ebda26e62f3ab536985ff3947/tumblr_of27gef5D51td30h9o1_1280.jpg "[XI] Lord Golden.")
![[Untitled]](https://64.media.tumblr.com/avatar_8b3b37ea685a_30.png){kind=avatar}
