My fundamental problem with the way Robin Hobb writes queerness is that it she is clearly so much less curious about it than she is about her (allegedly unintentional) Queer Allegory Magic and it results in most of her queer characters being uninteresting and often mean-spirited stereotypes. The Witted characters and their struggles to navigate society and relationships are so much better realized than the canonically queer characters, who for the first 9 books are depicted mostly as a series of rapists, pederasts, stereotypes and one (1) selflessly voluntarily celibate queer martyr character who pines forever for their One Straight Love. This of course wouldn't bother me as much if she didn't state that queer interpretations of her characters were akin to "mutilation" and "rape". Why is queerness seemingly so inexplicably linked to rape and violence for her? Why does that come out everywhere in her writing, be it book or blog post?
We have the perspectives of two different sentient sailing vessels and multiple sea serpents before we got a single gay person and he is - another wealthy foppish abuser (the twist is that he is also a victim and simultaneously enabling his abuser). Every instance of same-sex sexual contact we witness until book 10 has been abusive (rape, unwanted groping, pedophilia, etc.) and initiated by someone in a position of overwhelming power, and nearly all of the queer-coded characters (Regal, Cosgo) have been outrageously wealthy evil fops.
Having our first gay character after all that be yet another privileged foppish gay man who was coerced into a sexual relationship with an even more privileged, foppier gay man borders on self parody. We get the details on another group of wealthy, evil gay elites, but close to zero examples of how queer people outside Hest's League of Gay Evil exist within and struggle with wider society. We meet Davvie and Carson in a context in which we are not shown what it is like being a poorer queer person in their culture, we meet them in a context in which basically everyone already accepts them, so there's no actual tension or demonstration of the difficulties they legitimately must have faced until now. The closest we get is Carson off-handedly relating that he had to save Davvie from the consequences of his own cruising once.
There is zero explanation or curiosity for how homophobia manifests in the Six Duchies, Bingtown, Jamailia, etc. It just exists. Because Robin doesn't seem to care. We know every angle and convolution for how Witted people are oppressed within the Six Duchies, the history of Witted culture, a spectrum of examples of Witphobia (from lynching to fetishizing the Witted as sexual partners), how and why people closet their Wit - we don't even get a splash of this level of interest or detail into queerness beyond the odd "ohohohoho, lord golden fucks BOYS" (Soooooo interesting the number of times Robin depicts 'being gay' as 'wanting to fuck BOYS', always that language, always that framing, queerness is like inextricable from pedophilia in the way it's depicted in the series, I'm sorry but it is, I'll make an entire post about just that if I have to).
Our only real example of Sedric supposedly interacting with Bingtown's innate homophobia is when his father wants him to work on a sailing vessel but that's dirty and Sedric likes things to be 'clean and nice and pretty'. This is 1930s cartoon level stereotyping and it's the way Robin chooses to depict her first gay character supposedly grappling with homophobia. Arguably the biggest victim of homophobia in the series is Fitz, whose struggle with queerness is how awful and inconvenient it is for him that everyone thinks he's gay and his subsequent efforts to dispel that vile rumor. I just. Fuck.
I'm sorry, she just doesn't really write us like we're complete people. What I love about so much of her writing is her curiosity and ability to dissect the complexities of the human mind and relationship dynamics. That all kind of shuts off when she starts writing queer characters. Hest and Redding are Evil Fops, Davvie is Horny & Gay, Lecter Exists, Sedric is Redeemed Evil Fop and Carson is Pushy Creepy Bear Who Wears Sedric Down. It's dire.
If I had read Rainwild Chronicles first? I'd have less of a problem. But up until Dragon Haven, it'd been nothing but Men Raping Men, Men Groping Men, Men Abusing Boys, etc. (Sapphics just don't exist in the Realm of the Elderlings until the Willful Princess, by the way. Trans characters? Forget it. We get the Fool and Spark so we should all be happy.) And these are issues to be discussed! Yes, marginalized communities can produce a lot of abuse, yes women can and often do suffer from being their more powerful husband's 'beard' (Alice + Hest), but I'm sick of the exact same song and dance.
Having SO MUCH of Sedric's story be about how his queerness negatively affects Alise just felt. Idk, it was our first gay character's narrative arc and it felt completely dominated by how inconvenient (Sedric is a bitchy queen who annoys everyone and harms Alise's relationship with the crew) or traumatic (Sedric is complicit in deceiving Alise for years) Sedric's queerness was for his straight bestie. It feels like Robin attempted to write queer characters as an 'apology' for Tawny Man and accidentally ended up revealing how little she thinks of us.
Carson pressuring Sedric into sex after a suicide attempt (!!!) is never discussed. At all! The main gays fucked and are together now, so we should all be happy. Davvie and Lecter's relationship of convenience is never explored. They fight (allegedly), they make up (allegedly). I just see so little interest from her in the way she writes us, to the point where I truly think her best depictions of queerness are unintentional. The Wit as Queer Metaphor seemingly becomes less prevalent once she was aware that other people saw it that way.
"But what about the Fool!" What about them? They're a Magic Ethereal Alien Gay. They're above our petty rules. Their desire is unconditional, single target, aspects of it can be turned off and on like a light switch, and their experience with their gender identity is mostly discussed in the framing of how it benefits them materially to be genderfluid. It is NOTABLE that the most positively portrayed queer character in the series is depicted as 'honorable' ("I felt the honor in the Fool's touch", etc.) because they can so safely, so neatly manage and control their unrequited desire for the object of their affection and never have to navigate any pesky feelings of queer desire that might be external to their One Straight Love. It also NOTABLE that said character is implied to have been raped a bunch as a youth. And then is implied to have been raped a bunch after the events of Tawny Man. Almost as an aside. Can't have a queer character in this series without rape and pederasty being a major part of their backstory, thems the rules.
I'm not asking for Good, Safe, Painless Multi-Quadrant Queer Rep. It just felt SO QUEER as a narrative when I started reading it, and then we got so, so many books of truly awful, stereotypical depictions of evil gay rapists, charmless canon het relationships and simply no discussion about what others actually think about queer people or how multiple people from various cultures might interpret queerness beyond the odd vague homophobic remark. The Outislanders are a matriarchal culture with a strong raider-homemaker divide! The women spend most of their time with other women and the men spend most of their time with other men! There must be relationships between women and relationships between men that we as the reader might interpret as queer! What do those look like? How do they fit into their society? The answer is we don't know because the author doesn't care about that subject matter, plain and simple.
I know she wrote the "merely plumbing" conversation. The problem is she really didn't do anything interesting on that subject matter until the final trilogy, which was a lot of weak sauce "Fitz and his new crop of kids get gentle-parented into understanding gender fluidity." conversations. Which is good I guess. But too little, too late, too lacking in substance, imo.
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