Princess Boy

(Pet peeve: Seriously people, link the sources to articles. If you’re engaged enough to be enraged by this, you should make sure people can read all of it and get more information about the issue.)

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.

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! 

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 the opposite of 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 world to 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. 

(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 and Fool’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.

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.