#fitzposting

Who can sail without wind? Who can row without oars? Who can be parted from their friend without shedding tears?

the more and more i think about the ending of tawnyman trilogy the more clever nuanced and compelling it becomes. on one level there’s the fantasy of like, what if the bad thing never happened to you. this is particularly relevant re: the skill healing basically removing all of fitz’s physical disabilities. he even says something to this regard, of feeling like a man of his years *should* provided he never faced all that abuse. and then a big part of this is also getting back together with molly, which is not only about how the abuse prevented him from having a relationship with her but also about proving that he can do the heterosexual thing—especially the notion of “providing” for his family (this is literally what burrich asks him to do). but then there’s the wrench—burrich had to die so this could happen. fitz had to regain his memories/feelings of all the bad things that happened. it’s a situation so predicated on the history of everything that happened to him playing at the illusion of what if it never happened. it’s like this self-devouring fantasy—think of the urgency fitz felt to establish himself with molly again. and then the title, ever after, elide the happily. can you live like this forever? will you live like this forever? it’s the storybook ending, but again—that requires there to have been a story. fitz is still trying to outrun what happened in the story and live in the ending. but you can’t live in an ending!! and on some level he knows this—and the fool is his door to the future. he downplays his grief at losing the fool, that’s part of what he wants to avoid—especially since the fool rejected his offer to go with him and urged fitz to live out this life in the first place—but he acknowledges (and hopes for!) a potential that they will meet again. they both know there’s no role for the fool in the fantasy—they explicitly acknowledge this in conversation. to meet the fool again is to deconstruct the fantasy. but despite this, fitz leaves that crumb in the epilogue, that potential—an acknowledgement that one day the fantasy will end even as he weaves it for the reader and asserts that it is absolute. all that is to say: THERE IS STILL TIME!!

guys we need more on fitz being NOT OKAY AT ALL

sometimes i think about how Robin Hobb started the Realm of the Elderlings series with the premise that damage lasts, which is very rare in fantasy--protagonist FitzChivalry Farseer gets hit hard enough to be knocked unconscious but this also makes him prone to seizures for the rest of the Farseer trilogy. A broken nose stays crooked. The scars from his injuries make it harder for him to move certain ways.