#lebannen

My sonn

Yeah, Arren is a prince and Ged is the Archmage, but The Farthest Shore rarely portrays that as taking on more meaning than just a quirk of their background. Ged is powerful but he rarely uses his magic. Arren is a prince who never brings up his status to anyone he meets on the trip. This isn't because Le Guin has some moral about humility, it's because the story is about that part of childhood where you begin to see the adults you admire as real people, and how you grow up by gaining a love that is challenged, but as a result, more true and sincere. The most important thing about them is that Arron is a boy and Ged is a man that Arron admires.

Because of that, they feel humanized and small, like people you know. Ged makes jokes, he gets annoyed when this teen asks him too many questions, sometimes he's arrogant, and sometimes he tells Arren about his mistakes, and he's proud of his art and joyous when he doesn't have to use it responsibly anymore. Arren is young and impulsive, and he doesn't bring his sword when he needs it, and draws it when he shouldn't. He's constantly messing up and he gets annoyed when Ged doesn't use his magic to sail, and he gets anxious that Ged doesn't know what he's doing.

I bring this up because I think that they have a complex and changing relationship, one that is dependent on the reader relating to them as just some people. Ged has the biggest "just some guy who you know did some cool stuff but is also just some guy" energy and Arron is "just some kid". That's why the story doesn't read like the fulfillment of a prophecy, but instead the love and care between two people when faced with responsibility and hardship. The farthest shore doesn't feel like a traditional fantasy because of how it structures itself, of what it emphasizes, and how it tells it's story.

Anyways, my favorite passage of the book is

"[Ged] stopped, but in his eyes as he looked at Arren and at the sunlit hills there was a great, wordless, grieving love. And Arren saw that, and seeing it saw him, saw him for the first time whole, as he was.

'I cannot say what I mean,' Ged said unhappily.

But Arren thought of that first hour in the Fountain Court, of the man who had knelt by the running water of the fountain; and joy, as clear as that remembered water, welled up in him. He looked at his companion and said, 'I have given my love to what is worthy of love. Is that not the kingdom, and the unperishing spring?'"

“Now, then, you look beautiful!” said Tenar in her seamstress’s pride, when Therru first tried it on.

Therru turned her face away.

“You are beautiful,” Tenar said in a different tone. “Listen to me, Therru. Come here. You have scars, ugly scars, because an ugly, evil thing was done to you. People see the scars. But they see you, too, and you aren’t the scars. You aren’t ugly. You aren’t evil. You are Therru, and beautiful. You are Therru who can work, and walk, and run, and dance, beautifully, in a red dress.”

The child listened, the soft, unhurt side of her face as expressionless as the rigid, scar-masked side.

She looked down at Tenar’s hands, and presently touched them with her small fingers. “It’s a beautiful dress,” she said in her faint, hoarse voice.

When Tenar was alone, folding up the scraps of red material, tears came stinging into her eyes. She felt rebuked. She had done right to make the dress, and she had spoken the truth to the child. But it was not enough, the right and the truth. There was a gap, a void, a gulf, on beyond the right and the truth. Love, her love for Therru and Therru’s for her, made a bridge across that gap, a bridge of spiderweb, but love did not fill or close it. Nothing did that. And the child knew it better than she.”

- Tehanu, Ursula K. LeGuin

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Man, the way this quote has lived rent free in my brain ever since I first read it. I just knew I had to try and illustrate it. It took me far too long to get it done but, I'm glad to see it done at last.

stating it would carry out

"extensive strikes" against Hezbollah.

Israeli army spokesman, Avichay Adraee said strikes on houses and other targets in Lebanon are "imminent"

Residents of southern Lebanon are receiving calls from a Lebanese number ordering them to immediately distance themselves one kilometre away from what Israel claims are Hezbollah targets, a Reuters reporter said

Residents of Beirut are also reportedly receiving text messages, reportedly from the Israeli army, urging them to evacuate their locations quickly, according to Lebanon's National News Agency (NNA).

Minister of Information Ziad Makary received a voicemail urging the evacuation of his building, the agency reported.

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