#rote meta

his grandfather says, “I’ve fed him at my table for six years…I’ll not feed him any longer…Let him be fed by him what got him.” almost certainly, his grandfather can’t feed him any longer. when fitz ate that night, he “wasted no time filling [his] mouth” and “stuffed as much bread into [his] mouth as [he] could.” he was starving! given how desperate his mother was to keep fitz and his grandfather’s emphasis on food, their family had to have been experiencing severe food insecurity to finally have the grandfather give fitz up.

food insecurity can be defined in two ways: 1) limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate or safe foods 2) limited or uncertain ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways. while we don’t have confirmation for the nature of food insecurity fitz experienced before moonseye, we do know afterwards. the first day fitz arrives at buckkeep, cob and burrich obtain food for fitz but out of his sight and neither show him how to properly acquire food in the keep. during the time period after the first day and before burrich takes nosy away, burrich leaves before fitz wakes up and pays no mind to fitz as long as fitz is in bed every evening.

burrich’s negligence causes fitz to experience both of the definitions of food insecurity. he acquires food in socially unacceptable ways by learning to steal from the kitchens and town, as well as scavenging other food (burned crusts, raw sheel - this can be dangerous to eat, seaweed, fish) which is a nutritionally inadequate and unsafe diet. fitz mentions that burrich sees fitz “fed well enough to grow heartily,” but we can presume from fitz’s descriptions of daily life that he uses the word to mean burrich perceives fitz to be fed and the measure of “well enough” is clearly ambiguous. basically, anyone that’s eating burned crusts is not being fed well enough.

The trajectory seems to suggest that while the absence of bonds and burdens may make life easier, it also renders it profoundly lonely, and therefore ultimately incomplete, a kind of suspended existence rather than a fully lived life. One truly inhabits the world and finds one’s place within it only under the weight of duties, because caring for someone (whether a partner, a family, or a community) inevitably entails responsibility toward them.

I'VE BEEN SITTING ON THIS FOR A WHILE because I wanted to give it some good thought.

So for themes/the first question. I've never really pulled the trigger on getting into making video essays but IF I DID my first video would be about Fitz and his many parental figures and how they all, in one way or another, hurt him throughout his life. Burrich and Chade especially toe the line into outright abuse (in my opinion) on many occasions, but they remain sympathetic characters and their love for Fitz is abundantly clear, even if Fitz is not really capable of seeing or understanding it. I think there's a lot of potential to explore the nuances of abusive behavior in these characters, especially the notion that abuse is not something that you are, but something that you do.

Expanding on this a little more from Fitz's angle: Fitz is an extremely well-written unreliable narrator. His perception of the world, and especially other characters, is fundamentally skewed. He provides the reader with bad-faith interpretations of almost everyone in his life (except for Molly, whom he views largely as an object of worship and not really a person at all, once she reaches maturity), when in actuality he is surrounded by people who truly love him. He also perceives himself as being unlikable, selfish, and insufficient, when in reality his actions demonstrate him to be loyal and selfless to a fault, even if he is melancholy and surly by nature.

Basically, I think my favorite theme (and the strongest one, in my opinion) in the RoTE books overall is that the people in your life are more than you make of them. Everyone you ever meet will have their own perceptions of themselves, and is perceived by others often in a completely different way from how you perceive them. Everybody you ever meet has their own existence outside of you. Robin Hobb does a fantastic job at writing characters that do not revolve around her main character.