Tortall Recall

OWENNNNN you little scamp

Made a patch! Keladry of mindelan’s distaff bordered shield.

kel: I’ll keep all my emotions right here, and then one day, I’ll die.

neal: If it’s a true or false question, you should be able to add a third option, which is “who’s to say?”

duke baird: Psh. You’re not gonna faint.

alanna: First of all, no.

raoul: In terms of instant relief, cancelling plans is like heroin.

lalasa: Everybody get out of my way. I just want to sit here and feed my birds.

tobe: I have had a very long day. I am very small and I have no money. So you can imagine the kind of stress I am under.

cleon: All right! I am Too Blessed to be Stressed, let’s do it.

wyldon: Sometimes babies will point at me, and I don’t care for that shit at all.

peachblossom: You know how I’m filled with rage?

After Tamora Pierce revealed that Kel is aro, I was elated. To finally have representation of any kind, especially from an author and a character I really love, felt so good. Now, it’s not really good representation - I would have preferred to have it explicit and there from the beginning, but this is still incredible for me. So, naturally, this new information spurred me to reread the Protector of the Small series with Kel’s aromanticism in mind, and I unearthed a whole lot of interesting things.

A lot of this was fairly obvious, but much of it was subtext, and there’s still a lot of parts of Kel’s love life that required a bit of effort to see as part of her arospec experience, but I would say that she reads as pretty darn aromantic to me now. In this post, I’ve compiled a bunch of quotes/scenes (mostly paraphrased, sorry) and thoughts about Kel’s aromanticism and how it was portrayed in the books.

This post has been more than a year in the making, mostly because I’m lazy as fuck, but I finally managed to finish it up for @aggressivelyarospec​ week 2018! Also, the wonderful podcast @tortallrecall is coming up on Kel’s arc soon, and I hope they’ll discuss Kel’s aromanticism, so I wanted to provide an aro person’s opinion on Kel being aro for them to have as a resource if they want to use it :)

Overall: I don’t think Tamora Pierce wrote the series meaning for Kel to be aro, because I doubt she would have included the “romance” with Neal, Cleon, or Dom, though that is still justifiable with her being aro [see my explanations below], but I think that she did write it with her being less interested in romance than her peers and Pierce’s other heroines and I think she very intentionally gave Kel a happy ending without romance. And so looking back, the aro label fits. She is definitely arospec, and I am delighted to read about an aromantic character.

The next morning he sent Owen with her to write down her choices. When they reached the storehouse, Kel stopped to look at her unusually quiet friend. Owen wouldn’t meet her eyes. She put her hand under his chin, startled to feel the scrape of newly shaved whiskers, and made him look at her. “You didn’t know,” she said.

Owen grimaced. Words tumbled from his mouth: “Kel, I swear I didn’t! He told me this morning. He - he apologized, for keeping something important from me, he said, specially when I have to learn about making camps like this, but he said you’d see it on my face, and he wanted to talk to you first. Kel, if I knew, I’d’ve argued him out of it. Well, I’d’ve tried to,” he amended as Kel took her hand away from his chin. “He’s hard to argue with. But I would’ve tried! I’m so sorry!”