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miirshroom · 3 months ago

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Farseer and Tawny Man Trilogies

Thinking about the Magics

Finished re-reading Fool's Fate and appreciating how the chain of cause and effect is handled in this series. FitzChivalry is a mess of a person who swings wildly between making pragmatic decisions and irrational decisions as a consequence of everything that was done to him, and his clashing poorly-trained mental magical abilities. He's self aware enough to be introspective about agonizing over the choices made or not made and the sum of life experience and mistakes that make up the whole of a person. But since the accounting is written from his own perspective it's hard to tell sometimes if his bias is giving himself more or less grace than he deserves.

It's also interesting how the Tawny Man trilogy brings into sharper focus that mind magic is a kind of neuro-divergency. Like, because of these magical senses Fitz literally sees the world in different ways from other people, ways which he is constantly having to mask and which makes him unpredictable and distant even from most of his friends and allies because they can't follow his internal logic. And this is another layer on top of all the other physical and mental trauma.

The Effect of the Skill on the Mind

How could the Skill not be tied to mental reasoning, considering that it allows the user to rummage around inside the minds of other people? The Skill can be used to know a person on an impossible level that is beyond such imprecise things as words. It can be used to walk outside of a person's own body and step into the life of another person with the sensitivity, as a passive rider or active force. However that is only of practical use between Skill users, who are still just as fallible when interpreting the experience into words that non-Skill users can understand. The Skill has many fantastical and horrifying uses, but for practicality the choice of the Skill coterie through Fool's Fate is to generally limit its use to a private and long-distance communication channel - using the skill like a magical phone line in favour of exploring the abstract connectivity of the Skill current, Thick's music, or Nettle's dreamscapes.

The friendship and frustration between Fitz and Thick throughout Golden Fool and Fool's Fate is part of developing this theme - in some ways Thick is a more extreme version of Fitz. Thick has powerful mental abilities, but what non-magical people see first are the differences in his outwards appearance and his power with the Skill is linked to a fundamental difference in how his mind works. He is an inconvenience and would have been more easily disposed of similar to the way that Queen Desire wanted Fitz the Bastard killed as a visible reminder of the abdicated Prince Chivalry. Instead, Thick is won over with patience and gentle encouragement, despite Fitz struggling over his internalized cultural biases against people with physical and mental disabilities, and the way that other less tolerant people disparage him by proxy of his caring for Thick. He's not perfect, but it's a conscious effort to do better than the previous generation.

Chade mentions early in Assassin's Apprentice that Fitz has some strange blind spots, and deep into Fool's Fate Chade is still frequently perplexed by how the boy that he trained can have such disagreeing opinions. Their minds just don't work the same way. On one level it's that Chade doesn't have the same trauma - he learned and used his assassin's trade in a time of relative peace and his own status was as illegitimate brother to a King-in-Waiting close in age to himself, compared to Fitz being brought at a younger age and to a more volatile court. And on the other level, Chade has no experience with the Wit and his desire for the Skill blinds him to the drawbacks. Chade thinks of the Skill as a tool for use of the King and struggles to understand it as a thing that can become an addictive obsession or break a mind in other ways. He tolerates the Wit, but doesn't really understand that it is the supernatural sense of connection between people that keeps Fitz loyal to the Farseers, despite Fitz having different opinions about what specific actions would be best for the collective survival.

Overall the use of the Skill has done MORE damage to Fitz than the Wit, as it was through the Skill that he partially forged away some of his emotions.

Regal, Why are you Like This?

And then there is Regal. In counterpoint to the characters who are born with magical abilities and learn to handle both advantages and drawbacks, Regal was not educated in his weak Skill ability. He was handed a Skill coterie formed of members who had great potential once, but were mentally abused and weakened until they would accept being used by a parasite with no trained ability of his own.

Regal is a product of his environment as much as Fitz - his name means "suitable to be a king" and he was influenced by his mother "Desire" to believe that his claim to being king was better than either of his older brothers. He had the mentorship of his King father "Shrewd" who employed spies and assassins and underhanded techniques in general to achieve political goals. And so Regal learned paranoia when his mother died and also endeavored to be shrewd and use subterfuge to undermine his older brothers. He clung to the idea that his mother was poisoned in a denial of the truth that led to him falling into the same recreational drug habits that had damaged her brain and judgement.

Regal's lack of self control combined with egotistical need to be in control of other people and accumulate power and luxury by any means necessary is stronger than his bonds to family or duty to the people of his country. He is as arrogant as the stone dragons that he covets and the real dragons that are presently absent from the world - all products of the Skill and associated with ideas of immortality. Regal despises users of the Wit magic who are much maligned but essentially just have supernatural awareness of what it is to be a living, reproducing, and dying organism.

Also the irony: last time the Farseer line went seeking the aid of the Elderlings against Raiders was in the time of King Wisdom. Who obviously had the Wit magic, or had someone loyal to him that had it. The stone dragons are awoken by combined use of the Skill and the Wit and Blood. King Shrewd asked Regal once what he would make of Fitz, and Regal made Fitz his enemy. The one living Farseer who has the Wit magic and could have woken the dragons in the service of any King who treated him kindly.

The Piebalds and the Wit Magic

The Old Blood have a fairly codified set of traditions in their sub-society, and both Burrich and Fitz are outsiders to them. The traditions were designed to keep them as invisible as possible for fear of persecution, but no matter how well-intentioned the idea it only takes a few rogue agents to set off fear of the Witted again. Burrich's grandmother was a former slave in Chalced - how likely that the Old Blood comes from her part of the family but her knowledge of how to use it responsibly was lost upon being disconnected from her culture and enslaved? Burrich had no community to teach him and re-created from tales the Witted magic that can heal a body and bring a person back from the dead - the exact kind of thing that the Old Blood's don't practice because it's the part of the magic that drives people to such fear that they hang, quarter, and burn the bodies of the Witted.

The Piebalds are inspired by the Witted Bastard because he does with the Wit the things that they were taught not to do. Through Royal Assassin and Assassin's Quest Nighteyes learns too much of being human, fights alongside his partner for human causes, and does not live as a wild creature should. Fitz bonds far too closely with his wolf - close enough to hold his mind while his body is dead. Fitz breaks the rules of the Old Blood society, and it keeps him alive. The Old Blood folk experienced new rounds of persecution started by Regal and continuing in the years after as a consequence of Fitz breaking those rules. And so in response the Piebalds use the same techniques as Fitz - most notably with Peladine and Laudwine escaping into their Wit beasts when their human bodies die.

The persecution of the Wit Magic seems to combine ethnic discrimination with the traditions of witchcraft and werewolf stories. Fitz points out to hedge witch Jinna that it could just as easily be her craft that is seen as dangerous and evil. To say that just because a man is bonded to a beast means that he must have nefarious purpose is little different from accusing anyone with an extensive knowledge of herbs of being a poisoner. Fitz just happens to be both Witted and poisoner, and even when it is the assassin training that makes him an effective killer his acts are blamed on being Witted just because that's the part of his identity that is more openly known.

The Relationship between Fitz and Beloved

And the last of my hot takes* is that the expression of Fitz's Wit magic puts a wrench in the subtext reading of a sexual relationship between Fitz and the Fool. It is constantly emphasized by Nighteyes that the Fool is the "Scentless One" and no Wit presence - meaning that Fitz gets no pheromones and thus no attraction that way. The women who sleep with Fitz are described by scent to varying degrees depending on his attraction. Even the Pale Woman is described as having a scent (although an artificial one) when she is trying seduction. Instead, Fitz and the Fool have a Skill link and it is through the Skill that their relationship is expressed. This kindof seems to be the deal with all Skill Coteries - close groups of comrades who become dragons together forever. Overall, Fitz and Beloved have an aesthetic and intellectual attachment to each other, which seems like the ideal of philia love friendship - different from erotic love.

Neither Fitz or the Fool are faultless for the way that their relationship deteriorated in Golden Fool. Fitz being uncomfortable with the social stigma of homosexuality does have an impact, but the greater problem is the breakdown of communication.

The Fool struggles with speaking plainly. This has always been the cases since his fondness for riddles in Assassin's Apprentice. Like, the nature of being a prophet is to know that certain things will be true in the future, so he is disconnected from humans who would prefer to have information laid out clearly for them in the present so that they can react and make informed decisions. And Fitz is both slow to pick up on social cues, and then views it as a betrayal of trust that his friend would lead people to make assumptions about the nature of their relationship without his knowledge or consent. He wants to put words to abstract concepts like the exact kind of relationship shared by two people. He did 3 books worth of writing in an attempt to put his thoughts about himself into words. What Fitz struggles with is the idea that words will be misinterpreted no matter how plainly or poetically they are said - people fill in gaps in understanding with their own beliefs and/or prejudices.

Fool's Errand begins with the Fool reading all of Fitz's accounts and thoughts that he put on paper, which I assume to be effectively an in-universe version of the text of the first trilogy. And then in further conversation Fitz opens up about everything that he has done for the past 15 years. But the Fool doesn't similarly discuss being Amber or carving the Liveship Paragon or the whole story of the dragons until forced by circumstance. It was an unbalanced relationship that was going to come to a breaking point sooner or later. But after airing out all the hurt and betrayal and secrets they did manage to mend things by the end of Fool's Fate.

*I haven't read the Fitz and the Fool trilogy other than some summaries. So, this is like 90% my impression as of the end of the Tawny Man Trilogy.

#Farseer #tawny man #Realm of the Elderlings #Like this is what I mean about Elden Ring where there is misdirection about the truth of the history #And also that learning to look at a situation from as many different perspectives as possible is important #One of the themes of these books is that the true history is obscured by layers of secrecy and bias and embellishment #Even when the truth is written down the paper deteriorates or context is lost through a poor translation or etc

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