#wyldon

[minuiko]

Discord requested the scene where Raoul murders Wyldon for ordering Kel to abandon her people :)

[thefatfemme]

I GET TO BE AN ARC READER FOR THE FIRST PROTECTOR OF THE SMALL GRAPHIC NOVEL I AM LOSING MY SHIT

[obi-wann-cannoli]

Second year page stable brawl you will always be famous

[cricketnationrise]

wip wednesday 24.8

only a couple of weeks since the last one of these, we're doing better than last time! once again please enjoy some more tortall words as i near completion for my FTH fic:

A wicked glint lights Keladry’s eyes and somehow Wyldon knows what she’s going to ask. “And how is Margarry? I haven’t heard anything about a knight of Jesslaw going suspiciously missing, so I assume you didn’t actually kill Owen when he asked your permission for her hand.” Wyldon would very much like to forget that his former squire is married to his youngest daughter, but alas. “He’s a hellion and a plague, but a good man. They’re very happy.” Keladry beams as the dance finishes. But she spares him more teasing as he escorts her back to her parents, resuming their trade discussion instead. She truly is the finest knight he’s ever trained.

tags under the cut bc there are QUITE A FEW, but also this is your open tag if you want to participate :D

@cha-melodius @celeritas2997 @cactusdragon517 @blueeyedgrlwrites @kiwiana-writes

@leaves-of-laurelin @tailsbeth-writes @porcelainmortal @firenati0n @wordsofhoneydew

@14carrotghoul @iboatedhere @onthewaytosomewhere @thesleepyskipper @myheartalivewrites

@orchidscript @welcometololaland @duchesspolignaca03 @thedramasummer @tintagel-or-cockleshells

@missanniewhimsy @thoughtsofthegirlwiththecurl @the-lincyclopedia

[nimblermortal]

I have a fundamental principle of fanfic AU's:

If it's a canon divergence AU, more people should die. Canon should be the best possible way things could have gone. If you change something, things should be worse. They may still resolve well, but it should cost more. If it isn't going worse, have you properly examined the consequences of this change?

Plus, it hits your readers harder when you kill off named characters :)

[fytortall]

I absolutely love that wheel. Dad is on a first name basis with every war in the long legged Wolfpack, and I think that deserves more attention.

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Translation: I absolutely love that Wyldon is on a first name basis with every wolf in the Long Lake Wolf Pack, and I think that deserves more attention.

[bloodsbane]

i was just thinking earlier while listening to this book how much i LOVE platonic cheek/forehead kisses. i think they're an underrated expression of care and love between friends and peers, or even mentors with their apprentices when they've basically become like family

[dr-dendritic-trees]

I started rereading First Test and... wow Wyldon did actually go out of his way to keep Joren from being Kel's sponsor, didn't he?

Huh.

Wyldon makes a huge fuss, several times, about how he's definitely not going to make the slightest of exceptions for Kel. To the point that he bitches and moans about letting her bathe separately from her male classmates. But he does make an exception about the page sponsorship rules so she's sponsored by Neal (a first year, who started late and is an established pain in Wyldon's ass) instead of Joren (considered, if I remember the series correctly, a pretty good page and squire pretty much up until he gets arrested for kidnapping Lalasa).

[bellona1521]

settle an argument. if another girl had come to train to be a page before kel was made a squire, do you think wyldon would have put her on probation too? i think yes, friend says no

[copperhawks]

The funniest thing to me about Kel, and maybe one of the most interesting because of how understated it is, is that Kel becomes a good commander in the end, not by emulating Wyldon who was cold and implacable and insensitive, or by emulating Raoul who mostly only disobeys orders out of principle or because he has an issue with what the order says about his personal relationship with Jon, but by emulating JON.

Kel doesn't even LIKE Jon, she BARELY respects him as a person. He's a good enough ruler that she's willing to fight for him and swear loyalty to him and to at least mostly believe that he wouldn't work with Blayce to make his own killing monsters, but that's as far as it goes for Kel. If he's kind to her, she finds it uncomfortable and almost untrustworthy because she assumes he doesn't care about her and so his kindness and respect towards her must be fake.

But from the outside, as readers, we know just how much Jon fought for Kel. We know how much he does respect her right to be a knight. Jon is the sole reason that Kel DID get the opportunity to prove herself, if he'd capitulated to Wyldon completely, she just wouldn't have ever been allowed to join. Kel doesn't KNOW THAT, obviously, but we do. We know that Jon did everything he could to find a way to convince Wyldon to let Kel become a page. While Wyldon claims later that the reason he chose to let her stay at the end of the probation year was because his better judgment convinced him she'd earned it, I'd be willing to bet that part of that better judgment also included knowing if he couldn't prove to JON that she needed to go, then he'd be in trouble. Kel was training and working in front of plenty of other trainers and teachers who could easily contradict Wyldon's lies if he'd tried it, many of whom are closer to Jon than they are to Wyldon.

Kel's experiences and feelings about that experience are entirely valid, and she doesn't have the knowledge we do about how hard Jon fought for her, so it's not shocking that she's upset with him for a good portion of her series. She never even discovers this truth by the end of her series, even though she does get a lesson from Jon and Thayet (and Raoul to some degree) about how politics and compromises work in order to make changes happen. So her opinion of him by the end is boiled down to the quote from Squire: "good kings weren't always good men." It makes sense for her to think this, but because Kel's knowledge base is so limited (and her worldview so black and white for much of her series), it makes her an EXTREMELY unreliable narrator about this particular issue.

Kel believes that while Jon generally does his duty and keeps the peace, he doesn't actually care all that much about his people as individuals. But in their only meaningful conversation in Squire, Jon is able to point out that he (and Thayet, who is actually equal to Jon in power, something Kel either doesn't know which would be a failure in her education or just tends to ignore so she can focus her ire on Jon) has to make a LOT of compromises in order to get ANYTHING useful done at all. Sometimes, often, it means making deals with people he doesn't like or people he just fundamentally disagrees with, because it's the first step in a multi-step plan to help more people in the long run. He also points out that just throwing his weight and authority around in order to be able to change everything he wants to change immediately regardless of what anyone else thinks about it is a great way to get himself and his family killed. Because even if he had good intentions, that would be tyranny. It does make Kel think a little, but she doesn't tend to like him much still afterwards, her resentment from her page years will always color her opinion of him a little.

However, then she gets to Haven and she's suddenly tossed into a position of leadership over a lot of other people, many of whom disagree with each other or disagree with her or both. And all of the sudden, Kel has to make compromises. She doesn't LIKE the way the sergeants often treat their men, especially the sergeants whose men are convicts, but there's very very little she can do about it without really pissing off those same sergeants and that's not something she can afford to do. There's a moment when Neal starts getting frustrated about the treatment of the convicts and she takes him out to vent to her so he doesn't vent to the sergeants, something that the sergeants would then take out on their men. Kel's reasoning as she does this is that she "preferred to avoid battles with them now so she would have authority with them later if she needed to use it." Later, Kel is talking to Daine and she says "That's all this job is... Trying to please everyone and pleasing no one. And it will only get worse, not better."

Both of these moments showcase Kel choosing to make compromises. She may not like the way the sergeants treat the convicts, but she needs to stay on the sergeants' good sides because she doesn't have enough resources to butt heads with them nor enough authority to just force the issue, and even if she DID, it could cause the sergeants to become troublesome or take out their frustration with her on the men in ways she can't see as well. But staying on the sergeants' good sides might mean letting some of their maltreatment slide if it's not physically harming the convicts. And even setting that aside, she's dealing with nearly 500 refugees eventually, all of which are from different towns in the area and have different needs, not all of which she can accommodate. This requires compromise. Sometimes she can please some of them and not others, but mostly she probably just ends up not pleasing anybody because that's often how compromises WORK.

She never makes the active connection to Jon and his lesson on leadership from Squire while she's in Haven, but that quote up there about how this job (aka being a commander) is all about trying to please everyone and pleasing no one? It sounds a HECK of a lot like "good kings weren't always good men." You can try your best to help others, but often doing the right thing can involve making everyone unhappy. You can't be everybody's friend if you're going to get anything done.

Some of this she might've learned from Raoul's style of command, but Raoul commands a fairly small amount of people (at least in comparison to a King), and so we see him able to be pretty friendly to the people he commands in a way that Jon is perhaps unable to do. And she might believe that she learned some of this from Wyldon, but Wyldon had a tendency to be very unfair and biased due to his raging bigotry and conservative values, as well as the fact that he doesn't actually even LIKE being a training master and that likely impacted the way he treated the pages (he's almost never that kind to the pages, whereas we see him capable of being quite kind with the refugees later, which is where Kel comes to the conclusion that he hadn't enjoyed being a training master).

But Jon makes an entire speech about how he (and Thayet) have been working THEIR ENTIRE REIGN to change laws that help people. He explains how they have to consider the needs of merchants, nobles, farmers, street people, priests/priestesses, and mages. They have to consider not only what these people might need or want, but also what they could do when they feel sufficiently offended and how that could impact not just the royal family or the nobility but the realm as a whole. Jon points out that they HAVE made changes, for the better, and that just because they don't always succeed at everything or because they have to compromise sometimes, doesn't mean they aren't working at making changes or that they don't care about helping people. Not everyone you have power over is going to be your friend, they might not even be someone you like. But if you're going to take on the job of leadership, that's something you have to be willing to accept and work with, which often means making compromises with people whose needs and values are contradictory to your own.

Jon probably knows when he makes the compromise with Wyldon that it will likely impact a lot of people's good opinion of him. Alanna is right there and clearly angry, and we know Thayet doesn't like the decision, either. And it's entirely possible that Jon knows in the moment that Kel herself will put the blame on him because he's the King. But he also knows that if he insists on Kel being allowed to be a page without trying to compromise with Wyldon, Wyldon will quit over it and he'll end up with ten DIFFERENT problems that could cause a lot bigger issues to far more people than just one girl. So he makes the compromise. He sacrifices Alanna and Thayet and even Kel's good opinion of him in order to ensure that Kel gets the opportunity to become a Knight without turning all of his nobles against him which could ultimately lead to a civil war. Is it fair? No, and he knows it. But it's the best option he has in order to get the outcome they all actually want which is just for Kel to have the chance to prove herself.

Kel has to make similar choices once she's finally in a position of leadership of her own. And whether she realizes it or not, without ever even spending more than a few minutes with Jon, she ends up emulating his leadership style more than anybody else's because it WORKS and it works WELL. She'll probably never admit it, she might never even realize it herself, but she's so much more like Jon than any of the other men she sees as role models. And I love that. I love the dramatic irony of that, that the one person Kel only barely respects because of a compromise he made on her behalf that she'll never even know about, is the person Kel ends up most resembling. Jon is the reason she has the opportunity to become the Protector of the Small in the first place, Jon is the person who created that environment that allowed her to nurture those values, and she'll probably never even really be able to acknowledge that, because sometimes that's what being a good leader means.

[drwho-ess]

One of my favorite parts of Lady Knight by Tamora Pierce is essentially

Wyldon: bury your dead and get back to mastiff never mind the fact that you’ve consistently shown you care about everyone and will put your life on the line for them

Kel: *nods along while making plans to slip away*

*slips away*

Raoul: “wyldon you dumb fuck what were you thinking you should have hogtied her to her horse and brought her to mastiff”

Wyldon: “I realized I am a dumb fuck about this I don’t need more reminders”

Raoul: “you better hope Mithros forgives you because I sure as shit won’t if something happens to her” *storms out*

Kel I swear is the closest thing Raoul has to a child and he put so much time and effort into shaping her into what he knew she could be but just hearing stories and having minimum interactions with her before asking her to be his squire

[obi-wann-cannoli]

I think @copperhawks’s take in this post really explains it - Wyldon letting Kel stay was less about his own sense of fairness and more about his reputation and the fact that Kel had publicly exceeded expectations, making it impossible for him to justify his decision to turn her away.

Therefore if another girl were to try, were to be only average, Wyldon might turn her away even if she was equal to the boys.

Wyldon, admitting he was wrong, admitting he shirked his duties, admitting he was unfair - and yet his main reason for resigning is that it’s possible he would do it all again and worse if given the chance.

Capable of changing but apparently believes the change incapable of sticking.

[nimblermortal]

Raoul: You can't pick on Alan, he's just a little guy! Alex: Bullying is wrong! Gareth the Elder: Why would you expect a page to do your chores for you? That's bizarre. Detention for a month! Prince Jonathan: We will all band together to help our little friend. --years later, when Jonathan is supposedly Good King-- Cleon: Oh yeah, pages do work for squires and even older pages all the time. It's the way it's always been. Older pages generally: Yeah you shouldn't bully pages TOO hard but it's normal to haze the new ones a bit Younger pages: How dare you help me. We are fractured and there shall be no friends. Anders: If you tell people you're being beaten up, they'll give you detention for it. Prince Raoul: If I do anything about this it is taking sides, which royalty cannot do.

[fytortall]

Which of Kells friends or anyone in Kells time as a page under Lord, will learn, do you think are the gay couple that are sneaking around under wilderness nose and not noticing because Weldon thinks that only boys and girls will do things in closed doors