a lot of time in f&f is spent hammering home how frightening the servants should be. readers are taught to fear their ability to read the futures — their "all-knowing" nature, their ability to predict, expect, and counter the protagonists' actions. and i love prophecies and dreams. my favorite fantasy tools. so i was very excited for these prophetic antagonists! the question is posed over and over: how do you beat an enemy that can predict your every move?
it was a question i was excited for hobb to answer. but then.... they never predict any move. they don't predict bee being the destroyer. they don't predict beloved infiltrating clerres. they don't predict any of fitz and the fitzgang's actions. and some might say, "well, credit to the protagonists! they chose the unlikely path! they evaded the servants' eye!" but i just don't find that to be a satisfying answer, personally. i guess it could be a matter of personal preference.
there wasn't a single instance where i was scared of the servants for their knowledge — which is what i think we're intended to feel! i wanted to feel frightened at how much they knew! but no. the servants and the four are on their backfoot the entire time. they don't know who the unexpected son is. they laugh at dwalia and vindeliar and refuse to heed their warnings. vindeliar actually says "there is a farseer and dragons in the bay" and they don't look into it at all. these are the prophetic enemies we're supposed to be fearing? after we've spent three books hearing about how smart and knowledgeable they are?
and the way they die is soooo... i've already joked about it, but symphe thinking bee is stupid enough to believe her candy kidnapper trick? i don't even remember how fellowdy and coultrie died and i finished the book, like, three days ago. it was that insignificant. capra dies without much gusto or effort. after spending chapter after chapter after chapter with fitz and amber, listening to how fitz has to subject amber to memories of her torture just to know the layout + how to kill them? only for none of that to matter at all, because apparently it was really easy all along? why emphasize the planning phase that much? (good for beloved backstory exposition, but i hope you know what i'm getting at.) i was terrified for fitz to go head to head with the four, and i find their resulting deaths so anticlimactic. i liked that bee got to off symphe, but i wish it would've been harder.
again. caveat caveat caveat. "maybe the point was their hubris." i get it. i think that's a good and probably true reading of it. but i can't help feeling so cheated as a reader. if you're going to set up a cool, all-knowing, powerful set of villains, they better be cool, all-knowing, and powerful, or i will feel cheated! they should have been hard to kill! i never once felt scared of them or their prescience — and their prescience is the part that was propped up as being "most scary" by the narrative.
which leads me to bee and her destroyer scene. (yay bee! yay destroyer! i love her so much.) so she burned the libraries. again, i felt let down by this scene. cool! she burned them! well, we never really got a scene with the libraries. we heard how important the libraries are from an abundance of sources. sure, we know the servants will allow famines or shipwrecks based on the contents of the libraries. but it's mostly tell, not show.
the libraries act as this "heart of the servants" that bee is felling, but again, i never once felt scared of their prophecies or prescience or libraries. they're not doing so great with it. in every scene with the four, they're fumbling around in the dark, bickering like children, unsure what to do. they don't know what the dreams mean. their library does not scare me.
what does scare me is the torture chamber. that's where we see the servants in action. that's the part that is shown to us, not just told — through beloved's memories and crippled form, through dwalia's treatment of bee, we come to understand firsthand that the servants have a willingness and eagerness to commit sadistic brutality. that was what made them scary. not their fuddling of the prophecies.
it makes me sad because it feels like hobb cheated herself out of a destroyer scene. if you want bee to burn the libraries, make the scary part the libraries. the scary part is the torture chamber. none of the characters touch or harm that chamber — the cave-in does the dirty work. it feels like such a missed opportunity.
all of this is personal preference. i found myself disappointed in the destroyer scene — what visceral, hateful connection do i as a reader have, really, to the library? — as well as to the servants as antagonists on the whole. this is such a long rant. so sorry. it's just so personally frustrating to see a cool concept get set up and then fall so flat. we should have had library scenes! we should have had a more difficult infiltration! the four should have been smart! THE FOUR SHOULD HAVE BEEN SMART! you can have a smart character that still falls victim to hubris. just because they're prideful and have blindspots doesn't mean they need to be fumbling. they should have been hard to kill. okay whatever i'm done. im not proofreading all this so if i said something stupid whoops please don't come for me
We can talk all day about whether or not it was wrong to Starling to do what she did to Fitz but all of that aside I will actually never forgive Starling for what she said to Hap
fitz, probably: I obviously don't like LIKE the Fool, we are both men, it's innatural, I love him as a man loves another man, I could never desire him and his supple waist I don't care that he's like the golden sun and his hair is so beautiful and he is like glowing everytime I see him and has beautiful amber eyes and I feel safe in my sleep when I'm with him and
sometimes i dislike how often fitz is called an "unreliable" narrator. like yes you have to take the fitztake on the situations with a grain of salt but fitz is not unreliable in the sense of writing things that literally did not happen in the story. yes everything is filtered through fitz's perception of the world but that is just what a narrator does.
