F+F Book 2: Chapter 1-2 Thoughts:
At first, I struggled to wrap my head around the necessity of the overt torture the Fool seems to experience off-screen. I thought it stripped him of agency, dignity, and everything that makes him who he is, which didn’t sit right with me. When the reader encounters him last, the Fool makes a graceful exit. His sacrifice at the end of Fool’s Fate is very effective. And it’s a beautifully meaningful epilogue.
Then he returns, and to see him so blatantly dehumanised just felt extreme to me, like it didn’t have the impact Hobb was intending, save for making the reader (see: me) tear up over a character I cherish and respect.
He told Fitz that he was free, that fate was done with him. He bowed out, and made space for another to take his place at Fitz’s arm. All that made sense. So how could the Fool ask Fitz to kill for him? It took me some time to process it.
The Fool had his blindspots in the original trilogy. Sometimes his tunnel-visioned attitude came across as a lack of empathy, even. So I’m not trying to paint him as a saint, but I never imagined he could ask anything of anyone for his own sake. This got me thinking. Why? Was I was putting him on a pedestal, or was it because seeing him through Fitz’s eyes made me hold him to a higher standard?
The Fool is a layered character. He’s consistently stubborn, occasionally rash (I have never been wise), devoutly dedicated to his goals, kind and intelligent, sometimes even fickle and impulsive. So why did the “new” Fool in the first half of the last trilogy make me so uncomfortable?
In the wake of his decision to let Fitz go, I struggled to accept he would turn on a dime, even as I understand he’s been traumatised beyond recognition. Was I meant to reimagine his character, and accept that everything he has done to fulfil his life’s purpose, and everything he has asked of Fitz, has been out of self delusion?
Except, it isn’t all that far-fetched. The Fool is not unlike someone who grew up in a cult, being sold the idea that they’re special. What makes it worse is that in the Fool’s case, it’s true, but not in the way he was led to believe. By the final trilogy, he’s lost all conviction in who he is and what he’d originally set out to do. After years of working in service of his beliefs and pulling the strings from the shadows at the expense of his own needs and desires, he discovers that the people with a hand in nurturing him were his true abusers. AND he believes they were responsible for the death of his ‘son’.
Here’s the kicker. To the Fool, everything that became of Fitz was for the greater good…until it wasn’t.
He’s been beaten within an inch of his life. He’s lost everything he’d built around the carefully crafted identity he’s relied on to protect himself. And so, with ignorance born from desperation, he says something to Fitz that only serves to hurt them both. Because the Fool, at the end of FA, has lost his most defining character trait.
I’ve just started book 2/3. Not sure where things will go from here. Not certain if this is the Fool’s descent into corruption, or if he starts to come around - but what’s really interesting to me is that none of this would have happened - had Fitz not brought him back to life.
Death matters. Death is change. The Fool is no longer the person he was when he was riding off into the sunset on girl-on-a-dragon. Something is bound to fundamentally change when you’re faced with the most inevitable change of all. In a way, I wonder if one of the underlying themes here is that the Fool should have stayed dead. From the years he’s spent in abject suffering and pain, to the deaths of his followers, to the moment he tells an old friend the last thing he wants to hear - it’s clear that living past his time has broken him.
And there’s room for self-blame, because it was his decision to return to Clerres, with high hopes of changing the future of those that followed him, like changing the world just wasn’t enough. I’ve always interpreted this as the Fool fighting an internal battle over a pyrrhic victory. The battle won at the cost of the war. It’s difficult to feel accomplished when you’re the footnote in someone else’s story. This is not to say that the Fool was ever envious of Fitz, but not having a true say in being brought back to life puts him in a position where he has to wonder: did I give up my life for nothing?
TLDR, I am captivated and nervous for the Fool and Fitz alike, and I’m withholding judgement, because the more I read, the more the Fool’s arc in these books seems very deliberately written.
