[id: a 3x3 moodboard. 1: a single flower on a muted green background. 2: art of several small green hearts on a white background. 3: an outline of a heart on a green background with the words “kind heart / fierce mind / brave spirit” inside it. 4: cursive handwriting on a white background of the underlined word “brave.” 5: keladry of mindelan as depicted on the original cover of lady knight by tamora pierce on the background of the aromantic flag. 6: a black-and-white drawing of two knights in combat upon their horses; one is holding a crossbow and the other is wielding a spear. 7: a black-and-white close up of the hilt of a sword. 8: black text on a grey background reading “fight like a girl.” 9: the head of a black horse on a grey background. end id.]
@tortallrecall asked for a chamber of the ordeal fic so you know i had to do it to em
There are many who wish to be heroes. Rich and poor, proud and humble - a hero needs no class or race or gender to be.
That is why I am here. That is why I have always been here.
If I was born, I do not remember. If I can die, I do not know how.
I have been many things. A cloud, a crone, a coincidence. There are many tests. There are as many outcomes.
Despite what most believe, a hero need not be good, or pure, or righteous. There is always a cost, and all you must do to pass through me is pay it.
The ones who come to me now, they all have training. Most are disciplined enough to pay the price. But there are always those who will not bend themselves.
And so they break.
It happened more often, before. There is a reason youngest sons had more luck than oldest. There is a reason paupers had more luck than princes.
Perhaps it is not luck. I do not know the souls of humans. I am here to test them and to judge them, not to know them.
Now they call me a chamber. A man who passed through me settled here and made himself a king. His people built walls around me, and then a legend, thicker than the stone. I make their knights, or I break them. At times I hand out a hero's quest. Those are their own sort of price.
I will be here long after the stone walls around me crumble to dust. I will be here so long as those who would be heroes find me.
Perhaps, when they are gone, I will be gone as well.
ETA: I wrote a fic about aro!Kel/Dom, read that if you want ;)
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.
First Test
There’s a part where Neal is being all dramatic and talking about the glory of knighthood, but Kel says something along the lines of “Well, sure, but being sung about will take a lot of hard work”. Neal responds, “You aren’t a bit romantic, are you?” and I know that it’s a different kind of “romantic” in this context but also PUNS!
“she'd had experiences with crushes—none her own, of course”
I know Kel is 10 at this point, but also, that is exactly what I was thinking at age 10.
Whenever Cleon fake flirts with her, she's so exasperated and amused. At one part he says he'll pine for her until she returns and she thinks “He'll pine and I'm a holly bush”.
And she's always so sympathetic about Roald's arranged marriage. And sure, anyone could be because they’re not ~in love~ but Kel just seems really sympathetic about marriage in general.
Neal has a crush on Daine in this book, which I had forgotten about, and Kel is so exasperated every time he talks about it. She consoles him, but she's so confused and amused by his feelings.
Page
So here we get to the part where 11-year-old Kel thinks she likes Neal. It’s funny, because it happens at the same time when Neal has a crush on Uline of Hannalof, so I think there’s definitely an argument for her reacting of jealousy. She definitely has some feelings for him, but I don’t think they’re quite romantic, and she doesn’t understand them. At least, that’s how I’m choosing to read it.
And she keeps making fun of him about his feelings, and the part where she and her friends all get together to sing him a sappy love song is really funny.
Also, she keeps complaining to Lalasa that he won’t actually do anything about his feelings. Even when she thinks she has a crush on him, she’s annoyed by romance.
@buffintruda and I were talking about this, and I wondered how we hadn’t thought of Kel being aro before the announcement, and they said something I think is very true:
Too be fair, for me at least, the last time I read her books was before I knew I was aro, and her relationships and crushes deterred me from considering it, even though now that you point them out, they're pretty weak and aro-y
At some point in the story, Cleon’s fake flirting becomes real, but Kel doesn’t realize it. She still thinks he’s joking up until halfway through Squire. Even when he’s being really obvious and blushing and commenting on her appearance, she’s just confused as to why he keeps doing this and doesn’t even consider the idea that he could be sincere.
Honestly this is such a GEM of a quote. Like, same:
“I can flirt just as well as my gelding can dance”
When Kel is talking to Joren about how he’s “changed”, and he tells her that she should get married and her immediate response is “I don’t want to be married”. She does think of Neal, but it’s an afterthought. When I used to force myself to pretend to like someone, before I knew I was aro, I would do the same sort of thing - “I don’t want to marry anyone, ew! Wait, no, I would totally marry [insert fake crush here]...” It’s something she feels like she’s supposed to think, not something she actually feels.
Honestly, Kel’s whole crush on Neal is not really a big deal, even to her. She’ll pine over him when a situation comes up that makes her think about romance, and she’ll occasionally have that “heart flutter” thing, but it’s mostly them being great friends and she seems to forget she’s supposed to have a crush on him while she’s hanging out with him. This seems a lot more like a squish than a crush, at least to me.
So this isn’t technically related to Kel’s aromanticism, but I couldn’t leave it out. Before their third examinations, Kel and Neal talk about their friends and Neal says something like “I wouldn’t trade your friendship for anything”. Ahhh I was so emotional when I read that!! Their friendship is so good and heartwarming and beautiful that I wanted to cry!
Kel made a joke out of it, but it was really sweet and that moment was truly beautiful and relateable. It’s great to see strong friendships shown in books, even if one of the people thinks that they’re in love with the other one.
And in this scene, Kel didn’t think about her “crush” even once, even though it was a pretty intense moment for both of them.
Squire
When Kel finds out that Alanna wants Neal for her squire, she has this silly line about “I can’t not be his friend even if I can’t be his love” and Kel, please. That is far too melodramatic for you! This is so out of character it feels forced, which, if we view it through an aromantic lens, it probably is.
Aw yeah, Raoul is back! I love him. Another aro icon! @buffintruda and I couldn’t believe that we could imagine him as arospec, but totally overlook Kel!
When Kel joins the Own, she meets Dom! She’s wondering why Dom makes her feel all weird and “romantic” moreso than she ever felt for Neal, and I’m like... It’s because you’re making this all up! It’s amatonormativity and heteronormativity! Once you’re not around Neal, you forget you’re supposed to like him, so you find someone else to project your confusion and insecurity onto! You’re not “fickle”, you’re just a confused aromantic.
Kel wonders why “Lalasa never mentioned this”, and that’s pretty obvious. Lalasa is canonically in a relationship with her friend Tian...this girl is a lesbian.
“Who falls in and out of love in a summer?”
Probably someone who was never in love in the first place, Kel. This quote comes the next time that Kel sees Neal, and she realizes her romantic feelings are gone like they never were there in the first place.
“Were her feelings even real?”
Ding ding! Now you’re starting to get it!
Cleon is ridiculously awkward around Kel, and she is just as ridiculously oblivious of his feelings and exasperated by his flirting. (Relatable.) When he kisses her for the first time, she’s so shocked that she doesn’t know how to react which is a mood.
“They won’t be able to talk sense for weeks!”
When Yuki comes to Tortall, Kel makes fun of all the pages and squires for “falling in love” with her. She thinks “her messmates were romantic” in a way that totally excludes herself from that line of thought, because obviously she’s not romantic! That would be ridiculous!
“She hadn’t seen Cleon privately since that astonishing kiss. She couldn’t decide if she wanted to see him or never to see him again. She didn’t know which would be worse, finding that he’d done it on a dare or that he’d done it because he wanted to. Either meant a rat’s nest of problems.”
She liked the kiss, so we know she likes kissing, but that does not mean she isn’t aro. She doesn’t really want to like Cleon romantically. Unlike with Neal and Dom, she isn’t tricking herself into feeling something for Cleon; his feelings surprised her. “A rat’s nest of problems” is true not only politically, but also very much personally.
Tamora Pierce has also called Kel asexual at different times; this post is about her being aro, but there was one little ace thing I wanted to mention. When Kel meets George Cooper, she cannot figure out why Alanna is attracted to him; she only finds his eyes attractive. Kel is struggling to find anything attractive about him, and when has she ever before focused on the physical side of things when she’s forcing herself into liking someone? It isn’t something she even considers.
“Nice eyes hardly seemed to Kel like grounds for marriage.”
Yeah, well, for you it would be hard to find anything that would be grounds for marriage!
When Kel and Cleon (finally) talk about their first kiss, Cleon is trying to convince her that they should be in a relationship and Kel says something along the lines of “If people knew, they might not know it was friendly” and that’s literally the most aromantic thing I’ve ever heard. She is literally incapable of forming a reason why she would kiss someone outside of being friends. She likes kissing but doesn’t have romantic feelings.
In the same scene, she wants so badly to be interrupted by someone so she doesn’t have to deal with Cleon’s romantic advances. In the end they do get together, and some of this conversation was in jest, but Kel is truly terrified of romance and uncomfortable with her situation no matter how much she is genuinely fond of Cleon.
During the Progress, she talks to her mom about sex and Cleon. Her mom says, “you can choose if you want to have sex”, and Kel’s immediate response is “I don’t want to choose that!” Her reasoning is “I don’t want to be distracted”, “I just want my shield”, “I certainly don’t want babies” and if that ain’t the most aroace thing then I don’t know what is.
Shortly after this scene, Kel talks to Cleon, which goes something like this...
Cleon: Come down and let me hold you!
Kel: No, you come up, and no holding.
Kel is terrified of sex but simultaneously struggling with her self-worth and wanting to be fuckable.
Once Kel and Cleon are officially together, their relationship is pretty romantic, which explains why I didn’t consider she could be aro at first. But even then, I see it as more that she enjoys Cleon’s company and the physical side of their relationship even though they never actually have sex. And the whole time, Cleon is so much more scared than Kel of the inevitable end of their relationship. Kel is much more practical and sees their relationship as doomed from the beginning.
Not related, but I love how Raoul and Buri’s relationship develops. They’re basically mutual beards and best friends. Buri’s such a lesbian, and Raoul is so aro!
When Kel first suggests that Raoul should ask Buri to go to his party with his aunt, she says that Buri “won’t get any romantic notions” which 1) shows how gay Buri is and 2) shows how Kel’s thought process about romance works.
This speaks for itself:
“She had decided years before that she was no prize on the romance market.”
There’s this lovely conversation while the Own is helping some town...
Kel: Why don’t people talk about hard work when it comes to war? All I hear about is glory.
Dom: Pretty girls want to hear about glory, not work.
Kel wasn’t thinking about romance as a factor; she didn’t even consider it.
While the Own is at Giantkiller, Kel completely forgets about her crush on Dom and it’s pretty much never brought up again.
Another gem of a quote:
“Kel thought asking her for wedding ideas was like asking a cat how to raise a horse, but she did her best.”
Kel and Cleon’s forbidden words are “love” and “marriage” and oh my god that is the most aro thing ever.
Lady Knight
There is so much less romance in this book! That’s great it in general, but it also really establishes Kel as aromantic because this is the book in which she becomes more sure of herself. She thinks about romance much less, which means there’s less things to specify how her reaction to romance proves her aro. I think it was at this point that Tamora Pierce decided that Kel wasn’t going to end up with a romantic partner at the end of her series.
On the way to the Scanran border, Neal and Roald are complaining about being separated from their fiancees, and Kel is so exasperated with them. She feels sorrier for Roald, but she approaches the whole subject with way too critical an eye to be alloromantic.
“She wanted love and children, too—someday.”
She thinks about Cleon, but it’s so distant. She’s imagining that she’ll feel different in the future, because that’s what’s supposed to happen to people, right? But she doesn’t really want love and children.
Kel’s thought of “romance was more pleasant than reality” proves that she doesn’t believe that finding romance is realistic. And as we know, Kel is practical above all.
“Friendship was there, but passion was gone.”
When Kel sees Cleon again after a few years of separation, everything she thought she had felt for him has disappeared. And multiple times she feels bad about not loving him anymore; that’s textbook aro guilt. She emphasizes that “she could still be his friend even if she couldn’t be his lover.” She isn’t at all surprised that she doesn’t love Cleon anymore. She expected this, and she’s relieved that she was right.
“She wanted no lovers until she had settled the Nothing Man’s account.”
Kel will look for any excuse to not have to deal with romance, and everything that justifies her lack of love will do.
“Beyond kisses, Cleon was her friend.”
This proves that she always saw Cleon mostly as a friend, just a friend she also liked to kiss. To aro people things like that aren’t always cut and dry; she likes to kiss but to her kissing is not a romantic action.
She’s relieved that Cleon isn’t trying to keep things going, because it would hurt too much for both of them and because she didn’t want to have to keep faking romantic love. She’s upset about the end of their relationship because change is hard, not because she wants Cleon. She understands that now and talks to Tobe about it. I’m so proud of her!! She’s coming to terms with herself.
At Haven, Kel sees Dom again and remembers that she had a crush on him, but it’s a minor afterthought after a paragraph of her considering their friendship. When he leaves, she misses his friendship and support and doesn’t even think about romance.
And finally, the second to last paragraph in the whole series all but makes aro Kel explicit representation:
“Lovers, Kel thought, rolling her eyes. At least there was one headache she didn’t have. She was about to tell her friend [Neal] he could wait when she remembered that she’d get to see Dom at Steadfast. It would be nice to able to sit and chat for a while without kidnapping, flight, and war to distract them.”
Sure, that could (and has been) interpreted as Kel’s crush on Dom continuing to manifest, but to me it shows her value of friendship, especially as it immediately follows her declaration that lovers are a headache.
In conclusion, my point at the beginning still stands: this is not necessarily good representation. Kel’s story was written without authorial consideration of her aromanticism. But it is representation. And to me, a queer who grew up reading Kel and identifying more with her than with any of Tamora Pierce’s other heroines, even post-canonical, Word of God revelations of Kel being aro matters a lot. This is especially relevant because of the void that is aro rep—I can only name one or two canon aromantic characters from popular media, and Kel is one of them.
An aromantic lens is required to see Kel’s aromanticism, but it is there. It means something. And even though this post has been like two years in the making, Kel still means a lot to me.
Reasons I’m excited for the next episode of @tortallrecall
- My girl, Kel, whom I have been anxiously awaiting since episode one
-objectively speaking this series has the best friendships
-NEAL
-that scene where neal fixes all his clothes before knocking on Daine’s door
-Keladry, the actual love of my life
-boys reacting rashly to situations, meanwhile Kel is like “hey, lets try to see this from each other’s perspective
-Kel
-Neal losing the ability to speak when Kel picks a fight with Joren
-Keladry of mindelan
- "My aunt lit barrels of lard and had them catapulted onto Scanran ships this summer." “As would any delicately reared noblewoman”
In conclusion: I would die for Kel, and cannot wait to hear about her
I was looking through Tortall: A Spy’s Guide and saw that there’s a place in Carthak called “The Hag’s Playplace Mountains” and I thought you’d like to know. what kind of crazy shit did she get up to there for them to name it that??
