Full of genderness, with a richness and depth that allows it to age into modern Discourse
It’s time, my friends. I've spoken about setting, plot, characterization, love, risk, desire, and how Fitz just can't catch a break, each time particularized to a specific book. And I could do the same here. I even took notes on the Fool's Fate-specific theme I wanted to discuss. But I think that I'd rather set that aside; because here, at the end of things, we finally have all the pieces in place to address a different topic. And so although the structure of this whole Realm of the Elderlings Project might lead you to believe that today's entry is about Fool's Fate, in fact it's more a retrospective over the nine books as a whole, all of which contribute to today's discussion: The Fool, and Gender.
What makes the Fool’s ambiguous, shifting gender work so well, I think, is the way all of the conversations in these books have aged — a very hard task in a domain as volatile as gender. Typically, ‘ageing well’ is used to describe works that express a value we now agree is the correct one, before other people were mainstreamly expressing that value. But the whole Fool + Gender tapestry does something different. Here, the same events and interactions were relevant to gender discourse Back Then are also relevant to gender discourse Today, but in a different way. They are sufficiently rich and textured and ambiguous that they can be interpreted fruitfully across decades of shifting landscapes.
To demonstrate, I'm going to explore three moments from three different books that hit some (but not all — oh, by no means all!) of the main discussion points.
1. Misgendering: The Fool is a woman and she is in love with you [Assassin’s Quest, pg 551]
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| Cover art by John Howe |
This claim comes from Starling, and sets off a long sequence in which she insists that the Fool is a woman, and resolutely uses she/her for the Fool until Kettricken finally tells her to knock it off. Everything about this can be read in a way that engages fruitfully with sexuality discourse of the 1990s, and with gender identity discourse of the 2020s.
Today, this kind of claim in a modern book would immediately set off alarm bells about misgendering, so it can come across as a bit jarring how the Fool remains fully unbothered by something that is intricately intertwined with some very ugly attacks in modern discourse. 'What does it matter what she thinks?' he says. 'Let her think whatever is easiest for her to believe' (pg 634). Today, it matters an awful lot what someone thinks about your gender. Misgendering occupies a very specific cultural role, and when it appears in books it is there to elicit a very specific reaction. In non-awful books, misgendering is almost always either a symbol of intentionally malicious transphobia, or else represents the more insidious consequence of society’s insistence on gender-conforming expression and performance. It is not innocuous. It is not something to laugh off. In a modern book, the Fool’s willingness to disregard Starling’s behavior as a quirky bit of silliness would come across as some sort of attempt to minimize the very real problem of misgendering.
But this is not a modern book. It was written in the late 1990s, and the sorts of conversations we’re having now about misgendering simply weren’t as mainstream then. Starling isn’t malicious in what she’s doing by insisting that the Fool is ‘actually’ a woman. She’s not a representative of 2020s-era society’s refusal to respect gender identity. Instead, she’s representing a different kind of societal constraint: an unwillingness to respect queer love. She is absolutely all in favor of Fitz and the Fool getting together. And she's not wrong in her observation that the Fool is in love with Fitz. The Fool repeatedly tells Fitz that he is absolutely DTF should Fitz be interested; it’s just that he’s not only DTF.
The problem with Starling’s behavior here is not her observations of the romantic potential between Fitz and the Fool. It rather arises from the fact that she represents lot of 1990s opinions about male friendships. If there is love and affection between two guys, the opining opines, it had better not have any sexual overtones. No homo, dude. And if the romantic indicators become too clear to disregard, then you’d better find a way to make it straight. The 1990s were a banner decade for girls dressing up as boys to have adventures, so it’s not a surprise (in the Doylist reading) that Starling draws on that same trope to straighten out what she sees between Fitz and the Fool. The Fool is a woman, and thereby can be in love with Fitz. It’s a silly, hopeless attempt to change something unchangeable; and the Fool treats it accordingly.
Of course, any attempt to minimize society’s implacable cishet norms is not quite as harmless as the Fool makes it — hence the nagging concern that his reaction to Starling’s imposition of those norms on him trivializes the very real problem that she could be representing. Except, of course, that throughout the rest of this book, and the full Tawny Man trilogy, the Fool does retains a certain distaste for Starling. Is it simply jealousy, of how she can enjoy a sexual relationship with Fitz that is denied him? It could be. The Fool can be quite petty at times. But his dislike for Starling could also be read as a more unconscious reaction to her attempts to reinforce societal expectations of gender and sexuality.
It’s not clear. It doesn’t have to be clear. Hobb doesn't tell us what to think. She simply gives us the facts on the page. Starling misgenders the Fool. The Fool doesn't care for Starling. What you read out of that is a function of what you bring to the discussion; and that will change between 1998 and 2025. Regardless, however, Robin Hobb's readers are the smartest and most discerning and thoughtful of all readers, so the conversation that ensues cannot help but be smart and discerning and thoughtful.
2. Trans vs. drag personae: Why must I truncate myself to please you? [The Golden Fool, pg 404]
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| Jacket illustration by John Howe |
What makes the whole thing between the Fool and Starling even more interesting is that, in more than one way, she’s right. She's fully correct that the Fool is in love with Fitz, and although she's misgendering him, she's only doing it in the Six Duchies context. Elsewhere, in Bingtown, the Fool DOES have an identity that is female. As we learn in The Liveship Traders, the Fool is also Amber, and he is Amber in a way which seems to go beyond any kind of disguise. Amber is as real a person as the Fool is, and she is just as in love with Fitz as the Fool is. She uses Fitz's face as a model when she repairs Paragon, carving his features into the figurehead from her memory of his visage alone. Amber's got it bad for Fitz. And this discovery is the core of that awful rift between Fitz and the Fool in Golden Fool: Fitz learns about Amber, and starts to worry that the Fool he knows is another identity, no more real than Amber the woodworker in Bingtown, or Lord Golden the Jamaillian fuckboi in Buckkeep.
Fitz's discovery of the Fool's female-coded identity, and concerns over which one is 'real', can be related easily to modern discourses on transgender identity, just like the misgendering in Assassin's Quest. To the extent that anyone imagines one gender is less 'real' than another, that's just our resident dumbass Fitz. Certainly on the page Amber is never presented as anything other than a woman. And Fitz's reaction to learning about Amber has a lot in common with the furious, explosive rage that discovering a trans background can elicit in an ugly subset of our population (see the unpleasant history of the trans panic defense). We saw in Royal Assassin that Fitz does have a tendency to indulge in murderous rampages when he gets mad. It's uncomfortable to realize how much he has in common with those people who feel tricked or betrayed at discovering some intimate truth about a person, and persuade themselves that being denied access to those secrets justifies a violent response.
But to me, there’s another interpretation possible here. The Fool is not simply shifting his gender. He is not non-binary or gender fluid. He fully embraces whichever binary-coded gender he occupies at a given moment, and he is not gender fluid because when he shifts, he is shifting more than gender. He is shifting into fully distinct identities, with distinct skills and personalities, operating in separate spheres of his life. All of these facts are equally as important to the distinction of these personae as the fact that these personae have distinct gender expressions.
And to me, that feels more like drag.
I'm going to phrase this next bit carefully, because neither trans identity nor drag culture are monoliths, and any statement I make will be inaccurate for a subset of individuals. Feel free to @ me; my social media usernames are at the bottom. But for now, here is my impression: gender transition is a change in the external expression of an identity. What was assigned at birth is left behind, and what replaces it is a new and entire person. This may not be the case for all transgender people, but it is the case for enough of them to have given rise to the term 'deadnaming': the old name, the old identity, is gone. It is dead. Long live the new.
By contrast, many people who do drag embrace a drag identity without rejecting their non-drag lives. So that brings us to the question that worries Fitz: which of the Fool's personae are ‘real’ and which are assumed? From what I’ve read about drag culture, I get the impression that this is not a simple question. An individual’s drag persona is not necessarily any less ‘real’ than the day-to-day mainstream counterpart. We’re always performing our gender — or our identity more generally — one way or another. Drag is what happens when that performativity is explicitly acknowledged, explored, and played with (Levitt et al 2018). This is why, when Fitz asks whether the Fool he has known and loved as his dearest friend is real, the Fool says, ‘You know more of the whole of me than any other person who breaths, yet you persist in insisting that all of that cannot be me. What would you have me cut off and leave behind? And why must I truncate myself to please you?’
The Fool is not one gender or another. He does not assume a gender solely as a stratagem in his travels. He is all the genders, because he is all the identities. He expresses one part of himself, or another, as the situation calls for it. And even if Fitz does know more of the truth of him than anyone else, still, even Fitz does not know all of him.
Then Fitz does his dumbassery and starts getting all het up about sex — which is a laugh, given how firmly the Fool told him not to confuse love with plumbing back in Assassin's Quest — and that lands us squarely into the realm of toxic masculinity.
3. Toxic masculinity: I let him take whatever comfort he could in the warmth and strength of my body. I have never felt less of a man that I did so. [Fool's Fate, pg 644]
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| Jacket illustration by John Howe |
In the same way that the Fool's identity works as a commentary on sexuality, gender, and (in my opinion) drag, the arc of Fitz and the Fool’s relationship works really well as a commentary on toxic masculinity. The OED has citations for the phrase dating back 35 years, and judging from the quotes, not much has actually changed about this particular corner of gender discourse. Consider this example from 1990:
I speak of toxic masculinity as that which damages men, women, children and the earth through neglect, abuse and violence. We seek to overcome toxic masculinity, whose tools include homophobia, by recovering the deep masculine, which is playful, spontaneous, vital . . .
Fitz’s discomfort with the Fool’s love, and his repeated insistence on worrying about the sexual potential of such a relationship, is deeply homophobic. The Fool never asked him for any kind of sexual relationship. The Fool has always known that Fitz doesn’t swing that way, and respected that in their interactions. His flirting is mere playfulness, and doesn’t bother Fitz when it happens in private. Fitz only gets uneasy when other people start commenting on it, as they do when the Fool starts playing the libertine who indulges in all sorts of depravities with his manservant. But here’s the thing: the rumors that the Fool encourages in Buckkeep are not about the Fool and Fitz. They are about Lord Golden and Tom Badgerlock. They are rumors that serve a political fiction. Fitz is happy to accept that his role of Tom Badgerlock is assumed and distinct from his true self in every respect – except, crucially, when it comes to the possibility of who he sleeps with. Who cares if everyone in Buckkeep thinks Tom Badgerlock is being bedded by Lord Golden? Well, Fitz cares. Or more precisely, Fitz’s homophobia cares.
Consider a parallel with Nighteyes, Fitz’s Wit-bonded wolf. Fitz has always been willing to publicly deny Nighteyes’s identity. He calls him a dog. He treats him as a pet in public when he cannot pretend Nighteyes doesn’t exist. He will deny a sentient creature’s intelligence, relegating him to the status of a subservient animal, and accept that as a necessary fiction for the sake of not being lynched for being Witted.1 Ok, fine: needs must, avoid the noose. I get it.
But you know what also will get him lynched? Being Fitzchivalry Farseer! His assumed identity of Tom Badgerlock is just as necessary for his survival as Nighteyes’s assumed identity as a dog. But where Fitz is willing to accept the dumb animal portion of that assumed identity on Nighteyes’s behalf – indeed, to insist upon it! To reinforce it with his own words and actions — nevertheless he cannot accept the ‘maybe sleeping with Lord Golden’ portion of Tom Badgerlock’s identity for himself, even when that acceptance means nothing more than letting other people gossip about it.
That’s toxic masculinity for you: it is easier to explicitly deny your best friend’s sentience than to let other people imagine you might not be fully straight.
Remember that horrible conversation in Golden Fool? The one where Fitz says, ‘I could never desire you as a bed partner. Never,’ and the Fool says, ‘We could have gone all our lives and never had this conversation. Now you have doomed us both to recall it forever' ?
That’s also toxic masculinity for you, perpetually obsessed with sex, seeing it as the sole role of women, and absolutely forbidden between men. Toxic masculinity is why Starling is uncomfortable interacting with the Fool when it becomes clear he has no interest in bedding her. Toxic masculinity is why Starling, upon realizing that the Fool is actually pretty good at listening to her confidences, must decide he's actually a woman, because toxic masculinity disallows nonsexual intimacy with men. And thus, toxic masculinity will look at a friend whose love is unwavering and true, who has shared with you more of himself than any other person who breathes, who knows you will never have any kind of sexual interest in him, and who has never asked it of you — toxic masculinity will look at that friend, and force a conversation to say, for the avoidance of doubt: No homo, dude.
And that brings us to the end of this character arc, in which Fitz learns the Fool has died at the hands of the Pale Lady. Fitz stays in the Outislands to retrieve the Fool’s body from the icy caverns where he was flayed and tortured to death; he uncovers the secrets from the Rooster Crown to retrieve the Fool’s self from where it had fled when he died; he swaps bodies with the Fool2 so that the Fool does not need to be present in his ruined husk as Fitz takes on the agony of its damage and repairs it. All of these Fitz will do unthinkingly, because these actions — loyalty to comrades, rescue, and self sacrifice — are traditionally masculine acts. At any point in his life Fitz would probably have done these things, if not for the Fool, then for Molly, for Nighteyes, or for Verity. Has already done something similar, actually: he accepts his own dose of tortured-to-death for Verity’s sake in Royal Assassin. Fitz has always been pretty strong on the traditionally masculine virtues. The reason I keep calling him a dumbass is because emotional intelligence is not included in that category.
So the moment that stuck with me in the years since I last read this, the culmination of Fitz’s character arc that I was looking forward to rereading, is not any of that. Instead, I waited for that moment after the rescue, the body swapping, the mechanical repair of injuries. Because in addition to the physical recovery comes the emotional toll. This scene is the middle of the night, when the Fool wakes, tortured by the remembered agonies he endured, and Fitz takes him in his arms and holds him, giving love and comfort. This is what toxic masculinity disallows; and that is what Fitz must overcome to be the kind of friend the Fool needs him to be. For all that the Fool openly admits he would not decline a sexual relationship with Fitz ('I set no boundaries on my love. None. Do you understand me?' [The Golden Fool, pg 404]), he nevertheless understands that intimacy can exist without it. Only by decoupling this knee-jerk association between intimacy and sex that runs through the heart of toxic masculinity can Fitz properly realize the closeness that has always been present between him and the Fool, and never feel less of a man for doing so.
1 Let us take a moment to appreciate the construction of these taboos in this book. The Wit is something shameful, to be hidden and indulged in only in private, or in the safety of hidden subcultures, which develop their own norms and customs, where Old Blood is recognized as something not only harmless, but beautiful and natural. Outside that culture, however, it’s all Oh, Nighteyes? We’re just . . . very good friends. You know, as a man and a dog are in the usual way. Dogs: man’s best friend. Really we’re just friends. And roommates. Best friends and roommates. So, in Hobb’s incomparable richness of characterization, Fitz serves as a commentary on homophobia in two orthogonal ways: both in the text, with his own explicitly homophobic actions, and in the subtext, where he must exist as a queer Witted man in a society that abhors queerness the Wit.↩
2 Fitz’s body really does seem to be kind of the town bicycle in this series. Verity has a ride in Assassin’s Quest, and now, in the very same quarry of black memory stone, the Fool is taking it for a spin of his own↩
References:
Hobb, Robin. Assassin's Quest [Voyager, 1997].
Hobb, Robin. The Golden Fool [Voyager, 2002].
Hobb, Robin. Fool's Fate [Voyager, 2003].
Oxford University Press. (2023). Toxic masculinity, n. In Oxford English dictionary. Retrieved September 1, 2025, from https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/7276139079
CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative, and on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social
