I don’t understand what I’m feeling, because I’ve never reacted this way to a book before.
I finished *Assassin’s Quest* last night, and I have so much to say about these books that I have no idea how to express. I started the last book alongside rereasing asoiaf, but speaking as a huge asoiaf fan, I gave up, because the Farseer trilogy was better. It was so good it would hook me for hours on end. But it hurt me so badly I feel a physical pain in my chest. (I haven’t cried so much since I read *Christopher Robin and Pooh come to an Enchanted Place*.)
It wasn’t even the book I appreciate most as a technical achievement (I’d give that to Tolkein) or the book I had the most fun reading. It was the book that *clicked* for me. It hit every facet of what I love and what I hope I’ll find in a story. I don’t know if I’ll find some people on this sub who love it for the same reasons, but what I want the most is to understand why I loved these books more than anything else I’ve read.
Was it the beautiful *queerness* of the Fool? Of all the characters, he was the one who I felt I could relate to. I don’t know how to properly say this; I identified with him on such a deep, complete level that reading about him made me examine the contents of my life in a way I’d never done before. I recognised abuse, realised what made my life worth living, and discovered the truth of my gender. Yeah, the Fool made me queer.
I am literally not the same person I was when I started this series.
Why did I genuinely care about the characters as people? Why did I *shout* at them for their bad decisions? I don’t know why I found myself able to empathise with them without even having multiple perspectives!
FitzChivalry’s mental health being one of the central conflicts was something I have never seen before on such a complex level (Brandon Sanderson doesn’t get enough praise for how well>! Kaladin’s suicidal depression !<is handled, but I digress). He was a complex character who often did the wrong thing, but this made him human in a way GRRM’s morally ambiguous characters never did. I don’t know why, but I loved him, and I understood him.
Something interesting I got from reading GRRM and Hobb alongside each other was the massive difference in how they treat women and relationships. I enjoy asoiaf enormously, but the juxtaposition was staggering. The sheer visceral passion put into the feminism of Hobb’s writing clashes with the descriptions of women in asoiaf that make me uncomfortable on a level I never had before.
The level of understanding of sex was so nuanced and intelligent that the love scenes in asoiaf are beginning to grate on me. I’m not trying to call out GRRM as some kind of mysognist, but the difference between the way a talented male writer and a talented female writer wrote about it was so different it made me laugh.
Also Farseer Trilogy was realistic in a way that doesn’t apply to asoiaf, because it has darkness, but it isn’t conflated with realism!
It was deeply sociological, the worldbuilding handled mystery in the perfect way I like it, the characters felt like real people, it made me cry and cry and cry, it made me laugh, it hurt me, it was passionately feminist, and the way it explored the complicated topic of mental health made me relate to it and changed me as a person.
by Heracles_Croft