The Farseer Trilogy (Robin Hobb) : Review

Book(s):  Assassin's Apprentice, Royal Assassin, Assassin's Quest (The Farseer Trilogy)
Author:  Robin Hobb
Genre: Fantasy


First of all, let me just say that I can’t believe I’ve managed to call myself a fan of fantasy all these years and have never read any Robin Hobb.  I’ve actually read these all out of order.  I started with the Rain Wild series (after a recommendation from my mother to read the Liveship Traders, which I still have not done) so I ended up finding out a bunch of stuff in advance of the Liveship books which will probably ruin some of the surprise (specifically what the “wood” is that the Liveships are made of).  At any rate, I read those and then decided that I wanted to read the Farseer Trilogy.  I was admittedly a little put off, at first, by some of the names.  The nobility all had names like Verity and Chivalry and Shrewd.  It took me a little while to stop rolling my eyes every time she referred to King Shrewd or King-in-Waiting Chivalry.  It got even worse when Chivalry’s bastard, the main character of the book, took the name FitzChivalry (“Fitz” denoting that he was, in fact, a bastard).  But, as I continued to read, the story overrode my issues with the weird names and I really enjoyed all three books.  It had a bit of a Song of Ice and Fire feel to it, thought not quite as involved.  The characters, I thought, were very well fleshed out.  

One thing I both loved and hated was the reader’s relationship with Fitz himself.  Fitz starts out as an uncertain and eventually somewhat precocious youth who was taken from his mother at the age of six and dumped into Prince Verity’s lap, for the king to look over, since he was the bastard of the King-in-Waiting.  I’m not going to recap the plot of all three books, by the way.  I’m just going to assume that anyone reading this is already familiar with the plot and go from there.  Anyway, Fitz’s character progression was grueling and painful, for me.  He started out with such promise and you sort of have all of these hopes that he’ll Harry Potter it and turn out to be The Most Important Man In The World.  Which, he kind of does, but not in the way you’d expect.  His experiences with Galen were unexpected for me, probably because the series doesn’t follow the typical fantasy formula.  In typical fantasy, Fitz would be incredibly gifted in the Skill (which he is, at first) and would eventually, after many trials and tribulations, learn to master it through some kind of dramatic event and be a card carrying Skill bad ass.  That is not the way it goes for Fitz at all, though.  Instead, he has a tough time concentrating and doing what the rest of his potential coterie can do, and Galen eventually burns a lot of his Skill out of him.  Then, he starts using elfbark all the time and eats up a great deal more of what’s left (which he doesn’t find out until book three - oops).  Fitz never becomes the hero, in a conventional sense.  He is always a little bit of a coward and is always outmatched by the people around him in terms of Skill, physical prowess, etc.

People turn on him easily and leave him.  Molly leaves (although he was an idiot for not realizing she was pregnant - how many more hints did Hobb have to drop?) and Burrich decides to be a real dick about the whole Wit thing and abandons him for a while.  Fitz is childish and, even as he grows into a man, never really learns how to be a man.  He can be churlish and sullen, predisposed to holding grudges and dwelling on The Unfairness Of It All.  Basically, Fitz is human.  He isn’t perfect and he isn’t supposed to be.  He isn’t what you want him to be, and yet you feel like he couldn’t be anything else.  You root for Fitz, even when he’s being an idiot, and you keep hoping he’ll see it coming this time, or he’ll wise up and stop being such a child.  Sometimes he does and sometimes he doesn’t, but that’s what makes Fitz unique.

His extraordinary stretch of bad luck and bad timing was also a bit hard to stomach.  He doesn’t get the girl.  Well, he does, but only long enough to get her pregnant and for her to run off to take care of her child elsewhere and eventually marry Burrich (at least both he and Molly think Fitz is dead).  Starling seemed like a promising love interest, but Fitz is so dedicated to the fantasy of Molly and their daughter that Starling is all but ignored.  He sleeps with her once, eventually, when everything else is falling apart and he’s found out that Burrich and Molly are in love, etc., but there’s very little emotional connection there. Which is fine, but just unexpected.  He’s accused of murdering the king after he hunted down and slit the throats of the people who actually killed the king.  Regal throws him into a dungeon, beats the hell out of him, and he has to fake death to escape.  Chade and Burrich leave him.  Kettricken and Chade assure him that his daughter will be used as a piece in their game every bit as much as he has been and he has no say in it - it’s for the good of the kingdom.  He finds Verity, who has gone a little insane and dipped his arms in a Skill river, so he’s making dragons and eventually has to put himself into the dragon.  Verity Skill-swaps bodies with Fitz and gets it on with Kettricken, impregnating her with which is actually Fitz’s child, but it’s billed as Verity’s child.  So, not only does Fitz never get to see his daughter by Molly because she and Burrich think he’s dead and there’s no reason, apparently, to rock that boat, but he also gets to create another child who he can’t acknowledge or ever see.  Except on the coinage, maybe.  All of that (and so much more!) was hard to adjust to.  Realizing that the “hero” of the piece isn’t a hero at all and has had a really awful life, when you just wanted him to be awesome and win, is sobering.

But, I liked it.  I liked what Hobb did with it. She made Fitz real.  Bad luck is real.  Heroes may be a dime a dozen in the books, but in reality, things rarely go as well as you’d planned.  While Fitz had successes, it was his failures that were so mubh bigger, and isn’t that the way it is, so often?  We succeed to make ripples and fail to make tidal waves.

The books were written very well, and I enjoyed Hobb’s penchant for backstabbing and clever ploys.  More than once, Fitz got caught up in some scheme that I really hadn’t anticipated.  Over all, I really enjoyed the series.  I’m about to start the Tawny Man trilogy, which is apparently a continuation of Fitz’s story.  Maybe he’ll catch a break in this one.

Doctor Who: Series Four End

Holy Tardis of Gallfrey.  The last two episodes of the series were written by sadistic maniacs.  Seriously, I haven't cried over a T.V. show that much in... possibly ever, actually.  And LOST could be brutal, but it was nothing in comparison to the abject misery I experienced watching the last two episodes of series four.

Ten's unwillingness to regenerate literally ripped my heart right out of my chest.  And they just kept making it worse.  We didn't get much fanfare when Nine regenerated into Ten.  I mean, he told Rose he wouldn't see her again ("Not with this dusty old face,") and told her she'd been brilliant.  Then, he regenerated.  No hysterics, no emotions, just poof!  New doctor!  David Tennant made some crack about new teeth and that was that.

But this.  Oh my god, this was something altogether different and horrible.  Not only had the Doctor just had to give up Rose to his clone and wipe Donna's memory because her brain was going to fry otherwise, he also knew that he was going to die, courtesy of the Ood, and didn't want to.  Almost every single conversation he had with Wilfred throughout the episodes were devastating.  His conversation about needing a companion and his explaining to Wilfred what happens when he regenerates - that everything he is dies and some other man strolls away with his memories.  And Wilfred offering him the gun and saying, "You're the most wonderful man and I don't want you to die," caused me to completely lose my shit, for a second.

Then the hope he felt after the Master and the crazy Timelords were gone, and he was still alive, only to find out that he had to kill himself to save Wilfred.  His rant about it not being fair - AND OH MY GOD IT FUCKING ISN'T.  Then for him to go on his little journey to see everyone that he loved and cared for before he regenerated (Rose included, which just started up the waterworks again).  It was almost too much.  And then, when he started to regenerate and he said, "I don't want to go," I fucking was too much,

I found myself really angry with the writers of the show, because it was all too much.  Leaving your audience sad and potentially crying is one thing - completely destroying a character that they love after three seasons of completely shitting on him because he's a Timelord and apparently can't have anything good for more than a few minutes is just completely fucked.  I can't understand it.  I adored Ten.  David Tennant was beyond amazing as the Doctor, and his last performance quite literally had me in tears for a good, solid ten minutes.  I was not handling my shit well at all.

Now, we've started series five, with Matt Smith, and I am just struggling with it.  I can't seem to connect with Eleven (although, we've only watched three or so episodes) and I can't seem to find a reason to care about him.  I thought the transition would be good because I could stop associating the Doctor with all the shit Ten had to go through, but I find myself missing Tennant's brand of Doctor and not all that impressed with Smith's.  Smith seems like a watered down version of Ten as far as Doctor quirks go.  I don't care for the whole "Geronimo" thing (who the fuck came up with that idea?) and his quick temper doesn't work as well as it did for Nine.  Not that Nine had a short fuse, but when he got angry, it was intimidating.  Eleven seems to want to be intimidating, but... eh.  River is coming back in the next episode (maybe that's the third one, so we've watched two?) and I'm excited to see her.  I find myself missing, not just Ten, but also Rose, Martha, Donna, Jack - all of them.

It wouldn't be as irritating if I had immediately taken to Eleven like I did with Ten.  I was convinced that Nine would be my favorite Doctor and that Ten would take some getting used to, but no.  I immediately fell in love with Ten.  Now, granted, we had a lot more episodes with Ten than we did with Nine, but still.  I'm not digging the adjustment.

I do like Amy, though.  I like how capable she is and how easily she's taken to life with the Doctor.  I also liked how it was Amy that saved the day in the space whale episode, instead of the Doctor.  But, so far, Eleven - you are no Ten, sir.

And I'm getting way too worked up over Doctor Who.  I need to breathe.  Although, I did get two fun Tardis t-shirts today.  So, yay me and fandom obsession!

Doctor Who: Series Three

So, I have discovered that doing an episode by episode recap of our Doctor Who adventure was entirely too much.  If we'd been watching one episode per week, I could've kept up, but multiple episodes over a day or two was just too taxing.

So!  I'm just going to update as I go, when I feel like it.  As it stands, now, we have just finished Series Three, wherein Martha Jones takes her leave as the Doctor's companion.  I'm going to talk about the whole season, but I will largely concentrate on Martha.

So much to cover!  I enjoyed the revelation of Jack Harkness being The Face of Boe.  I had actually already spoiled myself on that a bit when I was researching Torchwood (oops), but I had been under the impression that it was more of a prevailing theory than something that had been confirmed on the show, so that part was a nice surprise.  I like Jack, so I was happy to see him back, even if it was just for a few episodes.  I also already knew that Rose had inadvertently immortalized Jack, so I wasn't surprised when he wouldn't die.

I also knew that Martha was going to leave at the end of the season and the circumstances surrounding it.  I have to say, I start off really unimpressed with Martha.  I didn't like the way that, after a grand total of two or three episodes, she was already getting weird and possessive about the Doctor and seemed to be throwing little mini tantrums every time he mentioned Rose.  Case in point, the Shakespeare episode, where the Doctor was lying in bed with Martha and said that Rose would know what was going on and have something clever to say, etc.  Martha's little flounce was ridiculous and totally uncalled for, not to mention a little creepy stalker of her.

However, as time wore on, she dialed it back a good bit and I was able to connect with the character more, instead of being constantly put off by her uncontrollable urge to make poorly veiled passes at the Doctor.  He total lack of sympathy for his having lost Rose, in the beginning, really turned me off.  It was nice, when she stopped doing that. You could tell that she had fallen in love with the Doctor, but she didn't make a big spectacle of it anymore and huff around getting mad about the fact that he wasn't in love with her.

Speaking of love, I really liked the 1913 episode with the Family of the Blood.  David Tennant really is a tremendous actor, and my heart was breaking for John Smith when he was confronted with the fact that he would have to become the Doctor again.  When he kept accusing Martha of being his executioner, I just wanted to hug him and Joan, too.  It was so sad, to see the Doctor have a tiny little glimmer of an ordinary life where he was loved and could love, only to have to return to his duty as the Doctor and abandon it all, Joan included.  Also, the flash forward - tears forever.

Anyway, Martha turned out to be pretty cool, what with saving the world, and all.  They ripped my heart out of my chest once again in the finale, when the Master died and the Doctor was so heartbroken.  To think that even though the Master was a villain and had tried to wipe out the human race had turned the Doctor into Dobby...

Dobby is a free elf!

... he was still torn up when he died, because they were the last of the Timelords.  And that was so sad.  Then, of course, Martha chooses to leave him because she loves him but she knows he doesn't love her, and won't.  And why waste her life chasing after him for nothing?  I had a lot of respect for her when she did that.  I ended the series liking her must more than I had started out.

Overall, I enjoyed series three, but Martha did take some warming up to.  We're onto Donna, now, and I love her, but I'll discuss that later.