luckydicekirby

Stumbling onto dreamwidth covered in blood like i FINALLY finished Royal Assassin I feel like I’ve been reading this book for five million years (it’s been two months). Evil book club book report time… Royal Assassin is book two of Robin Hobb’s Farseer Trilogy, trilogy one of like idk it seems like she wrote five of these thangs somehow. In the first book, our hero Fitz, a bastard of the crown prince Chivalry, was raised as an assassin in the royal keep and experienced various political problems such as ‘I’m a royal bastard’ and ‘we keep being attacked by fantasy vikings who are turning people into zombies’ and ‘my adopted dad hates that i’m gay I can talk to animals’.

I really enjoyed book one! It had its problems but I had a good time. this book meanwhile….was such a slog lol. I was actually planning to write a really long post about how much I disliked it, mainly because I wanted to complain, but then I actually liked the last 20% or so quite a bit! The ending went really hard! We had some crazy Burrich pathos moments! On some level this just makes me despair MORE of how boring the rest of it was!

I have two main issues. Issue one: This book is just so STAGNANT. It’s really long, which is fine, this is the fantasy doorstopper genre, but the same things keep happening over and over for the first like 70% of the book. Fitz contemplates the same problems without solving them or even really frankly TRYING to solve them, he just runs around in depressed circles in a way that makes me care less and less every time.

There are very obvious problems set up from the previous book that Fitz immediately needs to deal with, and fails to do so with any sense of urgency: the two remaining princes, Verity (the good one) and Regal (the evil one, extremely boringly so) are at each other’s throats, and also Regal wants to kill Fitz’s ass so bad. The king is sick and getting sicker, seemingly through Regal’s involvement. Fitz worries about all this at endless, endless length, and we keep being shown how bad things are in this vein, over and over and oooover. The king situation just feels dire for absolutely no reason for like 400 pages of nothing changing. Assassin’s Apprentice had plenty of forward momentum, despite not being exactly pacey, and this book has like none. Things are always getting worse, I guess, but not in a way that ever feels like the stakes have changed. At a certain point I’m just tapping my wrist waiting for the damn king to die already, because then at least something will have changed.

At least the fantasy vikings are a real unsolvable problem, but even that barely feels like it escalates. Like, okay, the war situation is getting worse and worse, but it was already quite bad. There’s something mysterious going on with them, but Robin is being so fucking cagey about it that it doesn’t matter to me. I think the solution really might just be she needed to cut the middle 300 pages of this book. Who EDITED this. The interesting things this book is actually accomplishing with Robin’s signature crazy character dynamics and Fun Magic Wolf Stuff get buried under the ‘same court politics again’ merry-go-round.

Issue two: The Molly Stuff. Molly I’m so sorry. I wish you had been cut from this book. I liked Molly in book one! She’s one of Fitz’s childhood friends from the town who is now a servant in the Keep, and was a genuinely enjoyable character. She had interiority, she had interesting and understandable problems! Now she is The Love Interest and it feels like all of that has been sucked out of the room. It’s not that she’s too sycophantic towards Fitz; she’s pissed off at him most of the time, but it’s hard to feel convinced of why she’d put up with his shit at all. Fitz keeps fumbling her so bad and in such stupid ways I want to hit him with a hammer. You know it’s bad when it was suggested he should give up his girl and just marry a nice noble daughter who’s into him who he cares nothing for and I was like, yeah, that would actually be better for everyone, just do that! Was at no point sufficiently convinced he shouldn’t just do that! He could at least have ill-advisedly banged KETTRICKEN, christ!

Also the actual most infuriating part of this book is that it takes Fitz like months and months of having unprotected sex with his secret girlfriend for it to occur to him that he should worry about getting her pregnant. Fitz, who is FAMOUSLY A BASTARD and this fact has SERIOUSLY AFFECTED HIS LIFE. BADLY. It colors EVERYTHING about his SAD SAD MEOW MEOW EXISTENCE!! You’re telling me he didn’t even THINK about it until the Fool hit him over the head with it??? HE KNOWS WHERE BABIES COME FROM. I know he’s stupid but I genuinely don’t believe he’s that stupid. Robin why did you do that. Genuinely baffled by this one it’s SO distracting. and PLOT RELEVANT. WHATEVER.

Anyway. The end DID manage to pull in all the stuff I’m most interested in (Fitz’s fucked up mindmelds with humans and/or animals, his relationship with Burrich, etc). The high points of this book are things that Robin is really good at—-she LOVES drama and I also love it when she forgets to try to do the most boring heterosexuality known to man. I feel genuinely crazy about ( interpersonal drama spoilers... )

Anyway despite this solid wall of complaints I will be continuing because I hear fitzfool starts to go crazy soon, and also this book’s problems felt so Middle Book Problems that maybe being a third book will fix them? Anything could happen! Fitz is certainly now in a place now where he can’t be treading water with the status quo for very long!

here is a post to make this blog look less horribly naked! perhaps something will become of it!