skygiants | (no subject)

I have succumbed to peer pressure and started rereading Robin Hobb's Farseer trilogy -- well that's not true, I have reread the first book, Assassin's Apprentice, and told myself [lying] I PROBABLY won't go on from here, I just want to remember what's what! But it seems I will in fact be going on from here because to my surprise I thought Assassin's Apprentice was better than I expected or indeed remembered it being and now I want to get to the Liveship Traders trilogy, which is the one I actually actively remember as being good [citation: fourteen-year-old Becca, a notoriously unreliable narrator as we have many times established.]

The thing is I essentially remembered nothing about Assassin's Apprentice because at the time I read it I didn't really know the narrative value of the fraught emotional bond between a protagonist and their mediocre-to-bad mentor and Assassin's Apprentice is NOTHING but mediocre-to-bad mentors. This book is chockablock full of problematic adults intensely projecting their various personal traumas and failures on our young protagonist and attempting to extend him care and guidance through these various highly distorted lenses, and unfortunately their best at its best is never very good but you can't say they're not trying: not really appealing to me at fourteen but delicious to me at forty.

Assassin's Apprentice begins with the arrival of our protagonist on a royal doorstep, age sixish: this kid is the illegitimate son of the famously upright, faithful, virtuous, happily married, non-slutty heir to the throne, Prince Chivalry, and his unknown relatives have decided that it's time for the child to be Chivalry's problem. This immediately and publicly blows up the entire political situation in the country, as Chivalry and his wife subsequently remove themselves from the line of succession and retire to a remote country estate without ever interacting with the child in question.

So that's Fitz, a kid with no official status who's a walking Weird Situation For Everyone. As for his various mediocre mentors, we've got:

Burrich, who was Chivalry's overwhelmingly devoted right-hand man, and due to a one-two-three punch of inconveniently timed injury/Fitz's arrival/Chivalry's retirement has found himself demoted from Heroic Hand of the Heir to the Throne to local stablemaster and accidental foster parent to the kid who blew up his life and his boss'

Chade, the king's assassin, who started from a similar position to Fitz and has been tasked by the king with molding Fitz into just as useful a tool for the royal dynasty as Chade has been for all these years

Verity, Fitz's uncle and the new responsible-but-overwhelmed heir to the throne, a pleasant and dutiful man with minimal emotional intelligence, who is always sort of absently nice to Fitz until the Kingdom's Problems start Eating Him Alive and suddenly things become enjoyably fraught as the potential increasingly arises that perhaps the Kingdom's Problems would eat Verity alive a little less if he let them eat Fitz alive a little more, but he is not going to do that! because he has ethics! but they both know that the possibility is there!!

Lady Patience, Chivalry's wife, who shows up midway through the book when Fitz is a teenager like 'oops possibly this child should have been parented by us? who says you can't fix the failures of the past! I'm doing it right now!'

What I find charming about Lady Patience in particular is that it's really obvious that to Chivalry she was his beautiful carefree manic pixie dream girl and to everyone else she is a nightmare. In fact all these people are sort of nightmares, and they all do care deeply about Fitz, and are also all failing him in important ways that have to do with their own deeply personal blind spots. The book's strength is in the evenhanded way it looks at these people and their strengths and their failures, and lets both the love and the mistakes matter equally.

The book's weakness is in that Robin Hobb apparently decided that since she had all these deeply flawed sympathetic characters, she also needed some actual villains that no one could possibly feel sympathetic about. There's an evil prince who wants to usurp the throne, and there are also some evil pirates who are kidnapping people from the kingdom and turning them into Soulless Monsters, or rather what

blotthis accurately describes as video game NPCs that you don't need to feel bad about killing. The fact that Hobb goes to great lengths to explain how everyone is very distraught about the situation and does some failed experiments to ensure that there's no way to turn these people back from being soulless monsters and you really truly don't need to feel bad about killing them really just makes it worse.

Also, I think it's important to note that Robin Hobb really is better than most of her peers at thinking about the practical requirements of domestic animals in a Nineties Eurofantasy environment; the proper care of horses and dogs forms a significant underlying element of the book and occasionally becomes a major plot point, especially since Fitz's Special Secret Skill is dog telepathy [Burrich thinks From Personal Experience this is an evil perversion that will ruin Fitz's life and that he must train out of Fitz as much as possible] [this is definitely not a metaphor for anything] [Robin Hobb wants to know how you could you possibly ask that]. Anyway the flip side of this is that Robin Hobb will Not hesitate to kill a puppy. Never think she won't do it. She has a knife to another puppy's throat right now. Sometimes she'll kill a puppy, then reveal that surprise! she never killed that puppy! that puppy is a happy full grown dog with a new beloved master! and now she's going to kill that happy full grown dog's beloved master. aaaaaand now she's going to kill the dog. Robin, cleaning her knife: I told you! I told you!!

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

snickfic

I too am excited to hear your thoughts on the Liveship trilogy, because that's the one I connected to as well, possibly because it was full of women of various kinds, and the assassin books very much are not, haha. I keep thinking I'll reread the liveship books one of these days...

From:

chestnut_pod

You know… I think I had this inexplicably mixed up with Brent Weeks' assassin books, which 14-year-old Chestnut deemed quite bad. (Notoriously unreliable or not, I think probably not worth another try.) But if they are NOT the same as those books, HM!

From:

caprices

All of this certainly explains why I bounced hard off the Assassin's books as a kid when my mom tried to foist them on me. The Liveship books were much more to my taste, if for no other reason than the payoff on the sea serpents.

From:

selki

I got partway through the liveship trilogy and stopped because what happened to one of the not-women characters and what was happening to the liveships. It was too distressing for me at the time. I might be more able to roll with it now. It was very interesting, I remember that.

From:

selki

Hobb apparently decided that since she had all these deeply flawed sympathetic characters, she also needed some actual villains that no one could possibly feel sympathetic about

Sigh, one can have a very interesting book just with deeply flawed sympathetic characters.

From:

ceitfianna

I know I read at least the first maybe three books of this series before falling off of it. I don't remember if I had a particular reason for that or just liked other books better.

From:

eglantiere

i read through so many of those books in the uni, because my friend was (still is) really into them and because technically they're very good, but eventually bailed because fitz is, for me, one those protagonist where you just go like: as a person, your behavior is very understandable, sympathetic and fully explainable by your jenga tower of trauma and by how much literally every adult in your life sucked in raising you. but as a protagonist, you're the most frustrating, emotionally dense, never-meet-a-mistake-you-won't-repeat, obstinate motherfucker and i keep hoping you will die in a ditch and put me out of my misery. which was not a good fit :D

(liveships didn't have the problem, but for me the hurt to comfort ration was cosmically skewed in the wrong direction. robin hobb sure loves her wringers...)

From:

luckydicekirby

It really is a surprisingly pretty good book! Patience is so interesting and also sucks! Burrich’s only model for how to parent is in how he would raise a dog! So many compelling bad dads! I hope someday Robin learned how to write an interesting villain but uhhh not currently hopeful!

the dead dog bait and switch and bait again was so funny of her. I really can’t help but respect it.

From:

sholio

From:

sovay

[this is definitely not a metaphor for anything] [Robin Hobb wants to know how you could you possibly ask that].

I read this trilogy shortly after it had concluded because it was the all-time favorite series to date of the first friend I made in college and I have intense mixed memories of the experience, but I am glad it is providing so many deliciously flawed adults for you! I had the least surprising reaction I could have to these books and imprinted on the Fool. Also, Chade.

From:

sovay

I am also in the apparently somewhat large group of people who read and enjoyed the Liveship books, although in my case I didn't actually read the Fitz books at all (and having had the plot described to me extensively at one point, I feel I may have dodged a bullet there).

I did read through the third trilogy and then she wrote two more and I understood her original dissatisfaction with where she had left the series protagonist(s), but she seemed to keep giving them the definitively intended last ending and then reopening it and I just tapped out.

From:

watersword

Oh man I remember haaaaating Fitz and some of it is not his fault but also what a fuckboy.

From:

shadaras

I have read Assassin's Apprentice multiple times, each time meaning to continue on, and yet have never succeeded at even getting through bk2 xD Perhaps your blogging about them shall entice me onwards! People say such interesting things about these books, especially about the Fool...

From:

larryhammer

I know I read this, to completion even, but absolutely nothing in your description rings the remotest bell except for the protagonist's name. That and a decision to not read the sequel. I did, eventually, try the first Liveship book, and I actually remember something of that, but I decided not to continue that trilogy as well -- and that I vastly preferred Robin Hobb when she wrote as Megan Lindholm (I still reread Wizard of the Pigeons every so often).

From:

torachan

I liked the first Assassin trilogy and the Liveship trilogy, but never read the later books (I think one more trilogy?) because by that point I'd kind of lost my patience for long fantasy series.

From:

melita66

I really liked The Wizard of the Pigeons. I'm pretty sure I finished the first Fitz trilogy but decided it was too grim. What I heard about the Liveship books kinda made me want to read them, but eh.

From:

gogollescent

Reading this for the first time as an adult last year was such a trip, I... if not for all the warnings in re: the handling of the soulless monsters I really would have thought it was setting up a long reveal because of the LENGTHS of excruciating protesting-too-much from Chade et al, but. No. No, that is not Robin Hobb's way. I feel like Fitz is such a frustrating almost for me as far as percentage spent being the protagonist of his own life vs percentage spent as camera on interesting flawed adults, like, I really understand why you bounced off it as a teenager and I didn't zero percent bounce off it even now, but it was also a lot more committed to his trauma and maladaptive reactions than I really expected going in... Not enough so to get me to read the rest of the series I think but enough so that I understand why (I infer) it burrowed weirdly into George R. R. Martin's brain to historic result.

What I'll never get over is the noun names. Chivalry, Verity, and... [Shrewd voice] "My wife says we can't name him a slur :( Regal it is I guess :("

Edited Date: 2026-05-10 05:58 am (UTC)

From:

mific

I went through a Robin Hobb phase in my thirties? Maybe forties. Read the Farseer trilogy, Liveship Traders, Tawny Man trilogy, and Soldier Son trilogy. I tended to just devour books fairly uncritically then, but I liked them all. Very good worldbuilding, with intriguing strangeness. The androgynous/gay character in Tawny Man made me feel... things. After that I discovered fandom, and slash, and that clarified a lot.

From:

littlerhymes

I really like the Assassins trilogy and the Liveship trilogy but dang does she have a habit of ending trilogies badly. Liveship mostly escapes this but the third Assassins book... I'll wait for your thoughts if you get there!

SHE WILL KILL ALL THE DOGS it's so true.