I’ve finally got around to finishing Assassin’s Fate by Robin Hobb. It’s the final book of the third trilogy about, and narrated by, FitzChivalry Fareer, aka Tom Badgerlock, aka Keppet, a prince’s bastard employed as an assassin by his royal kindred. Fitz is a character inversely like Egwene, in my mind. In both cases, I see a very definite pattern of wrongdoing, but I am sincerely confused as to the circumstances of the narrative, because it really seems like the books don’t recognize that. Egwene’s actions, objectively speaking, are generally morally wrong or tactically ill-advised, and this is a recurring pattern, but she is never called on it by the narrative, or by any characters, even those who oppose her or are wronged by her. Likewise with Fitz (though he is the victim, not the perpetrator). Every now and then someone pays lip service to the notion that he has done a lot or been put through a lot and might have some justification for his feelings & his position and especially his oft-stated intentions and desires to NOT do or go along with what various other people want for him, but it’s no more than lip service. Most the time, he is treated as utterly selfish, ungrateful and the worst thing to happen to various people in his life. I think Robin Hobb knows he’s got a point and they’re in the wrong, but it’s hard to tell for a couple of reasons.

First of all, Fitz is the first-person narrator, with occasional nods thrown to the notion of a framing device, namely that the books are his own in-story memoirs, written between the various trilogies. Thus, a really true-to-character portrayal of a traumatized abuse victim would legitimately have him unable to discern his own abuse, and there would be very few opportunities for the narration to explicitly state the extremity of what was done to him, mostly by his loved ones and family.

The second, is that Fitz has a number of undeniable faults and flaws, and is definitely a bit of an emo whiner in his first trilogy (which takes place largely in his teen years and early adulthood). He does make a number of important mistakes and is kind of selfish at times. And it’s also realistic that the other people in his life would harp on that stuff and even conflate his legitimate grievances with those flaws, rather than give voice to an even-handed and balanced critique of his character.

On the other hand, I don’t know how committed to narrative integrity Hobb actually is, since twice she wrote a resolution to Fitz’s story, and twice went back to write another trilogy which undid it. You would think that someone who keeps undoing the final ending of her story would find a way to insert some voice-of-god commentary more explicitly laying out that this guy isn’t really the loser everyone calls him out as.

In the first trilogy, Fitz ended up a solitary broken man, who was emotionally and physically devastated by what he was required to do. He had none of the glory or power or wealth that his surviving royal family achieved, though he was the behind-the-scenes, often indispensable facilitator of or inspiration for, many their accomplishments. His girlfriend married his foster father, who raised his infant daughter, and all but a handful of people believed him dead, and his posthumous reputation was tainted with charges of regicide and perverted witchcraft.

The second trilogy called Fitz back into action, and by the end of it, his health and most of his relationships were restored, and the anti-magic prejudices that had soiled his reputation were lifted. He got to marry his old girlfriend when her husband got a heroic death, and even received a clandestine reward of being allowed to retire to his royal father’s country estate with a family. Where before, he was suffering physical consequences of the acceptable magic he had also used, now those were fixed as well, so he had the benefits of magic without the drawbacks.

The third trilogy finally brings his story to an end. In the Kingdom of the Six Duchies, there is a particular magic called Skill, which is basically a form of telepathy, that is very common among the royal family, but has conveniently fallen into disuse, so Fitz doesn’t have reliable teachers to provide an easy path to mastering it, and all sorts of problems he encounters learning to use it contribute to his physical sufferings by the end of the first series. However, his uncle, King Verity, in the realm’s hour of desperation, goes looking for help among a group of mysterious magical allies who came to the kingdom’s aid in times past. It turns out, they’re all gone, but they left magic statues, and Verity carves one such statue of a dragon, and uses his Skill magic to transfer his mind and life into it so he can defeat the invading enemy. Fitz wakes up the other statues with another form of magic, the Wit (whose users are subjected to extreme bigotry) and sends them to help, but statue-Verity has to come back and sleep with them once the fighting is done. This ending is presented as the ultimate answer to the addictive qualities of the Skill, and it is hinted in the concluding coda to the first trilogy that Fitz is facing such an end himself, and looks forward to it as a kind of surcease from his sufferings.

This is averted by the mega-happy ending of the second trilogy, but by the end of the third, with his wife now dead of old age, and suffering an incurable magical affliction himself, Fitz goes back to the magic statues to make his own, which he completes with the help of all his surviving friends, the closest of whom, the Fool, joins him in merging with the statue (it was historically the effort of a group, Verity managed to largely do it solo, because he’s so awesome), which is a giant wolf, unlike the others which are all winged, and mostly dragons. So based on how EVERYTHING else goes, I imagine if Hobb ever comes back with another story about their descendants coming to wake the dragons again, I assume the other statues are going to give Fitz crap for not putting wings on his statue, and thus can’t follow the group as easily as he should. But that aside, it’s sort of a happy ending, as Fitz gets to sort-of live forever, it is implied he can commune with the dead Skill-users in his family in this new state, and all the characters who thought he was dead (he gets left for dead and all-but-killed a lot), get the pleasant surprise of an opportunity to say goodbye before the end.

But from a Doylist standpoint, it feels like more jerking around the readers to have a cake and eat it too. First we get the tragic deconstructive ending, about the guy who made it all possible, paid most of the price and gets squat reward. Then it’s undone in the second trilogy and things work out blatantly to give him pretty exactly the happy ending he would have wished for in the first one. Then in the third, there is the harrowing escape getting Fitz killed, so everyone can feel sad, but glad to have accomplished the mission, but he survives through a really forced coincidence, so he can run around murdering all the loose ends, so it looks like we’re headed to a happy reunion with his daughters, cousins and friends, only for the death sentence to be pronounced, and he has to go do the statue thing, but the rules have apparently changed so a dead magical character is able to go around and let everyone know he’s making his statue, so they can all gather to say good-bye. It’s like Hobb was trying out two different exits for the character she could not resist going back to two more times than she really should have. That’s why I am pretty sure that if she was intentionally telling a story about an abuse & trauma victim, she would have found some way to step outside the narrative strictures to let us know.

So with that in mind, I want to look at Fitz, and what he goes through, and how I really think he’s the victim of a lot of abusive, if inadvertently so in some cases, relationships.

First of all, Fitz is taken from his mother at age six. This is when the series begins, as it, according to the narrative framing conceit of Fitz writing his memoirs, is the very earliest memory he can recall for more or less the next thirty years, until magical intervention allows him to break through the trauma of his forced seperation and recall his mother & early childhood. Then he is dumped perfunctorily into the care of the stablemaster in the royal castle, where his paternal grandfather, King Shrewd, rules, while his father, the crown prince, called Chivalry, abdicates from the line of succession and retires to the countryside in disgrace, because it has become public knowledge that he once had sex before he married his current (and barren wife). It should be noted, BTW that this is the only such case of this happening, many other nobles have bastards, there is no organized religion or formal set of mores and only a really uptight fringe gets het up and bothered about illegitimate kids, and limitations on their advancement and inheritance seem more de facto than de jure (as opposed to, say, in Westeros). It is only in the case of his father that there are shown to be any real consequences for an illegitimate child, but Fitz is made to feel guilty about every single sexual relationship in his life, and they are all presented to him by officious, sanctimonious busybodies well-meaning people as selfish, shallow or unhealthy indulgences on his part. Because every rule in the series is interpreted or enforced strictly in the way to most inconvenience, traumatize or shame FitzChivalry Farseer.

Anyway, with his biological father removed from his life, Fitz gets all of the bad aspects of a royal father, and none of the benefits, like comfort or power. People who hated the former prince transfer that attitude to his son, people who loved Chivalry are more likely to blame Fitz for his downfall than have those sentiments redound to Fitz's benefit, and people who admred the prince generally set unrealistic expectations for the son he never raised. So Fitz is given to the care of the stablemaster, Burrich (effectively classifying this newest addition to the royal family as livestock), who is single, childless, relatively young, with little to no experience in raising kids, and a brusque, surly & undemonstrative manner. It means this lonely, friendless kid, in a new home, permanently parted from the maternal kin with whom he lived to date, is dependent on an unprepossessing man whose methods of teaching are more stick than carrot, who holds those extreme expectations of his prince’s son, and incidentally, had a dissolute adolescence, giving him all the tolerance toward youthful vices of a reformed smoker.

In this situation, Fitz is utterly devoid of affection or peer companionship, aside from peasant kids from the nearby town, but his circumstances estrange him from them to a degree. He magically bonds with a puppy through the Wit magic, not knowing it is held in superstitious revulsion by the general public, and is particularly reviled by Burrich (it being another of his past faults he seeks to beat out of Fitz when his charge indulges out of ignorance). The puppy is taken away from him in circumstances that lead him to believe it has been killed. This, of course, makes Fitz even more hostile, resentful & terrified of his sole foster parent.

Then Fitz randomly comes to the attention of King Shrewd, his biological grandfather, who, in trying to make a point to his spoiled youngest son, Prince Regal, decides on the spur of the moment to use Fitz as an example. King Shrewd makes an offer to buy the boy's loyalty, promising in exchange for his service and obedience, to feed, educate and board him. Because that's not at all something a dependent orphaned child of your immediate family is entitled to. No, that's a special favor for which he expects Fitz's undying devotion and obedience. Burrich foresees no good coming of this, and blames Fitz for putting himself in the King's way and catching his eye on purpose. I assume Burrich also correlates hemlines with rape incidence, because that's roughly as much relevance his assumption has to what actually happens. So Fitz moves up in the world a bit, but shortly after, at Shrewd's orders, is taken under the tutelage of the King's assassin, Chade, who lives in a secret passage, with no one even knowing he exists except for the royals who give him his orders. When asked if assassinating people on behalf of the king sounds like something young Fitz wants to do for the rest of his life, he says no, but tough cookies.

Chade sets about teaching Fitz to spy, manipulate and maneuver around people and various social situations and settings, and how to lie and deceive like a motherfucker, as well as all sorts of stuff about poison and killing people sneaky-like. This has the additional effect of isolating Fitz from any other people. Various folks in the castle take an interest in his well-being, some of whom offer other professional outlets to him, only for Chade to quash those paths as too dangerous, saying they would leave him vulnerable to his enemies, and by implication, outside the Farseer's circle of trust and too dangerous for his own family to leave alive.

Thus, in addition to the isolating effects of his knowledge and training, and the need to keep those things a secret, and other measures taken during his upbringing designed to keep Fitz appearing ordinary and beneath casual notice, as well as effectively being compelled to keep people at arm's length, he is all but explicitly threatened with death if he does not remain useful to the throne, and explicitly threatened with harm from unseen & unknown enemies, in order to keep him dependent on the Farseers and Chade for protection against these enemies they have created for him. At one point, he is chatting with his closest childhood friend, a girl, on whom he has a crush and will eventually be the love of his life. When she mentions a plant, Fitz starts blurting out the lethal applications of it, to her horror. So then he has to make up a story to cover his knowledge, which serves as both another point of estrangement from a friend, and an illustration to him of his need to not let his guard down around ANYone.

Then his father (whom he has never met) meets a fatal “accident” (because he was essentially alone and unprotected, which is all because Fitz had the temerity to exist, so it’s Fitz’s fault), and Burrich is mad at Fitz for not mourning someone who is only an abstraction to him. He also shaves Fitz's head which is a Six Duchies mourning custom, with the amount of hair varying according to the closeness of the relationship with the deceased. You cut it short for a close friend or comrade, a lock for someone less close, or a degree removed, like a friend's wife, but you only shave for a relationship akin to that of a parent or spouse. This extreme degree of involuntary public mourning highlights Fitz's origins to everyone, which is not only uncomfortable for him, but also incites Chade's disapproval, because he's trying to keep Fitz under the radar, to be a more effective assassin. You see how everything, no matter what, blows back on him in the worst way possible? And people like Burrich, who are not officially read in on his double life, nonetheless are highly observant and insightful (because otherwise, how could they constantly note Fitz's shortcomings? ), just enough to mock his attempts to maintain his cover, but very seldom sufficiently to get what's really going on in any way that would be helpful to Fitz, such as alleviating their disappointment in his failures to meet their expectations, or intervening because they see how messed up his life is getting.

The next person to blow into Fitz's life and inconvenience him is his father's widow, Lady Patience, who is a quirky and eccentric dilettante, and has decided to take an interest in her step-son, despite their sole point of connection being dead. Because she is super-capable at pestering people and wearing them down, Fitz is told to attend her so as to keep her out of the King's hair, and has to cope with her mercurial changes in temper and haphazard attempts at educating him. Again, as with Burrich and Chade, eventually a close relationship forms, but the initial impression made to a young boy is that once more, he is a possession or tool for this new person in his life, whose intentions and plans for him take precedence over his own. He only learns very late in life that Patience had desperately wanted to raise him and begged her husband to take his new-discovered son with them into exile, but was refused, and has come to court nurturing an obsession that has grown since she learned of his existence, as he is both the child she could never have, and all she has left of her beloved spouse. Which means more stress and unfair expectations on Fitz.

Thanks to Lady Patience's intervention, it is decided that Fitz shall be taught to master the Skill, the hereditary magic power of the Six Duchies, that is primarily found in the Farseer family, but also in the general population, who are then conscripted into service. These non-royal Skill users combine strength with the Farseer kings and princes to bolster the powers of the royals and so they might accomplish more together than the royals could alone, like a circle of channelers in WoT, but without the safety limits the One Power has. In fact, there are songs which praise those “coteries” whose members die from the king drawing on all their strength to perform some necessary feat. As with royal bastards, the rationale towards anyone born with the innate ability seems to be that the Farseers now own you, and if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem, and Chade is there to make sure that as few such parts remain breathing as possible.

Galen, the Skillmaster, who is teaching Fitz's class is one of those fanboys of his deceased sire Chivalry, except Galen’s devotion to the late prince isn't merely high expectations for the son who had nothing to do with him, it's resentment and blame for the prince's fall. Galen's methods are harsh, using austerity and asceticism to discipline his students’ minds, but he takes it to a special extreme level of outright physical abuse of Fitz, inflicting crippling injuries and then flunking him out. And then murdering Fitz’s second magic-friend dog.

It turns out that Chade, who is a royal bastard himself, always felt slighted that he had not been allowed to learn the Skill, and thus sought to have Fitz learn it for his vicarious gratification and class justification. For Fitz’s failure eto learn from a homicidally abusive teacher, who gives the least instruction he can get away with, Chade is disappointed in him and keeps nagging him about how and why he failed, despite the physically, emotionally and deliberately psychologically traumatic experience of his training (Galen deliberately used Stockholm Syndrome to keep his students respect and obedient). Later Burrich, who knows just enough so we can't stop respecting him, but not enough to get Fitz away from all this horrible stuff in time, beats the shit out of Galen for his treatment of Fitz. In accordance with a peculiar custom that, sort of like trial by combat, Burrich is “proven” right, so Galen is publicly embarrassed and legally unable to raise a hand to Fitz again. But the damage is done, so this triumph has no real benefit for Fitz and further stokes the enmity and resentments held against him by the premier practitioner of mind-fucking magic in the kingdom.

Chade deals with this with all the grace of a stage-parent whose child doesn't get into the show, but also when Fitz (and incidentally this reader) is surprised by Burrich's actions as they are the first sign in like, a decade of acquaintance, that Burrich actually gives a damn about Fitz as more than an extension of his worshipped father, he relates the tale in a way as to imply Fitz is a horribly ungrateful child for not realizing the guy who murdered his canine best friend and was at best a dutch uncle, actually cares deeply for him.

Chade,, over the course of the series, seems to flip-flop between "we are assassins, we cannot have nice things" when Fitz wants to cultivate a relationship, to a more normal mindset when he perceives Fitz as failing or not appreciating loved ones, then it's all "how can you be so heartless, boy?" Later on, after Fitz finally gets away from him and court, Chade decides that, yes, assassins CAN have nice things, and becomes a fashionable courtier, dashing lover, all-round party animal, and public counselor to the throne, recognized and respected as a power in the land. After he has spent about a decade treating Fitz like a spoiled brat for merely wanting a normal relationship with a girl that he liked, or heaven forbid, a job that didn't involve daily lies, routinely breaching trust & hospitality, no friends and the occasional homicide. When Fitz acts on his own initiative to give advice or support the members of the royal family who are nice to him, and incidentally the rightful & legal people to be holding authority, Chade is all "we serve, we don't act! Assassins must not use their initiative or intervene publicly", but once Fitz is out of the life, he flips the job description around. He literally made the job as traumatic and isolating and psychologically wearing as possible on Fitz, and once he no longer had his dependent sidekick lurking in the shadows alongside him, went out and did everything he had forbidden Fitz, and then some.

Anyway, the first book culminates in Fitz being sent on a diplomatic mission, where he is supposed to murder a foreign prince to further the kingdom's interest, only to discover that his bosses have been given bad intel by Prince Regal. Regal wants the assassination to go down so he can take control of two nations, murdering his brother, Verity, the crown prince, and killing Fitz into the bargain. Regal hates Fitz because his mother died of an overdose, but he believes she was poisoned by her husband King Shrewd and thinks Fitz was the agent of that poisoning. Fitz barely manages to foil this plot, despite getting poisoned himself, and after a long convalescence, has Shrewd lean hard on his personal loyalty to extract a promise that he won't get revenge on Regal, because he is Shrewd's son. Said son being an admitted traitor, attempted fratricide and near-inciter of an international incident, the last of which was only averted by nigh-superhuman forbearance on the part of the other country.

Fitz's reward for saving the diplomatic relationship and the life of the Crown Prince is more crap jobs, while enduring chronic seizures as a result of cumulative physical trauma from the attempt on his life and his abuse by his erstwhile Skill teacher. Regal's punishment for an attempted coup & fratricide is to be employed as the social face of the royal family, being assigned to play host to visiting nobles and schmooze, rather than being given any critical work to do. This is because he failed to learn any useful skills, like magic, administrative or military arts but spent his youth partying and getting high. His new assignment, by the way, lets him indulge in recreation to his heart's content while giving him a platform wth which he can undermine his father and older brother, and suborn the loyalties of the nobles. While bearing a grudge against Fitz. For all that Shrewd and Chade are supposed to be a smart king and a brilliant, ruthless adviser, they completely fail at Feudal Politics 101, in which the king is supposed to be the personal benefactor to retain the loyalty and affection of his vassals, instead transforming Shrewd’s role in the monarchy to a behind-the-scenes administrator.

Fitz tries to get out of being an assassin, so they find other tasks for him, like letting Verity sap his strength to keep working his magic, or serving as an oarsman and soldier in the brand new royal navy, which consists of a handful of warships, with inexperienced crews, attempting to thwart incessant Viking-style raids, that not only savage the kingdom's coasts, but leave behind living zombies, who terrorize the surviving population. Fitz serves with Verity telepathically bugging his mind, so the prince can see out of his eyes to observe the war effort. This becomes yet another factor isolating Fitz from normal people, because he has to be aware that he is effectively wearing a wire and he and anyone around him has no privacy from their monarch.

Meanwhile, everyone Fitz tries to warn about Regal's hostility, ambitions and utter lack of conscience laughs him off and ignores him until the book ends with Regal in control of the kingdom, Shrewd dead at Regal’s behest, Verity lost on a quest to summon magic allies, and Verity's wife a fugitive. Fitz ends up in cell being tortured to the point of death, where the only thing his allies can manage is to slip him a suicide pill. Then he wakes up with Burrich & Chade digging him out of a grave, because Burrich used a technique of the Wit magic he despises and tries to all but beat out of Fitz, to fake Fitz's death. From that time on, Fitz’s response to threats of violence, is an almost psychotic reaction, which he attributes to his experiences being tortured by Regal.

One of the last thoughts King Shrewd has before his death, which Fitz observes through a link with the Skill, is regret and horror at all that has befallen his only grandchild, largely as a result of Shrewd's own actions and decisions. Before his passing, Shrewd heartily, if belatedly, endorses Fitz's desire to be normal, but that's all too late. Burrich and Chade basically expect Fitz to go seek out Verity on his quest, and pile guilt trips on him for the mistakes he made in his efforts to help Verity's wife, Kettricken. It’s all about how stupid Fitz was, losing his cool and chasing down his grandfather’s killers and slitting their throats after telepathically experiencing Shrewd’s murder and the first ever expression of paternal love from anyone in his life. Why didn’t he just shrug that off and maintain his harmless abused courtier persona?

Anyway, eventually, Fitz does go off on his quest, but not to find Verity, which would have been futile, since no one knows where he went. As best I can tell, Burrich and Chade, neither of whom know anything about Skill magic, expect Fitz to somehow use it to find the new King, and never mind that it's excruciatingly painful for him, and functions only erratically, thanks to his abuse at the hands of his teacher. Instead, Fitz goes looking to assassinate Regal. If there is ANY justification for the existence of a royal assassin to serve the best interests of the kingdom by removing problematic individuals, Regal is an absolutely legitimate candidate, having boasted to Fitz of his own complete and total disregard for law, morality and social convention, and how this pathological criminality is an asset because no one expects him to be that ruthless. But right before Fitz can carry out the kill, Verity, who has intermittent mental contact with him, compels Fitz to leave off his planned killing and come find Verity, largely out of concern for Fitz's safety.

Shortly after the compulsion is placed, Fitz puts together a number of magically obtained clues to realize that his girlfriend, Molly, who had left him in the previous book, is actually pregnant with their child. He decides to go find her and raise their kid together, but he is literally unable to disobey Verity' magic command, and instead has to keep heading off to terra incognita. He keeps having sporadic visions of his girlfriend and her struggles and feels as she tries to cope with her pregnancy alone, and gets to hear all her expressed recriminations against him.

It turns out, that Molly had given him her breakup speech as a test, to see if he would come win her back. See, back before their relationship, when they were just childhood friends, she was in a tight financial bind so she came to the castle looking for his help getting a job and discovered he was not the servant she had assumed, but a royal bastard, so that was his fault. Then she kept pissing and moaning about how his duties, which he couldn't talk about, came before their relationship. When she caught him suffering seizures and other side effects of his various physical traumas, she assumed he was drunk, and she had issues with alcoholics because her father was one. Needless to say, she does not have the modern view of alcoholism as a disease, rather, she has the puritanical assumption of a moral shortcoming for which she gives him no end of crap.

When Molly finally emotionally blackmailed Fitz into confessing his true occupation, she ripped into him for not using his mad assassin skills to save her from goons harassing her one time. Then she broke off their relationship telling him there is someone else, whom she loves enough to put first, ahead of anything else. Fitz was supposed to divine from this cryptic comment that she referred to an unborn child and abandon his duties to the king to come after her. The context of her comment is that Fitz is scum for not putting his girlfriend ahead of his service to a king and a master assassin who takes a lethally dim view of royal assets not cooperating with the royal agenda.

And Fitz feels BAD about not falling in line with this manipulative little shrew's games! He feels guilty at inflicting the status of bastardy on his child (despite repeated assurances from Molly that she was using protection), and at not being there for the pregnancy and all the rest. When he confides his impending parenthood to a fellow traveler, she dumps on him for leaving his girlfriend to the trials of making a living as a single mother. Later Fitz discovers that Burrich knew about the pregnancy and has been keeping watch on Molly, so that's one thing Fitz doesn't have to worry about... until near the end of the book, with the main quest almost complete, and Fitz desperately looking forward to going back to his father figure, the love of his life and their baby daughter, he magically witnesses Molly and Burrich having sex and deciding to get married and raise his child themselves, because they assume he must be dead.

Meanwhile, Fitz's compulsory quest gets him nearly killed (it turns out that pulling up short of killing a homicidal prince and leaving him at your back is pretty dangerous, thanks a bunch, Verity), with an arrow in his back, but he coincidentally gets found by a friend. While recuperating, the person to whom he confided his impending fatherhood sees him, puts two and two together, and tracks down Kettricken, Verity's wife. She tells the queen that Fitz is alive and has admitted paternity of a child, so Kettricken leaves a will naming Fitz's daughter as a Farseer heir against Fitz's adamant wishes, making the baby the primary target of Regal who has managed to take out every other person between him and the crown.

Apparently the precedent where a universally admired and respect prince was ineligible to rule because he fathered a bastard, is suddenly defunct and that prince’s grand-bastard is irrevocably locked into the line of succession! See what I mean about rules only ever working to Fitz's detriment? Also, these people are hurt and mad that Fitz would try to conceal the existence of a Farseer heir from them when it is so important. While he is lying facedown trying to recuperate from the umpteenth near-mortal wound he has suffered as a result of being born into this horror show of a family he has to endure a torrent of criticism for trying to keep his daughter away from said family.

Then Fitz has to accompany Kettricken and the woman who betrayed his daughter on a mission to locate Verity, where the rightful king is carving a magic statue, and the mind-control command on Fitz is finally alleviated. And one night, near the end of the project, Verity laments to Fitz that he doesn't have any more feelings to put into his magic statue, but if he had the strength to get it on with his wife one more time, that would put him over the finish line. It would also allow Verity to conceive an heir, so his shit-stain of a little brother doesn't become the legit king, and relieve that burden from Fitz’s baby daughter whom Verity has prevented Fitz from ever meeting. So Fitz, with absolutely everything else in his life taken from him, from his lover to his child to his abusive mentor-friends, with his beloved uncle & king next, to his health and physical well-being and all relevant life choices, believing Verity is asking for the remainder of his physical strength, willingly gives it up.

Instead of his life, though, Verity just wanted his body, and switches their minds, leaving Fitz in Verity's older and worn-out husk of a body, while he takes over Fitz's and uses the combination of their familial resemblance and the dark of his wife's tent, to have sex with her and conceive a child to inherit his crown. Then they swap back with Kettricken none the wiser, and there is a lovely interlude where Fitz frantically bathes in a desperate attempt to wash the smell of his friend, and aunt-by-marriage, Kettricken, off his body. Verity turns into a magic statue, and carries his queen home to reclaim their castle from invaders and rally the kingdom. Fitz is left alone to face the small army of killers descending on their location at Prince Regal's behest, and only survives by a fluke accident revealing how to wake the rest of the magic statues, which he sends to help Verity after he survives the attack. Then, while everyone who used, betrayed and abandoned Fitz in the name of the greater good gets a mega happy ending, he settles down in an isolated farmhouse, broken in health, and traumatized in his mind, despite being only about 20 or so, to write his memoirs and hide away from the world until the Skill compels him to seek solace of eternal sleep in his own magic statue.

That's just the first trilogy. When Fitz gets called out of retirement in his mid-thirties to help the young Prince Dutiful whom Very sired while wearing Fitz’s body like a reverse condom, everyone is all solicitous to him, but start getting pissy whenever he has the temerity to not enthusiastically embrace their ideas, such as having him dive back into his traumatic experiences with the Skill so he can teach Dutiful the magic that has been a source of more pain than power. Also, they want to drag his bastard daughter, Nettle who doesn't even know she’s not the child of the man who raised her, to court, as a spare royal in case something happens to Prince Dutiful, and to also be made into a Skill-henchperson for the prince. And Fitz is a selfish asshole for not wanting his daughter to be exposed to the source of all the misery that was crammed into fourteen years of his adolescence and early adulthood. Kettricken's response to Fitz's desperate attempt to protect his child is basically "What about my feelings?" When Fitz first comes back, because they begged his help on a vital mission, he does so because he needs to provide for the education of a child for whom he has been caring. Chade is actually affronted that Fitz thinks he needs to bargain for this help, that he doesn't realize the royal family that trained him to be a paranoid, isolated spy & killer, who have put him through a wringer of multiple murder attempts and near-death experiences, and stripped him of every meaningful life choice, would not have simply helped him out at his request, with no conditions asked!

Anyway, Fitz's efforts to keep his daughter clear of everything come to naught, she gets dragged into court life and conscripted as a Skill wielder in service to the throne, gets along great with the prince, who likes having a new cousin in the family...but Nettle is pissed and resentful of Fitz, for not coming clean with her (and incidentally, exposing her parents' deception and breaking up their family) and for her being unprepared for her new lifestyle. How dare Fitz not prepare her for the very thing he spent all his efforts trying to prevent coming to pass! Burrich gets killed off, rather transparently for the purposes of freeing up Molly, and Fitz gets to live happily ever after, eventually getting Nettle to stop crapping on him. And, it goes without saying, that he gets run through the wringer on this second go-round as a Farseer henchman, taking yet another traumatic mortal wound he survives only by magical intervention, losing yet another magically bonded canine companion, and having a rough interlude where yet another close friend blames him for not living up to said friend's unspoken expectations of their relationship.

I don't want to give the wrong impression of these books. They're a pretty good read, and Fitz manages to generally find some lights at the end of his tunnels, and there are eventually some relationships that aren't quite as abusive as the ones detailed above, but when you pick through all the details and such, you really get this horrible, between-the-lines picture of an abuse victim on such a large scale, that he has internalized it all and feels guilty for failing his abusers, and letting down a family that takes everything he could possibly give and largely survives only through his sacrifices, while giving him very little familial relation in return.

Do any other Hobb readers have a take on this?