The Fool's Gender?

[the_faery_queen]

i always thought it was put of his fool routine thing. i never saw him as that camp really.

[cornelius]

ok that gave me some flashbacks... maybe i should get the next trilogy a go now ( i have only read the first trilogy (farseer) so far)

[Teir]

Originally Posted by the_faery_queen

i always thought it was put of his fool routine thing. i never saw him as that camp really.

*nod*
but sometimes you just knew he was doing it just to enjoy driving fitz crazy

[the_faery_queen]

oh totally! that's part of why i loved him. he was such a messer! he liked to stir things up. the way he was with fitz at the start of the tawny man seemed a lot more earnest and sensitive and quiet, less campy and outrageous, i always thought of that fool as the real one, the others as more of an act. because he was never one way all the time. must have been SO cool to have as a friend, in a frustrating way

[Teir]

Originally Posted by cornelius

ok that gave me some flashbacks... maybe i should get the next trilogy a go now ( i have only read the first trilogy (farseer) so far)

yes,
yes you should

i always thought of that fool as the real one, the others as more of an act. because he was never one way all the time. must have been SO cool to have as a friend, in a frustrating way

love the way you look at him and i believe you should have put a 'very very' in between 'a' and 'frustrating'

[the_faery_queen]

yeah poor fitz. must have been driven nuts sometimes

[ScottSF]

Since seer type people are born of human parents as a result of the original seer people interbreeding with humans then they are probably not sexless. Here's a thought, human embryos start out sexless (or was it all female?) and gender develops a bit later in the process. Maybe seers remain somewhat sexless untill they reach a certain stage in their long lives. Perhaps once they have fulfilled their role then they can settle on a gender. Unfortunately none of the three seer nobody showed any interest in breeding so there's not a lot to go on there. The only convincing evidence that was mentioned in the thread is that fits saw her naked when she was dead. Now I want to re-read that part to see if there is any squigle room. Hobb was very careful about not leaving any give aways but that may have been overlooked.
The Fool is emotionally very female. Other than the mentioned death scene, she always shows up fully dressed. (I admit that could be about hiding the tatoo) When she shows fits the tatoo on her back she covers her chest. When Fitz switches bodies he notes how "different" the Fool is physiologically. The fool compares the difference between herself and Fritz to the difference between Fritz and Nighteyes. If Beloved is so different, even supperior, compared to humans then gender may be more of a grey area. And can the average human tell the gender of a dragon on sight? Perhaps she can appear male but the way she acts, especially in Tawny (wo)Man , screams chick to me. I had the same feeling of frustration when she had her tiffs with Fitz as I do when arguing with a girlfriend.

[ScottSF]

Also I don't know of any culture that would name a male child Beloved, admitted it is Fantasy. The fool acts very much like a woman pretending to be a man would with all the clothes. And it's very much like a woman to use her influence to make Fitz wear pretty clothes that he doesn't want. If I had to give a percent I would say 80% female at the least.

[Teir]

Originally Posted by ScottSF

Since seer type people are born of human parents as a result of the original seer people interbreeding with humans then they are probably not sexless. Here's a thought, human embryos start out sexless (or was it all female?) and gender develops a bit later in the process. Maybe seers remain somewhat sexless untill they reach a certain stage in their long lives. Perhaps once they have fulfilled their role then they can settle on a gender. Unfortunately none of the three seer nobody showed any interest in breeding so there's not a lot to go on there. The only convincing evidence that was mentioned in the thread is that fits saw her naked when she was dead. Now I want to re-read that part to see if there is any squigle room. Hobb was very careful about not leaving any give aways but that may have been overlooked.
The Fool is emotionally very female. Other than the mentioned death scene, she always shows up fully dressed. (I admit that could be about hiding the tatoo) When she shows fits the tatoo on her back she covers her chest. When Fitz switches bodies he notes how "different" the Fool is physiologically. The fool compares the difference between herself and Fritz to the difference between Fritz and Nighteyes. If Beloved is so different, even supperior, compared to humans then gender may be more of a grey area. And can the average human tell the gender of a dragon on sight? Perhaps she can appear male but the way she acts, especially in Tawny (wo)Man , screams chick to me. I had the same feeling of frustration when she had her tiffs with Fitz as I do when arguing with a girlfriend.

Interesting. Going by your theory though, how do you explain the pale woman? It is clear that she never fulfills what was supposed to be her role and destiny and she is most assuredly 'settled' into a female gender. If nothing else, Fitz's description of her body quite determines that lol.

And just a thought - the fool and the pale women seem to share a history where at some point they had contact while he was a child. That was some time ago (the fools makes brief refferences to alot of time passing) and even back then he refers to her as female.
The fool has grown and by your reasoning has not yet reached the settled gender that his nemesis did.....

And I don't know about Fitz seeing the fool naked...i think i disagree with that wherever it was mentioned...i cant recall any specific point where hobb wrote that....but as i mentioned at the beginning - they did switch bodies and i cant see Fitz not taking any notice as to the fact that the body he was now in was female if the fool was indeed a woman. 'Different'..can be explained...at least i thought so....by the fact that the fool is from a different race...species if you will

Im not sure if the fools nature and attitude towards gender can be explained by his race. It might be something that is purely Fool

[the_faery_queen]

i don't thonk the fool acts anything like a woman trying to be a man. i think the problem is people are too hung up on gender roles and identitys, to be honest. and we find it hard to imagine that a man can behave the way that the fool did. but i know a lot of people who dont' identify with either gender, who are just themselves, despite being in a female or male body, and i think the fool is that. i think he's biologically male, because if he wasn't, the white prophettess woman would have known, she knew him as a child, and so would fitz, when they body swopped/mind linked all the rest of it. but he is emotionally genderless. he doesn't identify with either gender, as he says, it's just plumbing, it doesn't make you who you are. and i agree with that. im female but i don't identify with being female. have the bits, but they're meaningless to me (im asexual) and i think that the fool is like that. ok he's had sex, he said himself that he wasn't saving himself for fitz, but in other ways he loves like asexuals do, mind to mind, not with bodies. so for me, he's male, without having a male mindset, perhaps because of his upbringing (tho granted he had two fathers, from what i remember. so it's odd in that way that he isn't more masculine,)

for all we know tho, the female prophet could be the odd one. perhaps their culture isn't so sexual and she's the odd one out? or perhaps not. i just dont' think the fool is female at all. i don't think he's both or neither either. i think he's male, but without any of the concerns that go with gender identification. something i relate to. which is perhaps why i do think he's male, because i want him to be without that gender indentification, and if he was female, then he wouldn't have that.

[ScottSF]

And the debate goes on. I was frustrated by all the clues that the fool was secretly female and there was no payoff. Just as thinking of the Fool as female upsets some people, thinking about Amber as secretly male upsets me I guess. I found Amber a much easier character to deal with than the Fool. Wait, no, I think the fool was fine as the fool in Farseers it's Lord Golden that got on my nerves. In spite of all that I wouldn't change the story in that respect. I was annoyed in a good way from a fiction perspective as part of being engaged in the story line.

[the_faery_queen]

i do think that the fool did a very good woman tho. unnaturally good, which is why i did think he was female, at least until the end of the tawny man and the white prophetess calling him him. i didn't htink a man could understand the female boyd or how a woman could act as a man, that well, but as i said, the white prophetess knew him as a child, she would have known if he was a girl, i think.

lord golden was kinda meant to be annoying. shallow, callous fop. i do wish some sort of more conclusive outcome had been reached about the fool, but then i wished the same about the crown. i thought that was a real let down as well.

[jackokent]

Originally Posted by the_faery_queen

i . i didn't htink a man could understand the female boyd or how a woman could act as a man, that well,

There's lots of men who can pass themselves off as women very ably. To me the fool was such a chap, who was, as you say very convincing and good at it.

Whilst he was Amber I did feel something wasn't quite right about him and altough I also found Lord Golden a little annoying it felt more natural.

I just seem him as an effeminate man and to add my 2 pennies worth I think Fitz would have been far better off with Fool than moaning Molly.

[the_faery_queen]

oh totally. i really hate molly. she was so boring! and ok she stood for what fitz wanted, a life of his own, baaaaabies and marrrriage and all that nice safe ordinary stuff, which is fair enough considering all teh stuff he had to go through, she was just so boring and didn't understand him! she didnt really like the nighteyes bond thing, and hto he would never have another bond, after nighteyes, i still don't think fitz should have ended up with a person who didn't like something that was such a big part of him. she was also his childhood thing, i really wanted him to get over that. but as someone told me, he was a catylst, and they don't change.

he was trying to be annoying, i think, as lord golden. my fav version was really the fool that came to teh cabin, the gentle, quiet sort of fool. i also liked the mad, manic fool, cos i like that sort of hyperactivity, but quiet fool was my fav. amber was ok, better than anyone else in that series! (except paragon) but ultimately, the rarely seen normal fool was what i like

and i guess i was really thinking about the whole period thing, how well he could tell althea how to hide it. i really don't think that many men would know about that sort of thing. but the fool is pretty worldly, he seems to know everything abotu everything really, or at least, be sensitive enough to understand.

[Psychogirl]

Teir is right! The Fool is deffinately a male. The whole series would be ruined if he wasn't