The Fool (spoilers for all RotE books, including LST)

[ArtanisG]

I’ve been silently reading this thread for about a year and a half, I guess. But having read this, I just couldn’t stay silent any longer

The Fool could not be this "sequential hermaphrodite" because Robin Hobb never introduced the concept. This author lays the foundation for every object, concept, character and storyline in the reality of her books.

Because although there’re so many great thoughts and ideas and parallels mentioned here, I was always amused that nobody noticed one solid clue on the matter of White Prophets gender. The story of Prilkop.

To begin with, I don’t care about the Fool’s gender at all. He is a ‘he’ when I think of the Fool, and he is a ‘she’ when I think of Amber even though I figured that Amber and the Fool were the same person when Althea spoke to Amber for the first time (at the time, I just shared my thoughts on the subject in my blog, and one of my readers told me my suspicions were correct).

But then again, it’s impossible not to think about who and what the Fool is. And I do think he’s a hermaphrodite. Somewhere through reading the Tawny Man trilogy I came to a thought that, personally, I don’t want the Fool to be a man or a woman, that the exact gender would just simplify everything. But then, I thought, if he were a hermaphrodite, there must be some hints in the books. Robin Hobb is indeed the author who will not let anything happen without building a concept.

So, I started trying to think of a clue about the possibility of a hermaphrodite existence in the Realm of the Elderlings. And then it stroke me that such a creature was almost always there – Sa. And there was a quote in the book about duality of the White Prophet gender borrowed from the faith in Sa, so indirectly but Sa and White Prophets were connected by the author herself.

And coming back to the story of Prilkop – he is the character who is referred both as a man and a woman. He is the Black Man who collects the food which is left by the Outislanders on the shore. And there’s an old legend which I cannot quote at the moment as I don’t have my book with me but the legend tells a story of a girl who stayed young for years and years, whose hair was black and who was a prophet living on Aslevjal and collecting the food left by Outislanders for Icefyre. So, we have Prilkop who told that he came to Aslevjal even earlier than Icefyre, and we have a young female prophet who lived there after. And I think the legend of the Black Man and the legend of the black-haired girl are too similar to be coincidence or to describe different people.

And does anyone here know if this news is true?
http://www.fantasybookreview.co.uk/fbrbl...ovel-news/