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

[Lord Punctual]

As has been briefly mentioned before, I think we need to remember that Farseer and the Tawny Man are written from first person perspective. As in any work from this viewpoint, we must decide if our narrator is reliable or not... and I think dear FitzChivalry is a resounding not.

I mean, what with all the self-induced amnesia, the voluntary forging, and the admitted denial of facts, I don`t really think we can take anything Fitz writes down as being entirely factual.

I mean, what would it have meant if the Fool turned out to be female (spoiler for Fool's Fate)

Spoiler

when Fitz prepared him for the funeral pyre?

In Golden Fool, Lord Golden, in response to Fitz's famous "I don't like men" speech, said something along the lines of "Well I knew that, but I would have been a lot happier never actually having to hear you say it." That sort of implies that although Beloved never expected to have a physical relationship with Fitz, he would have like to if it were an option.

So, how would you feel if someone that you really cared about as a friend, but had turned down for a physical relationship on the basis that they were the same gender as you and you don't swing that way, turned out to in fact be the opposite gender? And you only found out after their death? And you really hurt their feelings at one point and damaged your friendship by earlier turning them down?

I think I'd feel pretty awful. And given Fitz's predilection for forgetting about things that make him feel bad (like his mom, for one thing) I think it's possible that he chose not to remember . (Sure Beloved didn't end up dying, but Fitz didn't know it would work out that way at the time.)

I'd also like to point out that, male or female, gender doesn't seem to be very important to the Fool. I think it would have been deeply disappointing to him/her to find out that the matter of plumbing was so important to Fitz. I'd almost go so far as to think that perhaps she didn't want Fitz to know that she was female after the arguement in Golden Fool because then she might have had to confront Fitz' changing opinion of her and possible openness to a relationship - because the change in Fitz' attraction to her would mean that Fitz' was only attracted to those facets of her overall personality that were indeed female, and not those that were not. I think that would have been hard for Beloved to stomach.

And... what else was I going to say? Oh yes. About Amber coaxing Althea on pretending to be a boy: certainly, female impersonators have a great understanding of what makes a person feminine, but does that mean that they have a great understanding of what makes a person appear masculine? My example being that although I am an excellent accent and voice impersonator (I'm great at parties) I wouldn't know how to begin coaching someone to mimic my native accent, because it's my "base value." But then, I'm not a gender impersonator, so it might be different for them.