#guissipo

[dafodilion]

okay so like, this might be lowkey controversial but, for the time being i’m not mad with The Letter For The King. Do i think certain things could have been handled better? Absolutely. But it’s definitely set up for another season at least. Tiuri’s mom hasn’t been seen since like, ep 2 or 3, The Queen had the black eyes that they haven’t explored yet, Lavinia hasn’t found the road, and Iona and Jaro’s strange acquantanceship is just starting.

I’m definitely upset about the death but I want to see what the show writers do with it. If it’s kept through the story and used as a source of inspiration/determination and not completely forgotten about then its one thing but if it is completely forgotten then it begs the question of why the character was introduced in the first place if they were only going to die.

This got long so analysis under the cut

I know a lot of people are upset that Tiuri was teased as the hero but it turned out to be Lavinia who had magic and I just have to say that Tiuri is definitely the protagonist in this story. It is completely centered around him. Not only does he tick most of the ‘hero’ boxes from Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey, he’s also the one we establish the emotional connection with first. I think that’s a part of why a lot of people are upset about the magic thing. He was designated ‘special dude’ in the first few episodes and then everyone finds out that there’s nothing supernatural about him. But what I think a lot of people are forgetting is that the thing that makes Tiuri the hero/protagonist in TLFTK is that he chose to be. He made the choice to help the old man at the chapel door. He’s also a kid. They all are. And save for Lavinia, they likely haven’t had much agency in a lot of their choices because they’re kids. They’re only just starting to be baby adults. So Tiuri chose to go help and that lead to him travelling across the continent.

Another part is the race thing. I’m not going to comment on this too much, not because I don’t think it’s there, I think it is to an extant, but more because I don’t want to make any rash judgments on the writers who had six episodes to tell a story that could very easily have been cut back from ten which is the usual netflix original s1 episode count. They also address that Tiuri does endure certain racist attitudes from other characters through the series. This in mind i’m really hoping that there is some nuance going into the writing that we’ll be able to see in future seasons.

Tiuri also has a questionable Lineage. His home was a victim of genocide and his and his Mother are, for all that we know, some of the few who are left. He doesn’t know who his biological father was. It was teased that his father was a Shaman and while I want to believe that, the information was given when we still thought that he had magic. It’s also shown that Shaman is used as a gender neutral term and I’ll get to that later. His mother tells him not to worry about who his father was and it could be that she was trying to get him to accept Sir Tiuri as his father and that it really doesn’t matter, or it could be that she said it for complicated plot reasons.

Speaking of parents, we have Lavinia. Lavinia’s character is interesting. She was introduced as a self-serving and very ambitious noble/princess who wants to help her people in a sustainable way. Her father is shown to see a quick fix and try to take it. Lavinia wants to find the road that ran from two kingdoms directly through her town(?). She’s done the research and the math and the planning. She just needs to go do it. That’s her goal. Then we’re introduced to the idea of her mother. We know almost nothing about her mother other than she’s gone. There’s mysterious circumstances there that have yet to be explored but they’re set up to be major plot points in the future. Also, just a side note about the magic, we only know of three cultures in TLFTK when there could easily be hundreds of cultures around the world. For there to only be one with magic would be bad world building and just on the detail we’re getting for future season set ups I want to say that the world building wouldn’t be that bad but I could be wrong.

I mentioned the gender neutral term used for Shaman and it being used to describe a magic user. For the time being, and until we get more info on the world building and term usage for the Netflix series because it apparently does differ wildly from the source material, I’m inclined to believe that Lavinia is a Shaman. So was(is?) Prince Veridian. Lavinia’s mother could have been the Shaman being talked about when Prince Veridian was interrogating the Shaman in the village. Now I’m not trying to say that Lavinia could be a woc in this world, I’m just saying that we don’t really know a whole lot about the magic being used and it’s cultural significance throughout the world, and that what we do know is incredibly limited.

Now, names are important for characters not only to distinguish them to readers but the also tell something about the characters. The name Lavinia also belonged to the wife of Aeneus who in Roman mythology was a survivor of Troy and son of Aphrodite and is an ancestor to Romulus and Remus, founders of Rome. One part of her story that her hair catches fire as an omen promising good things for her people and bad things for the latins. This is similar to how Lavinia in TLFTK almost looks to be on fire as ‘the light’ in the battle scene in e6. This is so interesting just from a meta standpoint so I wanted to point it out. I haven’t read the book or the sequel so I don’t know anything about the source material but from a writing perspective that’s a hell of a derivitave. Side note, Tiuri could possibly be derived from Turi meaning ‘of Thor’ or Tiri meaning ‘swift one’ from persian mythology or ‘outsider’ in ijaw, and these are theoretical, it could just be a name. The meanings do come from behindthename and babynames so the meanings could be entirely wrong.

Now Iona. I lover her character and I can’t wait to see more of her. She’s competent, knows what she does and doesn’t know, she can work in a group or independently, takes charge, and can kick ass. She’s also a kid, which is super important. We don’t know much about her history other than her parents are dead and that she’s likely lived a pretty rough life to be somewhat proficient in thievery, survival skills, sleight of hand, and ‘bar speak’ for lack of a better term. Past this we don’t really know much about her, or the rest of the characters for that matter. We have six plot based episodes and that’s it, so from here it’s gonna be less character analysis and more general analysis.

I think that she’s being set up as a foil to Tiuri. A foil is one character who contrasts another. They’re not necessarily opposites. One of the reasons I think this is so is because of how competent Iona is and how incompetent Tiuri is. She goes off with an adult who now(?) has no real ties to anyone, but he’s following her. (This would seem creepy but I see it more as an exasperated adult accidentally adopted an ambitious kid and now feels obligated to make sure they don’t get themselves killed.) Tiuri ends the series belonging to the knighthood. Speaking of the knighthood, this was the one thing that Iona was sure she would get and Tiuri was sure he wouldn’t. She had the confidence and skill to match and Tiuri was just kind of. There.

Now, we know so little of the characters mentioned above and even less of Foldo, Guissipo, and Piak, but they are intrinsically connected to eachother.

Its implied that they grew up together. Piak knows that Foldo tells good stories. So the three of them know each other and that makes the little romance between Foldo and Guissipo a bit more believable once that is realized. Like I said earlier, I really want to know what the show writers deal with Guissipo’s death and how it affects Foldo and Piak. I don’t really expect it to hit Tiuri or Lavinia so hard, maybe Iona if she knows, but it should definitely hit Foldo and Piak. I really hope that in the future, it’s addressed how they both grieve individually and together.

I think the only other character that I really wanna talk about is Queen Alianor. She has Tiuri’s mother and had black eyes, but she also knighted all of the boys. i really want to see what they do with that only because I don’t know what could happen.

Anyway this was more of a ‘okay people are mad about a lot of things and while I know and can agree with why, we don’t really have a lot of information as to what is planned especially with only 6 episodes adding up to less than 300 minutes and a story that could have been so much longer.’ I know that it has issues and that the show has hit certain pitfalls. I know. But I want to hope that there was a reason behind what they’ve done and with more time we’ll get to see those reasons.