White-bellied Sea Eagles (Icthyophaga leucogaster), family Accipitridae, order Accipitriformes The Kimberley, Western Australia

photograph by Richard Sidey

Red-necked Tanager (Tangara cyanocephala), family Thraupidae, order Passeriformes, Atlantic Forest of Brazil

photograph by Aisse Gaertner

Melon collies

Imperial fruit-sucking moths (Phyllodes imperialis)

The funniest thing to me about Kel, and maybe one of the most interesting because of how understated it is, is that Kel becomes a good commander in the end, not by emulating Wyldon who was cold and implacable and insensitive, or by emulating Raoul who mostly only disobeys orders out of principle or because he has an issue with what the order says about his personal relationship with Jon, but by emulating JON.

Kel doesn't even LIKE Jon, she BARELY respects him as a person. He's a good enough ruler that she's willing to fight for him and swear loyalty to him and to at least mostly believe that he wouldn't work with Blayce to make his own killing monsters, but that's as far as it goes for Kel. If he's kind to her, she finds it uncomfortable and almost untrustworthy because she assumes he doesn't care about her and so his kindness and respect towards her must be fake.

But from the outside, as readers, we know just how much Jon fought for Kel. We know how much he does respect her right to be a knight. Jon is the sole reason that Kel DID get the opportunity to prove herself, if he'd capitulated to Wyldon completely, she just wouldn't have ever been allowed to join. Kel doesn't KNOW THAT, obviously, but we do. We know that Jon did everything he could to find a way to convince Wyldon to let Kel become a page. While Wyldon claims later that the reason he chose to let her stay at the end of the probation year was because his better judgment convinced him she'd earned it, I'd be willing to bet that part of that better judgment also included knowing if he couldn't prove to JON that she needed to go, then he'd be in trouble. Kel was training and working in front of plenty of other trainers and teachers who could easily contradict Wyldon's lies if he'd tried it, many of whom are closer to Jon than they are to Wyldon.

Kel's experiences and feelings about that experience are entirely valid, and she doesn't have the knowledge we do about how hard Jon fought for her, so it's not shocking that she's upset with him for a good portion of her series. She never even discovers this truth by the end of her series, even though she does get a lesson from Jon and Thayet (and Raoul to some degree) about how politics and compromises work in order to make changes happen. So her opinion of him by the end is boiled down to the quote from Squire: "good kings weren't always good men." It makes sense for her to think this, but because Kel's knowledge base is so limited (and her worldview so black and white for much of her series), it makes her an EXTREMELY unreliable narrator about this particular issue.

Kel believes that while Jon generally does his duty and keeps the peace, he doesn't actually care all that much about his people as individuals. But in their only meaningful conversation in Squire, Jon is able to point out that he (and Thayet, who is actually equal to Jon in power, something Kel either doesn't know which would be a failure in her education or just tends to ignore so she can focus her ire on Jon) has to make a LOT of compromises in order to get ANYTHING useful done at all. Sometimes, often, it means making deals with people he doesn't like or people he just fundamentally disagrees with, because it's the first step in a multi-step plan to help more people in the long run. He also points out that just throwing his weight and authority around in order to be able to change everything he wants to change immediately regardless of what anyone else thinks about it is a great way to get himself and his family killed. Because even if he had good intentions, that would be tyranny. It does make Kel think a little, but she doesn't tend to like him much still afterwards, her resentment from her page years will always color her opinion of him a little.

However, then she gets to Haven and she's suddenly tossed into a position of leadership over a lot of other people, many of whom disagree with each other or disagree with her or both. And all of the sudden, Kel has to make compromises. She doesn't LIKE the way the sergeants often treat their men, especially the sergeants whose men are convicts, but there's very very little she can do about it without really pissing off those same sergeants and that's not something she can afford to do. There's a moment when Neal starts getting frustrated about the treatment of the convicts and she takes him out to vent to her so he doesn't vent to the sergeants, something that the sergeants would then take out on their men. Kel's reasoning as she does this is that she "preferred to avoid battles with them now so she would have authority with them later if she needed to use it." Later, Kel is talking to Daine and she says "That's all this job is... Trying to please everyone and pleasing no one. And it will only get worse, not better."

Both of these moments showcase Kel choosing to make compromises. She may not like the way the sergeants treat the convicts, but she needs to stay on the sergeants' good sides because she doesn't have enough resources to butt heads with them nor enough authority to just force the issue, and even if she DID, it could cause the sergeants to become troublesome or take out their frustration with her on the men in ways she can't see as well. But staying on the sergeants' good sides might mean letting some of their maltreatment slide if it's not physically harming the convicts. And even setting that aside, she's dealing with nearly 500 refugees eventually, all of which are from different towns in the area and have different needs, not all of which she can accommodate. This requires compromise. Sometimes she can please some of them and not others, but mostly she probably just ends up not pleasing anybody because that's often how compromises WORK.

She never makes the active connection to Jon and his lesson on leadership from Squire while she's in Haven, but that quote up there about how this job (aka being a commander) is all about trying to please everyone and pleasing no one? It sounds a HECK of a lot like "good kings weren't always good men." You can try your best to help others, but often doing the right thing can involve making everyone unhappy. You can't be everybody's friend if you're going to get anything done.

Some of this she might've learned from Raoul's style of command, but Raoul commands a fairly small amount of people (at least in comparison to a King), and so we see him able to be pretty friendly to the people he commands in a way that Jon is perhaps unable to do. And she might believe that she learned some of this from Wyldon, but Wyldon had a tendency to be very unfair and biased due to his raging bigotry and conservative values, as well as the fact that he doesn't actually even LIKE being a training master and that likely impacted the way he treated the pages (he's almost never that kind to the pages, whereas we see him capable of being quite kind with the refugees later, which is where Kel comes to the conclusion that he hadn't enjoyed being a training master).

But Jon makes an entire speech about how he (and Thayet) have been working THEIR ENTIRE REIGN to change laws that help people. He explains how they have to consider the needs of merchants, nobles, farmers, street people, priests/priestesses, and mages. They have to consider not only what these people might need or want, but also what they could do when they feel sufficiently offended and how that could impact not just the royal family or the nobility but the realm as a whole. Jon points out that they HAVE made changes, for the better, and that just because they don't always succeed at everything or because they have to compromise sometimes, doesn't mean they aren't working at making changes or that they don't care about helping people. Not everyone you have power over is going to be your friend, they might not even be someone you like. But if you're going to take on the job of leadership, that's something you have to be willing to accept and work with, which often means making compromises with people whose needs and values are contradictory to your own.

Jon probably knows when he makes the compromise with Wyldon that it will likely impact a lot of people's good opinion of him. Alanna is right there and clearly angry, and we know Thayet doesn't like the decision, either. And it's entirely possible that Jon knows in the moment that Kel herself will put the blame on him because he's the King. But he also knows that if he insists on Kel being allowed to be a page without trying to compromise with Wyldon, Wyldon will quit over it and he'll end up with ten DIFFERENT problems that could cause a lot bigger issues to far more people than just one girl. So he makes the compromise. He sacrifices Alanna and Thayet and even Kel's good opinion of him in order to ensure that Kel gets the opportunity to become a Knight without turning all of his nobles against him which could ultimately lead to a civil war. Is it fair? No, and he knows it. But it's the best option he has in order to get the outcome they all actually want which is just for Kel to have the chance to prove herself.

Kel has to make similar choices once she's finally in a position of leadership of her own. And whether she realizes it or not, without ever even spending more than a few minutes with Jon, she ends up emulating his leadership style more than anybody else's because it WORKS and it works WELL. She'll probably never admit it, she might never even realize it herself, but she's so much more like Jon than any of the other men she sees as role models. And I love that. I love the dramatic irony of that, that the one person Kel only barely respects because of a compromise he made on her behalf that she'll never even know about, is the person Kel ends up most resembling. Jon is the reason she has the opportunity to become the Protector of the Small in the first place, Jon is the person who created that environment that allowed her to nurture those values, and she'll probably never even really be able to acknowledge that, because sometimes that's what being a good leader means.

You're not the first person to make this comparison on this post, but when I wrote this, I hadn't done a re-read of SOTL yet (and the last time I'd read In the Hand of the Goddess was... a LONG time ago, so I couldn't really make a good comparison between these two scenes), but I have now and I've been sort-of thinking this over and have some thoughts on it.

For me, this isn't so much an indication of them being similar so much as it is just an unusually similar narrative beat. A character chooses to disobey an order about not crossing a border during a war in order to go save someone who has been captured and, in so doing, takes out a major antagonist that leads to the end of the war.

But the MOTIVES behind the two actions seem very different to me. Jon goes to save Alanna because he's in love with her and can't bear to lose her. Kel goes to save the refugees because she's responsible for them and takes that extremely seriously. She does CARE about the people, obviously, it's still being done out of love, but she's not doing it because she can't stand to live without them so much as that she's INSANELY duty-driven. She goes up to save Lalasa for similar reasons after being told that a noble's duty to their servants is basically sacrosanct. Kel goes across the border because she believes it's the honorable thing to do. Jon's motives aren't about honor and are, arguably, somewhat more selfish in origin.

So while this is obviously a very similar storyline, I don't find that it's an example of these two characters being similar to each other.

Kel is willing to give up EVERYTHING out of a sense of duty to the people she's responsible for. While Jon is someone who does a LOT of things for his people and spends a lot of his time and energy making life better for them, I can't recall a moment where Jon is ready to give up everything he wants and everything he's worked for just to save his people. Jon actually tells Kel in Squire that he and Thayet work pretty hard to keep themselves OUT of that kind of danger whenever possible, that's the point behind all of the compromises. All of the arranged marriages for his kids are to try to ensure peace through political connections and stop fighting in wars.

This is where they DO differ because Kel feels like someone who, at least at this point in her life, is willing to die to protect her people. But Jon is someone who will do whatever it takes to LIVE for his people for as long as possible. Jon understands that, in his position, it's more beneficial for everybody for him to make compromises in order to stay alive so he can keep making changes that will make people's lives better in the long run. This is a lesson that, while we do see Kel LEARNING it a little during Lady Knight, isn't one that really plays into the final conflict of the book. It's possible that Kel will end up being even more like Jon in this way as she gets older, more willing to stay back herself and trust others to do what needs to be done in her place, but by the end of Lady Knight, that just isn't who she is yet.

And maybe that's what's interesting about the comparison. Kel isn't all that much like Jon YET, and she's certainly not all that much like Jon when HE was 19, but Kel shows signs of being a lot more like Jon as he is during HER series as she gets older and gains more experience. Kel is very righteous, very inclined to just act and get things done, but over the 9 years we get to know her, she has to learn more and more about when to act and when to WAIT. She has to learn when to push and when to bend a little.

As a woman, she's going to be held to different standards than her male counterparts like Raoul or Wyldon, she'll be dealing with different limitations and setbacks than they ever did. And so her approach to leadership will, by necessity, have to be different than theirs was. She does look to them for inspiration, but in execution, I think she'll likely end up far more like Jon. Jon is obviously not a woman himself, but as King he's ALSO held to different higher standards than his compatriots and he was very young when he took the throne and has been very progressive throughout his reign which means he's dealing with certain limitations and setbacks that more conservative people might not.

Kel has strong opinions and firm ideas of what the world SHOULD be like, and that's going to lead her down a similar path of trying to CHANGE things, but she'll be dealing with all of the same limitations that Jon is, which will force her to approach things the way he does. She's going to have to compromise, she's going to have to bend, she's going to have to learn when a fight is worth having, she's going to have to learn to give a little in order to get a little later.

Kel would probably not have crossed the border for just one person. If it had been Neal, for example, and Neal alone, she may not have decided to take that risk. Neal is a trained knight like herself and probably won't thank her for giving up everything to come save him. Kel could probably have been convinced not to cross the border for him, as much as it would've pained her. And Jon I think would not necessarily give up everything to save a few hundred people the way Kel did, even though it would pain him to have to make that choice.

Kel IS like Jon and will likely become even more so as she ages, but crossing the border just isn't one of those places where their similarities are showcased to me.

i adore this analysis. dramatic irony in characterisation is off the charts beautiful.

a thought i had while reading this was that arguably, jon went after alanna because he loved her, yes, and at that age he had much less of a sense of how great a duty he has to NOT risk himself (although we also see him getting yelled at by general vanget in squire for running off on his own on the brink of war so… maybe hasn’t changed thaaat much), but i think there was also an element of political choice making here in

1. his knowledge of alanna’s gender, which no one else had; if his normal male squire got kidnapped perhaps he can wait around for a noble ransom to be demanded. if his female squire has her clothes removed then… well the consequences are considerably worse

2. his father the king had decreed that no one was to cross the river, punishable by death. jon is thus in a way the only person in this camp who CAN actually cross that river and be reasonably certain he will not get hung as a traitor. he is not, at that point, ready to order someone else to certain death to do something that he can also do and NOT DIE and in a way it is his father’s fault that he does it because that decree means that literally no one else can.

sounds kinda like “don’t give orders you know won’t be obeyed/which you know will force people to impossible choices” which… sounds a little like raoul and wyldon’s conversation? 🧐

The funniest part about this analysis and this particular dramatic irony is that I'm not even entirely convinced that it was intentional. Kel's series lands a little in-between Middle Grade and YA in tone and execution (it starts more MG and ends slightly more YA), but it still feels like it leans more Middle Grade. And what you see in a lot of Pierce's Middle Grade works (and even some of her YA for that matter), is things getting pointed out fairly blatantly if she wants to make sure you pick up on it. And there's no point where anybody makes a comment about how Kel is starting to seem like Jon, or how a decision she makes is one that Jon might make. There's no point where Kel maybe makes a choice that SHE feels is similar to Jon putting her on probation for a year and having extremely complicated feelings about it. And she certainly never makes an intentional choice to do something that she thinks he would do. Even at the end of the series, her feelings towards him are... still more negative leaning than positive. She respects his position and she's willing to believe he's a good leader in general, but she questions whether he'd do something that she'd consider abhorrent.

So while I'm SEEING a comparison between them here and it creates a very compelling dramatic irony, I don't know if it was intentionally built in or not. I'm leaning more towards not, but I like it and it's one of the few things I truly like about this series, so I'm going to keep it as a personal headcanon/interpretation lmao.

As for Jon's motives, it has now been a little while since I read that book again so I have no fresh memories of exactly how that scene goes, but we're obviously not in his head so it's a little harder to know exactly why he made the choices he did.

I do think he made his choice knowing that he'd never suffer the consequences of breaking his father's rules, and it's entirely possible that he knew that in any other situation he probably SHOULD send someone else to get Alanna rather than risk himself, but that in this case that wasn't possible and he couldn't ask someone to die for this.

As for Alanna's gender potentially being revealed, I don't know if I buy that that has serious political consequences for him. Like he could probably claim to have been tricked and hadn't known about it (which he WAS for a while), which would be a little embarrassing but not ruinous. It's ruinous for ALANNA, for sure, but that's not a political choice for Jon. It's just adding on that he wants to spare his friend that possibility because he cares about her and wants her to succeed. Which is still a PERSONAL motivation based on not wanting to lose her (which is what would happen if everyone else found out about Alanna being a girl at this point). Even if Jon admitted to having known about her gender when he took her as his squire, I don't know that Jon COULD suffer any real consequences for that for the same reasons he doesn't suffer any consequences for crossing the river. And I'm sure Jon knows that, too.

So I'm sure Jon is running all the numbers here and recognizing that he has two choices. He can obey his father's orders and leave Alanna and either she dies or her true gender is revealed and either way he loses her. Or he can cross the river and save her and she gets to stay his squire and nothing has to change. (The other problem with sending someone across the river to save her is if she's already had her gender revealed then Jon can't control who else finds out.) And he ends up deciding that the benefits of keeping Alanna with him are worth the risks to his life. But those benefits are still all personal ones, not political ones.

And I think that that's a pretty major part of Jon's character development in later books. Jon is a very emotional person who is very righteous, but when he has to take over the throne at a very young age, he's forced to become a far more responsible and far more political person than he'd been before. He doesn't have a choice. If he doesn't, he loses all respect from his nobles and he probably ends up dead. Raoul tells Kel in POTS that he feels like Jon is an almost completely different person now than he used to be when he was younger, and that's likely not entirely inaccurate! Jon COULD NOT stay that person that Raoul remembers growing up with, the burden of who and what he is was always going to change him in ways that Raoul simply didn't predict.

Kel is ALSO someone who's pretty righteous and can be guided by her emotions sometimes (she's not as emotional as Jon, of course, but her love for Lalasa and her care for her friends and her care for her people are all part of the choices she makes). But that righteousness will only last so long when she starts getting older and coming up against what it actually means to MAKE change. Because not everyone is going to be convinced into changing at the end of a spear or her fists. Violence is unlikely to always be the answer to every problem she ever has. It's actually MORE likely to cause her problems if she ever tries to make more serious societal change of any kind. Even in her conversation with Jon, Raoul is having to remind her to tone it down and stop being so emotional if she wants to be heard and taken seriously.

I think Kel has had to figure out responsibility and things like that a lot earlier than Jon did, but there's so many ways in which they are SO SIMILAR and they will likely only become more so as she gets older and it's SO INTERESTING because it starts being REALLY HARD to hate Jon for making the choices he makes if you interpret Kel as someone who will probably have to follow in his footsteps more than anybody else's and someone who is NOT DISSIMILAR to Jon in a lot of ways.

I dunno if this fic exists out there or not, I imagine not, but I'd LOVE a little short story of Kel a few decades down the road looking at herself and the choices she's made to get here and realizing exactly who she's most like and being a little gobsmacked but also... not actually displeased the way a younger version of her might have been. She wanted to be a leader, a commander, and THIS IS WHAT A COMMANDER LOOKS LIKE. Especially a commander who wants to push back against the status quo and change things.

tgis is so fucking funny to me. they accidentally Rock Lee'd a retired racehorse

imagine youre a fat horse and your new neighbour is a personal trainer

horse that reads Marcus Aurelius

I was wrong. they didnt rock lee him. this horse is literally Gai. and i wish he was my dad

There is a special place in book hell for books marketed as if their main character has the powers of Sandrilene fa Toren when their main character does NOT have the powers of Sandrilene fa Toren

Daine Sarrasri is the most character ever. Shes half god of the hunt, she's a vegetarian. She talks to her horse and brought bones back to life. Has a dragon. I named my first dnd character after her. I love her <3

A sketch of Daine, from The Immortals Quartet by @tamorapierce. I’m not sure how it’s taken me this long to do fanart of one of my favourite book series of all time, though I’m sure there are some very old sketches by preteen me somewhere!

New Zealand Kaka Nestor meridionalis

La tendresse c'est toucher avec respect l'âme de l'autre

Tenderness is touching another a soul with respect.

I think this is AI

Is it? It's very typical horse and toddler behaviour and the physical details in fiddly stuff like the hay and the child's jumper look fine. It might be very good ai but what would be the point in simulating something so common and normal?

Then again people do generate ai images of very normal stuff like "cat sitting in a parking space" so

Video source

https://www.instagram.com/roslynfarm/reel/DDJ25Q2uLRk/

By Roslyn Farm.

Yeah this is definitely real.

Here we see a demonstration of the only antidote to AI slop: proper sourcing

Garden Sunbird (Cinnyris jugularis), male, family Nectariniidae, order Passeriformes, endemic to the Philippines

photograph by B Sharma

Jamaican Tody (Todus todus), family Todidae, order Coraciiformes, endemic to Jamaica

photograph by Sam Woods

Red-billed Streamertail (Trochilus polytmus), male, family Trochilidae, order Apodiformes, endemic to Jamaica

photograph by Sam Woods

This video depicts a moment that is nearly impossible to observe: a sperm whale surfacing with a giant squid clenched between its teeth. These predators hunt at depths exceeding 800 meters, where light does not penetrate, and only biosonar directs the pursuit. Consequently, clear surface images are exceedingly rare.

🎬: @lud_adventure

This is, factually, the first footage of this that we have ever gotten. This has never been observed by a human being before in recorded history. The only reason we knew these whales ate those squids before was the beaks of the squids found in the stomachs of dead whales, and the battle scars on whales consistent with fighting giant squids.

My favorite thing about this clip is that, in the original uncropped footage, you can see her calf is right beside her, ascending from the depths along with her. Whale calves don't dive until they're taught by their mothers. It is very likely that this footage is of a mother whale teaching her calf to hunt on one of its very first dives.

When I saw this footage for the first time, I cried a little tbh.

Arising from the inky depths with a delicious giant squid snack… with mama.

arctic/antarctic

bonus info:

northern species represented are polar bears, greenland sharks, bottlenose whale, narwhal, harbor porpoise, atlantic white-sided dolphin, beluga, atlantic puffin, bearded seal, walrus, sabine's gull, and arctic tern

cosmopolitan species are humpback whales, sperm whales, orcas, and minke whales

southern species are emperor penguins, colossal squids, spectacled porpoise, pygmy right whale, arnoux's beaked whale, cape petrel, sooty albatross, southern elephant seal, chinstrap penguin, adelie penguin, leopard seal, ross seal, and arctic tern again

i wanted to include more marine creatures than just mammals and birds, but i'm less familiar with them so figuring out who could be included was harder and it was also difficult to fit them in. i almost nixed the greenland shark (whose face is sadly hidden) and giant squid so it would be just mammals + birds, but then couldn't figure out who would replace them so they stayed

the circling animals are divided into four categories, basically (iirc) "big whales" "medium/small whales" "porpoises and seals" and "birds." the first three are to scale (as in, the animals are the right size compared to other animals in that category) and the birds are just whatever size i needed them to be

all in all it was a bit of work but i'm still really happy with the result! i always have fun with black-and-white, especially line-only work like this (and i also always say "i should do this more often!" and then don't, lmao)