Fridge Brilliance
- Faithful of Song of the Lioness and Pounce of Provost's Dog are the same entity but the roles they play are quite different. For the most part Faithful restricts himself to advising, providing comfort, and keeping watch; in combat he may attack Alanna's enemies but it's as a cat, with normal claws and teeth, more to distract than anything else. He uses magic for her exactly once. Most characters are barely even aware that he's something strange. Pounce is openly sentient and supernatural and frequently helps Beka in big, obvious ways. Why the change? He was Pounce a few hundred years before he was Faithful and probably learned from the experience. Beka wasn't a mage and couldn't defend herself against many magics, unlike Alanna. Alanna, finding that he was absent, could always carry on with a shrug, while Beka was dependent to a point on him and worried whenever he was gone. He meddled enough when with Beka that the gods had him leave the mortal plane - so, he learned a lighter touch.
- Also, Alanna was fourteen and had had some adventures on her own before the Goddess showed up on Faithful's tail, and already had some support and good friends. His presence and small-scale interference were enough. He came as Pounce to Beka when she was eight in the slums of Corus, about to lose her mother. Beka grew up leaning on him.
- Why didn't Duke Roger's image magic work as well on Alanna as it did on everyone else (even before her Ordeal)? Because it was made in the image of Alan the boy, not the girl that Alanna actually was. Also helps to make Alanna's inexplicable, Gut Feeling suspicion of him early on more plausible.
- Extra dose of Fridge Brilliance, since this probably also explains why he flipped out when her true gender was revealed in their duel. He realized that was why she had always suspected him/been semi-immune to his magic and it pissed him off.
- The Conté family's Gift is colored blue. Roger's Gift for whatever reason is orange. Orange and blue are opposites on the color wheel, making Roger Color-Coded for Your Convenience as the villain of Song of the Lioness.
- During Bloodhound, a distracted Beka leaves her lodgings without being properly wary and is jumped by some thugs acting against the Rogue's will, and has to be saved. Those lodgings get turned into the Dancing Dove, and a few hundred years later a distracted George leaves it without being properly wary and is jumped by some thugs acting against the Rogue's will, and has to be saved. Like ancestor, like descendant.
- Almost got it... except that the Dancing Dove is converted out of two houses across the street Rosto bought from Beka's landlady.
- Squire: In hindsight, it's not actually that surprising that Joren and Vinson failed their Ordeals. Everyone in-universe seemed to have forgotten that the Chamber of the Ordeal is not obligated to let everyone who faces it become a knight unless they screw up the being silent part- at the end of the day, the Chamber is there to make sure that only the worthy become knights, and it's not just a test of being strong enough, it's also about being a good person. Joren was so bigoted and intolerant that he repeatedly tried to force Kel out of being a page despite her presence being accepted by the king and Lord Wyldon, and while Kel didn't know about Vinson attacking and raping girls in the Lower City before he confessed, she did know that he tried to rape Lalasa. Why would the Chamber allow a bigot who went against his king and training master's orders, and a serial assaulter and rapist to become knights, just because they succeeded as pages and squires?
- Related to the above, this helps explain why narrow-minded, uncompromising Lord Wyldon decides that Kel has met the terms of her probation at the end of First Test. Even though he got his shield long before Keladry or Alanna arrived to disrupt his worldview, as a youth he had to be flexible enough to make through his own Ordeal. As Stump-like as he might be in the present, enough remained that he couldn't help but bend enough to acknowledge that Kel had earned a right to continue training (even if he couldn't yet believe it was actually a good idea).
- Daine's final fight with Ozorne in Realms of the Gods. It might not be just the Full-Frontal Assault conditions that dictated Daine's final weapon - the Badger claw. Ozorne was not only immortal as a Storm Wing, but the the Goddess of Chaos's chosen proxy in the mortal realms. It's quite possible that mortal weapons - even god-born Daine's shapeshifted talons - wouldn't be able to kill him. Given that the Badger claw was originally part of the Badger God's body, perhaps only a divine weapon could have actually killed Ozorne.
- In Mastiff, the young prince's personal protective mage, Fea of Seabeth, dies - has to be melted - before he can be kidnapped. Therefore, logically, Fea was one of the very few high-ranking Palace mages not to be part of the conspiracy. In the modern era, Keladry's mother is Ilane of Seabeth and Sejane. Being assigned to defend children and taking it deadly seriously runs in the family.
Fridge Horror
- Remember that poor dust spinner outside the prison in Bloodhound and how relieved it is that it can finally shed years and years' worth of human misery into Beka's ears? Well, unless the prison moves, once Beka leaves Port Caynn it's going to start collecting pain all over again, and goodness knows how long it will be before it has a way to get rid of it.
- Well, at least this time it has the happy memory Beka gave it.
