Trivia / Tortall Universe

• Ascended Fanon: Sometimes. For example, when discussing the terms of Delia's imprisonment, one fan said that of course there would be magical barriers in place as well. Pierce's reply? "Oooh, yes!"
• Author's Saving Throw:
  • The creepy romance between Bronau and Sarai in Trickster's Choice definitely feels like an acknowledgement of the issues people had with the series' previous major romances, with Pierce saying she gets why people had problems with them. And she actually wasn't even satisfied with this, and put another such relationship into the book "Cold Fire" in her other series Circle of Magic.
  • Pierce tried to put in gay characters right from the start of the series, but never managed to actually make it explicit in the text. She very much regretted this by the time of Provost's Dog and made sure to specify that it includes an unquestionably canon gay couple.
• Creator's Favorite:
  • Pierce says that Keladry is the most relaxing character for her to write.
  • Inverted with Aly, who Pierce has said makes her want to bang her head on the wall as they're such completely different personalities.
  • Pierce really loves Numair. He's based on an actor she finds attractive and his power and skill are commented on constantly through his many appearances. Unlike other heroes who show up Older and Wiser in the series, he's never recontextualized as a good but flawed person the way, say, Jon and Alanna are. Neal dislikes him a bit but whenever he expresses this other characters immediately defend Numair; all the other heroic characters who have an opinion about him just adore him. This continues in the first book of The Numair Chronicles, where things largely just seem to go his way.
• I Just Write the Thing:
  • Pierce relates that Alanna completely revolted against the original plan for Jonathan and Alanna to end up together; Alanna was having none of that "queen" business, thank you very much. So, at the last minute, Alanna ended up with George and Thayet made her debut.
  • Wyldon of Cavall was supposed to be an outright villain. He wasn't interested, and Pierce wound up rewriting him into the Jerk with a Heart of Gold beloved by so many fans of the novels.
  • Pierce had a lot of trouble writing Kel's romances, and that she's never been able to give a definitive answer on who she ends up with. She realized about the same time that Kel herself did that Kel really didn't have any interest in romance.
• Old Shame:
  • The rather stalkerish romances in the Song of the Lioness quartet, along with the Mighty Whitey overtones of Alanna and Jon's interactions with the Bazhir.
  • After seeing how positively queer fans responded to just Word of Gay characters, Pierce decided to avert Hide Your Gays for all her future works, since having queer heroes is important to them as girl heroes is to girls.
• Word of Gay:
  • On Alanna, Pierce says:
  Alanna has always defied labels. She took the best bits of being a woman and a man, and created her own unique identity. I think the term is 'gender-fluid', though there wasn't a word for this (to my knowledge) when I was writing her.
  • Pierce has said that in the original version of Song of the Lioness, Roger and Thom were meant to be gay lovers. She had to cut it when she retooled it as a YA book thanks to the Moral Guardians at the time, but she did leave in the subtext.
  • Lalasa and Tian in Protector of the Small. There's plenty of subtext, but Pierce didn't think she could mention it directly without invoking Have I Mentioned I Am Gay?.
  • Pierce also confirmed that Okha is a trans woman who should be referred to with female pronouns, and the male pronouns used in the book were just for Deliberate Values Dissonance.
• Word of God: Tamora Pierce is very accessible to her fans, formerly running a forum and having an active online presence. She frequently answers questions from fans. The blog Words of Tamora Pierce has gone to great lengths to gather everything she's said about the Tortall series.
• What Could Have Been:
  • In the original drafts of Song of the Lioness, Alanna and Jonathan were supposed to end up together. But Alanna refused point-blank to have anything to do with this 'queen' business, and so Thayet was introduced and Alanna wound up with George.
  • Wyldon would have been the Big Bad of Protector of the Small; the original plan was that he would start a rebellion over girls becoming knights. This failed to work, and after talking it through with her husband, Pierce reconfigured him into the Ensemble Dark Horse he is.
  • The first draft of Bloodhound, the second Beka Cooper, had Beka put onto the Port Caynn investigation in part to get her out of Corus after she offended a young, drunk Queenscove. The published book changed this to a cover story where she was supposedly there to protect her from vengeful members of the Pell family.