Tricksy Whimsy

Am I the only one who thinks the gods are really quite impotent in Tortall? In SotL this is kind of explicit: IIRC the Goddess (or was it Faithful?) tells Alanna that there are pivotal turning points where even the gods can't see what happens and humans have to do things for themselves, but also in SotL it's strongly implied the gods need to work through chosen people anyway - like for saving Jon, or for bringing back female knights to Tortall. And the most active divinity is a constellation, who at least in PD is explicit about not being a god. Honestly? SotL's view of the gods as these powers on the fringes works for me, and it works well with the setup of the whole world.

Later canon, starting with Immortals, borks all this. Suddenly, we get some really bizarre rules about gods, like the whole thing about new ones being bound to their land for 100 years, and honestly? Letting us see the Realm of the Gods, especially all the cutesy-ass animal gods, really ruins everything. It brings them all down to just people-with-powers, really no different than powerful mages except in lifespan. The Immortals themselves bork things: suddenly we have to have all these fine distinctions between immortal non-god things and immortal gods, and it just unnecessarily overcomplicates things - especially because the dragons are portrayed as being on equal footing with the gods.

I honestly like the Graveyard Hag, and she's about the only deity in TIQ that makes sense to me; she fits with the mode of godhood we saw in SotL - she has to work through a human medium, mostly - though she, in line with her nature, pushes the envelope in a way the Goddess doesn't with Alanna. But the other gods are all problematic: Gainel has no substance, the badger is just there to be a grumpy guide for Daine, Weiryn is just kind of ... there to provide Daine with godly parentage, and Sarra becoming a god is six kinds of fucked up. IDK. Also, the whole fighting-Chaos thing is just so simplistic that it comes out in the narrative as really weird, especially when it's shoehorned in there with this also-simplistic message about how humans are part Chaos anyway. I really don't get RotG as it stands, can you tell? I can see what Pierce was trying for, but what we get is just a muddle.

PotS - we're back to SotL mode; the gods apparently cannot intervene directly, and so the Chamber assigns Kel the task of ridding the world of Blayce. But. In the previous quartet, we saw much more active gods - the Hag, again sorta - and the gods certainly interfered in RotG, to great extent - and only to save one kingdom. Tortall is not that effing special that it should get its enemies - immortal-but-killable beings or not - removed by divine intervention. But apparently intervention is selective? IDK. Kel also mentions Yamani gods, particularly Sakuyo, and her belief in those gods does manifest in her daily life in small ways; she also has a few interesting musings on the dead, which work with the whole backgrounded-supernatural idea.

DotL is what really effs things up. There we get directly interventionist deities, Kyprioth being both direct and indirect, and we also get the sparkly sky battle of DOOM, which is wrong in so many ways I can't even articulate them. But more to the point, DotL was what tipped me off about how hollow the gods are: with a single exception I can think of, they are all trappings and no substance.

Let's see:
-Kyprioth has all the surface trappings of a trickster, but he is missing the deeper sense: the amorality, the whimsy, the liminality, the appetite/primal drive, and the cunning, all of which are rather essential to a trickster. (I am starting to think Pierce has a real hard time writing cunning people, esp. given how badly she fails with Aly.)

-Mithros has the trappings of a war god, but he never acts as one, and his priests are, as Carmarthen pointed out so well, ripoffs of Buddhist monks. Which is more than a little jarring.

-The Goddess rings hollow because she apparently, despite physically existing, physically appearing to people, and actually being able to talk to mortals, cannot make her nature and desires known - yet sort of can? IDK. She's so inconsistently portrayed, and so is her cult, and more importantly, so are Tortall-world notions of women. Women can make their own decisions, except then they can't, and it all contradicts and the whole thing falls apart. IDEK

-Gainel is a ripoff of Gaiman's Dream, to the point that there's really nothing there. He ... shares the split nature that humans have, between Chaos and Order? Uh, wouldn't all the tricksters? Hell, wouldn't all the gods, esp. those we see with nature connections, like the Goddess? He gives weird and opaque messages in dreams. Honestly, I think Pierce is just bad at writing dreams; they're not always these horribly disjointed, illogical, opaque messes. But Gainel is a really flat character.

-The Black God is just sort of there. We don't get much on him outside of PD, which I don't remember well, so there's not much to say on him. In SotL, we glimpse him as a kind of gatekeeper, which is reasonable.

-Weiryn is ... weird. We never see him being godlike; again, it's all surface trappings. He's supposedly a god of the hunt, but he's also a lesser one, and Pierce seems to write lesser gods as not really being very godlike ... except, well, she writes Sarra being lesser-but-still-godlike. Sorta. IDK. Weiryn made more sense when he was mentioned earlier on as a somewhat mysterious local god the hunters left offerings for. Once we see him, he goes into grumpy-patriarch mode, and it just, it doesn't work. Trappings but no substance; he's a god, apparently, just 'cause he has antlers.

-Sarra is bizarre. She's portrayed as Daine's mother and only that, but inexplicably deified, until the narrative needs to hammer home to Daine that her mother is really a god - then we get the absentminded-Sarra scene, which makes me think all Pierce's gods are answering-machines. We're told she appears as the Green Lady over the Snowsdale well, but we never see that, and she never leaves the Divine Realms to go manifest, and while I can get behind the notion that gods can appear in multiple places at once, it's so awkward in that scene I just. It feels fake. My-godhood-is-pasted-on fake. (Also, Sarra becoming divine at all skeeves me out more than a little, but that's a separate topic.)

-Chaos is just a hot mess, largely because it's portrayed entirely as a horrible, hideous, and yet-again crazy villain - all of which skeeves me out bigtime in a moral/philosophical sense, because hello? Order =/= good and chaos =/= evil/bad; they're both, if you believe they exist as such, fundamental principles of the universe that interact with each other to give rise to life/reality, and both things that can destroy life, the universe, and everything if taken to an extreme. Lip-service is given to the notion of balance, mostly through Gainel being emo, but the narrative comes down pretty firmly on the chaos=evil thing.

-The only other god I recall really seeing (aside from the animals, who are treated like talking animals, not gods) is the Graveyard Hag, unless Chitral counts as a god. The Hag works. She's a trickster, and because EM still somewhat holds to the notion that gods need mortal vessels to do their work, we really get to see her being a trickster, pushing at the boundaries of indirect action. We see more of that trickster nature in DotL, where she outtricks the Trickster and thus comes off as far more real a trickster than Kyprioth, who really reads more as a badly-thwarted Apollo- or Zeus-type, or a childish Odin-type, than a genuine trickster. I think part of it is that the Hag is where Pierce breaks her own mold of having the gods be presented as majestic; she portrays a Hag who is associated with all sorts of not-so-nice things we wish we could sweep under the rug: rats, slaves, physical ugliness, old age, the grave, skeletons, physical deformity/mutilation, etc. She's also the only god (other than half-assed Gainel) who is portrayed as being somewhat chaotic - and this is portrayed as a good thing, and isn't harped on. And yet, despite her associations with chaos, brain-breaking, and drastic change, the Hag is also portrayed as being on the side of order, and as wanting to get Carthak back on track.

....Honestly, the only issue I have with the Hag is the issue I have with Kyprioth and the unseen Jaguar Goddess: tricksters, and gods associated with unsavory animals (rats, crows, jaguars-implied to be insatiably bloodthirsty), are gods for the dark-skinned barbarian peoples. They're not "proper." The Graveyard Hag revels in that impropriety, which gives her a sense of realism and, IDK, divinity, i guess, that the others lack.

So. The Hag, and possibly the Black God, are the only two Tortall gods that read as gods to me. XD

Also- I just realized that another reason I wonder about the impotence of Tortall's gods is Blayce. If he honest-to-god thought the Black God existed and/or could mess with him, would he really be doing what he does to dead souls? IDK. Blayce is supposed to be all crazy, but. He's crazy in an our-world way, and I'm not sure it directly translates to Tortall.

Also also - Carmarthen mentioned ... somewhere ... that the Bazhir mention that the Burning-Brightly One and Night One are gods. We know they're Alanna and Jon, which means, I guess, that we're meant to read this as an exaggeration on the part of the Bazhir legends. But. Ozorne goes and declares himself a god, basically - which again, it's something that works in an our-world setting as a shorthand for megalomania on the part of the ruler, but is frankly suicidal in a world with gods (if the gods aren't impotent). It's implied in EM that this is part of why the Hag finally slaps him down, but if you couple it with the Bazhir legend, and with Numair's offhand mention of heroes going through tests in the Divine Realms, and couple it with Sarra becoming a god for no other reason than that her one-night-stand asks for it, there is only one real conclusion to draw: mortals in Tortall can become gods. And they don't even have to be particularly exceptional mortals to do so (Sarra...).

...Which might explain a lot about the so-called Great Gods we do see.

ETA: I forgot about Yahzed! We never see him, only his cult in WWRLAM, and it is skeevy. It is so high-handed and wrong I just don't know. Pierce was clearly trying to slap down both witch-burnings and patriarchal religion, and slaps down monotheism in the process - which can work, with the polytheistic set-up of that 'verse - but it reads as such a twisted, deliberate ripoff of faux-medieval Christianity that I, pagan as I am, want to scream. And then q-canon (was it mentioned in canon? I don't recall) has it that Yahzed is a Scanran god, which makes it yet another case of all of Tortall's traditional enemies - and all the cultures specifically shown as barbaric, though at least Scanra is white - having unacceptable deities.

Also, wasn't it the Yahzed cult in the short stories that insisted on veiling, and tried to burn an unveiled woman? I don't own T&OL, so I can't check, but if so, that just underlines the issues. Are there no redeeming features to the Yahzed cult? Who the hell would follow a religion that had no positive side? And if it is the Yahzed cult in T&OL, then the implication is that it's only okay again if/when the oppressed goddess is worshipped. Which has, despite the supposedly feminist message, some skeevy gender-essentialist implications. What, no god can be positive without a goddess? I don't quite buy that - I don't think men need the restraining, gentling hand of a woman, thanks - but it does have some interesting implications for Kyprioth, whose own goddess counterpart is explicitly bound.

Why the Tortall stories aren't as feminist as Pierce thinks they are.

( Broken Aesops from Tortall )

There will be more, if I can ever stand to think about this again.

For all that Pierce tries to tackle sexism and racism, and even, lately, attempts to tackle heterosexism, she never really seems to tackle classism much at all.

( Read more... )

I like Numair.

There's a dissonance in the books, between how characters act and how the text treats them. I'm pretty sure this has come up in every one of these posts, and it will continue to. It is rarely more clear, imo, than with Numair.

Pierce seems to act, randomly, like Numair is some flighty, immature mage. But, aside from one really out-of-character scene in early PotS (one that seriously makes me wonder if he has a special little garden somewhere), we're not shown that - and what we know of his history makes it unlikely that he would be either flighty or immature.

You can't really be either and successfully escape from the Emperor Mage of Carthak, or survive on the streets of Tortall - or, for that matter, be a mage as powerful as Numair is without blowing your ass up.

This is why, incidentally, Pierce's flippant explanation for why Daine and Numair are soulmates bothers me so damn much - Daine in the books reads very immature to me ... and Numair doesn't read particularly immature at all. I sometimes wonder if Pierce honestly knows her own characters, or pays any attention to what the hell she writes.

The most glaring example of the textual dissonance, for any character, occurs in WM. The setup for it is this: Daine, ignorant of what she's doing, uses meditation on a whim to stop her heart. And Numair yells at her for this - and not particularly nastily, either.

...And every. single. character. in that scene makes some comment belittling his anger, and talking about how utterly unreasonable it is. Daine even makes some condescending (but, admittedly, in-character for a bratty teen) comment about not being able to talk to him with "this pet he's in".

All I could think about, for that whole scene, was that Numair was right to yell at Daine. Sometimes, especially when dealing with potentially dangerous crafts - and what is more dangerous than magic? - you have to yell. I've been yelled at, a lot, for doing stupid shit when crafting ... and no, ignorance is no excuse. She stopped her heart because she wanted to hear the whales. Daine damn well deserves at least a round of yelling ... but when Numair does this, the text unambiguously and emphatically sides against him, in a way that makes it abundantly clear that Pierce wants us to see Numair as unreasonable and his anger as over-the-top and silly.

Um. No.

This is why I find it hard to talk about her characters, and why I find these posts, frustrating as they are, valuable. It's almost like there are two characters (or more): the one who shines through in action, and the one(s) we're told via text (or deuterocanon) exists. There's the flawed (and more interesting, imo) Alanna you see if you look at her actions - and there's the perfect and frankly Sue-ish Alanna of the text/deuterocanon. Sometimes, there's a third version, the ideal, like we see with Daine: there's the not-really-all-that-nice Daine evidenced by her actions, the text!Daines who are all some variant of Awesome Ecowarrior after WM, and this shadowy Platonic form of Daine, who I can sort of see when I think through what Pierce was likely trying to do with her (and failing, imo).

We get the show/tell split with Numair, pretty explicitly. What we see of how Numair acts doesn't match what the text tries to tell us, or what Pierce tries to tell us. I keep pointing to that Daine-stops-her-heart scene because it's only the most obvious instance of this dissonance that I see: I don't see an unreasonable man at all.

As an aside, I'm sick of Pierce belittling male anger, not least because she sets up this male anger bad/female anger good split that ends up belittling female anger too, by making it just some cute personality trait, and not a flaw for women. Look. I know that too often in fiction and real life female anger is belittled - hello, I'm a temperamental female, I've experienced that often. But the solution is not to then go "Ha! I will belittle MALE anger instead, and make female anger always cute and righteous!"

I don't like hard dualism in any form. I also don't agree with any form of feminism that utilizes dualism at all - and Pierce's morals in Tortall are very dualistic. This is a huge part of why I also get so damn frustrated that all good women in Tortall can fight somehow; it's fine and laudable to say that women can fight, but it's a really warped aesop to take it as far as Pierce does, and say that to be a good/worthwhile woman you must fight.

...And I'll leave that for the Varice post, and get back to Numair.

Ok, head-canon. Most of this will be jossed when the Numair book comes out, I'm sure.
-The Numair we see in canon is largely a facade. He's still a nice guy, but his real personality is not all that jokesterish, and he's got a dark side. (I wish people in canon actually had dark sides... *sigh*)
-Numair, power-wise, is not much more powerful than Roger and Thom, if he's more powerful at all. It's more that he has a ton of esoteric knowledge, thanks to the Carthaki university, that they don't.
-Numair's Gift either was always black with sparkles (gah) or, if I actually use Pierce's incredibly stupid deuterocanon, it changed color from amber because the uni students learned ways to recolor their Gifts, not because he's so uber-powerful or any shit like that.
-If Numair recolored his Gift, his grandma gave him hell for it.
-Numair has a scary grandma.
-Numair is much more loyal to Tyra than Jon - or Daine, for that matter - realizes. I'm working on an AU where he's actually a Tyran agent, but even in canon or non-badass-Tyra fics, I still see him as being very strongly loyal to his home country ... and not really all that happy with being the pet mage of another monarch, though it's better than life on the streets.
-Numair was living on the streets for longer than just a few months. (Where the hell did that fanon convention come from, anyway?)
-Numair had to flee Carthak because he refused to do battle magic for Ozorne.
-Numair's bisexual, and may have had a not-terribly-good-but-he-was-young-and-clueless relationship with Ozorne. If he did, he cottoned on to how awful and manipulative Ozorne was around the time he fled.
-Numair has trouble saying no to women when they proposition him. This is literally the only explanation I can swallow for why he marries a former student who has nothing more than a major crush on him. Well, the only explanation that doesn't make him basically predatory.
-Numair falls out of love with Daine really fast, though he won't leave her or the kids.
-Numair and Onua are really good friends. Onua is actually his best friend, which he'd tell you if you asked.
-Numair is a verbose and sometimes morose drunk, and his reflexes get faster when tipsy ... because he usually moves slower than he could, which is a street magician's trick.
-Actually, I'm wrong. There's another potential explanation for him marrying Daine I can sort of buy, but it requires me to assume things about godborns that aren't at all evidenced in the text - and that's that, basically, he sort of has to to keep her from going on a Carthaki-palace-style rampage when she's refused. GOD, Daine/Numair is so squicky and wrong and out-of-character for Numair, and it's pretty sad when the only way to make your wondrous love match work is to assume that one or the other partner is morally fucked up. Either Numair's a predator, or Daine's hugely unbalanced. THANKS, Pierce. (This is why in most of my fics, Daine/Numair never happens. I can't square it with their characters.)
-Numair likes needling Jon and Alanna. Jon's wise to it, but Alanna never quite catches on that it's deliberate.
-This isn't quite head-canon, but I've toyed with the idea that a young Numair has already enacted the necessary magics for the Sorcerer's Sleep, and so if Numair is ever killed, there's potential for a Roger-style resurrection. Zombie!Numair may not be insane if this happens, but his Gift would go back to its natural color.
-Another not-quite-head-canon bit: I toy with the idea that it wasn't the simulacrum that died, but the real Numair. It would be a neat, if dark, way to explain away Numair's out-of-character reciprocation of Daine's crush in RotG, and Numair's ooc flightiness in early PotS.
-Young Numair was actually not all that fond of Lindhall, until things went to hell with Ozorne and Lindhall got him the hell out of the country. Now Lindhall's his favorite teacher ever.
-Young Numair was a hell of a brat, and prone to pranking his teachers. Really unsubtly, too. This is directly responsible for why young Numair's not fond of Lindhall. XD
-If Numair had stayed in Carthak, he would have married Varice. They were genuinely in love.

***

My Fics
Canon compliant:
Her - Numair learns the hard way not to go pub-crawling with Lindhall.
Love Consumes All Things - Ozorne has only ever had one great love in his life.
Traitors and Monsters - Ozorne and Arram. Sometimes, falling in love is the start of the whole downfall.

Allegiance AU:
Difference - Daine comes to Tortall. Things are different, in this world.

Making the Best of Things AU:
So far, Numair's a pretty minor character in this 'verse, but he does show up in the following two fics.
Some People - Ten people who weren't ever wary of Thom, and one person who should've been.
Weird Folk - Ten friends Daine makes in Tortall.

What a Flicker Brings AU:
Numair becomes a major character in this 'verse.
Never - Thom never asks Numair what he sees in the charms.
Old Ghosts - Numair never looks Thom in the eye.
Fools in Love - Daine asks an impertinent question.
The Way to His Heart - Numair can cook a grand total of three things.
Nine Clues - Nine ways Thom knows Numair is just as broken as he is. Spoilers for an in-progress fic.
Reasons - Numair is a silly romantic, which makes him way too easy to tease.

Thom is probably my single biggest reason for ficcing SotL so much. I just like him. (Dunno why; he's an utter ass.) Also, he's one of the most vexing examples of something that's an unfortunate trend for Pierce: the derailed character.

Let me get this out of the way: yes, I think it's totally possible for an author to write their own characters out-of-character. Pierce does it repeatedly.

Through most of SotL, Thom is actually more paranoid over Roger than Alanna is. He's also the one who pieces everything together, and keeps having to nag his sister via letter to remain on her guard.

Then he randomly raises Roger from the dead. Why? Because Delia said he couldn't.

Are you kidding me?

The other vexing thing about this is that Alanna is very clear in the very first book: among other things, Thom can see the future. So, uh. Was he just not looking that day? Paranoid Thom? Who suspected Roger all along, who played dumb for years to avoid drawing Roger's suspicion, who was more sure of Roger's perfidy than Alanna was?

This all just doesn't add up.

I'm also not entirely convinced that his random stealing of Alanna's Gift is all that in-character for him, either.

Leaving that whole matter aside. It's pretty clear in canon he's a genius; he's a Master at seventeen, has been ready for it for at least a year, and was playing stupid for literally years beforehand. (Which, come to think of it, is probably what really annoys his teachers. Speaking as a substitute teacher and sometime tutor, there's nothing more obnoxious than a smart kid playing dumb. And yes, it's always horribly obvious, too.)

I also think that while he and Alanna may have been born with the same strength Gift (we really don't know either way), it's pretty clear he's got a broader affinity, and with his training, by the end of ItHotG if not sooner, he's probably both stronger and a hell of a lot more knowledgeable than Alanna, with her limited interest in magic, will ever be.

My other big problem with Thom is that his death is so random. It feels wasteful, like Pierce wanted some pathos but didn't want to off a character we (or Alanna, apparently) actually cared about. I think one major reason I do so many SotL AUs is that I'm utterly fascinated by all the possibilities of what could have happened if Thom had lived.

Also, I think it's hilarious that Thom is apparently a Mithran priest. Can you imagine anyone less devout?

Head-canon
-He's gay. I have written the rare fic where he's not, but my head-canon is still that Thom's gay.
-Roger planted a compulsion in Thom at some point - that if Roger died and thus triggered the Sorcerer's Sleep, Thom would, when triggered, raise him. This is literally the only plausible explanation I can come up with for why on Earth Thom would raise Roger.
-Honestly, and I don't know where this comes from, but I always see him as being more aware of others' feelings and thoughts than Alanna. (Oh. Wait. I know where part of it comes from - Alanna's mention that among other things, Thom can read minds.)
-I think, given that he was initially trained by the village healer, he's probably a pretty decent healer himself, even if he's not that interested in it.
-Roger either seduced or compelled Thom into sleeping with him. (Or some combination of both; I think compulsions need something there to glom onto.) I see this happening both before Roger died the first time, briefly (and thus being when Roger managed to plant the other compulsion mentioned above), and after Roger's resurrected. I also don't usually think it was all that happy a relationship.
-Along with the above point, I am fairly certain Thom was in Corus for at least a few days prior to Alanna's knighting. Probably longer, given what we're later told of the state of the roads from the north.
-Thom is pretty wary of his sister. I mentioned this in the Alanna post, but we know basically two things about their childhood relationship: Alanna was the more physical one, and Alanna ducked him in the pond at least once (and brings this up, years later, to get Thom to shut up and stop needling her). I suspect that what Alanna sees as just her playing around or getting a bit exasperated, Thom would see as bullying. The first thing I flashed to, reading the ducking-in-the-pond line, was Raoul and all holding Ralon underwater, which was probably not what Pierce was going for (and it's pretty clear that we're meant to cheer Ralon being half-drowned, which is disturbing), but has tainted that line for me ever since.
-Thom likes the cold north, and heights, and the simple dark stone construction in the mountains. He is really not a people person (understatement of the century, what), and is not at all fond of busy places like cities.
-Thom is nearsighted. It occurred to me that the two major things Alanna mentions Thom being bad at - archery and tracking - require decent distance vision. I can't do either, without my glasses. (Idly, I wonder if there's any way to correct vision in Tortall.)
-(that stupid crap about Gift color aside) Thom, Roger, and Numair are all roughly about as powerful as each other. Actually, I'd peg Roger as the weakest of the three.
-(I have NO canon support for this next bit at all) Thom is in a tricky legal situation when it comes to Trebond, after Lord Alan dies. Somehow, in my head-canon, Mithran priests can't inherit property. I think this came about largely because I was sort of wondering why we never heard of any other noblemen going there, and why Jon would feel it necessary to start up another institution for learning magic if the City of the Gods was already there. (Maybe he pissed off all the Mithrans?) I'm pretty sure that this issue would have cropped up before, but I suspect that the probable solution - give up his Mastery to go run the fief - would not sit well with Thom at all. (Honestly, most of this came about because I love complicated situations with no easy solution. That I can make it work with canon is a bonus.)
-Given half a chance, Thom is a terrifyingly good strategist.
-Thom sees glimpses of the future. A lot. It's his primary affinity, and he can scry in anything - often not even deliberately.
-Thom had too strong a Gift to have safely avoided training it. (My head-canon seems to be on the side of "yes, Thom is stronger than his sister".) I do think we see enough evidence that untrained Gifts are potentially dangerous that it's fully possible an undertrained Thom would have been a walking disaster.
-Thom is a sappy and affectionate drunk. This disturbs him, so he rarely drinks. (Though I can also see him faking drunk, for the freedom it'd give him.)
-And now for a bit of AU-canon: in any 'verse where Thom takes up the sword, he's the natural that Alanna had to learn to be. (Mostly just because it would vex Alanna terribly.)

***

My Fics
Canon compliant:
Compulsion - Thom never knows why he sleeps with Roger. Canon compliant.
Nothing But Pleasure - Roger is a sadist.
Both of the above are part of the What a Flicker Brings AU, but they are also canon-compliant.
Foretelling - Thom has always been able to see the future.
Growing Pains - Si-cham vs. a certain ornery student.
Letters from the Dead - Fifty letters to the living. Thom's not a major character here, but really, no one is.
Making Conversation - Jon and Thom have precisely one conversation.
The Meaning of Life - Four universes in which Thom doesn't die young.
Radiance - There are only two things Thom has ever loved.
World On Its Head - Also includes the sentence-fic "Sacrifices". Two glimpses of a pivotal moment not seen in canon.

Miscellaneous AUs:
-
Song of the Seer - My first "the twins don't switch" fic.
Stricken to the Bone - Thom and Alanna both go for page training.

Discovery AU:
This AU centers on Alanna, but Thom is a secondary character. He does get a short little fic, though.
Sounds - To George, Thom isn't silent.

The Iron King AU:
Glass - Killing someone while they're Sleeping is not a wise idea.

Making the Best of Things AU:
Thom is a major character in the whole AU. Here are the main fics where he appears.
Burning Brightly - Jon wants to go explore the Black City. Fortunately, Thom is there to stop him.
New Things - Roger always knew that page was insane.
Some People - Ten people who weren't ever wary of Thom, and one person who should've been.
Irony - Of all the ways Roger could die, it is the Sweating Sickness that fells him.
Jollity - Owen needs a knight-master.

Patchwork AU:
In this 'verse, the Grimhold Mountains are their own country, and Tortall itself is very small.
Ten Scenes from Another World - A short history lesson, and what happens when Tortall sends an embassy to Grimhold.
Away - The twins are celebrating Midwinter separately, and Thom is pensive. This fic may no longer be canon for this 'verse.
Epiphany - Roger figures something out.

Snake in the Grass AU:
Another AU all about Thom. I am not sure how to describe this, save to say that I am ridiculously proud of it.
The Morning Star - Thom is stuck visiting his family at the Swoop when a certain fleet attacks it.
Caduceus - A traitor gets a visitor.

What a Flicker Brings AU:
This AU is all about Thom, and he is in every fic. I am only listing the main fic and a few of my favorites below; for the full list, click the series title.
What a Flicker Brings - Thom gets a glimpse of the future in his mug. The foundation fic for this 'verse.
Bitterness - Thom does not like Carthak.
Ethics - Page training is about to start, and Lord Wyldon's ethics teacher has just up and quit. Of course King Jonathan has a suggestion. Major spoilers for an in-progress fic.
Talking Treason - Thom and Kel have a conversation.