I didn't like that. It wasn't foreshadowed, it was a clear example of retcon.
The last Earthsea books are a bit to the first three what the prequels are to Star Wars. They're the author being ashamed of their earlier work, and radically reinterpreting it.
Of course, Ursula Le Guin is a much better writer than George Lucas is a director, so the later books are not exactly bad. But they do retcon on the universe and the message.
The first three Earthsea books were heavy with Taoism, which is of course heavily gender essentialist. So it was a lot about gender roles, but in a complex way. The main character Ged is a celibate man, balancing between "doing" (yang) and "being" (yin). I liked it. I think she managed to take a pretty sexist world-view (Taoism) and make it more human, sympathetic - and balanced, ironically enough.
But in the latter books, she apparently didn't think she had been feminist enough. The villains are all men. The victims are all women. Ged now stabs a guy with a pitchfork to save a woman, stops being celibate (with the woman he saved...), I mean, come on. I think it went the wrong way entirely when it came to gender roles.
The last Earthsea books are a bit to the first three what the prequels are to Star Wars. They're the author being ashamed of their earlier work, and radically reinterpreting it.
Of course, Ursula Le Guin is a much better writer than George Lucas is a director, so the later books are not exactly bad. But they do retcon on the universe and the message.
The first three Earthsea books were heavy with Taoism, which is of course heavily gender essentialist. So it was a lot about gender roles, but in a complex way. The main character Ged is a celibate man, balancing between "doing" (yang) and "being" (yin). I liked it. I think she managed to take a pretty sexist world-view (Taoism) and make it more human, sympathetic - and balanced, ironically enough.
But in the latter books, she apparently didn't think she had been feminist enough. The villains are all men. The victims are all women. Ged now stabs a guy with a pitchfork to save a woman, stops being celibate (with the woman he saved...), I mean, come on. I think it went the wrong way entirely when it came to gender roles.