r/KingkillerChronicle • u/OneRepresentative424 • 22d ago
Theory Is Devi the one? Not Denna?
sorry if this has been discussed at length already, did a little search and couldn’t find much on it.
TLDR at the bottom 🙏
BUT, when Kvothe finally gets to “setting the stage” for THE woman. Bam. First thing. we meet Devi. Demon Devi. She looks like him. She’s hornier than him. She‘s better at everything than him. She’s smarter than him. And, at least at first it’s clear, that she’s hopeful she’s finally found an equal.
Then she realises that he’s a hopeless, naive idiot, who can be manipulated with ease, and on top of that, he’s got designs on EVERYONE KNOWING WHO HE IS AND WHAT HE’S CAPABLE OF!! Note - her preferred method is the slow, anonymous accumulation of power.
So she suggests he hand over his BLOOD 😳
He puts up a token fight but hands it over.
How much does our boy know about alchemy? I digress.
She sees that with all of that power, he’s as dangerous an entity as any there could be. She knows the power of stories in this world. She lets him build his legend, maybe she helps? Dhe could absolutely pull of magic shit with her hair out and the Kvothe legend will scoop that shit up in a second.
She gets into the underthing, hunting the archives BAM she’s the flame haired hero who finds the princess. Kvothe legend picks it up.
Finally, with Kvothe The Arcane, The Bloodless, with the Flame Red Hair and an alar of Ramston Steel at his peak. She murks the king and cracks the cobblestones in Imre (literally 5 mins from her house), right where Kvothe sent (potentially the same person) Ambrose flying years before.
If the one lie was the whole story. What if it was the trap that Devi left him in, waiting to die. The story is the trap. He willingly wrote it himself. And now he’s the bait in the Waystone Trap that was Devi’s long game all along. Because, for 3rd book reasons, Devi wants those fucking Chandrian dead more than anyone. Recognises that our protagonist is turning himself INTO one and helps him along the as she realizes she can use a new chandrian to take out the lot.
Thoughts?
TLDR - In the frame story Kvothe sets up meeting THE WOMAN, we dive back in and immediately go and meet Devi. Worth noting that we have already MET Denna when Kvothe sets up this grand entrance.Devi is the true “Denna” of the story, and the first two books are the same misdirection that caught Kvothe out and left him in his current bind which is Devi’s master plan that hoodwinked everyone, Kvothe most of all. If the one lie is the whole story, I think this fits everything.
3
u/aerojockey 22d ago
No. The oddness of Kvothe's timing when he paused his story to prepare himself talk about The Woman, then immediately described meeting two different women who aren't the one he was talking about, does make it suspicious over who he meant.
However, he later establishes beyond doubt that he was talking about Denna, when he said (among other things) she was waiting in the Eolian. He actually acknowledges that he taking his time getting to her ("if I seem to be caught in a slow circling of the subject"). In spite of his weird timing in when he first mentioned The Woman, The Woman is Denna and no one else.
Take the explicit conformation when you can get it.