As promised, I’m importing the A Court of Thorns and Roses recaps here from Patreon. These were originally written beginning in August of 2020, so there will be references to upcoming or seasonal events that won’t fit with our current timeline. I am not a time traveler and you’ll never be able to prove that I am. I will also include editors notes like this every now and then as we go, mostly to amuse myself but to give re-read value to those who’ve already been on this awful, awful journey with me.
I know what you’re wondering. And yes.
The next morning, my paint and supplies arrived from wherever Tamlin or the servants had dug them up, […]
THANK THE CAULDRON AND YE OLDE AMAZON DOT COM
The rest of that sentence covers Tamlin taking Feyre to the gallery. Of the hallways on the way there, she observes:
The marble floors shone so brightly that they had to have been freshly mopped, and that rose-scented breeze floated in through the opened windows. All this—he’d done this for me. As if I would have cared about cobwebs or dust.
I mean. He didn’t mop the floors. And you complain about everything else so it’s safe to assume you’d complain about cobwebs and dust.
Before Tamlin can show Feyre the gallery proper, she asks him why he would do something like this out of kindness. Because apparently, kindness is out of character for Tamlin despite us never once having seen this being the case.
Want a writing tip?
The smile faltered. “It’s been a long time since there was anyone here who appreciated these things. I like seeing them used again.” Especially when there was such blood and death in every other part of his life.
That’s what we call a POV skew. Feyre can’t definitively tell us the “why” behind Tamlin’s desire to see someone enjoy the gallery. She’s not in his head.
This is also a missed opportunity: if Feyre had compared her own relationship to blood and death and hardship to his, it would have created more of a bond between them in the reader’s mind. But this is super popular YA fantasy romance, so “I seen his abs through his shirt so now you should be horny, too, reader,” is good enough, I guess.
Tamlin opens the doors to the gallery.
The pale wooden floors gleamed in the clean, bright light pouring in from the windows. The room was empty save for a few large chairs and benches for viewing the … the …
The suspense is unbearable, Feyre.
What’s in the gallery? What is it?!
I barely registered moving into the long gallery, one hand absentmindedly wrapping around my throat as I looked up at the paintings.
Paintings so good, you have to choke yourself.
Pastorals, portraits, still lifes … each a story and an experience, each a voice shouting or whispering or singing about what that moment, that feeling, had been like, each a cry into the void of time that they had been here, had existed.
Aaaand prose so good I have to choke myself. Every time I run across something in this book that I find particularly neat or interesting, I get angry. I know I’ve been saying that a lot in these recaps but damnit, I’m just so frustrated. If Maas would slow down or get honest beta readers or an editor who gave a damn, her writing could be actually good! WHY NOT TRY TO BE GOOD?!
There’s an interesting bit where Feyre recognizes that despite the differences between her and the fairy artists who’ve made the paintings, their art transcends those boundaries and makes her understand them.
A concept so good, I have to choke a stranger because I’ve finally had enough disappointment and despair at the wasted opportunities that abound in this book and it’s translated to a Hulk-esque rampage of violence and blood.
That’s gonna be the title of my “spicy” “Young Adult” fantasy novel: A Rampage of Violence and Blood.
That’s a joke. I don’t have it in me to write something like this. It would suck the soul from my body. ed.—In a bizarre turn of events, I’m in negotiations about a spicy fantasy novel. The title is out of my hands, but I strongly suspect the publisher will go with something noun of noun and noun and I will have to stop making jokes.
Tamlin is shocked that a human could possibly appreciate fairy art.
I wiped at my damp cheeks. “It’s …” Perfect, wonderful, beyond my wildest imaginings didn’t cover it. I kept my hand over my heart. “Thank you,” I said. It was all I could find to show him what these paintings—to be allowed into this room—meant.
With the reputation these books have for being non-stop sexfests, I honestly expected this to be followed by Feyre telling the Tamlin that she can think of a better way to pay for that pizza just as soon as her roommate Taffiny gets out of the shower.
This would have been a fantastic bonding moment if it had come earlier in the story. Also, if we hadn’t seen it before. We’ve already done the dramatic room reveal and Feyre studying paintings and learning about Prythian. And the study was magic. Tamlin strolled in, lit all the candles magically… but that first time, the sentiment was wasted because it’s a library and she can’t read.
Imagine if this scene occurred in place of the library scene. Feyre could see the mural here; that information wouldn’t be lost. It could also incorporate Tamlin, making the reveal less of an infodump. Cutting the entire library scene and slotting the gallery into its place would lay the foundations of understanding between the two of them. That would have made everything that’s happened since charged with the romance that at the moment seems forced. As a reader, I recognize they’re gonna fuck, despite the lack of chemistry between the characters. I’m not excited for that. I’m not anticipating it. I’m just accepting it as a fact, like my own mortality.
Tamlin leaves Feyre in the gallery, where she stares at paintings until she almost passes out from hunger.
After lunch, Alis showed me to an empty room on the first floor with a table full of canvases of various sizes, brushes whose wooden handles gleamed in the perfect, clear light, and paints—so, so many paints, beyond the four basic ones I’d hoped for, that the breath was knocked from me again.
This is where I, a hobby artist myself, thinks snidely to myself “you really only need three and a white if it’s not watercolor,” but in the interest of not being a dick I will confess that most of the paint sets I’ve curated for myself are six colors (warm and cold primaries) and a white.
Anyway, Feyre says she began to paint and we go into a section break.
Weeks passed, the days melting together. I painted and painted, most of it awful and useless.
Self-portraits, then?
I bet when we hear about her art through Tamlin’s eyes, it’s going to be ZOMG SO AMAZING and she’s just modest. She don’t know they’re beautiful, that’s what makes them beautiful, as Harry Styles used to say.
Feyre does note that she takes an occasional break from her dawn-to-dusk painting to hang out with Tamlin and ride around on horses with him.
But there were the days when Tamlin was called away to face the latest threat to his borders, and even painting couldn’t distract me until he returned, covered in blood that wasn’t his own, sometimes in his beast form, sometimes as the High Lord. He never gave me details, and I didn’t presume to ask about them; his safe return was enough.
I guess if I’d ever gotten even a whiff of the chemistry these two supposedly have, I would be like, swoon, so romantic, she worries about him but doesn’t admit it to him. Since Tamlin has all the personality of wet toilet paper drying on the ceiling of a middle school bathroom, their relationship development means nothing to me.
And though my dreams continued to be plagued by the deaths I’d witnessed, the deaths I’d caused, and that horrible pale woman ripping me to shreds—all watched over by a shadow I could never quite glimpse—I slowly stopped being so afraid. Stay with the High Lord. You will be safe. So I did.
Okay, I’m putting money on it: the shadow she could “never quite glimpse” is Lucien. I might have thought it would be a really cool twist and actually, it’s Tamlin who’s the person who just calmly watches Feyre get cut apart, but we already know that Lucien isn’t a High Lord. We just found this out in the last chapter.
But whoever it is who gets to watch Feyre get tortured to death…lucky bastard.
The Spring Court was a land of rolling green hills and lush forests and clear, bottomless lakes. Magic didn’t just abound in the bumps and the hollows—it grew there. Try as I might to paint it, I could never capture it—the feel of it.
1. We fucking know because you tell us in every chapter.
2. Magic actually doesn’t grow there and that’s been established as a problem.
3. WE FUCKING KNOW BECAUSE YOU TELL US IN EVERY CHAPTER.
Feyre admits she even tries to paint pictures of Tamlin because she’s so comfortable being around him. She’s even able to not think about her family, sometimes. Until she does.
My family, glamoured, cared for, safe, still had no idea where I was. The mortal world … it had moved on without me, as if I had never existed. A whisper of a miserable life—gone, unremembered by anyone whom I’d known or cared for.
That’s what happens to pretty much everybody in the end. But it’s apparently the first time Feyre has ever realized that even though she’s the main character of this book, she’s not the main character of the entire universe and it spins her into an existential crisis in which she can’t paint anymore.
No one would remember me back home—I was as good as dead to them. And Tamlin had let me forget them.
At what point did it become Tamlin’s job to make you remember, Feyre?
She spirals into this whole thing where Tamlin probably only gave her the paints to get her to shut up about her family and keep her in the dark about the blight and shit like that, which culminates in her thinking about how stupid and useless she is. Which, pardon the shit out of me, Feyre, is my job. But the passage really would be a good insight into depression, anxiety, or any number of other hateful brain diseases that trick people. Instead, it’s just another poor me, I’m so mistreated moment in a long line of self-pitying passages.
After dinner, she’s so pissed off at the unfairness of living in a paradise where everything is provided for and nothing is expected of her that she storms off into the garden.
“My father had this garden planted for my mother,” Tamlin said from behind me. I didn’t bother to face him. I dug my nails into my palms as he stopped by my side. “It was a mating present.”
Is that like a push present or something?
I stared at the flowers without seeing anything. The flowers I’d painted on the table at home were probably crumbling or gone by now. Nesta might have even scraped them off.
When are we gonna stop fixating on Nesta and how unfair Nesta is and how much she hated wonderful, wonderful Feyre for absolutely no reason? I get it, trauma from bad families lasts forever. But this kind of writing also makes books feel like they’re gonna last forever.
Tamlin providing for them or no, glamouring their memories or no, I’d been … erased from their lives. Forgotten. Id’ let him erase me. He’d offered me paints and space and time to practice; he’d shown me pools of starlight; he’d save my life like some kind of feral knight in a legend, and I’d gulped it down like faerie wine. I was no better than those zealot Children of the Blessed.
You mean the Cult of the Totally Right About Everything? Because so far, Prythian is exactly how they described it and the High Fae, with the exception of ones we’ve only been told about but never met, are also pretty much exactly how the Children of the Blessed envisioned them.
And why does the girl who runs through the woods skinning animals and fucking dudes in haystacks refer to the super polite and accommodating guy who lives in a sumptuous palace full of priceless art as feral?
Words mean things, Sarah.
I stalked to the nearest rosebush and ripped off a rose, my fingers tearing on the thorns.
Leo-pointing-at-tv-meme.gif
I ignored the pain, the warmth of the blood that trickled down. I could never paint it accurately—never render it the way those artists had in the gallery pieces.
I’m starting to think Feyre isn’t a very good artist. I’m very much wondering why there are apparently numerous paintings of Feyre pricking her finger in the present which were painted in the past.
The order of words also affects meaning, Sarah.
He didn’t reprimand me for taking one of his parents’ roses—parents who were as absent as my own, but who had probably loved each other and loved him better than mine cared for me.
Oh good, the Who Had It Worse circus is rolling into town, featuring Feyre the Sad-Sack Clown.
A family that would have offered to go in his place if someone had come to steal him away.
I opened my eyes so wide they’re stuck that way and now I can’t blink. This has to be a joke, right? Because in chapter four, Tamlin made it clear that it had to be Feyre because she’s the one who killed Andras. Nobody, not even Feyre, questioned that. And she’s the one who stood up and admitted to killing Andras, specifically so Tamlin would take her and not harm her family.
Plus, she’s saying her whole family should have offered to go her in place. In Feyre’s equation, three of them equal one of her in an even trade.
Feyre explains to Tamlin that she feels ashamed to have left her family and that she feels “selfish and horrible” for painting. That’s somehow tied to her shame over leaving her family but she doesn’t expand on it. We’re meant to just accept it without questioning it too much.
“All Those years, what I did for them … and they didn’t try to stop you from taking me.”
Bullshit, Feyre, we were there! And we can turn back to chapter four where your father begged for your life and for Tamlin not to take you.
Like, if you’re going to retcon shit that happened in your book while the book is being written, might I suggest you scroll up and fucking fix it that way?
“I don’t know why I expected them to—why I believed that the puca’s illusion was real that night. I don’t know why I bother still thinking about it. Or still caring.” He was silent long enough that I added, “Compared to you—to your borders and magic being weakened—I suppose my self-pity is absurd.”
Pretty much, yeah. Don’t forget, he’s grieving for the friend you murdered, too.
I can’t believe I didn’t think of this until right now, but…if the treaty demands a life for a life and fairies are out there slaughtering humans all the time, how is Andras’s death not a fair trade for one of the random villagers who are allegedly getting killed? ed.—Generally, I think of myself as a generally kinda stupid person. You know, like, I’m not a great thinker, right? But I’m still 100% that even my dumb ass could outthink every damn High Fae in Prythian and absolutely run that motherfucker.
Tamlin tells Feyre that if the whole thing with her family bothers her, it’s not “absurd” to be sad about it but I disagree because I’ve been trapped in this whiny brat’s head all the damn time. Tamlin is way more understanding than I am. Then, he kisses her boo-boo from the thorn.
His lips were smooth against my skin, his breath warm, and my knees buckled as he lifted my other hand to his mouth and kissed it, too. Kissed it carefully—in a way that made heat begin pounding my core, between my legs.
Is that the spicy part BookTok is soaking their panties over? Because this is like, the first time anyone hasn’t been fully dead from the waist down. ed.—I’m pretty sure that at this point, I still didn’t have TikTok, or at least, I wasn’t active on it. Like, when I tell you that shit CAME IN LIKE A WRECKING BALL when I did.
Seriously, we’re 40% in with barely a stirring of my loins and everyone who recommended this book to me ever made it sound like solid porn.
When he withdrew, my blood shone on his mouth. I glanced at my hands, which he still held, and found the wounds gone.
Okay, wait. I’m kinda. Wait.
Hang on.
Is he a vampire or some shit? I thought he didn’t have enough magic to heal things anymore? Am I somehow confusing this with a different book I’ve forgotten all about?
Anyway, he somehow has the rose she “chucked” (direct quote) into the bushes in an earlier paragraph and the thorns are magically gone and he puts it in her hair and tells her she shouldn’t feel bad about painting because it brings her joy.
Tamlin seems like a pretty solid dude. You can do better than Feyre, bro.
He leaned in closer, so close that I had to tip my head back to see him. “Because your human joy fascinates me—the way you experience things, in your life span, so wildly and deeply and all once, is … entrancing. I’m drawn to it, even when I know I shouldn’t be, even when I try not to be.”
Mr.Jen often says he wishes he could “feel joy” the way I do over tiny things. Is he a High Fae and, if so, where the fuck is my magic castle full of free food?
But I like this motivation for Tamlin liking her, despite the fact that we haven’t really seen Feyre express joy or anything other than self-pity. It’s so much more interesting than books of this genre that are like, “oh, you’re so sexy and mysterious and unusual and amazing and brave for reasons that will go unexplored as your actions continue to evade anything approaching a single one of those adjectives.” This is specific enough to satisfy me.
Just as soon as Feyre like…enjoys something.
But she kinda fixates on the “try not to be” part:
Because I was human, and I would grow old and—I didn’t let myself get that far as he came closer still.
I’m sorry, is he inside her at this point? I don’t mean penis in vagina. I mean like, has he fused with her and/or phased partially through her? Because he keeps getting closer when we’re told he’s already super close.
But bonus points to Feyre for just assuming that he doesn’t want to get attached to her because she’ll die and he secretly yearns to be with her forever or something.
He gives her a slow, tender kiss on her cheek and says:
“One day—one day there will be answers for everything,” he said, releasing my hand and stepping away. “But into until the time is right. Until it’s safe.”
That’s mighty convenient for the author, ain’t it? “I can tell you exactly what’s going on but dang, it’s just really unsafe at this point. Better hang around for like three hundred more pages and endless descriptions of grass Feyre can’t paint until we get there!”
He left me and I took a gasping breath, not realizing I’d been holding it.
Look, I know fanfic has obliterated the usefulness of the phrase, but holding a breath you didn’t realize you were holding is a real thing and it’s a grammatical hill I’ll die on.
After a section break, Feyre decides she needs to go to the “sanctuary” of the woods to think about how things with Tamlin have changed following their garden interlude. Sanctuary is an interesting word choice to describe a place we’ve been consistently warned is super dangerous.
Especially when she notes that she’s brought her knife and her bow and arrows so she won’t be caught empty-handed.
Because everyone needs to be armed in a sanctuary.
I crept through the trees and brush for no more than an hour before I felt a presence behind me—coming ever closer, sending the animals running for cover. I smiled to myself, and twenty minutes later, I settled in the crook of a towering elm and waited.
How does she know it’s precisely twenty minutes?
She waits up in the tree until:
A snap and roar of fury echoed across the lands, scattering the birds.
When I climbed out of the tree and walked into the little clearing, I merely crossed my arms and looked up at the High Lord, dangling by his legs from the snare I’d laid.
She caught a High Lord in a snare. After telling us over and over that no human could possibly match a High Lord in any way.
Sure.
Like, maybe we’re gonna find out that he knew it was there and let himself get captured? I hope? I just want one glimmer of consistency in this book that isn’t Feyre whining about how everything sucks for her.
He chuckled, and I came close enough to dare stroke a finger along the silken golden hair dangling just above my face, admiring the many colors within it—the hues of yellow and brown and wheat.
But no mention of whether or not she can paint it. I’m dying to know, Feyre! CAN YOU PAINT IT AND DO IT JUSTICE?!
My heart thundered, and I knew he could probably hear it.
He couldn’t hear you sitting up in a tree or making a snare or anything like that.
But he leaned his head toward me, a silent invitation, and I ran my fingers through his hair—gently, carefully. He purred, the sound rumbling through my fingers, arms, legs, and core. I wondered how that sound would feel if he were fully pressed up against me, skin-to-skin. I stepped back.
Oh my gosh, is this chemistry? Unearned chemistry, but at least there’s a reason for her nethers to tingle.
What? This part was sexy.
Tamlin frees himself from the snare and asks Feyre if she’s feeling any better, and gives her some paper with poems on them. He reads her one:
There once was a lady most beautiful.
Spirited, if a little unusual
Her friends were few
But how the men did queue
But to all she gave a refusal
As he reads the increasingly off-color poems, Feyre realizes that they all include words from the list she’d been compiling when trying to send a message to her family.
“We had a contest to see who could write the dirtiest limericks while I was living with my father’s war-band by the border. […]”
By the border of where? Limerick, the town in Ireland? That border? BECAUSE I’M NOT SURE YOU CAN HAVE A LIMERICK IN A WORLD WHERE IRELAND DOESN’T EXIST. THAT PARTICULAR TYPE OF POEM WAS INSPIRED BY A SONG CALLED “WON’T YOU COME TO LIMERICK” AND WAS NAMED LIMERICK AS A RESULT BUT OKAY THEY MEAN THE ONE IN PRYTHIAN.
Despite previous characterization, Feyre finds the whole thing really funny. Yuppers siree, after being so sensitive about this list of words and interpreting any reference to them as mockery of illiteracy, Feyre is fully cool with Tamlin mocking her with obscene poems (the rest of which we are, mercifully, spared).
And then comes the section break.
The only thing that happened in that scene is the poems and the hair petting. It advanced the plot…not at all. I can’t even say it advanced the relationship because Tamlin poking fun at something Feyre is ashamed of doesn’t fit with his characterization and Feyre letting that shit slide without four chapters of woe-is-me definitely doesn’t fit with hers.
I used to think fanfic was a good place for people to learn to write but damn, not if they’re not gonna bother to learn the difference in conventions between writing fanfic and writing original fiction. I love fanfic and write pointless PWP scenes all the time but this book is already way, way too long.
After the break:
I was still smiling when we walked out of the park and toward the rolling hills, meandering back to the manor.
WHAT PARK?! THIS IS THE FIRST TIME A PARK HAS EVER BEEN MENTIONED. I THOUGHT THEY WERE IN THE WOODS BECAUSE THAT’S WHERE SHE SAID SHE WAS.
I have no idea where the fuck they are (apparently I should, from the way it was just dropped in there) but let’s just follow them and hope we find our way back.
Feyre asks Tamlin what he meant about his dad giving his mom a mating present and not a wedding present. Tamlin explains that High Fae marry, but they can also find a fated match who’s like their soulmate. It’s like, deeper than regular love, I guess.
I didn’t have the nerve to ask if faeries had ever had mating bonds with humans, […]
Whoa, yeah, that would have taken A LOT of nerve. Why is she just assuming that’s gonna be a possibility? Why is she even wondering about it? They’ve flirted a little, we know they’ve spent time together off-screen, and now she’s like, wondering if they could be soulmates?
She ends up asking him what happened to his parents, and it’s time for what I assume is a hallmark of Maas’s writing: the exposition dump. Tamlin rambles on about how his father was worse than Lucien’s terrible dad. Like, enslaved people. And pre-treaty, apparently they did some real, real gross things. He tells Feyre that the reason he spared her was that when he saw how shitty her house was he decided not to be cruel like the rest of his family.
Slaves—there had been slaves here. I didn’t want to know—had never looked for traces of them, even five hundred years later. I was still little better than chattel to most of his people, his world.
WHY WOULD YOU HAVE LOOKED FOR THEM?! YOU JUST FOUND OUT ABOUT THEM!
Seriously, do editors just huff burning plastic fumes all day? Did Maas even bother to read through her first fucking draft or did she just go, eh, good enough, and mail it off?
Love that the white heroine is not only traumatized by the very thought that she could have been enslaved (but wasn’t) and has decided to opt out of knowing about slavery. That rings pretty fucking true.
Tamlin goes on another monologue about how his mother loved his father despite him being a full-on monster of a person. Tamlin joined the war-band because he wasn’t interested in inheriting the title of High Lord (and his brothers would have killed him if he had shown interest) and because:
“I’d realized from an early age that fighting and killing were about the only things I was good at.”
The problem was, no matter how he tried to downplay his abilities, he kept getting more and more magical, I guess.
“Fortunately or unfortunately, they were all killed by the High Lord of an enemy court. I was spared for whatever reason or Cauldron-granted luck. […]”
Editor’s Note: How did he survive when all of them had been killed?
Author: whatever reason.
Editor’s Note: Which court killed his family?
Author: …an enemy one.
Such a brutal, harsh world—with families killing each other for power, for revenge, for spite and control.
Bitch, your dad got beat so bad you shit your pants and that was just over money. Don’t act like you had no idea such a concept existed.
But brace yourselves, dear patrons. Because you’re about to laugh so hard you prolapse your anus.
Perhaps his generosity, his kindness, was a reaction to that—perhaps he’d seen me and found it to be like gazing into a mirror of sorts.
WHAT? LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL OMG. OMG.
Yes, Feyre. He looked at you, the person who had just killed and skinned his friend and saw directly through to your inner selflessness and abounding goodness. That’s exactly what it was. That is exactly the benefit of the doubt most murder victims’ loved ones extend directly post homicide and mutilation of the corpse.
That was the equivalent of the heroine describing herself in a mirror. But this time, it’s a metaphorical mirror and instead of seeing how beautifully ugly the heroine’s perfectly attractive face and body are, we’re seeing how gorgeous her soul is.
And it’s all based on someone else’s experience which is just… the cherry on top of a rotten maggot and slug dairy-free ice cream sundae.
“[…] When the title fell to me, it was a … rough transition. Many of my father’s courtiers defected to other courts rather than have a warrior-beast snarling at them.”
A half-wild beast, Nesta had once called me. It was an effort to not take his hand, to not reach out to him and tell him that I understood.
DOES HER ARROGANCE HAVE NO BOUNDS?! He’s cursed to be an ACTUAL BEAST. You don’t understand that type of body horror because YOUR SISTER SAID SOMETHING MEAN.
This is like when someone’s human family member dies and someone hijacks their grief to talk about their dead cat.
I HAAAAAAAAATE IIIIIIIIIT!
Before I could ask about it, we cleared the little wood, a spread of hills and knolls laid out ahead.
I THOUGHT THEY WERE ALREADY OUT OF THE WOODS?! WHERE IS THIS FUCKING PARK?! WHAT IS HAPPENING?!
Anyway, she sees faeries assembling wood for bonfires, for a holiday called “Calanmai”, standing in here for Calan Mai, which is kinda similar to Beltane. Spoiler: I read ahead and it’s a good thing she called it Calanmai or I would never have noticed that the structure of the ritual is lifted almost entirely from The Mists of Avalon.
But he does call it “fire night”.
I’m wondering why Prythian celebrates seasonal holidays when the land itself is always divided up into seasons that never, ever change. It would have been neat if the author who created the world would have wondered that, too.
Tamlin even describes it as a “spring ceremony” meant to create magic to sustain his lands for another year. But how does a year work, when it’s always spring? Do the other courts have to do this? What about the winter place and the autumn place? How do they summon up magic if their seasons are about death and dormancy?
Why write fantasy if you’re not curious about the world you’re creating? That’s the entire point.
Tamlin warns that Feyre will see more faeries than usual, despite the fact that the blight has scared them off from the land.
“It has—but there will be a number of them. Just … stay away from them all. You’ll be safe in the house, but if you run into one before we light the fires at sundown in two days, ignore them.”
“And I’m not invited to your ceremony?”
“No. You’re not.” He clenched and loosened his fingers, again and again, as if trying to keep the claws contained.
He’s probably frustrated because he already had a date for this thing lined up and then you had to get involved in his life and he doesn’t want to have to explain all this baggage to the faerie lady he’s trying to pull.
Though I tried to ignore it, my chest caved a bit.
Again, the arrogance. The sheer arrogance. She’s spent all this time shit-talking faeries, trying to escape, trying to set traps for them, literally killing more than one, and then she’s gonna get sad because she’s not invited to one of their parties?
When they arrive at the garden which I guess could have been a basketball court or a mountain and probably still could be in a future chapter because this author has apparently never been outside before, there’s something bad lurking. Tamlin tells her:
“Stay hidden, and no matter what you overhear, don’t come out.”
Come on, dude. You know she isn’t gonna do any of that. Are you new here?
Alone, I looked to either side of the gravel path, like some gawking idiot. If there was indeed something here, I’d be caught out in the open. Perhaps it was shameful not to go to his aid, but—he was a High Lord. I would just get in the way.
DID YOU NOT HEAR THE INSTRUCTIONS HE CLEARLY GAVE YOU? That’s something else I’m noticing a lot about Feyre. People who know better than her will tell her to do something and she takes the time to sit around and try to make it her decision. Writing Tip: Listening to other characters and trusting them to know better in situations when they actually do know better will not make your female characters weak.
I had just ducked behind a hedge when I heard Tamlin and Lucien approaching.
No matter what you overhear…
Maybe I could sneak across the fields to the stables.
Stay hidden and don’t come out.
That’s the gist of what he said, right? And what’s she considering?
I was about to make for the high grasses mere steps beyond the edge of the gardens when Tamlin’s snarl ripped through the air on the other side of the hedge.
I turned—just enough to spy on them through the dense leaves. Stay hidden, he’d said. If I moved now, I would surely be noticed.
WHY ARE WE HAVING A FULL PAGE EXPLANATION FOR WHY FEYRE IS CHOOSING NOT TO RUN? BECAUSE THE HIGH LORD SAID SO AND HE KNOWS MORE ABOUT THIS WORLD THAN SHE DOES IS ENOUGH! WE DON’T NEED TO HEAR THE EXPLANATION OF WHY SHE’S GONNA STAY BUT ONLY BECAUSE SHE DECIDED TO.
Tamlin and Lucien are…apparently in the middle of a conversation with a disembodied voice? That we’re not hearing until just right now? How did she miss the first part when she’s just on the other side of the hedge?
I don’t care. Fuck it, at this point, I just don’t care. This book made sense to someone somewhere. Maybe I’m the one who’s poorly written. Maybe I’m a poorly-written, sad-sack author in a Charlie Kaufman screenplay who doesn’t realize they’re reading a book within a book. Maybe at the denouement I will be killed in an accident that’s supposed to be ironically funny but instead just shows the audience that they’ve wasted two hours of their time on something that’s objectively just not entertaining.
Again, by Charlie Kaufman. Can’t stress that enough.
The disembodied voice Tamlin and Lucien are arguing with is there to warn them that the dreaded She is angry about the dead naga and Tamlin’s “continued behavior.” What behavior, oh ghostly voice?
“Speak you so ill of she who holds your fate in her hands? With one word, she could destroy this pathetic estate. She wasn’t pleased when she heard of you dispatching your warriors.” The voice now seemed turned toward Tamlin. “But, as nothing has come of it, she has chosen to ignore it.”
I think I’ve figured out what’s happening. There is a fantasy novel style plot going on, but it’s not in the book we’re in. Which is why we’re not privy to it at all, and the author keeps delaying the plot with sentences like, “she has chosen to ignore it” so no detail is needed.
“Tell her I’m sick of cleaning up the trash she dumps on my borders.”
The voice chuckled, the sound like sand shifting. “She sets them loose as gifts—and reminders of what will happen if she catches you trying to break the terms of—”
We found her. The Chosen One. The one who loves em dashes even more than Jenny Trout.
This scene doesn’t serve up much new information at all. I’m pretty sure we’ve already heard about She releasing the bad faeries or being in charge of them or whatever. Though She is clearly part of the main plot (which, again, hasn’t shown up and we’re almost halfway through the book) here’s what I think I’ve pieced together, so far:
- She is bad
- She likes the bad faeries
- For some reason, Tamlin owes her fealty
- But she keeps attacking him
- And that’s supposed to make him more obedient
The disembodied voice tells Tamlin it can tell that he’s afraid and not to worry because it’ll all be okay soon, but it’s, you know. Evil mocking. In response:
“Burn in Hell,” Lucien replied for Tamlin, and the thing laughed again before a flap of leathery wings boomed, a foul wind bit my face, and everything went silent.
My guess is the evil disembodied voice is running off to tell everybody back at the office about how hilarious is it that these non-Christian faeries keep talking about hell.
Once the thing is gone, Tamlin and Lucien find Feyre. Lucien is super concerned about what she might have overheard, but just like us, she didn’t understand what the fuck they were talking about. Good thing the author doesn’t take the opportunity to clue us in, beyond Tamlin saying that some faeries are really, really scary.
Thank god someone reminded us.
Apparently, the thing that was in the garden is called an Attor. I guess we should hold onto that information in case it comes back later. The important thing is that it didn’t see Feyre.
I guess it’s good that it couldn’t hear her through the hedge the way Tamlin and Lucien can hear her breathing halfway across the castle or whatever.
Tamlin is clearly shaken up and tells Feyre he’ll see her at dinner.
Understanding a dismissal, and craving the locked door of my bedroom, I trudged back to the house, contemplating who this she was to make Tamlin and Lucien so nervous and to command that thing as her messenger.
The spring breeze whispered that I didn’t want to know.
I don’t know who she is, but I’d lay money she’ll end up being blonde.
Anyway, that’s the hook for this exhaustingly long chapter.
It would have been about 2/3 shorter if we hadn’t had to live through all the god damn painting.
My guess is that the story is never going to stop ragging on Nesta, because there are so few Other Girls around that Feyre can prove she’s Not Like.
I feel like I’m seeing this whole recap through a NLOG lens, but it keeps fitting!
NO ONE else appreciates paintings in this house?? Are you shitting me? This is also implying TAMLIN doesn’t enjoy them either!
Hey, maybe instead of murdering every other fairy who comes to visit and ISOLATING TAMLIN AS WELL we could see some friendly visitors. MAYBE THE WINGS GUY COULD’VE LIVED or the SURIEL COULD’VE STOPPED IN FOR A VISIT.
I’m so fucking angry now. But thank you for pointing out the POV skew. This is why I like 3rd person limited/omniscient even if I probably abuse it horribly and don’t know how to handle it.
Also, I forgot a few things from yesterday regarding banter and something else and maybe I’ll remember them again in a second lol. I’m not done reading; I was gonna read the Ogre Waifu thing in full but like you told me her Amazon order was in and I had to see the trainwreck of “I don’t know anything about making art” on display again.
I didn’t expect to be this angry about the gallery first because I forgot about that part entirely lol. And now for my own sanity must step away for a moment because I know writing romance is hard… people think it’s easy to do well but writing relationships takes effort to make it feel natural and good. The same holds true for any other sort of relationship, like family and friends (which is why that’s also awful in this book.)
I feel a little better about my own writing and definitely enjoying the tips sprinkled in. Dissecting piss poor fiction for instruction is always eye-opening even if you’re capable of decent prose. Learning about something or a reminder of things is never a bad idea especially for someone like me who is forgetful.
Will Fayree, who is–it cannot be emphasized enough–skinny from a decade of insufficient food and grueling labors, complain soon about gaining weight because she’s eating three sumptuous feasts in every chapter and performing minimal physical activity? Does fairy food have no calories? Does she have a tapeworm to keep her skinny-but-with-curves-men-can’t-keep-their-eyes-off? IS ABS BOY KEEPING HER SKINNY WITH MAGIC? Will that be the revelation that convinces her of his kindness and decency?
Ten billion years ago when she arrived in Fairyworld, one of them asked “Didn’t your mother tell you anything about the fae?”, and I figured the seemingly random question about the one member of her family who was absent when he visited and the offhand mention of a weird drifter who put a ward on the door of their house were pointing to the subtly named Fae-ree being secretly a fairy princess they’ve been keeping an eye on all along. But it’s taken so damn long to get to “I’ll tell you everything when the time is right” that I completely forgot there was an attempt made at intrigue.
Editor: A mystery needs periodic clues to remind readers a mystery exists.
SJM, at that spot and that spot only: “I’ll tell you everything. But not now.”
Oh yeah I had that same thought but I never even considered the drifter with the magic ward doing it to protect her for the good of the faeries. So much missed opportunity for something interesting instead of the sad sack sludgefest that we actually got so far!
Imagine how much better this would be if Feyre just…liked her family. Imagine if her inner conflict was that she needs to stay away from them to keep them safe but also being away from them is painful because she’s never been separated from them before. Feyre hating her family adds nothing to the story except making her an unlikeable brat, but if she actually cared about them? If she genuinely missed being around them? Suddenly this stops being “feyre won the lottery but won’t stop complaining about it” and becomes a situation with actual emotional complexity.
OMG yes. If Feyre loved her family and they were great, there could be all kinds of good memories and she could share some of them with Tamlin and/or Lucien. THAT would also tie in better with “your human joy is so amazing” because then we’d SEE some of it in the past and the present I hope ugh. Make it complicated instead of frustrating, Maas, please!
I kinda forgot anything new I wanted to say having finished read through this but lord… so exhausting. Especially anything to do with Feyre. They finally get touches of chemistry and yet nothing matters. And yeah trying to do the “we’re both brutal killers” as a way to understand one another… man. Like, you could do that but not with the plot or story or ANYTHING as it is. It’d also help if ya know Tamlin is actually closer to her in age or at any rate his experiences are within that range.
OR shockingly maybe fighting isn’t the only way to make them understand each other. Especially since she’s not a trained warrior or a mercenary or attempting to become one or… there’s the other annoying factor where Feyre has to be the best up until she would make the hot men look bad and then she has to fail. She can only fail, and not really be her fault, to keep her from one-upping the authority-figure hot men.
It strikes me that the author didn’t truly contemplate generations beyond anyone’s immediate parents. Also, actually knowing how brainwashing functions would be really critical for writing evil characters or at least the “good” partners or descendants of such. And well, don’t bring up slavery if yer not committed to examining that nonsense.
Actually, now that we’ve seen the stupid rose scene and the snaring of the Tamlin scene, I just keep thinking that Maas wanted to write BDSM but she’s not knowledgeable enough to do so, which is how we get stupid stuff like this. That second bit I feel like she either had begun separate and pasted in but forgot about connecting to the story or maybe that was the first thing she wrote before trying to write the stuff leading up to it and forgot to tie it in properly (because of the park) or maybe she accidentally deleted some of it and didn’t even notice. IDK.
Also it’d be more bearable for Feyre to not listen to people if she actually suffered a little bit for not doing so. Doesn’t have to be a lot but if she ya know had a good reason to feel stupid because she panicked, was noticed, and that suddenly kicked things into high gear. I guess also the other problem for why she doesn’t want to listen is the author can’t make up their mind if she trusts who ever it is so then there’s a huge disconnect like when you pointed out about her not listening regarding the Suriel and stuff. See, it’d be different if we actually knew who was trustworthy and who at least was an uncertainty where the text confirmed it. You just can’t have political intrigue with sudden betrayals if nothing is consistent and I think that’s what she’s aiming for which is a very bad sign.
In general, yeah, I feel like Tamlin and Lucien are both kinda empty but they’re bringing so much more to the table than Feyre is right now it’s frustrating. I really wish Feyre had instead been enticed by that cult which was correct and then she spent her life being a nun who painted pictures in books for rich people before she met these boys; like her sisters were already married and the Cult was helping her care for her father after she took her vows and shit. Maybe it’d be boring but it’d still be more interesting than what we already got and she’d think about her family a lot less that’s for sure. IDK how she’d relate to them but I don’t even care. Killing Andras was a terrible idea. This can’t be worse… it just can’t. And then you know what?! FEYRE WOULD FEEL JUSTIFIED WHEN IT TURNS OUT THE CULT IS RIGHT ABOUT THE FAERIES. Also her telling the fucking cult about the Blight makes way more sense. WTF is her stupid useless family going to do? What will the Blight even do to humans if nothing anyway? IDK I don’t care but for fuck sake at least then NO ONE would go “oh but she’s just Belle” because BELLE WASN’T A NUN.
for fuck sake it’d be sexier too. IDK if it’d piss off the religious Christian nutters but damn. It can’t be worse can it??
I guess I should clarify, I know the text TOLD US the Suriel was fucking trust-worthy but yeah how she instantly second-guesses even it instead of Lucien when she should’ve and then other times she doesn’t trust Lucien or Tamlin which is all inconsistent and just creates endless confusion. You can’t have a plot twist if there’s no reason to feel confident in your assumptions but then the realization MUST also make a lot of sense. UGH this book makes me insane. I hate it. I’m learning a lot from Jenny’s commentary but the book itself is so irritating.
Although the idea of Tamlin’s model glitching inside of Feyre’s amuses me, I forgot to mention that lol
Well, you wouldn’t need sexual celibacy to be part of the cult’s vows. Not unless you had a good reason for it.
There are plenty of other vows someone can take for their religion: poverty, abstaining from certain foods, abstaining from alcohol or other recreational drugs, or (and this is the one I think has the best plot potential) services to the community.
Oh there you go! Services to the community all the way. Sorry, I just said “nun” because I couldn’t be assed to check what they were actually called lol. This not only makes perfect sense but really makes me wish she’d gone this route! It does everything she wanted while allowing her to be Not Like Other Girls except maybe she won’t martyr herself as annoyingly since the Cult sees this as a blessing. Maybe she has Imposter Syndrome or something? Or just yanno do away with that aspect please and thanks.
…So, I know I gave Maas a pass for using “Hell”, because many religions have sections of the afterlife devoted to punishment, and the terms for them are usually translated as “hell”.
HOWEVER.
Not every “Bad Place” afterlife includes fire or burning. IIRC, the Norse Helheim is often described as being *cold*.
So yeah, defaulting to a Hell of fire and brimstone is lazy, especially considering this society has at least one ritual involving sacred fires.
I really don’t get this laziness. One of the fun things about writing a different society and/or religion is coming up with new and interesting ways for characters to cuss each other out! A religion I came up with for a RPG setting believed that people’s souls went into the womb of the earth to be reborn, so one of the worst things you could say to someone was, “Earth spit up your bones!”
Oooooh that’s fun! “Earth spit up your bones!” I like that, works perfectly; good setting integration indeed.
I suspect if Maas was erring on the side of some Christian nuttiness then she probably can’t actually swear… much. Which means calling the Cultist ladies “whores” was only okay because they willingly want to go to the faeries and fuck. I wouldn’t have suspected because of Feyre banging Egg Boy but maybe Maas felt okay slipping that past the religious censors since Feyre didn’t “truly” seem to enjoy that… even though she did it for some reason. Compulsive heterosexuality at its finest! Before we’re presented with the umm… uhhh… muscle-dudes. Who are totally sexy of course! Only muscles can ever be sexy. Nothing else about being healthy and strong or other parts like okay I’ll admit I like softer guys and body builders are meh but apparently most women DO want guys that aren’t as rippling as men would like to see rippling so clearly women do like some fat deposits, just enough to be cuddly and carry the muscle along. lol I admit I mostly pay attention to strong ladies they always look hot to me and they’re not exactly chiselled unless they dehydrate hard. So strong but snuggly please and I’ll take Dad and Mom bods as well I will. (I’m old enough lol.) But I do confess it’s not our fault it’s more society’s for trying to impress upon us that men don’t get sexualized therefore they’re only a dick and nothing else can be marveled at except at a distance and like it’s a prize horse… NO STOP ADMIRING THOSE BALLS HOW DARE YOU lol
Actually I read an article that said even though some movies/media have become more willing to show a guy’s dick in non-X-rated stuff, it’s often not his real dick because focusing all of the sexuality and power on the phallus is part of the patriarchy’s design so the real thing can never match up to the ideal. I’d hunt it down but for anyone interested it might be myth of the phallus or something like that. Specifically phallus and movies and fake should bring it up I think. If not I can search my bookmarks!
Thanks. ^_^
Personally, I think the word “muscled” is vague enough that the reader can (and probably does) substitute in whatever amount they find attractive. ISTR reading that most women tend to prefer more of a smoothly-muscled build, closer to a swimmer than a bodybuilder, though of course there are exceptions.
I can’t help but compare this with Kit Rocha’s Beyond series, in which there are a variety of male leads with different kinds of attractiveness, from “beefy biker” to “dapper adonis”. Maas gives us very little description of her male characters aside from hair colour and some vague references to muscle. Is he broad-shouldered? Is he wiry? We have no idea.
Also worth noting: as I understand it, bodybuilding is a sort of athletic performance art in which someone transforms their physique to match a particular aesthetic and practices showy, short-burst feats of strength. They frequently lack stamina. (Also, the exaggeratedly “cut” look is achieved through dehydration.)
If you want someone really useful on moving day, look for people with some body fat.
Right! They might actually have better stamina in the off-season when they aren’t dehydrated like crazy. But yeah the muscle helps the fat with actually performing the work. That’s why people who think you can’t have any are also clearly going for pure aesthetics and IMHO there’s a line… for me I just can’t stand seeing someone’s rib cage.
Oh, another fun fact, apparently six packs are somewhat arbitrary and might be more genetic than exercise-based. Like some people might work out like crazy but it just doesn’t really show in that way. That’s what I’ve read anyhow!
That’s true. Ha ha sorry you worded that much better than I did. And yes that’s the thing, it helps conveying a general overall archetype and/or focusing on certain areas. Is Tamlin built like Popeye?? We’d never know!
HEROIC DORITO!
I want to ask Maas if the contest was also to write the worst “limericks,” because beyond the laziness of having limericks (and calling them limericks) in a universe that does not contain their namesake, the definition of a limerick is pretty darn simple, and she failed utterly to meet it.
A limerick should have:
– Five lines
– In anapestic meter
– With an AABBA rhyme scheme
– In which the A-rhymed lines contain three metrical feet and the B-rhymed lines contain two.
Tamlin’s “limerick” isn’t in anapestic meter. It’s not in ANY consistent meter. The A rhymes don’t rhyme (“beautiful” and “refusal” aren’t even close). It can sort of squeak by as having approximately the right number of feet per line if you ignore the fact that they aren’t friggin’ feet because there’s no consistent meter in the first place. Pretty much the only part of the definition that sorry excuse for a poem actually managed to comply with was “five lines.” By that standard, Tamlin could fart fourteen times and then declare that he’d just written Feyre a perfect sonnet.
For comparison, here is an actual limerick. It is not particularly good, because I wrote it in roughly two minutes. It is still miles better than Tamlin’s limerick, because it IS a limerick:
In this book, there’s a “hero” called Feyre
Whose name sounds too stupid to say-re.
“Look, a thing I can’t paint!
My folks suck! I’m a saint!”
She complains, fifty times every day-re.
It is depressing that the supposed “limerick” in this bestselling novel seems to be meant to make us think, “Wow, how charming and clever the hero is!” and not, “Wow, no one involved in the production of this book bothered to spend even two minutes coming up with a limerick that actually rhymed and scanned properly.” I wouldn’t care if Maas had just added an extra syllable somewhere or had one imperfect rhyme, but I do not understand why no editor said, “Have you considered putting even the tiniest bit of effort into the limerick? Or, better yet, have you considered not having your hero write a limerick in the first place, both because Limerick isn’t a place in this book’s universe and because literally any other poetic form makes more sense as a medium for romantic gestures than one that a whole lot of readers will primarily associate with men from Nantucket and the things they can do with certain unusually large parts of their anatomy?”
There once was an author named Sarah
Who wrote of a heroine, Feyre
The work was not hot
put they paid her a lot
So I took a fork to my sclera.
That put was supposed to be but, but I think we’re all aware that I’m never clear-headed while typing.
That’s okay! We’ll pretend the “put” is a biblically accurate nod to Sarah’s editor dying from alcohol poisoning ala a Monty Python Sketch. It’s still a million times better plus you used one of my favorite words that autocorrect never recognizes: sclera!
Bwa hahaha! Yes, I don’t even have to scroll back up to find Sarah’s poem to confirm yours is still better.
I’m glad you also brought that up because I was too lazy and exhausted by the irritation this book causes to even double-check how those are supposed to work after Jenny pointed it out. I honestly wonder if someone else mentioned sonnets to Sarah and how it’d be cool to tie that into the letter and then Sarah thought about how funny limericks are (or maybe she just sincerely thought a limerick was any funny poem IDK the woman uses a thesaurus clearly) but she didn’t follow up with format after hammering home the first draft.
The editor, who had lost patience chapters ago, simply said “Why is this here? We could remove these bits about the park entirely.” And then if she actually deleted any part of that section it wasn’t all of it. But my best guess is she argued “oh that’s to show how Feyre likes him now.” And maybe nothing changed.
I mean, maybe none of that happened; I could be entirely off the mark. But I could see some of it happening that way. It’s definitely one of those ideas that probably seemed great at the time and she put some minor effort into connecting a few scattered dots but it never made a clear picture.
I also swear I feel like her snaring him and being smug is from something else too but all I can think of is Nani catching Lilo who hid in the dryer which absolutely isn’t the vibes lol. I do keep getting an image of Mulan too but I don’t think that’s in that movie so I’m really blanking. It’s probably not Disney at all but my brain keeps going there. Maybe Tarzan?? Did it happen in Hunger Games? Or that 90’s tv show about Beauty and the Beast? I got nothin’.
Maybe it’s just so generic that I feel like I’ve seen it. I’ll be honest, the snare thing could’ve been hot if it was actual BDSM play. Although the fact that she murdered Andras and that she also snared the Suriel kind of… dampens this. The former because whoa and the second because how cool would it have been if instead of murdering Andras she accidentally caught or found Tamlin and immediately freed him because she didn’t want to risk breaking the treaty?? So he’s lingering and she’s like treating him like a stray, trying to make him leave without being cruel. And then she found out later the reason he was in her snare is because he just wanted to introduce himself to her but he got nervous?? YES IT’S SILLY and DUBIOUS MEET CUTE but by the BLACK CAULDRON it’s so much better!
I hope you don’t mind me asking this, I mean, I am only reading theseposts for the fun of seeing you administer a bloody good kicking to a piece of crap, it’s not like I’m ever going to see the actual book, let along read it, but we’re 19 chapters in and you say that’s about two-fifths of the book, so I have to ask: is there any risk of a story happening?
I only ask out of curiosity.
Hi, you mentioned that when Feyre is painting and spiraling about her family that “the passage really would be a good insight into depression, anxiety, or any number of other hateful brain diseases that trick people. Instead, it’s just another poor me, I’m so mistreated moment in a long line of self-pitying passages.”
I fully appreciate that. But I wondered if you had any advice for how to convey the presence of a hateful brain disease without having an endlessly self-pitying character a-la Feyre, an appearance of poor characterization (confident brain vs anxiety/depression brain)?
So far, I’ve come up with “self-awareness” — “oh whoops, this feels like a downward spiral with my brain telling me some nasty shit, better engage in coping skills and hope I can talk myself back out of it” or interference from a secondary character — “babe, you appear to be suffering from anxiety or depression and that’s alarming let’s get you some help” (please reader don’t go anywhere, it doesn’t last!!!)
Either way, I think I’ve only read a few books with pronounced and prolonged mental health difficulties that were acknowledged as such, and they were really difficult to get through because it reminded me of when I was in that position myself. But it would be great to have more representation of poor mental health that can be tempered with a character we can root for instead of someone like Feyre who, it feels like, victimizes herself so much that it’s difficult to offer her sympathy for those circumstances in which she could truly use it — like losing her entire family and realizing that their grief is disparate or that she might be in a situation she doesn’t understand and is being manipulated by the person with superior knowledge and control of the situation.
I’m not Jenny but I think a mix of self-awareness, as you noted (even if it’s not codified by modern terminology) and just… having good days, bad days, and neutral days on top of keeping it all brief would help. Explaining how those can differ when it feels poignant and then summarizing and doing time-skips might be a good way to keep pacing decent without simply getting bogged down into repetition while still showing a passage of time and hopelessness? Maybe!
I think one of the main problems here is that it’s possible the author is trying to show that depressed mindset but failing because nothing really happens or changes until it suddenly inexplicably DOES which just ends up confusing. The simple fact everything is inconsistent means it’s really hard to peg Feyre’s internal monologues, constant waffling, and never getting anything done as a mental illness/trauma versus the author simply failing to write an engaging story.
The word “core” as a euphemism is making me beg for the return of “inner goddess”. I don’t know how it’s worse to me, but somehow it’s worse. It’s up there with “center”.
> I used to think fanfic was a good place for people to learn to write but damn, not if they’re not gonna bother to learn the difference in conventions between writing fanfic and writing original fiction.
I wish. Most of the stuff in my AO3 bookmarks is miles better than this. Written by people who seem actually aware of pacing and shit.
> Why is she just assuming that’s gonna be a possibility? Why is she even wondering about it? They’ve flirted a little, we know they’ve spent time together off-screen, and now she’s like, wondering if they could be soulmates?
This is probably 80% of the reason I hate this romance. Feyre speedruns hating the entirety of humankind to realising they’re just (magical, extremely powerful) people to idly entertaining thoughts of long-term romance with one. It doesn’t work, it just doesn’t. Either her hatred of them was so insubstantial that overcoming it isn’t significant, or she overcame it in a way that feels cheap and unearned, and thus not meaningful.
> Such a brutal, harsh world—with families killing each other for power, for revenge, for spite and control.
SJM didn’t invent this shitty trope, fantasy authors far more established and respected are mired in it. Basically every piece of worldbuilding to include “evil elves” is guilty of it. But fuck it, I’ll never stop complaining about how stupid this trope is.
You can have a savage, warlike people that don’t value life and where even family can’t be trusted, or you can have a long-lived people who live for centuries and have maybe one child per century. You can’t really have both – or rather, you can, but not without a SHITTON more worldbuilding to make it work and probably ending up with a society that’s going to be drastically unlike a human one.
I hate it so much when this happens, not only is it lazy AF, it also makes the whole worldbuilding extremely surface-level by extension, in a way that makes fanon very difficult as well. My first blorbo in life was a character like this. It was such a headache to try to give him any more background beyond the text. Like, some bits of weak writing or plotting or worldbuilding lend themselves well to reader creativity and patching the holes; that is why some of the most active fandoms are based on source material that’s actually kinda bad. But this? This is not one of them. I take extra offense at bad writing when it makes it harder to love the material in spite of its flaws.