A Court of Jealousy and Haters: ACOTAR chapter 31 or “Extreme Urkel Vibes”

I’m shamelessly plugging my new Fantasy Romance serial in the intro to an unrelated post. Join the new Patreon tier or my Ream page , or read it on Kindle Vella.

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.

This chapter opens at the ball in Feyre’s honor, which she isn’t enjoying because she keeps thinking about Tamlin.

I’d known something was wrong. I’d known he was in trouble––not just with the blight on Prythian, but also that the forces gathering to destroy him were deadly, and yet … and yet I’d stopped looking for answers, stopped fighting it, glad––so selfishly glad––to be able to set down that savage, wild part of me that had only survived hour to hour.

I’m not sure Feyre is living in the same book we’re all reading, because I don’t remember the part in Prythian where Feyre was “savage” or “wild” or surviving “hour to hour.” I remember her making a lot of bad choices and then just wearing pretty dresses and painting. There was never once, even with all the mentions of how the blight is going to get there soon, really soon, this is super scary, Maas promises it’s super scary, oooh, get ready for your pulse to pound, a time when Feyre’s mortality hung suspended on the whims of the moment.

And let’s discuss that sentence up above. Yes. It’s a single sentence. Go check. Writing Tip: stating something, then making an em dash, then stating the same thing again but in italics, and putting in a ellipses of suspense isn’t a substitute for paying attention to the shit you already wrote. ed.—And yet, it is now the prevailing style in the Romantasy genre.

I’d let him send me home. I hadn’t tried harder to piece together the information I’d gathered about the blight or Amarantha; I hadn’t tried to save him.

What information?! The entire time she was in Prythian we kept getting these excuses about how, well, the plot is happening over here but Feyre can’t get any answers about it, ho hum, let’s go to the magical lake of liquid mercury or whatever. Oh, now it’s time for a party. And another party. But damn, nothing about the plot because Feyre just can’t get any information on it.

And Lucien … Lucien had known it, too––and shown it in his bitter words on my last day, his disappointment in me.

Which I also do not understand. Lucien hasn’t been present for most of the book. He’s mentioned a lot, but usually in excuses as to why he’s not in a scene. There’s never really been an interaction between Feyre and Lucien that made me think he somehow believed in her or had faith that she would save them.

There’s a paragraph about how late the party goes and what time Feyre and Nesta and Elain leave and that’s a wrap on the ball. Seriously, the ball happens for no reason. There’s no dialogue there, no plot events happen, it’s just Feyre saying, this was what the ball was like, anyway, the next day…

What was the point of talking about the ball for like a whole chapter prior to this?

But whatever. It’s the next day and Feyre and her family are at lunch when her father says:

“I’m thinking of buying the Beddor land,” my father was saying to Elain, who was the only one of us listening to him. “I heard a rumor it’ll go up for sale soon, since none of the family survived, and it would be a good investment property. Perhaps one of you girls might build a house on it when you’re ready.”

I FUCKING KNEW IT! I FUCKING KNEW FEYRE WAS GOING TO GET THAT FAMILY FULL-TIME DEADED!

But what a fucking gruesome thing to say to your daughters. Yeah, you know your friend whose family burned to death? One day, you could build your home on the ashes of the place where they perished horribly.

Thanks, dad.

Feyre is like, oh no, what happened to them and like, put two-and-two together, please. You know someone’s house burned down, your dad is like hey, I’m gonna buy this specific family’s land because everyone is dead, and you can’t figure it out?

“Their house burned down, and everybody died. Well, they couldn’t find Clare’s body, but …” She looked down at her plate. “It happened in the dead of night––the family, their servants, everyone. The day before you came home to us, actually.”

“Clare Beddor,” I said slowly.

Yeah, boo, you did that.

“Our friend, remember?” Elain said.

Thanks for the reminder, Elain.

No––no, it couldn’t be possible. It had to be a coincidence––had to be a coincidence, because the alternative…

I feel like having a conversation with Sarah J. Maas would be like:

SJM: So, then I had to go stop by the bank––the bank, where money is kept––because…

You: Because… what?

SJM: Because, if I didn’t…

You: If you didn’t, what would happen?

SJM: I wouldn’t have any cash––wouldn’t have anything to pay for all these Girl Scout cookies with… Girl Scout cookies I want to buy…

You: So. Are we like, done here? Or is there more? You keep trailing off and staring into the distance.

I’ve never had a conversation with her, though, so this is all speculation. ed.—It is my deepest hope for my life that I never have to speak to her, either. Because I would not have nice things to say.

I had given that name to Rhysand.

You sure did.

And he had not forgotten it.

Well, considering he showed up and you left the next day, it sounds like he didn’t have much time to forget. It kinda sounds like he went directly from Tamlin’s house to Clare Beddor’s house and killed her whole family.

Except for Clare, who wasn’t found.

So, did they assume Clare, in the human world, was Feyre, whom Rhysand had just seen in Prythian? Remember, it takes two days to get from Prythian to where Feyre lives. Let’s say, for the sake of keeping shit straight, Rhysand was at Tamlin’s house on a Monday. Feyre then leaves on Tuesday morning and arrives at home on Thursday. That would mean the Beddors died on Wednesday…so Rhysand would have, what, departed Tamlin’s manor immediately after finding Feyre and run off to the human world to…find Feyre? This doesn’t make any sense at all. 

Oh, Jenny. Stop trying to make sense of this steaming pile. You are sorting through sewage looking for diamonds. There won’t be diamonds. There won’t even be cubic zirconia. There’s just gonna be more turds.

I pushed back against the guilt, the disgust and terror.

Must be nice to just “push back” those bad feelings after getting an innocent family killed. Which, by the way, I’m not giving her any leeway like, “but she panicked and just said a name!” or anything like that. She had time to think around for a name and she deliberately chose that one. She could have said “Val Gina” or “Dick Johnson,” literally anything but a real person’s name. To me, her inability to grasp the possible consequences of the situation is proof that Feyre is just not as clever and resourceful as the author wants us to think Feyre is.

I had to get answers––had to know if it had been a coincidence, or if I might yet be able to save Clare.

IF IT HAD BEEN A COINCIDENCE?!

Feyre comes to the conclusion that something terrible must have happened with the blight in Prythian because:

Faeries. They had come over the wall and left no trace behind.

They burned down a house and the entire town is talking about it. What the fuck do you mean, they left no trace? And this isn’t the first time. Andras was across the wall when Feyre shot him. Tamlin crossed the wall to find Feyre and drag her back to Prythian. And if we’re talking about leaving no trace, he did it and made everyone in the village forget where she went or that her family was ever poor.

Feyre tells Nesta that everything they’ve talked about with regards to Prythian has to stay secret, and of course Elain and their dad are like, come again? Because they’re still under the glamour.

I’d never learned what warning signs Tamlin had instilled in their glamours to prod my family to run, but I wasn’t going to risk relying solely on them. Not when Clare had been taken, her family murdered…because of me.

Did we even know that these flight triggers were installed in the glamour in the first place?

Feyre instructs Nesta to force the family to run away the second they hear of anything happening at the wall. Like, even if they just get a weird feeling, they’re supposed to get on a ship and go wherever it is that fairies wouldn’t want to go.

My father and Elain began blinking, as if clearing some fog from their minds––as if emerging from a deep sleep.

In other news, I used an em dash in my own writing yesterday and physically gagged. ed.—I wrote a particularly ellipses-heavy scene the other day and wanted to die, but there was no other way.

Nesta wants to know if there’s going to be an invasion, and Feyre tells her all about the blight, which I guess she omitted when she told her everything in the previous chapter? I was under the impression that Nesta had heard “everything,” since those were the words that the author used. I’m starting to get the sense that with hugely popular books like this, thinking too hard about the actual words on the page will ruin the experience.

Feyre goes to her room and changes into practical tactical man clothes, and Nesta tells her:

“Father once told you to never come back,” Nesta said, “and I’m telling you now. We can take care of ourselves.”

Shockingly, Feyre doesn’t find this insulting and we don’t have to hear about how awful Nesta is. Feyre gets her weapons and tells her sister:

“They can lie,” I said, giving her information I hoped she would never need. “Faeries can lie, and iron doesn’t bother them one bit. But ash wood––that seems to work. Take my money and buy a damned grove of it for Elain to tend.”

Remember at the beginning of the book, when Feyre said the faeries burned all the ash trees and she’s never seen one? Pepperidge Farm might remember, but Sarah J. Maas does not.

Nesta asks Feyre what she thinks she can do if the faeries can’t even fight off the blight themselves, and Feyre is like, good question, idk, but I’m still gonna go. She encourages Nesta to go out and find a better life. Then there’s a section break for no reason whatsoever and Feyre is walking out of the house. Elain tells her that the glamour is gone and she can now remember what really happened, and their father doesn’t come out to say goodbye to Feyre because he’s probably too busy being greedy and crippled.

That’s not in the book, I’m just being mean.

Then, Feyre leaves.

I had to go back––had to see what had happened, had to tell Tamlin everything that was in my heart before it was too late.

Oh, see, I thought she was riding off to help. She’s just riding off to save her relationship or whatever.

Let’s talk about horses in fantasy novels. Feyre says she “rode all day and stopped only when it was too dark for me to see.” Then:

I rode all of the second day, slept fitfully, and was off before first light.

While I am still skeptical that the author did not have a pony as a child, this is a common thing that happens with fantasy novels. People act like horses are just cars and they can keep going and going as much as you need them to. But they’re like…animals? And they have to rest? And eat? And drink water? After about eight hours with a rider on its back, on really uneven forest ground, a horse is going to be exhausted and at higher risk for injury.

I’m not saying I need to hear every little detail about Feyre watering her horse or feeding it or whatever. And I’m not saying Maas is the only person who ever did this in a fantasy novel. This is a problem across the board in most books with medieval-lite settings. Just because your main character needs to get somewhere and is willing to travel for twenty hours straight, that doesn’t mean their horse can or will do so.

And yes, horses will refuse to keep going if they’re tired. And people are not big enough or strong enough to argue with a stubborn horse. If you get a horse that will do this kind of nonstop, strenuous travel? It’s gonna work itself to death and you’ll have no horse.

In conclusion, Horses: they’re not cars

Feyre reaches the wall and it’s this invisible force, not an actual physical barrier that you can see.

But the faeries came and went through it––through holes, rumor claimed.

Not to be picky here but is it really a rumor if it’s something you have literally experienced? Or is it just what the fuck happens?

Feyre walks for two whole days testing the damn wall like she’s a velociraptor and finally, clever girl, she finds a gate formed by two stones with symbols carved into them. But what I’m thinking is, okay, once she gets into Prythian, how is she going to find the Spring Court? She doesn’t know where she––

Magic stung my nostrils, zapping until my horse bucked again, but we were through.

I knew these trees.

Oh. Well. That’s convenient. The gate leads right into the woods around Tamlin’s manor. What are the odds?

I rode in silence, an arrow nocked and ready, the threats lurking in the forest far greater than those in the woods I’d just left.

At some point, I’m going to have to stop pointing out the number of times we’ve heard that mortal weapons won’t do shit against faeries but that day…is not today.

Tamlin might be furious––he might command me to turn around and go home. But I would tell him that I was going to help, tell him that I loved him and would fight for him however I could, even if I had to tie him down and make him listen.

Tied up and forced to listen to Feyre talk? Worst. BDSM. Ever.

I became so intent on contemplating how I might convince him not to start roaring that I didn’t immediately notice the quiet––how the birds didn’t sing, even as I drew closer to the manor itself, how the hedges of the estate looked in need of a trim.

The forest is always quiet. Like, that was one of the things that was pointed out to make it scarier.

The manor is a mess, bro. The gates are all torn open and the doors are off the hinges.

I dismounted, arrow still at the ready. But there was no need. Empty––it was utterly empty here. Like a tomb.

Tombs aren’t empty. They have dead people and cool skeletons in them.

It looked as if an army had marched through. Tapestries hung in shreds, the marble banister was fractured, and the chandeliers lay broken on the ground, reduced to mounds of shattered crystal.

So, did the blight hit, or what? Feyre doesn’t even have that thought, like, oh no, is it the blight? Which was my first thought, as a reader. I skimmed the next chapter and it doesn’t look like she ever even questions whether or not it could have been the blight (but like I said, I skimmed).

Feyre calls out for Tamlin and Lucien but nobody comes.

Alone in the wreckage of the manor, I sank to my knees.

He was gone.

Hopefully for good, but whatever.

If this seems like another really short chapter, don’t worry; the next one is like twenty pages of pure info dump. No joke. It’s literally twenty pages of Alis of just telling Feyre (and the reader) every single detail that could have been slowly doled out over the rest of the god damn book when nothing was happening otherwise. You are going to be infuriated, probably. I know I am, just thinking about having to slog through it. ed.—Honestly, it’s so painful that just thinking about reposting that chapter is making tired. I’m reliving the mental hell that was navigating that chapter, so…buckle the fuck up.