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.
Thanks everybody, for your patience with me while I took a week off to finish up the Radish Original I was working on. I hope your saint-like demeanor will extend to the material we’re recapping, so you don’t give up. ed.—That Radish Original I refer to is Taken By The Alpha King, a werewolf Urban Fantasy which last time I checked had seven million views on the platform. And good news! The first three seasons are available as a paperback or e-book wherever paperbacks and ebooks are sold, so you might wanna go and check that out if you like werewolves and books that harken back to the ’00s Urban Fantasy boom.
Don’t leave me here in the dark. Alone. With this book.
As per the end of the last chapter, Feyre is being dragged off to the first task.
My armed escort didn’t bother with drawn weapons as they tugged me forward. I wasn’t even shackled. Someone or something would catch me before I moved three feet and gut me where I stood.
In the last chapter, Feyre was memorizing all the cracks in the walls so she could make a clever escape somehow. This chapter, she’s unbound and the guards dragging her haven’t bothered with weapons. Seems like a good time to make a break for it, right? To just run off and save your life, since that’s what Tamlin wanted you to do in the first place?
But no, it’s hopeless, she would be killed the moment she tried!
It’s this back and forth that has consistently ruined any sense of drama or suspense throughout the story. In her first days at the manor, we were told that she had no chance of surviving a matter of minutes in the woods. But then she needed to go to the woods, where the creatures that we were told she had absolutely no chance of surviving an encounter with lived, and she ran into those creatures, and she survived. Then, she would be in grave danger at the festival. She went, survived, and was invited to the next festival (which makes zero sense in hindsight; why wouldn’t Tamlin have kept her presence totally secret so Amarantha wouldn’t have known Feyre was there in the first place?). She was for sure going to die making her way Under the Mountain. She didn’t. Everything in this book that is potentially deadly isn’t deadly. Feyre will always be conveniently rescued from danger or the danger will simply decide not to be dangerous.
So, I don’t buy for a moment that she can’t try an escape here without getting killed. I just don’t believe it. At this point, there are zero stakes and no reason whatsoever for me to believe that she’s in any danger at all.
Which is the space you really want your reader to be in when they’re coming into what should be one of the most exciting scenes in the book.
They take Feyre to a big cave that’s coated with mud like this is Woodstock ’99, and it’s full of about the same kind of crowd. They’re spooky, shouting, and “feral.”
I was hauled toward a wooden platform erected above the crowd. Atop it sat Amarantha and Tamlin, and before it …
I want an audiobook version of this where every ellipse are read out loud as “dun dun duuuuhn!”
I did my best to keep my chin high as I beheld the exposed labyrinth of tunnels and trenches running along the floor. The crowd stood along the banks, blocking my view of what lay within as I was thrown to my knees before Amarantha’s platform.
Love the neat trick of Feyre being able to see something that’s blocked from her view.
Around the platform stood a group of six males, secluded from the main crowd. From their cold, beautiful faces, from that echo of power still about them, I knew they were the other High Lords of Prythian. I ignored Rhysand as soon as I noticed his feline smile, the corona of darkness around him.
Since coronas, astronomically speaking, are fields of gaseous plasma, I’m going to imagine Rhysand walking around in a fart cloud at all times.
I can’t possibly be the only person who keeps forgetting the difference between High Lord and High Fae, can I? I know we’ve been reading this book for a long time but I just feel like I should be able to keep them straight.
“Well, Feyre,” the Faerie Queen said. I tried not to look at the hand she rested on Tamlin’s knee, that ring as vulgar as the gesture itself. “Your first task is here. Let us see how deep that human affection of yours runs.”
Putting your hand on Feyre’s boyfriend’s knee is just as bad as killing someone and trapping their soul in their eyeball and putting it in a ring you wear around so you can enjoy their eternal suffering.
You know what’s funny? If Feyre doesn’t guess the answer to the riddle (it’s love, the answer is love), then it won’t matter if she does all these tasks. Amarantha can just say sorry, you’re not worthy because you did these three heroic things and you still couldn’t figure out what love is, or something like that.
Amarantha tells Feyre that she’d learned some stuff about her (she can do the research on Feyre but not figure out her name?) and says Feyre will like the first task and tells her to look into the labyrinth.
The trenches, probably twenty feet deep, were slick with mud—in fact, they seemed to have been dug from mud.
Why, Sarah? Why must you continue with the em-dashes?
The trenches ran in a maze along the entire floor of the chamber, and their path made little sense.
You just explained what a maze is. You sat there at your computer, writing a book allegedly meant for adults and explained what a maze is. That’s a choice that you made, Sarah. That’s a choice that you made after describing it once already and using the word “labyrinth” to do so.
I don’t know Sarah J. Maas. I will very likely never, ever meet her. ed.—I will do everything humanly possible to avoid ever being within three miles of her. But I guarantee that this is the work of someone who is always the smartest person in the room, no matter where she goes.
In the maze, there are pitfalls and such, and Feyre thinks there might be underground tunnels. But as Sarah is describing all of this to us, the Attor scoops Feyre up and flies her down into the maze and drops her there. From her floating platform, Amarantha says:
“Rhysand tells me you’re a huntress,” she said, and my heartbeat faltered.
He must have read my thoughts again, or … or maybe he’d found my family, and—
Amarantha flicked her fingers in my direction. “Hunt this.”
Something is going to attack Feyre, but let’s stop a minute. Feyre. You know how they got that information. They have Tamlin and Lucien and a mind reader. That is how they got the information. Why is this even a question? Not a single damn reader questioned how she knew this stuff. ed.—Then again, this morning my FB memories reminded me of a reader who complained to me that I “used a bigger font” to make one of my books seem longer, and she was reading the ebook version and was in total control of the font size, so I assume that’s who we’re talking about when discussing an audience for Maas’s work.
There are some faeries placing bets around the edge of the pit and Feyre takes a last look at Tamlin with painting terms, and Amarantha orders some kind of creature to be released. Feyre hears something scraping open, then a slithering noise, then she feels the vibrations of something rushing at her, but she’s smart enough to know that this won’t look as good on Hulu if she’s proactive. She stays stock still until:
Amarantha clicked her tongue, and I whipped my head to her. Her brows rose. “Run,” she whispered.
Then it appeared.
I ran.
You know SJM was writing that part and thinking, “This will be in the trailer.”
It was a giant worm, or what might have once been a worm had its front end not become an enormous mouth filled with ring after ring of razor-sharp teeth. It barreled toward me, its pinkish brown body surging and twisting with horrific ease. These trenches were its lair.
This chapter was clearly directed by Joss Whedon. Holy penis monster. ed.—Be sure to check out my ongoing rewatch of Buffy the Vampire Slayer over on YouTube.
It’s weird that having teeth somehow makes it an ex-worm, though.
There’s a lot of description of sliding in the mud and how bad the mud stinks that I’ll be skipping as we go through. The thing is, this is a chapter in which the heroine is being chased by a giant worm and somehow, SJM has managed to make it painfully slow. Just be aware that Feyre is running and there’s mud and it stinks.
I had to get as much distance between us as possible; I had to find a spot where I could make a plan, a spot where I could find an advantage.
Oh, you and your plans. You always need to make plans, and then the plans you make aren’t revealed to us even as you’re enacting those plans. I love your stupid, useless plans.
The worm is like, right on her ass no matter how many turns she takes or how fast she runs, and the fairies are cheering on the worm while they all watch her from above. She makes the mistake of looking over her shoulder as she runs:
I almost missed a slender opening in the side of the trench thanks to that look, and I gave up valuable steps as I skidded to a halt to squeeze myself through the gap. It was too small for the worm, but the creature could probably shatter through the mud If not, its teeth could do the trick. But it was worth the risk.
Of course, it can get through the mud. This is its lair. How did it get a lair if it couldn’t get through the mud to make the lair?
The crack was too small, and I’d so frantically thrown myself through it that I’d become wedged between it. My back to the worm, and too far between the walls to be able to turn, I couldn’t see it as it approached. The smell though—the smell was growing worse.
Here’s the part of the chapter I had the most difficult time visualizing and understanding. When I read the excerpt before this last one, I assumed she had been upright when she went into the crack, and her shoulders are pinned. But then:
The trenches reverberated with the thunderous movements of the worm. I could almost feel its reeking breath upon my half-exposed body, could hear those teeth slashing through the air, closer and closer.
Is she on her stomach? Is that why she’s half-exposed? Otherwise, I can’t picture what’s being described here. Is she upright, facing straight forward, somehow deep enough that she’s pinned but shallow enough that her back is exposed? Or is she on her stomach and doing a half-Shawshank here?
That doesn’t matter. They’ll figure it out when this is adapted for the screen.
But put your vote in the comments.
Not like this. It couldn’t end like this.
Okay, but wouldn’t it be awesome if it did, though? If we all just went home right now and the book was over and Feyre was dead and we could all sleep peacefully knowing that the rest of the series just doesn’t exist?
Now, in case you’ve forgotten, there is mud around and it is smelly and the worm is smelly. I’m just letting you know because that’s what’s happening in the book. It’s the motif, if you will.
Feyre manages to dig her way through the crack and falls into a different corridor of the labyrinth.
I didn’t have time for tears of relief as I found myself in another passageway and I launched farther into the labyrinth. From the continuing quieted roars, I knew the worm had overshot me.
I have been able to make zero sense of this entire action sequence. It’s written like it was the last bit of the book that was worked on, like the author hurried back and quickly added it to make the deadline. It’s written like someone describing what happened in a movie they saw but only once and they were a very small child at the time. Scratch that. It reads like a very small child describing something they didn’t see in a movie, but they had a dream about it after they saw a little bit of a scary movie on TV.
Is the worm behind her, or did it go over her head? How did the worm “overshoot” her?
But that made no sense—the passage offered no place to hide. It would have seen me stuck there. Unless it couldn’t break through and was now taking some alternate route, and would spring upon me.
That’s what I’m saying! It makes no sense! But in fairness, that’s only because the author hasn’t accurately described shit like, idk, body position or generally where the worm was while Feyre was trying to dig her way through the crack. Because it sounded like it was right on her ass and now apparently it went right by her? But she’s somehow unaware that it went past her?
This is possibly the worst action sequence I have ever read in a book.
And I read Apolonia by Jamie McGuire.
Feyre’s still running, still taking turns fast and bouncing off the wall like she’s playing 200cc Mario Kart and she just got the starman power-up. The fairies who are watching are pretty disappointed that she hasn’t been eaten yet, and they’re also watching a totally different part of the maze, so Feyre knows that’s where the worm has gone. And then she’s like:
It was blind.
No shit?! NO SHIT?!
A WORM?!
BLIND?!
Feyre is so stunned by her awesome powers of deduction that she falls into a pit.
Gasping for breath, I fumbled a few steps into the blackness of the tunnel. I bit down my shriek as something beneath my foot crunched hard. I staggered back, and my tailbone wailed in pain. I kept scrambling away, but my hand connected with something smooth and hard, and I lifted it to see a gleam of white.
Guess what it is!
That’s right, she’s in a cave full of bones.
“Feyre,” I heard Amarantha’s distant call. “You’re ruining everyone’s fun!” She said it as if I were a lousy shuttlecock partner.
There is shuttlecock in this fantasy world.
Imagine having no limit on your imagination and still creating a world in which there is shuttlecock.
The worm didn’t know where I was; it couldn’t smell me.
How can she possibly know this?
As my sight adjusted to the darkness of the worm’s den, mounds and mounds of bones gleamed, piles rolling away into the gloom.
This is obviously where Feyre grabs some bones to fashion weapons for hunting the worm.
No, she just tries and fails several times to climb up the muddy wall. Then one of the fairies makes a joke about her needing a stepping stool.
A stepping stool.
I whirled toward the piles of bones, then pushed my hand hard against the wall. It felt firm. The entire place was made of packed mud, […]
Oh was it? You hadn’t mentioned that before, Sarah.
[…] and if this creature was anything like its smaller, harmless brethren, I could assume the stench—and therefore the mud itself—was the remnant of whatever had passed through its system after it sucked the bones clean.
There’s no reason we’re getting this lecture on how worms shit. It doesn’t come into play at all. But aren’t you glad that you know?
Disregarding that wretched fact, I seized the spark of hope and grabbed the two biggest, strongest bones I could quickly find.
Okay, Worm Biology 101 is over. Time to make weapons.
Both were longer than my leg and heavy—so heavy as I jammed them into the wall.
Oh, you’re making a ladder, then? All right, that’s fair—fair, as long as you also make something to defend yourself.
She keeps putting bones in the pit wall to climb up, but then she gets an even better idea!
It’s to make bones into weapons, right?
I drew the bone from my belt, and with a sharp intake of breath, I snapped it across my knee.
My own bones burned with pain, but the shaft broke, leaving me with two sharp-ended spikes. It was going to work.
If Amarantha wanted me to hunt, I would hunt.
Heck yeah! Armed with her sharp-ass bone knives, she climbs up from the pit and—
I walked to the middle of the pit opening, calculated the distance, and plunged the two bones into the ground. I returned back to the mound of bones and made quick work of whatever I could find that was sturdy and sharp.
Nevermind then. She cleverly makes the pit into a trap instead. Still acceptable, right?
One by one, I stuck them into the muddy floor beneath the pit opening until the whole area, save for one small spot, was filled with white lances.
Okay… if you’re getting a bad feeling about the one small spot, don’t worry. I had those feelings, as well.
And just like that, I heaved myself out of the pit mouth, and almost wept to be exposed to the open air once more.
But she’s not in the open air. She’s still in the labyrinth.
This book was NOT edited. I do not care what the author, publisher, fans might say. Not a damn person put their eyes on this book in a critical way before they shipped it off to the printer and bought up a place for it on the NYT list.
Then, for some reason, Feyre covers her entire body with mud.
If the creature was blind, then it relied on smell—and my smell would be my greatest weakness.
*wavy sitcom flashback transition*
The worm didn’t know where I was; it couldn’t smell me.
*wavy sitcom flash-forward transition*
Maybe it’s not smell, Feyre. Maybe it’s vibrations, and you need to walk without rhythm. Or maybe it senses body heat, like in Predator, the movie that was on in the background when Maas wrote this scene. But one thing we know for sure: this is a first draft, no one ever edited it, and anyone who genuinely enjoys this book needs to get their home tested for low-level carbon monoxide leaks.
BTW, this whole time? Where’s the fucking worm? She’s had time to build a bone ladder and a bone tiger pit, then do a full Schwarzenegger in the worm shit, and the worm is just off, idk, doing worm stuff?
“What’s it doing?” the green-faced faerie whined again.
A deep, elegant voice replied this time. “She’s building a trap.” Rhysand.
“But the Middengard—”
“Relies on its scent to see,” Rhysand answered, and I gave a special glower for him as I glanced at the rim of the trench and found him smiling at me. “And Feyre just became invisible.
*wavy sitcom flashback transition*
The worm didn’t know where I was; it couldn’t smell me.
*wavy sitcom flash-forward transition*
Also, the Middengard? Surely you don’t mean the Midgard, or Jörmungandr, the serpent who girdles the world, Sarah? I’m going to give the author the benefit of the doubt here and assume she’s literally named the worm “shitgardener” because I choose to believe that one thing, just one damn thing, in this book could bring me joy.
For reasons I cannot fathom, there is a full-on section break between this part and a direct continuation of the scene. It goes:
I made an obscene gesture before I broke into a run, heading straight for the worm.
Then a section break followed by:
I placed the remaining bones at especially tight corners, knowing well enough that I couldn’t turn at the speed I hoped I would be running.
Like, at what point do I stop saying “this book is bad” because I’m starting to feel like I’m repeating myself more than Feyre does.
And by the way, why did she run “straight for the worm” if she wasn’t done setting up this elaborate trap? And if she put the last of the bones she’d broken into the walls… does she not have any kind of rudimentary weapon or something?
The faeries watching the worm—ten of them, with frosty blue skin and almond-shaped black eyes—giggled. I could only assume they’d grown bored of me and decided to watch something else die.
Cool, more non-Aryan beings (with almond-shaped eyes, no less!) being savages. That’s rad.
Look, I’m not suggesting that it’s racist against blue people. It just suggests fucking racism to put every skin color except literally any tone of brown human skin, into your book and then make a rainbow of mindless brutality out of the beings who don’t look like elegant and beautiful white people.
So, the worm is eating something else while these fairies watch and… feed it.
Too covered in its scent to smell me, the worm continued feasting, stretching its bulbous form upward as one of the faeries dangled what looked like a hairy arm. The worm gnashed its teeth, and the blue faeries cackled as they dropped the arm into its waiting mouth.
Quick quesh: why is Amarantha letting her court feed and distract the worm that’s supposed to be killing Feyre? Isn’t the whole point of this that Feyre will almost certainly be eaten by the worm?
I recoiled around the bend and raised the bone-sword I’d made.
She just said she put “the remaining bones” in the walls. There has been no mention of a bone sword whatsoever.
The lack of continuity in this fucker is astounding.
Still, my heart lodged in my throat as I drew the jagged edge of the bone across my palm, splitting open my flesh. Blood welled, bright and shining as rubies. I let it build before clenching my hand into a fist. The worm would smell that soon enough.
Here’s another spot where the author was more concerned about how cool this will look in the inevitable film adaptation than whether or not it makes sense to the story. Feyre is a hunter and a painter, and she knows she has more tasks coming up.
Why would she cut a part of her body that she will need to complete her next task. A part that is difficult to heal and easy to get infected (like, idk, when it’s slathered in worm shit, for example). Note the lack of question marks there; I want you to read it in the flat affect with which I thought it.
But while Feyre is doing this whole super tough and clever thing that for sure demonstrates she’s a practical, intelligent person who has a lot of experience thinking of ways to survive, she loses track of the fucking worm.
Then, shattering the silence like a shooting star, a voice—Lucien’s—bellowed across the chamber, “TO YOUR LEFT!”
Is that… is that ALL CAPS? Is that something we’re allowed to do?!
The worm bursts through the wall right next to her, then we have a page of her running and describing herself running, the word “turn” is used approximately forty-eight thousand times, and then she gets back to the hole.
Now, remember when she made the tiger pit? And she left a tiny area clear?
I swung my arms as I careened down, aiming for the spot I’d planned.
That’s right. The plan was to run and leap into the pit of jagged bone spikes and somehow land perfectly in the tiny spot she left open.
That’s the brilliant plan.
Let’s see how it goes:
Pain barked through my bones, my head, as I collided with the muddle ground and rolled. I flipped over myself and screamed as something hit my arm, biting through flesh.
I did not see this coming.
The worm falls into the pit and dies, Feyre climbs up out of the hole, and she’s still got her bone sword of badassness that just appeared out of fucking nowhere.
I tightened my grip on the long bone in my hand. I was shaking—shaking all over. But not with fear. Oh, no. It wasn’t fear at all. I’d proved my love—and then some.
When Amarantha makes a remark about how anyone could have done what Feyre did, Feyre fucking snaps.
I took a few running steps and hurled the bone at her with all my remaining strength.
It embedded itself in the mud at her feet, splattering filth onto her white gown, and remained there, quivering.
And everybody on the bus clapped.
She smiled slowly. “Naughty,” she asked.
Did she ask? Doesn’t sound like an ask. Doesn’t even sound like the full stop you put at the end of a sentence when you want someone to read it in the pissed-off voice with which they wrote it.
Ahem.
Had there not been an insurmountable trench between us, I would have ripped her throat out. Someday—if I lived through this—I would skin her alive.
LOL isn’t that like, the EXACT SAME THING AMARANTHA DID THAT’S UNFORGIVABLE? I could have sworn she skinned somebody. Who cares, honestly. Who really the fuck cares.
Read those full stops. Feel them in your bones.
Amarantha tells Feyre that a lot of people in the court lost money betting that she would be killed, and Feyre looks at Tamlin.
His green eyes were bright, and though his face was deathly pale, I could have sworn there was a ghost of triumph on his face.
Could have said “it” instead of using “face” twice in the same sentence, but nothing matters anymore.
Still, I’m so happy that we’ve arrived at, “but when he said it, his face looked this way. What do you think that meeeeeaaans?” as the core of the romance here.
“Let’s see,” Amarantha went on, reading the paper as she toyed with Jurian’s finger bone at the end of her necklace. “Yes, I’d say almost my entire court bet on you dying within the first minute; some said you’d last five, and”—she turned over the paper—”and just one person said you would win.”
Oh wow, gosh, I bet it was Tamlin or Lucien wow gosh, I’m sure it’s one of them I’m going to be totally surprised when we find out it was Rhysand.
Especially after Amarantha says:
“Rhysand, come here.”
Feyre is dragged back to her cell and checks out the arm she fucking ruined like a god damn McArthur Genius Grant recipient.
I looked at my left forearm then, and my stomach rose at the trickling blood and ripped tendons, at the lips of my skin pulled back to accommodate the shaft of a bone shard protruding clean through it.
Well, that’s fucking disgusting, isn’t it? The only time I want to hear about lips pulling back to accommodate shafts is…
Look, the point is, with the medical care available to her and the hygiene situation… this should be a fatal injury. You’re looking at infection, you’re looking at shock, possibly an embolism, the movement of the bone could sever a blood vessel, this is not the injury you want to give your main character in the very first physical challenge you’re giving her. How is she going to do the rest of the stuff?
Okay, we all know someone is probably going to come to heal her.
But still, it’s an injury that could have been avoided… if Feyre hadn’t made the frankly bananas decision to jump straight down into a pit of giant bone spikes.
This book sucks, yous all. It just.
It just sucks. There’s no other way to put it. It massively sucks.
so, Maas thought it important to mention the mud like twenty times but didn’t think it important to even hint that Faydipshit was making a weapon? Was it supposed to be a big shocking reveal or something? and was anyone who read this on the edge of their seat for any of it? Did anyone anywhere over the age of an embryo think Fannoying was going to die? We all know nothing major is going to happen until Fayry Potter gets her hands on the Trifairy Cup at the end of the last challenge.
This book is what happens when an entitled princess reads a bunch of fantasy books and fairytales and thinks “I can totally make those worse!”
Jenny: “I can’t possibly be the only person who keeps forgetting the difference between High Lord and High Fae, can I?”
me: “I thought they were the same thing. There’s a difference? Wait, I don’t care. I just assume high is the only way to get through this terrible, terrible book.
I’m totally with you, I didn’t realize there was a difference between High Lords and High Fae. I never even noticed that different terms were being used!
I would feel stupid if this were a better book.
I think I guessed but I’m pretty sure I got it muddled too because there’s like barely any goddamn distinction. And if this were a better book, the author would’ve not only made it clear but used maybe slightly different terms to help or something. IDK
If you were wondering, “High Fae” is a class that’s higher than mere “faeries”. There’s probably some racism or classism to unpack there; the faeries look less human and less attractive than the High Fae, which is, uh. Anyway, a ‘High Lord’ is the ruler of one of the 7 courts, which we got exposition on from the map. So there’s only 7 High Lords but something like thousands of High Fae. And High Lords are the ~hottest~ and ~deadliest~, while faeries are the least attractive and lethal, and have lower ranks and less resources and power in the society. Faeries are also more likely to have non-white skin tones than High Fae. It’s… a whole thing.
Thanks. If only Maas were a better writer, or gave a shit about anything beyond Faytheobviousfairy, we might get some commentary on the horrible unfairness of a class based society where looks determine what class you get to be in. But SuperFay can’t paint that so guess we won’t be going there. We’ll just keep hearing about how attractive the white people are. Yay. 🙁
Damn, so it’s not even a species, so to speak? It’s literally just the 1% and then everyone else? I can’t say I’m surprised since that IS also how things have traditionally been portrayed (with the concept of whiteness being tossed in for any remotely European inspired/impacted cultures) but that doesn’t mean I like it. And yes, it’s a lot to unpack; I’m not immune to prior ignorance either.
We’re basically just trying to find Not Elves and Not Vampires to fit inside that same icky niche.
Oh yeah no sorry — I should’ve typed that more clearly! It is a species thing — the faeries are a different species from the High Fae, and I thiiiink the High Fae are mostly all the same species? Whereas there are a lot of different faerie species. But the High Fae have more privileges and tend to be seen as better. This was never really explained in the first book, but I think they inherently have more magical power or something?
In the second book, Maas starts actually touching on this, and it gets… really messy. But apparently Rhysand is from a Fae race that isn’t teeechnically “High Fae”, and is considered slightly lower but still decent or something? Whereas a couple of bat boys get introduced in that book who aren’t High Fae at all, and are apparently of a race that’s seen as ‘lesser’ by the High Fae. But they’re not ‘faeries’, either. Also they’re all white until she retcons them into being people of color, because she’s very progressive that way. And because of all the magic stuff going on, it’s not quite clear if this is more like a race or species distinction, but Maas does seem to be trying to say “this is bad and wrong and unfair”. Except there are also bits about the “brutality” of their culture and how harsh it is on women and children, and how Rhys is half something-nicer that made him civilized enough to try and put a stop to it, so… I don’t even know.
The regular ‘fae’ are all the different subgenres of traditional fairies, nymphs, goblins, sprites, etc, while the ‘high fae’ are Tolkien-flavoured pretty elves.
Just not named elves. Because that would be too derivative.
In future books there is an attempt at exploring this classism thing, where we meet folks who are technically ‘lesser fae’ but just as worthy of personhood (aka hot) as the not-elves, and they’re rather unhappy about the designation, but, well. It’s an attempt.
(Yes I read them please don’t judge me sometimes I like to turn my brain off)
No judgement! Thanks for clarifying my garbled point XD
Oh yeah haha I know we get nasty in the comments but sincerely no judgement. We all have our guilty pleasures; stuff we just love in spite of many flaws. What you and others said makes sense. Still awkward AF but at least Maas had someone get through to her a tiny bit or she became ever so slightly aware on her own lol.
Out of curiosity, did you manage to get through this first book more or less unscathed or did you skip it entirely?
I will only pass judgement if you think this is the best book ever written. lol (even then, whatever, we all like what we like). Since you said you like to turn off your brain sometimes I’m assuming you don’t and this is just the book equivalent of a guilty pleasure, so I am grateful for your reading it so you can, as you did here, fill in some blanks for those of us who haven’t.
@dove imho that’s a major misinterpretation of this sitch (not mad or anything XD just pointing it out). Like I had fun reading ACoTaR, but it’s not a “guilty” pleasure, and it certainly wasn’t “in spite of” its flaws.
If ACoTaR was actually good, I probably wouldn’t have bothered reading it. I’m not that into the idea of a faerie romance, and there are much better faerie stories out there that I already know I like.
My enjoyment of ACoTaR comes specifically from just how *bad* it is.
And a lot of people have media like that! Where the pleasure of watching and making fun of a trashy show *is* the whole point. It’s enjoyable in an entirely different way from consuming media of good quality that you like wholeheartedly. Trashy media just fills a niche in some people.
lol Oh sorry, @Al. I was responding to @Sr4f who did ask for no judgement. And maybe I was judgy in asking my question but I was wondering if they found it an okay beginning with their brain turned off or if they followed some fan recommendation and began with a later book. Like it’s fine either way, I was just wondering haha.
In your case, Al, I totally get it! MST3K all the way for you. 😉
@Dove (sorry, I ran out of nesting)
I read a lot of fanfic. Like, a *lot* of fanfic. This book tickled the same parts of my brain that fanfic does. The use of tropes and preexisting settings to shortcut having to take in a whole new universe, for instance. You recognize the characters for what they are *supposed* to be rather than what they are actually described as, because you gloss over what they are described as because you already know what they’re supposed to be.
And it also goes for other aspects of this book. There is a lot of clumsy writing, but when you read enough fanfic that you’ve exhausted all of the good one, you start reading less well-written stuff and you learn to just ignore the clumsiness. There is a lot of potential in the book, and I found it easy to ignore the clumsiness and get taken in by the potential.
It also helps that I didn’t actually pay anything to read that book. Or any of the following.
|This book is what happens when an entitled princess reads a bunch of fantasy books and fairytales and thinks “I can totally make those worse!”
I honestly believe Maas is trying to create subversion of various tropes here but she doesn’t really understand them or “Not Like Other Girls” which I would be more willing to be generous towards, most people start off not understanding the root of that problem, if she wasn’t bare minimum a millionaire by now and patting herself on the back for shilling the same shit each time, simply getting bolder about what she’s willing to depict in her novels based on the genre it got shoveled into.
And they’re making a tv show out of this drek so I sincerely hope they’re able to hammer something good out of it, that’s all I can say. It’ll be funny if anyone complains about the changes that they make.
Update since this recap — the show actually got canceled!
BWA HA HA HAAA! Seriously?! That’s delicious.
Was it canceled after one season or before it was ever finished?
Before! I’m not actually sure anything even got started… I don’t think there was even a cast announcement.
Interesting. I wonder if they cancelled it because Maas insisted on having her input, things got awkward, and they decided to fold, or if a lot of other fantasy franchises faltered before then, the company hired to make it hadn’t started so who ever paid to green-light it got cold feet and pulled the plug? My guess would be the latter even though it’s a very low-magic setting.
My neighbor has worm bins in his garage for compost, which I babysit while he’s on vacation. Worm shit smells like wet potting soil.
Stinky Shit Labyrinth, therefore, has to be the fairy latrine.
lol also if it stinks so very badly why the fuck are they using it for entertainment? Why would you willingly throw people into your latrine to watch them die? Gross.
I think she refused to pull it out of its worm lair because Maas didn’t want to get accused of ripping off the Sarlacc pit or maybe the rancor in hindsight or maybe one of the many movie scenes with a giant snake in it. So she used a worm, which she only barely did research on. I feel like this is definitely ripping off something but it’s so generic maybe it’s just because it’s all of that regurgitated into a conveniently bland and obnoxious package.
How do you babysit the worms btw? Do you just feed them regularly?
Oh that’s adorable! My mom also has worms in her compost bin, but I assumed the compost was too stinky to determine what the worms’ shit would smell like. I guess this specific ‘shitgardener’ worm is just especially stinky!
Exactly! If your compost stinks you’re doing it wrong, because it means it’s rotting instead of composting. I mean, I have worm bins in my apartment! Kitchen scraps go right into the bin. Worm compost is the best stuff 🙂
Really? O.o cuz most compost I’ve seen starts out very stinky. It is a lot of old foodstuff and food waste, after all.
Well, I guess it might depend on your definition of “stinky”. A good compost is layered, moist and airy. The stink usually comes from rot which is not wanted as it produces subpar soil. My garden compost bin does not stink even when I open it in the summer.
Worm bins are even more managed so the organic stuff is never left too long for the bacterias to break down so the worms can slurp it up.
That makes sense. It’s the worms breaking it down naturally and turning it back into nutrients to some degree, I guess. They’re nature’s answer on top of other creatures eating it up. That’s probably why potting soil smells weird but not as awful as really rotten stuff?
@Dove Yup 🙂 Not to go all nerdy as this is not a gardening blog, but there are very different ways of decomposing. It can be aerobic, anaerobic, by animals, fungi, bacteria, whatnot. For example, earthworms are common in Europe but invasive in North America.
A lot of people conflate compost with a garbage heap. Throwing in meat scraps will indeed reek of decaying flesh and attract the sort of pests that will eat pets. When eggshells are the closest thing to protein in the pile, there shouldn’t be any stench, flies, or predators.
I’d like to address the point about meat scraps — im well aware that one doesn’t put meat or bones into compost. That doesn’t change the fact that things like vegetable and fruit peels will be going in there. I do appreciate Tina’s explanation about rot etc, though; it’s interesting. It does seem like a difference in definition, then.
@Tina Oh, cool, yeah I get it’s not a gardening blog but I like nerdy stuff, especially when I’m feeling curious. And holy shit TDIL earthworms are invasive and there’s multiple species because it just never crossed my mind before!
Damn, this story. *shakes head*
I state again, I don’t think Maas knows about anal sex in spite of the penis monster, which I’m going to assume is stolen from that one scene in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, because Tremors would’ve told Maas about the fucking vibrations.
I had the same amount of confusion here, I assumed upright too, but then it made very little sense so I guess she had her ass out, presenting itself in doggy position.
But like… why? Wouldn’t this be the scene where her stealing/squirreling away a knife would’ve worked and made sense? Also WTF is the point of slathering yourself in shit if you wanted it to follow you to the bone pit trap?
Why did Clare even die? Jurian is the one Feyre thinks about, never Clare again. And FEYRE is the one who skinned Andras although at least he was already dead. Amarantha hasn’t skinned anyone that I remember anyway; she just tortured Clare to death. Or did she fucking skin Jurian? It’s not like I’d fucking know since she also removed his eye and finger and ripped out his soul, which is laughable.
There’s an interesting essay called “Why Hollywood keeps the penis out of sight” written by David Titterington which IDK I’m sure many people have talked about but this was my first time reading about the societal conceits surrounding phallus worship created by the patriarchy and how it affects the perceptions and presentations of masculinity. I think I found that one because I stumbled on this essay (or maybe vice versa) “How the Sausage Gets Made: Inside Hollywood’s Prosthetic Penis Craze” written by By Emma Fraser because apparently a lot of dicks shown on screen aren’t even the real thing. Which is pretty amazing when you think about it but makes perfect sense in the context the other page talks about. Men are never depicted as vulnerably as women are and even when that happens, it’s uncommon for it to be as bodily real.
Which is why Jurian is two disembodied body parts and UNDEAD OR ALIVE but Clare was laid bare as an empty husk of a dead body on display for all to see. And then no one really cared even though they pretended they did.
Her death was meaningless. It grows more meaningless with each passing moment, because Clare’s death didn’t introduce anything new. She may have been something added in as hastily as the damned action sequences after the editors, crying and gnashing their teeth, desperately tried to get Maas to create some kind of true impact for Feyre to feel when Maas kept insisting on adding in all this Grit without any Substance.
Maybe this isn’t the point to bring that up but then fucking Maas writes about a bland penis monster ramming into some bones inside of a literal shit hole. And Feyre still has more chemistry and things in common with Amarantha than she does with fucking Tamlin OR Rhysand.
Look, I’m not a smart person. I like to think that I am. I’m probably the same asshole who decided to cleverly describe a goddamn maze after already introducing it. I was a little shit as a kid. I don’t know if I even have a point.
I’m bitter as all fuck that Clare, Wingless Wonder, Headless, the Suriel, and Attor aren’t here, alive, and cheering Feyre on right now. I just am.
She keeps presenting Amarantha as this dark mirror and all I can say is this is clearly who Feyre will become by the end of the series, torture and all. I will be genuinely shocked if that’s not true. I mean, yes, Jenny is correct and it doesn’t fucking matter. It really doesn’t. I just find this so obnoxious lol.
Frankly, I’d rather read about them playing shuttlecock and being bitchy. At least we’d get to see the word cock a lot more and less about her getting injured in gruesomely sexual but pointless ways because Maas wants to pretend Feyre isn’t perfect while thinking she also can’t let anything stick.
I mean… how the fuck would she even bathe all the shit off, which she intentionally rubbed onto herself like a goddamned idiot, while pretending to be oh so clever, if she didn’t have her Helpers? Also, do we know if they’re even feeding and watering her if we don’t see it? Do I fucking care? I guess I must since I’m writing all this damn shit in this stupid fucking post right now.
yeah idk man I just can’t fathom anyone sincerely recommending this first novel to anyone. Cuz there were editors and they drank themselves to sleep at night getting this horrible book into the shape it’s currently in and that was all they could wrangle Amarantha, I mean MAAS, into doing because it was so unbelievably fucked from beginning to end that everyone just gave up at some point. That’s my firm belief.
Sorry, I meant to say people have presumably talked about that topic many times before, not that exact essay/article by that person. That’s simply the first time that I think I was introduced to those ideas.
lol also I know Attor and Suriel are both alive and the former IS there but I meant all of them are now living, and all of them having been won over and cheering Feyre on for some fucking variety instead of just three High Fae dicks. (Which yeah I got that confused too because wut)
“I mean… how the fuck would she even bathe all the shit off, which she intentionally rubbed onto herself like a goddamned idiot, while pretending to be oh so clever, if she didn’t have her Helpers?”
OMG I hadn’t even thought of that. if I were Ameaniedah I’d make her stay in her cell covered in worm shit. She wants to cover herself in shit, fine, she can stay covered in shit.
But given Maas’ total lack of continuity and desperate need for Fucknuts to be bangable, I’m sure Fuckingdiealready will be all cleaned up and healed by next chapter.
This book has clearly broken me.
*comforts* This book has broken me too.
Yeah, perfectly good response for Amanda Tugnuts to not even have FayBottom hosed off or put into a boiling cauldron to scream or if you want to get all magical and fancy, some kind of giant ice box where she freezes then thaws out as her method of washing.
I suspect Feyre got so accustomed to Alis bathing her every day that she just never thought about that even though she was imprisoned for a while already. Imagine Lucien showing up and Feyre REEKS and he just immediately poofs because the stench is so bad?
Also, I feel like Alis should meet the remaining Naga and take them with her so they can all live Happily Ever After somewhere pleasant with her nieces/nephews/other orphans. Faerie Land is boring and sad and not worth living in.
Hey, what if this entire book is because Maas has a literal shit fetish/kink? We haven’t heard about pissing a single time here nor have we presumably heard about the toilet and plumbing situations although I assume there is none, just chamber pots and water boiled in cauldrons over fireplaces.
Wow. I mean, she did come up with an excuse for Feyre to rub shit all over herself and she did shit herself twice at least. She bathes an awful lot. That’s not nothing.
It’s okay, Maas. I don’t like you any better, you’re still a hopeless POS whom I hate, but you can find porn of it online. I’ll shame her for everything else but I won’t shame this woman for being kinky. I will however shame her for not simply writing erotica instead and surprising people with her fetish, forcing them to read about a situation they didn’t give consent for.
I don’t think anyone picked up this book about faeries and wondered how many times the MC would interact with slippery diarrhea.
Well, the book is pretty shitty so it is all starting to make sense now. A piece of shit writes a shitty book about a shit covered heroine who shits alot. I wonder if that was her elevator pitch. HAHAHAHA
Bwahahahaha! Yes. Just… yes. It’s just turds all the way down! 😀
I know a bunch of people were confused about this on Patreon, so just sharing that FYI, it’s not FEYRE’s bone that’s broken and sticking out of her arm. A splinter of the bones in the pit she was using to make her weird trap ended up stabbing her in the arm. It’s still gross, but not NEARLY as gory as Maas accidentally made it sound.
I had to read that section multiple times to figure that out, though, because it was described so horribly ambiguously.
Anyway, I hope that helps some of you sleep better at night. Also it’s good context for the next chapter, which makes absolutely ZERO sense if it’s her own bone sticking out like that.
OMG I actually didn’t think about her own arm bones sticking out ew ew ew! Thank you for the clarification but I guess I’m lucky that I assumed the stupidest possible outcome. I was betting that like an arrow in any given movie with arrows, Lucien would remove the giant bone splinter from her arm and then “lightly” heal the skin, as he did with her nose, and Feyre would be magically okay. Because it’s so stupid of course it works. UGH.
Whoops! But also.. mild spoiler, but the next recap assumes that it is her own bones, which is not actually the case, and I very much wanted to offer that assurance before tomorrow’s recap showed up!
“Amarantha tells Feyre that a lot of people in the court lost money betting that she would be killed, and Feyre looks at Tamlin“
I read this and my brain autocompleted Feyre yelling “Tamlin you asshole you bet on the worm???” And Tamlin waving his hands like “sorry babe it was good money!”
Bwa ha ha ha ha! WHY didn’t we get that bit of dialog?! It’s so perfect!
I realize it’s supposed to be Feyre in denial so that Tamlin being an asshole is a slow realization for her because she doesn’t want it to be true, but you can still have cheeky fun like that at the same time! Maas is taking everything that she writes too seriously and at the same time not seriously enough. Or else she’s isn’t pushing the humor very far because she isn’t funny.
you’re right. If she had a sense of humour and leaned into that more, this could be a hilarious poke at all the “not like other girl” “he’s immortal and still pervs on teenage girls” fantasy tropes. But I have yet to see any sign that she means this to be funny.
All the funny is 100% Jenny spinning shit covered straw into comedy gold.
I was going to point out that the latter trope is how teenager girls frequently explore their sexuality — with a Fantasy Boyfriend — which makes it feel meanspirited to lambast, but actually in Tamlin’s case specifically… I don’t remember if Jenny pointed this out in a recap, but it was VERY explicitly stated that while Tamlin is at least a few centuries old, after Amarantha’s curse, he sent his men in wolf-form to find girls around Feyre’s age (19; technically an adult but a lil on the young side), but instead of trying to kill or fight the wolves, the girls “cried and begged for mercy” (paraphrasing here).
This makes zero sense given that the thing chasing them was.. a wolf. It’s yet another Not Like Other Girls thing. And YET! That’s not even the most infuriating part!!
The MOST infuriating part is that during that massive infodump back in whatever chapter, Alis informs us that the crying girls would *run away*, upon which usually an older woman would protect them and kill the wolf. Which is great female solidarity, but!
WHY THE FUCK DIDNT YOU JUST TAKE ONE OF THEM TO YOUR MANOR TAMLIN?!?!?!
GODDAMNIT TAMLIN YOU IDIOT
Anyway, I have no idea what the rationale was because it makes zero sense, but I can only imagine he was like “mmm… nope, not my type; they have to be less than 10% my age. Next!” Like an multiplicatively worse Leonardo DiCaprio.
This would actually work with the ruthless Tamlin idea I had, though… where he doesn’t care about the mortal girl; he just wants to save his people, so he deliberately finds someone young and self-centered, who will easily fall for someone who praises her and showers her with luxuries, and he manipulates her flaws in order to break the curse.
“This would actually work with the ruthless Tamlin idea I had, though… where he doesn’t care about the mortal girl; he just wants to save his people, so he deliberately finds someone young and self-centered, who will easily fall for someone who praises her and showers her with luxuries, and he manipulates her flaws in order to break the curse.”
If that’s the case, he hit the jackpot with Fayisnotlikeothergirls. Other girls tend to feel intense guilt at naming an innocent and getting them brutally tortured. Actually, most other girls would probably have made up a name not named someone they know. Other girls would try to save their family, friends, village, the world rather than run after a man. Other girls wouldn’t cover themselves in shit to hide their scent, then cut their hand because now they want something to follow their scent.
Tamtam lucked out in stumbling upon the most shallow, self centered, insecure moron in all of human history. Unfortunately, she still managed to fuck it all up. HAHAHAHA
oh gross I didn’t know that about the wolves and such. Yeah it sounds like quite honestly your ruthless Tamlin idea is what she was going for whether she did it on purpose (possible since Maas decides to make him Not The One and he was trying to use Feyre) or Maas was just playing around in the trope without much thought. Should’ve otherwise gone for those women protecting the girls lol.
*spongebob squarepants voice*
ALASKAN
BULL
WORM
Ohhhh—this is the tongue… and the whole… thing… is the worm.
This scene is exponentially improved by imagining a squirrel in an aquanaut suit cosplaying Schwarzenegger in Predator. Thank you.
I don’t know the reference (for whatever reason I just never ended up watching much of Spongebob probably the timing and other situational issues that kept me from that) but I know the characters and this still amuses the hell out of me lol. I’ll prolly have to hunt down some clips on YT of this specifically
10/10 worth the watch, if only to picture a cartoon worm hunting feyre for sport
YES! this was my first thought as well!
The most interesting thing about this chapter has been the discussion on composting. It was most informative, and better written than the book. lol It doesn’t bode well when an explanation of composting is more riveting than a books heroine fighting for her life. lol
>its front end not become an enormous mouth filled with ring after ring of razor-sharp teeth
This just makes it sound like, a giant land lamprey. Which is horrifying and would make for a good monster.
When she said Fayre would have to complete 3 tasks I was thinking more things like, the Labours of Heracles or the kind of ‘impossible if you don’t think outside the box’ tasks that you see in fairy tales (like, what The Beast made Greg do in Over the Garden Wall, things like that).
This is considerably more disappointing.
I’m honestly not certain WTF this task was even supposed to be. Did Amarantha need her Latrine De-wormed? This is more of a Gladiator Fight than a Task or a Labour!
Maas tried to make it look like Feyre thought outside the box but the most obvious solution is to murder it somehow or simply survive it, I guess.