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.
Welcome to chapter thirty-eight.
Why are we doing this to ourselves?
Feyre is in a hallway, scrubbing the floors and trying to keep her mind off her new tattoo:
The ink—which, in the light, was actually a blue so dark it appeared black—was a cloud upon my thoughts, and those were bleak enough even without knowing I’d sold myself to Rhysand. I couldn’t look at the eye on my palm. I had an absurd, creeping feeling that it watched me.
Perhaps you’re wondering why she’s scrubbing the floor or how she got there. Don’t worry. That part of the story (you know, the part that contains all the stakes and stuff) gets told kinda in past-perfect?
I dunked the large brush into the bucket the red-skinned guards had thrown into my arms. I could barely comprehend them through their mouths full of long yellow teeth, but when they gave me the brush and bucket and shoved me into a long hallway of white marble, I understood.
“If it’s not washed and shining by supper,’ one of them had said, its teeth clicking as it grinned, “we’re to tie you to the spit and give you a few good turns over the fire.”
Then a few lines down:
My back already ached like fire, and I hadn’t been scrubbing the marble hall for more than thirty minutes.
Being grabbed by demons and threatened with roasting seems like an exciting enough part of the story to put on the page as it happens, but I’m not commercially popular on an astronomic level, so how do I know what makes an enjoyable read?
Here’s the thing, though:
But the water they’d given me was filthy, and the more I scrubbed the floor, the dirtier it became.
Why not just… stop scrubbing the floor?
Feyre recognizes that she’s been given this impossible task specifically so she’ll fail, and all she can think about are the screams in the dungeon and how the fairies are going to cook her alive, but like:
I cursed as I scrubbed harder, the coarse bristles of the brush crinkling and whispering against the tiles. A rainbow of brown was left in their wake, and I growled as I dunked the brush again. Filthy water came out with it, dripping all over the floor.
A trail of brown much grew with each sweep.
MAYBE STOP SCRUBBING THE FLOOR?!
And Feyre keeps mentioning how she will be roasted on a spit, etc, but frankly? It doesn’t sound scary to me. I mean, obviously, the concept of being roasted alive is scary, but we know that Feyre isn’t in any danger, and we only heard about this terrifying threat second hand, so like… I don’t feel any urgency from the narrative at all.
It almost feels like Maas begrudgingly wrote this chapter. Like, it’s a part of the story she knew she had to write, but she just wasn’t interested? Because up until now, every important (and unimportant) event in the book has gotten at least a full chapter on its own, and in this short chapter, Feyre is going to solve—sorry, be rescued from—two impossible tasks.
The dirt was actually turning into mud the harder I scrubbed it.
I would recommend stopping actually scrubbing the floors.
The thing is, this is the fairy court, right? Did they say she had to use the water? They basically just wanted it clean, and the hallway is described as white marble, but not as being dirty. If the water makes the hall dirtier… maybe the point was not to use it at all? I feel like you have to approach some of this shit like an episode of Taskmaster, Feyre.
I mean, she even considers that it’s probably some kind of trick, but she doesn’t try anything new. She just keeps scrubbing the floor and heaping more and more dirt onto it, despite thinking there must be a catch.
But then someone comes in.
She looked perhaps a bit older than Amarantha, but her porcelain skin was exquisitely colored, graced with the faintest blush of rose along her cheeks. Had the red hair not been indication enough, when her russet eyes met mine, I knew who she was.
Feyre realizes it’s Lucien’s mother, the Lady of the Autumn Court. ed.—When Maas went back and retconned Lucien and the entire Autumn Court as being Black, that leaves us with this sentence about a Black woman being, and I cannot stress this enough, “colored.”
How convenient.
“For giving her your name in place of my son’s life,” she said, her voice as sweet as sun-warmed apples. She must have been in the crowd that day. She pointed at the bucket with a long, slender hand. “My debt is paid.”
If you’re wondering what that means, it means the bucket of water is clean, but we’ll get to that in the minute. Right now, let’s talk about the fact that, yet again, Feyre is rescued.
We just need to come to terms with the fact that no matter how much work Feyre puts into saving herself (the worm pit) or how little she tries to fix things (spreading mud all over the floor like it’s somehow gonna stop being mud), someone rescues her.
Let’s refresh our memories:
- Feyre could have been tricked by the Bogge and doesn’t notice it’s a trick until Tamlin appears out of nowhere and warns her.
- Feyre battles the Naga but ultimately needs Tamlin to finish the job.
- Feyre is attacked at Calanmai and rescued by Rhysand.
- Feyre is attacked by Rhysand in the dining room and is saved when Tamlin and Lucien grovel for her life.
- Feyre returns to the manor and receives all the information she needs directly from one person, who leads her exactly where she needs to go.
- Despite all the work Feyre put into tricking and killing the worm, Lucien’s shouted warning saved her life.
- Both times that Feyre nearly died in her cell from injuries, someone showed up to magically heal her.
- Now this clean water bullshit.
Now here’s the thing. There is something I genuinely enjoy in this next bit, but we’ve reached the portion of our program where finding otherwise good writing in this mess is like receiving extra bathroom privileges from your hostage-taker. So I can’t even properly enjoy it.
She disappeared through the door she’d opened, and I could have sworn I smelled roasting chestnuts and crackling fires in her wake.
That, coupled with the “sun-warmed apples” voice described above? So good! Why not write like that the whole time?
I knelt beside the bucket and dipped my fingers into the water. They came out clean.
I shuddered, allowing myself a moment to slump over my knees before I dumped some of the water onto the floor and watched it wash away the muck.
Am I the only one who thinks that, idk, magically cleaning the floors would have been a better way of repaying someone who saved your son’s life?
There’s a section break, and we arrive at impossible task number two:
“Servant spilled lentils in the ash,” one of the guards grunted, tossing me a wooden bucket. “Clean it up before the occupant returns, or he’ll peel off your skin in strips.”
Fairy tale aficionados will recognize that classic. Actually, the muddy hallway, too. I would say that Maas really did her homework with classic fairy tales, but, to be honest? I think she just has the DVDs of Jim Henson’s The Storyteller.
Sorting lentils from ash and embers—ridiculous, wasteful, and—
AAAAAAAAAND?
I approached the darkened fireplace and cringed.
Impossible.
Also, weird that anybody had lentils in there in the first place. I mean, clearly, the guards put them there, right? Because this is a bedroom. I know people like to involve food in sex sometimes, but I doubt the erotic possibilities of lentils.
The bed was enormous and neatly made, its black sheets of—of silk.
I’m sorry, is Feyre’s personal narrative developing a stutter? WTF is “of—of silk.” Does Maas somehow own stock in em-dashes?
There was nothing else in the room beyond basic furniture; not even discarded clothes or books or weapons As if its occupant never slept here.
WOW I WONDER WHO THE EMPTY BEDROOM WITH THE BIG BED WITH BLACK SILK SHEETS BELONGS TO WOW, SUCH SUSPENSE.
Feyre gets to work, and there’s a section break, after which Feyre has been sorting through ashes for two hours, and she still keeps finding more lentils she missed. She notes that she once again doesn’t have a firm time limit, so she arms herself with a poker every time she hears someone approaching the door.
Amarantha had never said anything about not fighting back—never specified that I wasn’t allowed to defend myself. At least I’d go down swinging.
I’m so tired of hearing about how Feyre is going to “go down” fighting, especially now that Tamlin damned his entire court to save her life.
Finally, the mysterious occupant, who we totally could not predict would be Rhysand, comes back.
Darkness entered the room, guttering the andles with a snow-kissed breeze. I gripped the poker harder, pressing against the stone of the fireplace, even as that darkness settled on the bed and took a familiar form.
WHAT FORM?! THE SUSPENSE!
Rhysand asks Feyre what she’s doing in the fireplace and Feyre is like, trying not to get skinned.
“Do I have you to thank for this idea?” I hissed. He wasn’t allowed to kill me, not with my bargain with Amarantha, but … there were other ways to hurt me.
You know how much I love it when characters “hiss” words or phrases that don’t hiss when you say them. Now, all I’m hearing is, “Do I have you to tttttthhhhank for ttthhhhhissssssss idea?” like the snake in Disney’s Robin Hood.
Also, looking back over her bargain with Amarantha, there wasn’t a stipulation that Feyre couldn’t be harmed. The very first thing that happened after Feyre made a deal with Amarantha was that Feyre got her ass-kicked in front of and at the request of Amarantha.
But at this point, I think we’re all pretty used to the rules of the world changing like… just whenever.
Rhysand is like, nope, not my thing, and P.S., nobody noticed your arm yet. Feyre asks if the fireplace is clean enough, and he’s like, wtf were there lentils in the fireplace?
I gave him a flat look. “One of your mistress’s household chores, I suppose.”
“Hm,” he said, examining his nails. “Apparently she or her cronies think I’ll find some sport with you.”
My mouth dried up. “Or it’s a test for you,” I managed to get out. “You said you bet on me on my first task. She didn’t seem pleased about it.”
Rhysand is like, yeah, uh, what would the point of testing me be?
I didn’t balk from that violet stare. Amarantha’s whore, Lucien had once called him. “You lied about her. About Clare. You knew very well what I looked like.”
Ope, there were go. She’s found someone else she can definitively blame for Clare’s death. She’s never gonna accept responsibility for it again after this.
Rhysand sat up in a fluid movement and braced his forearms on his thighs. Such grace contained in such a powerful form. I was slaughtering on the battlefield before you were even born, he’d once said to Lucien. I didn’t doubt it.
Feyre has this weird, fetishistic thing where she’s constantly talking about how fairies will murder anything, and they’re so dangerous, then immediately apply that horrible danger and violence to someone as an example of their attractiveness. I’m just saying, for someone who is always so disgusted and appalled by fairy violence, she seems to find it incredibly hot.
“Amarantha plays her games,” he said simply, “and I play mine. It gets rather boring down here, day after day.”
Remember: the plot twist is that he’s the actual love interest in this story. Not Tamlin. Rhysand is endgame, and he just described the torture and murder of one of Feyre’s “friends” as a game.
Feyre points out that he doesn’t always stay Under the Mountain. Rhysand has some vague reason for why he can’t come and go as he pleases:
“She asked me to put that head in the garden. As for Fire Night … ” He looked me up and down. “I had my reasons to be out then. Do not think, Feyre, that it did not cost me.”
Lemme guess, he was out at Fire Night because he had heard about the human Tamlin was keeping, and Rhysand just had to see her for himself, and she turned out to be the most exquisite creature he’d ever seen or something. I won’t ever find out because I will not be continuing with this series.
But I’m digging Rhysand’s “I was just following orders” excuse here.
Rhysand mentions the poker Feyre is still holding and notes that fighting him would be useless. Feyre already knows that, of course, and asks him why Amarantha didn’t take his powers away.
He lifted a groomed, dark brow. “Oh, she took my powers. This … ” A caress of talons against my mind. I jerked back a step, slamming into the fireplace. The pressure on my mind vanished. “This is just the remnant. The scraps I get to play with. Your Tamlin has brute strength and shape-shifting; my arsenal is a far deadlier assortment.”
All right. Here we have a pretty good case for how this book romanticizes intimate partner violence. Like I spoilered this before, Rhysand is Feyre’s true love or whatever. But right now, he’s a guy who seems to relish hurting her just to prove that he can.
She asks if all the High Lords can shape-shift.
“Oh, all the High Lords can. Each of us has a beast roaming beneath our skin, roaring to get out. While your Tamlin prefers fur, I find wings and talons to be more entertaining.”
Inside of you are two wolves. One of them is a wolf and the other is a bat or something.
But the darkness that hovered around him began to writhe and twist and flare as he rose to his feet. I blinked, and it was done.
I lifted the iron poker, just a little bit.
“Not a full shift, you see,” Rhysand said, clicking the black razor-sharp talons that had replaced his fingers.
Interesting choice of adjective order with “black razor-sharp talons.” There’s a general order we accept as “right.” I don’t know if it’s an actual grammatical rule or just a convention of the language that we’ve internalized as sounding the correct way. Anyway, if we’re using the common structure, it should have been “razor-sharp, black talons” because color always comes after physical quality.
Like, you wouldn’t tell a friend that you went to the beach and took your blue, ugly swimsuit. You took your ugly, blue swimsuit. Which isn’t really ugly, you just need to have more confidence in yourself. Every body is a beach body.
Indeed, it was still Rhysand’s face, his powerful male body, but flaring out behind him were massive black membranous wings—like a bat’s, like the Attor’s.
OH MY FUCKING
WHOOOO DEEP BREATHS.
There was finally an appropriate place to use an em-dash. And she fuuuuuuucked it uuuuuuuup whyyyyyyyyyyyyyy.
“black membranous wings, like a bat’s—like the Attor’s.”
I would have accepted that. I mean, no, I would have still made fun of it. But still. It could have been one of the least egregious uses of the em dash in this book, and she squandered it.
He tucked them in neatly behind him, but the single claw at the apex of each peeked over his broad shoulders. Horrific, stunning—the face of a thousand nightmares and dreams. That again-useless part of me stirred at the sight, the way the candlelight shone through the wings, illuminating the veins, the way it bounced off his talons.
Okay, I re-read this interaction a few times, and I still can’t tell what her “again-useless” part refers to. I guess the only real meaning it could have is her instinct to fight? But if that’s the case, why is this being described so hornily?
Rhysand shifts back, and there’s some banter about how he has a high opinion of himself, and of course, he laughs at the bravery she displays teasing a High Lord. But my favorite part is that he says:
“I can’t decide whether I should consider you admirable or very stupid for being so bold with a High Lord.”
And then she immediately asks:
“Do you know the answer to the riddle?”
Doesn’t that give Rhysand his answer right there?
Rhysand admonishes Feyre for trying to cheat and offers another “just following orders” explanation.
“Don’t waste your breath,” he said. “I can’t tell you—no one here can. If she ordered us all to stop breathing, we would have to obey that, too.” He frowned at me and snapped his fingers. The soot, the dirt, the ash vanished off my skin, leaving me as clean as if I’d bathed. “There. A gift—for having the balls to even ask.”
I dislike modern phrases in fantasy novels set in alternate past Europe. Have I ever mentioned that?
He also makes the lentils disappear from the fireplace and reappear in the bucket. Then he magically summons the guards and tells them to take Feyre back to her cell.
They grabbed for me, but he bared his teeth in a smile that was anything but friendly—and they halted. “No more household chores, no more tasks,” he said, his voice an erotic caress. Their yellow eyes went glazed and dull, their sharp teeth gleaming as their mouths slackened. “The the others, too. Stay out of her cell, and don’t touch her. If you do, you’re to take your own daggers and gut yourselves. Understood?”
LOL he’s a Bene Gesserit.
Rhysand smiled at me. “You’re welcome,” he purred as I walked out.
And that’s the end of the chapter.
So, I have some feelings about how this is going, but I want to share them with the book club book club, too, so head over there to get those pearls of wisdom, I guess. I feel guilty when that becomes too much of a cut-and-paste of my thoughts I shared here. Because if there’s a way to make myself feel guilty about something, hoo boy, I’ll find it. ed.—Which is why I’m now going to post that particular installment of Jealous Patrons Book Club Book Club here in its entirety.
Sometimes, I wonder if popular books actually are really good and I just suck at reading.
I’m beginning to feel like A Court of Thorns and Roses should have ended with Feyre realizing that she had to go back, finding the manor shit-wrecked, and ending on that cliffhanger of now she has to go rescue him. It feels like the author is beginning to rush through events that need to be fleshed out more to be impactful, but she knows she’s nearing her deadline or something.
The reason I say this is because there are two big things that happen in this chapter. Like, really, really big things. One, Feyre meets Lucien’s mother. We’ve gotten so much of Lucien’s backstory and how his mother was destroyed when he was banished or left or whatever. We heard all about his brothers.
And when Lucien’s mother is finally on the page… it’s for three paragraphs. Not even long ones.
The other big thing is Feyre’s interaction with Rhysand. Now, when you first look at it, it seems like it’s not going to matter and is fully superfluous to the chapter, but spoiler, we needed it so we can get to know Rhysand because he’s the actual love interest/soul mate or whatever of Feyre. He rescues her from an impossible task set by Amarantha’s guards (picking lentils out of a fireplace) and shows her that he can shape shift and is really super dangerous. And then…that’s it. He’s there for a few pages of random power establishment.
I just can’t help but feel like this book truly ended, gosh, even when Feyre went back home. When Tamlin sent her away, that could have easily been the end. But then the closer we get to the actual end, the more stuff Sarah throws onto the pile. Oh, you thought this was over? Nope, now I’m going to rescue Tamlin and it’s going to take THREE MONTHS. And there’s a RIDDLE. And ANOTHER HOT GUY. And IMPOSSIBLE HOUSEWORK.
And we still have two trials to go, and it all wraps up in less than a hundred pages?
This book is a mess.
I laughed way too hard at Feyre scrubbing the floor and you screaming at her to stop 😀
The Lady of the Autumn Court has porcelain skin but is Black. Uhm, correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t porcelain by definition… white?! As far as I know any other color comes from painting on it.
Language nerd insert: in German, I’d use the order “black razor-sharp talons”, too. We are less strict in that grammatical regard, though.
I imagined Lucian’s mom as Jolene from the song. Jolene is described as a creature of unearthly chaotic beauty so I can imagine her as a Fey.
Oh that works wonderfully! Plus we don’t have a name yet. Jolene is as good as any!
The BIPOC Lucien twist is actually that his dad isn’t really the High Lord of the Autumn Court, he’s the High Lord of the Day Court, who’s supposed to be, like, Fantasy!Middle Eastern, so Lucien’s mom *is* actually white. It’s very obvious in the later books that Sarah is tired of people criticizing the diversity of her mAsTeRpIeCe so she makes the High Fae from some of the courts different minorities and sprinkles in some incredibly hamfisted queer characters. iirc the Summer Court is Black (which only solidifies Alis coming off as a mammy stereotype ), the Day Court are Middle Eastern, I think, and the Night Court has a population of indigenous clans that get portrayed as brutal savages except for the three good ones (one of them being retconned BIPOC Rhysand). It’s awful.
“I’m sorry, is Feyre’s personal narrative developing a stutter? WTF is “of—of silk.” Does Maas somehow own stock in em-dashes?”
You know, I considered buying em-dash stock, but I thought, no one is going to use enough em-dashes to make my investment worth while. I underestimated the Maas.
I wonder at what point Maas decided Rhys was going to be the real love interest because, IMO, it’s still not being written that way. If I didn’t know this was supposed to be some “hot” fairy romance I’d assume the happy ending was Fayray getting the fuck out of fairytown and getting a therapist to help her work through her violence fetish because Maas’ version of fairies so far is extremely toxic.
If you threatened to put my over a spit and make me wash a floor with dirty water, I’d say the only romance I’d be remotely interested in is Tamlin and Lucien, with maybe a love triangle through the middle of the book with Rhys, but with Luclin as endgame. Fayray can get eaten by a penis worm for all I care, or spend the rest of her life as Amabadguy’s futile Cinderella, cleaning an uncleanable castle for all time.
Yeah, I think it’s a combination of trying to pretend there’s danger around every corner to keep the readers awake, pretend this is an adventure-focused story, and Maas being incapable of describing men as attractive in any way, except for the few times she gets slightly more evocative descriptions but those are usually reserved for women and very aesthetic driven.
This is why I said in a comment in the previous chapter “maybe it’s an Ace/Sex Repulsed/low libido” crowd not because I’m shaming them (or saying they have bad taste) but people who don’t FEEL any attraction for other people won’t feel awkward or weird about the author trying to depict those feelings because she doesn’t, at all. And if they’re into kinky shit without knowing what kinky shit is perhaps they really are being titillated by all the accidental fetish stuff tossed in. I got plenty of rando kinks from cartoons man. Not like a ton but I very much enjoy seeing bondage for that reason. (I struggle with enjoying it because I’m kinda impatient and ADHD so tying someone up requires a lot more focus for me and I get freaked out from intense pressure on my own chest, which is the only reason I also haven’t tried binding. I mean yeah I could just be tied in other areas, I haven’t done a lot. I’m just sharing some of my very limited life experience because while I admit to being an idiot sometimes and I should be called out accordingly when I fuck up, someone jumped down my throat last time over the Ace thing and I’m a bitter little shit about that lol.)
The main detraction, beyond the inconsistency, the toxic faeries, and Feyre being such a stubborn asshole, is that Feyre never connects any behavior one of her love interests has with protecting her (and then when she does she has to fuck it up and make it useless.) Their strength is all for show and for destruction, never anything else.
I also kinda wonder when she decided Rhysand was the one but I still think perhaps Lucien at the very beginning was originally Rhysand and later on she decided to remove him from the Spring Court so Lucien was born. That’s just a guess though. I really have no idea.
dangit to clarify I should say “don’t feel attraction or immediate interest in sex” like I’m not trying to apply the label per se but just explain people from those groupings might be the target and if so this could read as spicy because of all the accidental BDSM-type shit and not the actual stupid tame shit that’s mostly intentional.
And I’m not saying all of them would be concerned about that but perhaps that demographic is more attuned to liking a “spicy” book without “rippling muscles, calloused hands from sword-fighting, a veined gigantic cock pulsing with power, his abs dripping with sweat, smelling musky and manly, her pussy getting moist and her thighs quivering with need” or whatever you’d usually find around these corners. I can’t even remember the sex scene but I’m pretty sure that shit wasn’t in there for the most part? I mean, there’s probably people who also could use it to get excited for Amarantha as a domme idk. She seems really concerned about her slaves giving consent except when they’re getting a beat down.
Eh, I’m well aware of what kinks I’m into, I’m extremely kinky, and I’m kinda into all the violence and threatening stuff. The main issue I have is that Maas is a coward with zero follow-through and retcons it all into “ACTUALLY they were all super nicey-nice and would NEVER have hurt Feyre truly :)”, which is one massive, massive pet peeve I have about this trend in romances — the way authors sometimes try to have it both ways by spicing it up with “scary” love interests but then just… kinda… make their endgame still the fluffy hearts-and-flowers kind, thereby accidentally affirming that these ‘scary’ behaviors belong in sweet unproblematic romance. It does not! Put that in the fun dark romance where it belongs!!!
(Like, spoiler alert, but Rhysand gets justified in the next book as being a misunderstood good guy who was just acting for the Greater Good, and literally all the villain-coding here was just him putting on an act, and I haaaate that. If you’re going to woobify and declaw a monster for Feyre’s love interest then Tamlin is already right there!!! )
Oh, that’s absolutely fair! But that’s why I said people who don’t know. (I’m also not saying every single person who ever read these books and maybe have liked them.) I’m just hypothesizing about the popularity, to be clear.
And I agree, if she leaned into it and either admitted this is problematic (more so than she’s willing to anyway, she offers lip service here and there) or else she just kept it kinky, that would work better. Trying to mix everything, as you said, unfortunately condones abusive behaviors. Without any insight, that’s wonky at best and enabling victim blaming too. Clare just didn’t fight back enough! Obviously if she had then she’d be alive right now. Which isn’t true; she was doomed the minute Feyre opened her fucking mouth and other people heard her voice.
Woof, yeah. She’s trying to pretend these two guys aren’t the same but they are. Ughhh Tamlin is the Jacob(?) and Rhysand is the vampire considering he suddenly got sparkly and had bat wings (though I suspected dragon until vampire dawned on me.) But don’t declaw your monsters, that’s cruel! lol
“(Like, spoiler alert, but Rhysand gets justified in the next book as being a misunderstood good guy who was just acting for the Greater Good, and literally all the villain-coding here was just him putting on an act, and I haaaate that. If you’re going to woobify and declaw a monster for Feyre’s love interest then Tamlin is already right there!!! )”
Are you fucking shitting me?!?!?! Honestly, I would have liked this whole mess a lot more if Maas had gone with Fayray having a violence fetish, her being attracted to the darkness in these fairies rather. She could have been weary of it, afraid of her desire to basically stick her hand in the fire, but she can’t control her desires. Rhys, Tamlin, all of them are violent and dangerous, they aren’t human, they aren’t really mortal so it would make sense for them to be dangerous and it could have been hot and sexy dangerous with all kinds of angst going on. Instead she backs down and, well, she’s basically ripping the wings off her fairies. Making them just humans who can make tables get bigger and shit. Lame!!!!
This story could have been amazing in the hands of a better writer who isn’t so afraid of the darker passions. And, since Fayray is into the violence, it would be consensual, so less problematic than the 80s bodice ripper stories about sweet innocent girls being victimized by brutish men.
The most infuriating thing about this book is the potential that got squandered.
Yup!!!!!!!!!
I was so mad…
Honestly, him doing the villain-coding as an act wouldn’t even be so bad, it could create some damn nuance, but again it needs to be actual BDSM. So yeah, either lean in hard to Feyre just having very bad taste in men and acknowledging it with her going after what she wants in perhaps not the best way or have it be forthright about how these are all kinks and consensual scenes with a Jerk who has a Heart of Gold. Give him an actual character arc Heel-Face turn if you want, I love those, but don’t just say “oh he was a goodie all along” and hand-wave it lol.
Very *good taste :L
I dunno; the person he was underneath the fun act was rather generic. Maas is just too afraid to do a proper villain romance…
Well said
I think that the “again-useless part” of her is her vagina actually. It’s again-useless because she doesn’t need it at this moment to bone Tamlin, and I found there’s a trend in describing sexual desire as “useless” when it influences woman’s behavior with the “wrong guy.” But it’s dumb nonetheless.
lol I guess she wishes she had a dick to fuck Rhysand in the ass with. She hasn’t heard of pegging yet.
I thought it was that or her painting.
FYI, that “useless part” of herself is the part she keeps shaming for being into pretty things and noticing like flowers and colors and things she can paint. Apparently it’s less useless than the part of her that notices what she CANT paint XD
Also per what I said in an earlier comment, part of what I REALLY don’t like about the way these two “impossible tasks” are resolved is — so Rhysand literally just fixes it because he wants to nope out of this fairy tale, which is narratively so lazy. And Lucien’s mom could’ve been good if we’d LITERALLY SEEN HER AT ANY POINT!!!! The connection to her sparing Lucien was just hand waved away with “she must have been in the crowd that day”. No!!! That’s lazy!!! Maas could very easily have shown Lucien’s mother there instead of his brothers! There could even been a moment of pathos/empathy, where Feyre sees how terrified the mother is for Lucien, maybe thinks about her own mother, maybe realizes that her mother probably cared just as much about her daughters but was so delirious by the end that she didn’t recognize Feyre, but was so desperate for anyone to promise to take care of her family that she made that person at her bedside swear to do it; and that could have resolved whatever lingering feelings and confusion she had around her vow to take care of her family. Spoiler alert — that vow never comes up again in this book or the next, so this could’ve been a good reason for it, a moment of transfixed realization as Lucien’s mother met her eyes. Then after that, Lucien’s mother could have come help her in the hallway, e.g. magicking the hall squeaky-clean, and they could have talked about Lucien and Amarantha… idk; it could’ve been more meaningful. It also could have set up some stuff for the gender issues in the next book — the mother could have mentioned she was powerless when her husband banished Lucien, or how she feels in a male-dominated sphere and how she knows the first priority is to get Amarantha out, but so many of the males are all about returning to the status quo and a lot of the females aren’t so into that. Which could ALSO have helped set up some of the conflict in the next book around (again, spoilers) preserving the status quo, stability versus challenging things, etc.
lol her creativity is useless, huh? That explains why she’s so fucking stupid and incapable of thinking of any better plans ever.
I love your idea for bringing in the mom in a previous chapter (or more) and also having Lucien’s mom help Feyre understand her own mother’s motivations. Especially if they talked at length, like maybe the mom could point some things out and Feyre ACTUALLY LISTENS AND HEARS HER OUT because she respects this woman. What if Feyre’s fucking stubbornness was because she didn’t want to be told what to do by the men in her life? It’s an understandable fault in lacking trust because every woman has been there and it’d give us a chance to see WTF Feyre actually does know. Maybe she isn’t a completely hopeless idiot the entire time either and she does listen to other women (perhaps even to a fault so Amarantha manages to trick her at first idk) and yes some men who do know what they’re talking about if they don’t infantilize her in the process. There’s so much room for nuance but instead we just got “Feyre is a fucking idiot when I need her to be relatable” and that can work but it helps if it’s a damn comedy and not this brooding cesspit where she never actually does anything unless it’s annoying.
Brb creating a cross stitch of “I doubt the erotic possibilities of lentils.”
It’s absolutely a conversation starter for the living room, the office, the kitchen, or the bedroom.
I…. am going to crochet that line into a backpack! xD that’s gold!
–Being grabbed by demons and threatened with roasting seems like an exciting enough part of the story to put on the page as it happens, but I’m not commercially popular on an astronomic level, so how do I know what makes an enjoyable read?–
As someone who has read many trash manga and manhwa webcomics, I can say that many writers/creator always skip essential plot scenes because it’s tedious to the romance. They just want to get back to the hot guy as soon as possible (which actually did happen in this chapter). And I’m guessing most of their readers accept this. The world is not fair to some skillful writers, Jenny.
–I gave him a flat look. “One of your mistress’s household chores, I suppose.”
“Hm,” he said, examining his nails. “Apparently she or her cronies think I’ll find some sport with you.”
My mouth dried up. “Or it’s a test for you,” I managed to get out. “You said you bet on me on my first task. She didn’t seem pleased about it.”–
It’s always the women, huh? The men are certified assholes, but they will never be mean to Feyre, of course, because she is just so desirable and oh so feisty. And Amarantha hates her because of that. Not because Feyre’s a threat to fairykind or her authority, but because she’s stealing her men.
I think it would be more exciting if Feyre makes a deal with Amarantha that if she clears and survives a trial, a fairy that Amarantha cursed gets freed. Except for Tamlin, who can only be freed by solving the riddle. Lucien could be the first, and Rhysand might be slyly positioning for the second. Other fairies might also try to support her to show that there are cracks to Amarantha’s rule. That way it will make more sense if others help her than just sheer heroine plot armor.
I get it, I’m not the audience for this. But I always acknowledge interesting stories no matter how much of a trash they are. From summaries, I thought this is just dumb fun, but as Jenny brings out the infuriating details, it’s hard to really give it too much credit.
I’m weird in that I get super excited adding lore into my p0rn fanfiction. I have trouble sticking with PWP or even just fluff lol. The plot grabs me and runs off half the time and I’m like “but I just wanted them to bone down… I guess I do need to explore how their lives got better, and they hang out with their friends, and how their boss is handling that whole evil tyrant determined to destroy everyone by offering some evil bargains of her own laced with free will.”
| I think it would be more exciting if Feyre makes a deal with Amarantha that if she clears and survives a trial, a fairy that Amarantha cursed gets freed. Except for Tamlin, who can only be freed by solving the riddle. Lucien could be the first, and Rhysand might be slyly positioning for the second. Other fairies might also try to support her to show that there are cracks to Amarantha’s rule. That way it will make more sense if others help her than just sheer heroine plot armor. |
Oh yes! That would solve a lot of issues with the faeries just kind of randomly helping her. It really needs to be more dumb fun too. For me this book would just be a slog.
This one writer I follow keeps trying to write PWP and ending up with tens of thousands of words of more XD one of her PWPs had *linguistics*.
*Lore, not more, whoops!
haha I feel that so hard. I just get so excited exploring how all these things impact the characters and their relationships. It makes them feel more interesting to me and I’m just not a master of brevity I’m afraid.
I have also read romance stories where they diverted too much to the complicated plots, and I have been so engrossed I forgot I was shipping pairs there 😀 but I will never complain about that, so godspeed to your fanfiction
Ohhh that’s actually really clever. I love that!
Thanks! And it seems a simpler deal compared to how convoluted it was actually stated
Suppose this is as good a time as any to point out there’s a ACOTR collection at Hot Topic
https://www.hottopic.com/pop-culture/shop-by-license/a-court-of-thorns-and-roses/
That “Only You Can Decide What Breaks You” merch makes me want to hit things. It’s got the same faux-empowering, toxic-positivity vibe as “God never gives us more than we can handle”.
Also I find the other merch hilarious for all the wrong reasons. The graphic design work is fine and the starfall dress is just a lovely sparkle print on blue fabric but all of the text is ridiculous or painful. I refused to look past page one lol
I, unfortunately, really like that star dress
Was just ordering something at Snag Tights, when I noticed this (which I very much did not buy): https://snagtights.com.au/pages/acotar-official-merch
That washed-out blue shirt that said “Hello Feyre Darling” over the right shoulder confused me so much. What is the appeal? It looks weird and lopsided! If it’s a callback to Feyre’s eyeball tattoo, it’s on the wrong side for that!
I hate that I’m thinking about this, but you know what a great piece of merch would be?
Elbow-length gloves, with one white and one with intricate black designs all over it and an eye on the palm. Like the tattoo she got from Rhysand. Idk; I feel like that would just appeal so much to fans?
Alternatively, one of those dresses that have lace/netting gauzy sleeves, except one sleeve is sheer and the other has a lacy black design like the tattoo, and the rest of the dress maybe has a starry background and is dark blue with little points of white or maybe tiny rhinestones on it. Very Night Court, and again with the tattoo on display… I can’t believe hot topic didn’t at least try it; surely it would’ve sold?
Sarah J. Maas is reminding me of someone I used to game with.
This person… I think she wanted to play a Mary Sue, but that doesn’t work in a TTRPG. What makes a Mary Sue, I would argue, is the disconnect between the author’s view of the character and a (critical) audience’s view. And in collaborative storytelling, the rest of the group is both co-author and audience.
Any time there was an attractive male NPC, she assumed that he must be in love with her character. Mary Sue characters never have unrequited attraction!
The worst thing, though, was that even when the GM gave her a NPC who was fully committed to having a romance with her character, she mucked that up by chasing after *another* attractive character. Part of this was failure to recognize that just because someone’s hot doesn’t mean they have your best interests at heart, but I think there was a certain amount of “chasing the next shiny object” going on there, too.
This is what the switch in love interests reminds me of. It doesn’t come off as a planned bait-and-switch so much as the author deciding, “Ooh, I think this guy’s hotter now.”
Polyamory would solve so many bait-and-switch problems, planned or otherwise. Every time a new-shiny appears, just tell him to hop in.
Exactly! lol I’m not saying every situation must become polyamory but if that’s just how you want to handle relationships for characters or even in your life (as long as concern and care is shown for actual people and everyone is on the same page) then it makes the most sense.
Oof, no. An essential part of polyamory is checking in with everyone (including yourself!) to make sure everyone’s cool with what’s going on, and nobody feels neglected.
This person… well, it turns out that she had the “next shiny object” thing in real life, but DIDN’T check in with other partners.
Oh noooo.
And I think Lena is saying it’d solve things in the game, not in real life. You don’t have to check in with every NPC like that; it’s just a game; as long as none of the players are uncomfortable, you can collect a tidy harem if you want. (And ‘players’ includes the GM). The nice thing about fictional characters is that you can bypass all the pesky, labor-intensive parts of treating them like actual people.
That said, what she does in real life sounds… yikes!!
Erm… still no. In a TTRPG, you can say, “I check in with [name] to see if they’re okay with this” instead of coming up with the proper phrasing yourself. But whoever plays the other character might still say, “Uh, no, they’re not okay with this.”
Or they might say, “I’d be okay with it if it were someone I knew and trusted, but absolutely not this obvious villain you just met five minutes ago.”
I’m wondering if we had a miscommunication here. Do you use ‘NPC’ in a different way from how it’s conventionally used? As I understand it, from my six years of playing and designing TTRPGs, the acronym ‘NPC’ stands for ‘non-player character’. In games with a conventional GM role (rather than a GMless game, or one with multiple GMs and/or a rotating set of GMs), the GM is the player responsible for NPCs. It sounds like that’s the case here, given you referred to a singular GM. So you won’t be checking in with a different player per NPC; asking the person playing “each character” would literally just be a question of whether the GM is okay with a small harem subplot.
Also, I don’t believe you read my comment before responding. Please note that I explicitly said “as long as none of the players are uncomfortable” in the very first paragraph. What you’re describing sounds like checking in with the literal NPC, by name, which sounds unnecessary at best. If no player is at all uncomfortable with or opposed to that direction, then I’m not sure where the need to check in with *the NPC* is coming from. Is this a religious or animism thing around NPCs and spirits? If so, I apologize for disrespecting your spiritual beliefs/practices and will stay out of it. I’ve never heard of TTRPGs played in such a way that would involve NPCs’ feelings needing to be respected beyond “at least one player doesn’t think this would plausibly happen” or “at least one player has a bit of an ick”, but obviously there are experiences beyond my own, and I don’t want to disregard any of that.
Realized we might be having different conversations and that’s probably on me, actually.
I interpreted your comments as being about necessity/ethics in polyamory in real life and applying that to TTRPG characters in *general*, which would’ve been wrong; but you *were* talking about this one problem person in your particular group playing that particular game, in which case, yeah, poly totally wouldn’t have solved anything; it sounds like what she wanted out of the experience was different from what y’all wanted. And of course your group in particular is allowed to have its own rules and ways of communicating — while some groups are comfortable enough that a player can say “I want to do this” or even “I do this”, and any objections can be addressed afterwards by retconning things, for other groups it might be safer to only say “Is everyone open to [thing] happening?” And then proceed only if everyone gives explicit approval. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with doing that for any particular group, and I apologize for implying there was. I was trying to say it’s entirely unnecessary as a blanket requirement across *all* roleplaying, not that any one individual group would be doing it wrong if they did that.
Also I totally forgot about one sitch, in which while there is one ‘GM’ player who arbitrates things or determines some consequences, but each non-GM player might still have control of one or more NPCs. In those cases, yeah, you’re right that it might be a different player for each NPC; sorry for correcting you on that.
Tl;dr I thought I was addressing prescriptiveness toward how TTRPGs are played in general. Of course your group can and should do as it likes within that group, so long as nothing’s being universalized or anything outside the group. Likewise, other groups are totally fine to play in ways that are completely different, and they aren’t doing anything wrong or anything they “shouldn’t”.
Basically if you think every TTRPG in every group needs to approach things that particular way, that’s wrong. But if your use of “you” was still about your particular group, or groups like it, and nothing else, then I certainly wouldn’t object.
And, of course, again, if you’ve a personal religious, spiritual, or otherwise important belief in NPC autonomy, then the “wrong” bit no longer applies; we can just agree to disagree on it.
Threading wouldn’t let me reply directly to your comments below, so I’ll put it here.
While it is one GM handling all the NPCs, it’s not a matter of believing each NPC is a spirit-being so much as just… writer’s craft. If it wouldn’t make sense for a character to react positively, why have them do that?
Let’s say you had a player who wanted their character to be able to be incredibly rude to every NPC. Some of them might laugh it off, but it would make far more sense for most of them to react negatively, just as real people would.
Most players in my experience approach TTRPG games as “immersive world” experiences, which means that actions may have unforeseen consequences.
I definitely think it’s a good thing to give everyone the ability to say, “This is subject matter I’m seriously uncomfortable with” (as an example, my group has a very strict policy barring anything sexual assault-related from the table), but I don’t think it’s reasonable to extend that to “my wish-fulfillment fantasies aren’t being satisfied”.
Also, though I’m trying to obscure the particulars to protect the guilty, I should probably add that infidelity wasn’t even the biggest problem in that scenario.
This game setting was one of those which frequently flouts the “good people are pretty, evil people are ugly and/or disfigured” trope. This player did the dumb YA heroine thing of ignoring all the red flags indicating that Mr. New Shiny Object was, in fact, a willing and obedient servant of the Cosmic Big Bads, purely on the logic of, “I have pantsfeelings, therefore he must be redeemable through the power of love!”. Our GM, not being a bad YA author, opted not to contradict everything previously established and turn Mr. NSO into a woobie just because a PC was dumb enough to jump his bones.
The fact that she’d recently acquired a loyal and devoted mate was the icing on that terrible cake.
If anything, this is similar to a D&D story (involving a completely different player!) in which someone ignored every possible red flag because he thought it would be cool for his paladin to have a Nightmare steed.
I think you’re right. I think as Maas was writing Rhys she started finding him hotter than Tam and of course Fayray has to have the hottest guy in the story and made the switch. It just doesn’t at all feel like she planned it from the start. Especially since, other than him being Hot, there is nothing that says “love interest” about him. So far in the story he is 100% villain. Of course that will change, now that he’s the love interest. I swear this is just a fanfic that got published without anyone actually reviewing and editing it.
Also, ugh, that Mary Sue player sounds exhausting.
It’s also possible the GM in spite of their best intentions and any information the player gave them about what they wanted, didn’t really know the kind of characters she enjoyed crushing on.
And it’s possible she enjoyed the pursuit more than anything. A lot of romance stories (at least in other media, not necessarily romance novels per say, I can’t speak to those) focus more on the chase and aren’t very good at showing the relationship after that. This happens the most when it’s a side-plot in a different genre of story but even within rom-coms and anime where that’s the entire point of it. So she probably had no idea what to do once she had the “love” she was looking for OR she wasn’t concerned about portraying it.
Which is fine in a one-on-one scenario, even better if other people find it amusing and are able to join in somehow as friends or rivals or whatever, but definitely a lot if she’s hogging the spotlight repeatedly. It depends on how much patience people have and if they want to shine too or just kind of hang out casually. Unfortunately, she probably didn’t make it terribly fun for anyone else. The issue of Mary Sue is purely execution and context, which is where the disconnect comes from. It’s not a disease of literature, it’s a symptom of the overarching issue which is execution pure and simple, typically a sign of a very inexperienced author. Which is why it’s easier to live and let live in fandom spaces than say a published bestseller lol it just feels like a raw deal. But at the same time there are people who eat up Mary Sues/Self Inserts because it gives them the shiny hunt and self-aggrandizing characteristics they’re looking for.
Oh, she was quite up-front about what sorts of characters she liked chasing, and even suggested it as a tailored character weakness! But despite all that, she didn’t seem to expect any real negative consequences.
To explain further would risk giving identifying features, and while it seems unlikely that she’d ever read this blog, I’d rather avoid that just in case. It would feel mean.
Don’t know whether people will be able to see this m-dash meme (it’s on Facebook), but it was appropriate enough that I had to share: https://www.facebook.com/redtimmy/posts/pfbid0niLFdwMrANFE7ZbZyCyu8Uan3g2oi6x5zkGNFjCFJpsgtXVVassQjxuXu6i4azdel?__cft__%5B0%5D=AZWSP3tqW3sZaCEULnTU4UnHHcp-Vt2CeBo-rRwYcZbzuPGzLQNoYTunb3C4GiTeL0Uop8351BgS8JCIVRv0v1J-as9rwOm3PKtEWWpR1-uxByu5MHiEdSHfSRI9094hQewExkjjMVYpjlEzCrqU-8LkDWP8mEUGiiDovrnjcx6UYtLVnoiGKAdtHPf6QQLUwPg&__tn__=%2CO%2CP-y-R
If they can’t see it, they just have to log into an account to do so. Facebook likes to tell you that you can’t look at something without explaining how to solve that problem lol.
So, I had a realization because it just didn’t occur to me before (and I was inspired by a comment I saw elsewhere on unrelated internet content.)
Being in subspace is literally about turning your brain off to enjoy things more. There’s research that suggests as much (though I’m sure more research is needed.) It’s literally equated with overwhelming and not using the frontal lobe as much to experience something similar to a Runner’s High or meditation etc.
You may literally have to turn your brain off to enjoy this book.
I’m not saying this means people who enjoy being a sub are filled with bad taste but I believe that is absolutely one of the reasons the target audience is so big and have made it so popular.
It targets subs and bottoms (two different things mind you) and it targets young women/femme presenting people who may have less experience with relationships and have internalized a lot of problematic stuff they’re still sorting out in life (as many of us have or are still in the process of.) There is a lot of kinky implications even if there’s very little actual sex and there aren’t a lot of deep concepts/lore you need to grasp to understand what is happening even if the narrative is wildly inconsistent. It keeps pretending there’s bad stuff while it’s actually all very tame and safe. I also still believe that it appeals to people who probably aren’t that into attraction but more so aesthetic vibes (because whenever Maas does good descriptions that evoke anything that’s what we get.) It appeals to people who love the shiny hunt (like the concept of polyamory playing around or just love the pursuit) while also showing off typical monogamy tropes like The One True Love.
It also appeals to people with low self-esteem (I’m not saying you must be to enjoy it mind you) while still having a sense of greatness and beauty (not even narcissism necessarily but perhaps symptoms of the infantilization, exploitation, and sexualization of youth today coupled with in the USA the de-funding of public schools at large.) They may feel a great deal of bitterness about the world around them (for any reason whatsoever these days honestly), and who want a form of escapism but feel guilty about wanting or having the finer things in life. It teases traditionalism and the escape from it without really breaking most social cultural norms at least so far anyway.
I’m still positive there are better books out there that do all of that but I feel like I’ve pinned down most of the overall appeal at any rate (and why Maas might’ve enjoyed writing it, if she did enjoy writing it.) Feel free to dispute any of that; I’m always down for discussion even if I get burned for it hahaha. But quite literally I feel like the intended audience is more forgiving because it’s targeting a lot of traits that would make them feel that way towards it. This book especially just isn’t as much dumb fun for anyone who expected something else which unfortunately I think the marketing and word of mouth might lead you to believe? IDK!
I’m just overly analytical by default and often spit out theories. And I absolutely can’t read anyone’s mind nor can I claim that every person who has ever read this series and enjoyed it will be a carbon copy of what I’m suggesting. I also wasn’t trying to shame people, if that’s unclear.
Also please forgive me if I fuck shit up. I’m only human and there’s no editing feature here ha ha.
*sighs* see after hitting send I realized I already fucked up.
|I’m not saying this means people who enjoy being a sub are filled with bad taste but I believe that is absolutely one of the reasons the target audience is so big and have made it so popular.
Subs don’t have bad taste but do turn their brains off to enjoy more sensations and endorphins. There is literally research that shows they will literally fail a Stroop Test while in subspace. So if this book gives them a remote inkling of that or they turned off their brain to find it, they won’t be bothered by most of the stuff we see as glaring flaws that ruin the entire experience. And that’s why you won’t see anyone who enjoyed the books getting critical about them. That’s the connection I was trying to make anyway.
I think there are aspects of this explanation that feel a bit… conflating? Not, like, offensive or anything; I just think it might be putting the cart before the horse.
So with subspace, it’s great, but it’s not a *conscious choice* to “turn your brain off” in order to “enjoy things more”; that doesn’t really make much sense. It’s more of a… result of having enjoyed your scene so much and having gotten into the right mindset for it that you end up all nice and floaty. You can’t just *decide* to go into subspace and automatically get there. You certainly can’t do it in advance in order to read a bad book. I guess arguably *some* people could get into subspace by reading some hints and implications of kink in said bad book, and then keep reading… I mean, I don’t really get how that can happen (with just a few hints and implications), but I’m not going to speak for other people; maybe they’re better at entering that mindset than I know. Maybe I’m just bad at getting subs to enter it XD
You’re right that subs and bottoms are very different, but I’m not sure what bottoms have to do with all this. Like.. there’s a difference between “bottoms” as a term in American gay culture or whatever, and people who just happen to enjoy being penetrated; and enjoying being penetrated doesn’t mean you like turning your brain off to enjoy things more. There’s no inherent connection there.
It’s interesting, though, connecting it with things like runner’s high. That usually takes a lot more effort to do than just switching your brain off, though! But, then again, maybe it’s the same process; idk if I’ve experienced it per se.
I would strongly disagree with characterizing meditation as “switching your brain off to enjoy things more”; while I’m not a psychology professional, I have studied cultures where meditation is part of religious practices, and “enjoying things more” is VERY much not the point of meditation in those religions! It’s arguable whether strict meditation even *does* let you enjoy anything more.
You raise an interesting point about guilt… personally, I thought the appeal was on a few prongs — Feyre isn’t great, in terms of personality or abilities; but hot boys fall for her all the time anyway, and she can keep being stupid and passive and doing nothing but bathing and eating all day, and still there will be faeries who help her and propel her through the plot so she can have a “badass action hero” arc and get all the nice rewards and such that action heroes deserve. And you raised a really good point about low self-esteem — I hadn’t connected it to that, but you’re right that that would definitely appeal to people who maybe don’t think they’re particularly strong or smart or badass or kind, but would enjoy the wish fulfillment of hot boys and action heroing.
I can definitely see the perspective of “I find this hot and I’m easy so now that I’m horny I don’t care too much about quality as long as it keeps delivering”, but I don’t think that’s exclusive to subs or bottoms, and it doesn’t seem to be related to subspace or meditation. Doms and tops and vanilla fuckers can easily get horny enough from something that they no longer care about things they’d otherwise care about (e.g. dialogue, film quality, plot) — that’s why so many pornos have such contrived plots that make no sense (or so I’ve heard XD )
I mean that’s fair lol. I’m probably hypothesizing bullshit lol
Bottom is more than penetration; it’s being the receiver of a sexual act. Top is more than penetration; it’s being the more active partner. And of course most people are probably not 100% one or the other but a lot of people enjoy receiving, including guys. That’s what I understood it to mean anyhow and that’s how I was using it, although I’m too lazy to reread my own post rn cuz I realized I hadn’t checked back in a few days for new chapters. Anyway, Feyre has a LOT of stuff done to her (including the bathing) and she’s extremely passive as a partner even though I think Jenny mentioned at one point something about them both whispering names against bare skin during the sex scene lol. I don’t think Feyre would ever be a Top by any means and if she’s the self-insert, unless people are imagining being the guys doing stuff to her, which isn’t impossible, then I guess they’re into imagining having things done to them.
So for example, if someone is having their pussy eaten, the bottom is the one receiving while the top is the one eating them out. This doesn’t include a power exchange but it can. We supposedly got any automatic implications of everything receptive being submissive except for receiving oral because the Romans assumed the person receiving head was always in charge and it was somehow the ultimate most dominant role because only the person receiving oral was being pleasured and they assume yer always kneeling and not giving head from any other location (like lying down for 69 lol.) Or something to that extent. I’m paraphrasing some shit I probably read on wikipedia so take that with a giant grain of salt. And if any of that is correct, they were also kinda homophobic, although they didn’t have those terms, since they supposedly didn’t think it was acceptable for a man to be a bottom past a certain age and be penetrated, which is just a lot to unpack I guess and goes beyond whatever my original point probably was.
The meditation thing was about explaining subspace and the brain connection. IDK, apparently the high one can get from it, the altered mental activity, is similar to subspace or at least it activates a similar region of the brain. Feel free to google search the studies that have been done on how the brain changes during subspace. They could already agree with you. It’s entirely possible I misunderstood what I read. I do make mistakes.
I’ll admit I was quick to leap to any of these conclusions and I’m not trying to blame anyone even if I used that kind of terminology (and probably blamed them anyway haha I don’t always follow my own best intentions.) The true blame for a train wreck is the publishers and the author not giving a shit about the quality. I was conjecturing, admittedly armchair psychology puzzling and analyzing who I think this appeals to. I was just considering that one MUST turn off their brain to enjoy this and hypothesizing over what that might mean and who that might target the most. And I might be wrong about everything but lol I’m not doing a large scale study to prove myself wrong, which is how one would run a proper experiment. I won’t be surprised if I would prove myself wrong but I simply won’t be doing the legwork to be definitive about that because it’d be a lot of effort and involve a whole lot of people filling out a survey bare minimum.
Anyway, tl;Dr it seems unfair to pin this on subs and/or bottoms when the actual problem is just the allosexual tendency toward “body get horny —> brain turn off”
Re: a previous comment about asexual/Sex-repulsed people: If anything, asexual or sex-repulsed people are significantly LESS likely to enjoy this, as they won’t be affected by hints of horny in the same way. I don’t know if you’ve interacted with a lot of ace writers, but I’ve worked alongside some of them, and they write excellent smut. It’s very well thought out and sexy, even from my allo perspective. Those people say they will have SIGNIFICANTLY higher standards for smut — it doesn’t turn them on, so they aren’t going to settle for generic stuff that follows a pattern to give them the endorphins; there’s no shortcut to bypass the logical centers of their brain by telling their bodies, “it’s hot so who cares?” A few of them have said that it needs to make *sense* to them, to convince them on a conscious level that a person could enjoy/take pleasure in doing a thing; otherwise they can’t maintain suspension of belief and it loses plausibility.
I also don’t see any sex-repulsed person calling a book “~spicy~”. If anything, they’d be like “yeah, I heard of ACoTaR, but based on what I heard I’m not into it.” Why would a sex-repulsed person read a book marketed as “fairy porn”?
An ace friend told me she likes to read PWP fanfiction because, as she put it, “A well-written sex scene is a kind of character sketch”.
Extremely valid XD
I know some aro people who like reading romance for similar reasons — it’s very character-focused, and there are lots of emotions involved.
Sex scenes are action scenes with different goals, so yeah you can explore so much personality and motivation through them! It’s really boring if it’s just insert tab A into tab B without anything about the individual characters that makes it unique.
Romance is definitely the more emotional side of this. Both involve a lot of character dynamics. haha too far down to reply directly to Al there, so adding that on top of replying to ShifterCat. 😀
Okay, so you’ve got me there lol. I’m Aromantic, Asexual, and Aegosexual (but Sex-Positive or Sex-Neutral whatever the terms should be) and I do have trouble just writing PWP. I’ve done it before but extremely rarely over the past two decades. I can’t say the quality of my writing is stellar (I have more unfinished stories than finished) but every time I try to write something short and simple, I always end up writing a ton of build-up pages/chapters because the situation itself, the relationship dynamics (of any sort), and character’s being IC and relatable are extremely important to me. BUT THAT SAID I can get horny as fuck for PWP once that has been created. Like I will imagine the characters I adore just fucking casually but I have to know them really well and appreciate their partners deeply (even if the character is also Aro or Ace.) I find it harder to write that without having gone through the build-up because getting from point A to point B is important to me in a narrative sense.
So, on the one hand, I may have some minor insight that you don’t, but I’m admttedly assuming a lot about an angle of this that I don’t know about. I don’t feel attraction for real people, only characters who don’t actually exist, so I think maybe I experience some attraction in certain scenarios but even there I’m not certain. It took me three decades to realize I was probably Ace because of this. And I might even be Demiromantic/Demisexual on the Aegosexual side of things because I can have that “wow they’re kinda hot” sensation but it’s mostly after I’ve gotten to know them really well. If I don’t know them, I can’t do that. If anything, knowing Feyre and these other assholes has turned me off significantly haha and I enjoy redeeming villains from certain fandoms.
To explain where I was coming from, because I acknowledge I was probably wrong, I was thinking about this from, hear me out, fetish art porn. You know the stuff where it’s just fat fetish, foot fetish, giant/tiny, balloons, being crushed, or number of other things? Some of them never even show genitals because sometimes the artist really doesn’t like seeing them; it’s just the fetish front and center. And I’m sure plenty of those very skilled artists are also Allosexual, Sex-Positive, AND/OR Medium or High Libido, but there’s probably a reasonable chunk of them who are well within the ranks of Asexual, Sex-repulsed or Sex Neutral, AND/OR Low Libido. (Math isn’t my strong suit so just understand I’m trying to explain there’s a bunch of combinations, including Asexual, Sex Positive, High Libido and Allosexual, Sex Repulsed, Low Libido.) I mean, there’s no proof Maas isn’t sex-repulsed herself, whether she’s Straight Allo or not, though a lot of that was probably just Catholic Guilt. There’s really next to nothing truly horny in here except for the accidental stuff. It’s all lip service levels of horny. That’s what I’ve been driving at too. So yeah the marketing would lead one to assume they don’t want it if it’s just on the spice alone perhaps and hearing more about it, if they need it to make sense and have any experience with other books, this might turn them off too.
So if they’re not Demiromantic/Demisexual, have no desire to see extended attraction depicted or genitals mentioned or anything else that could be squicky, the book glosses over all of that, are new to kink and fetish stuff so they have no idea what else is out there, like faeries but also have no idea what else is out there, want a passive feel good experience but always hear about how it has to be earned from every criticism of a female lead ever known, and aren’t actually here for the sex because if they have been given ACCURATE word of mouth, it’s very clear there isn’t much in the way of actual sex scenes, but maybe they have a lot of shame and self-esteem issues and are essentially a Christian teenage Incel of any gender. I’m not saying this is every ACoTaR fan in existence but I was hypothesizing maybe people like that exist. I’m hypothesizing they just want to submit/receive a very specific, kinky, not that sexual experience for any number of reasons.
But anyway, I admit I’m probably just a fucking idiot lol. It happens a lot.
I didn’t think it was possible to hate a book more than 50 Shades or Apollonia and yet, here I am, hating this book with every fiber of my being.