I feel a need to address the elephant in the room. For someone that hates the ACOTAR series as much as I do, I sure do talk about it a lot, don't I?
I'm willing to admit that I'm somewhat hyper-focused on it, in a sense, but trust me, there's sound reasoning behind it.
First, love it or hate it, you can't deny that the books are a behemoth in the YA/Fantasy world, and publishing in general. They're a phenomenon, for good or ill (mostly ill, but more on that later), so it's difficult not to judge other works in comparison. Everyone wants to the next biggest thing, and right now these books are one of the biggest things.
Second, they were a gateway for me that led to other books I eventually wound up admiring and valuing more. ACOMAF was probably the first book with smut I ever read, and it eventually led me to realize that hey I kind of like it so let me read more (I did, and let me tell you in hindsight the vaunted Chapter 55 is a joke). It introduced me to the joys of Fae fantasy, and without it I would never had discovered The Folk of the Air books, which are straight up one of my favorites of all time now.
Lastly, and this is personal purely to me, I feel fucking betrayed by these books. I very much am in my I-just-got-dumped-by-the-guy-I-thought-was-awesome feels when it comes to ACOTAR. Consider the repeated analytical blog posts the current-equivalent of every emo diatribe I wrote on MySpace way back when (and unfortunately they're probably still out there in the ether, some place). I loved these books when I first read them. I devoured the first five in days. I think I even paid full price for them on Kindle, because I could not wait to find out what happens next. I recommended them to friends and family. I was in love. And then somewhere along the way I found out the love of my life was a skeez and I'm burned and I need to purge myself of these feelings.
Items two and three are a somewhat simplified version of what I'm really feeling here, but it's true for the most part. I'm significantly older than the target audience for this series, but I feel like I'm still growing and changing and expanding my worldview, and even though I think I only read these for the first time back in 2019 (book one was a Prime Day special....thanks Jeff Bezos) I feel like I've changed enough since then to explain why I just can't with Rhy and Feyre and all that stuff anymore.
Let's put it this way - reading and loving a book for the first time is very much like falling in love with someone new. It's like the honeymoon phase of any relationship, when your SO shits rainbows, farts roses, and can practically murder someone in front of you and you'll still think they're the bee's knees. I'm not sure about anyone else, but for me in particular, when I get swept up in a new book, I sometimes have a really hard time seeing the forest for the trees. I don't skim when I read, but I don't always look closely or notice all of the finer points. I'm taste-testing a lot of time, not checking the ingredients list and calorie count.
At some point though, when you love a book a lot, you want to consume as much material related to it as you can, and eventually re-read it. This is where it started to get ugly for me. You know the line from Romeo and Juliet, my greatest love, sprung from my greatest hate? For me it's the exact opposite. I hate it so much now because I loved it so much then. I've been cuckolded, damn it, and I'm not going to keep quiet about it.
I thought Rhys was sooo romantic at first. Why couldn't I find me a man built like a brick shithouse that also like to advance feminist causes in his spare time? I couldn't believe the Tamlin I fell in love with in book one betrayed Feyre (aka meeee) like that! Blah blah...you know the story. Rhysand is obviously idealized, as is his relationship with Feyre, and ate it up like the jumbo bag of Skittles I finished like a day after I bought it.
Through the consumption of critical content on Sarah J. Maas, the books themselves, as well as other books (and relationships therein) that I found more palatable, I eventually came to realize that I looked at the ACOTAR series along the same lines that Feyre thinks she saw Tamlin in book one. What was romantic and clever (Rhys' protection of Feyre and his court in book 1) became creepy and downright abusive - mostly because it is abusive. I don't care how much you're doing it to protect someone, drugging them and making them dance naked in front of strangers isn't romantic. Touching someone in a sexual manner without their consent is assault, not flirting.
Tamlin was still in the wrong ACOMAF forward, but what I originally saw as misogynistic piggery just became pathetic attempts at control ultimately born of low self esteem, paranoia, and trauma. A lot of that came to light for me, in very stark detail, after the death of my father.
I'll be honest - my father was not always a good man. I didn't always realize this, or realize it at all, until after my parents divorced in my twenties, but eventually those rose-colored glasses came off. My dad wound up getting ill just after Christmas 2020, and while sitting in the ER with him, he just broke down crying, telling me how he knew he was a terrible father, and how he messed up his whole life and our whole life and how sorry he was. This was something he'd come to express a lot in the past, always related to health issues of his (my father was a Vietnam veteran and had been in a very bad motorcycle accident in his twenties and battled health issues the rest of his life as a result). It wasn't anything I hadn't heard before, but it definitely soothed the wounds I felt not so much from the divorce as from the betrayal I felt when finding out he wasn't who I'd imagined him to be.
In any case, he wound up sufferings a massive stroke shortly after this ER visit. He lingered in the hospital for a month, and I visited him and sat with him every single day. I read ACOSF at his bedside, so these events in my life and these books are inextricably linked for me. Forever. I can't unsee it. My father passed away in a rehab home on March 8th 2021. In my own mind, and because he expressed his regret to me so many times before, I feel like he took that month he basically spent in a coma to make amends in his own mind and prepare himself to leave this world. I'm not religious, I don't go to church or pray, but I feel like something bigger is out there, so this makes sense to me and it makes me feel better.
I needed to forgive him, not for my own benefit, but for his. I couldn't let all of the bad things he'd done erase the fact that I was a happy child; even if it was later revealed as a lie, I was happy, I had a great life, I wasn't going to let anyone tell me that those memories meant nothing because my dad did bad things. All this is to say that you can still love people that have hurt you, you can still find things to value in them. People can also be genuinely sorry for doing things that have hurt people they love. They don't have to be forgiven, and nobody is EVER obligated to forgive someone that's wronged them, but that doesn't erase the fact that their regret can be genuine. I choose to believe my dad's regret was, and I choose to mourn him and miss him and I'll be damned if someone tells me my grief is wasted on a man that was not always a good person.
I saw so much of my father's experience, in his transformation from the doting father of my youth to the cheating bastard that drove my mother to a nervous breakdown, in Tamlin's 180 from ACOTAR to ACOMAF and beyond. If Tamlin was as beyond redemption as some of the more vociferous fans would have one believe, then so was my father, and I couldn't believe that. I saw my father's traumatic experiences in Vietnam (ones that kept him up at night and crying even 50 years later) in Tamlin's trauma with Amarantha. I saw my dad's inability to seek psychological help in the wake of this trauma (something which I believe down to my very bones led to so many of his issues later in life) as the same situation with Tamlin refusing to talk about what he experienced. If Tamlin was an irredeemable jerk, then so was my father, and I was wrong for loving him and continuing to see the good in him (both dad and Tamlin).
This is not to say that I'm conflating the situation with my father and my growing dislike of the ACOTAR series, but it very much put things in perspective. I could still love my father, I could mourn him and remember all the good things he did. I could forgive him (I do). I could still love and appreciate Tamlin as a character, his arc in book 1, even with his complete retcon afterward. I loved ACOTAR book 1 so much, and I still look back fondly on the joy I experienced reading it, and I'm not letting a shoddily constructed revision tell me otherwise, just like I'm not letting certain people tell me that my happy childhood memories mean shit in light of the revelation of my father as someone who wasn't who I thought he was.
This was an absolute revelation to me. I was so upset as a reader and felt so duped into falling for a guy that became an abuser, but this allowed me to see that I can appreciate the past even in spite of the present. This realization allowed me the perspective I needed to go back and look at the books with new eyes, and to see that while Tamlin was certainly in the wrong, he wasn't beyond redemption. There are so many different degrees of wrong in this world, and trauma and how we deal with it is not black and white. My dad and his temper and how he dealt with his trauma was so much like Tamlin, but I came to see that my experiences with men were more along the lines of how Rhys treats Feyre - telling her that everything he did, even if it seemed bad, was actually good because he LoOoOvEd her. Being treated as an object or a plaything, having smoke blown up my ass so I let my guard down and believed that the poor treatment I was receiving was actually good for me...I saw all of that in Rhys. Feyre fucking fell for it. I, however, will not.
In closing, I have to say that the perspective fiction gives us, especially fantasy fiction, about real life is maybe the best thing about the reading experience. We're so often our own worst enemies and can't get out of our way long enough to fix whatever may be wrong at the moment, but books have a very special way of showing us the path forward or the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel.
So if you're ever reading this blog, or anything I say and wondering why I seem to have tunnel-vision for a book series I largely dislike now, this is your explanation. Not that I own you one.
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