Don’t worry, Tam Tam. I’m on your side.
Below is the full export of all of my highlights and notes, collected during my recent critical re-read of ACOMAF. I tried my hardest to focus only on passages that showcased either the blatant revisionary approach SJM took to Tamlin, the blatant hypocrisy exhibited by both Feyre and Rhys, or if you're really lucky, both.
As you can see the infodump is massive, which leads whether or not SJM even tried to be careful about how she was even contradicting her own work. My gut tells me that, much like Feyre, she's often enamored of her own cleverness, and thinks she was probably being like super-smart about dismantling every single thing Rhys did wrong in book one (to make it be right) and every good thing Tamlin ever did (to make it be wrong). I can literally see the bullet-point list in my imagination, and her ticking off items one by one, cackling in glee.
What she, and the less mentally independent readers out there, see as cleverness, I just see as laziness, because for all of her very thorough efforts to showcase Rhys as the good guy all along, she appears to have completely ignored the fact that she's created the two most blatantly oblivious characters in the history of YA/NA Fantasy Romance, neither of which have any awareness of the fact that they are actually not the heroes they think they are, but are instead sanctimonious, condescending Mary-Sues. I’ve found that taking that perspective makes re-reads much more bearable, because I’m sure Feyre and Rhys will never get their comeuppance, and certainly not in the way Tamlin has.
