Charlotte Kersten

(Please note that I have also recorded a YouTube version of this essay. Do I know how to make a YouTube video? Not really, but I didn’t let that stop me.)

Today I am going to do something extremely bold and original: I am going to talk about Sarah J Maas books online. I think most of my online friends know that I’ve had something of an…adversarial relationship with her ACOTAR (A Court of Thorns and Roses) series since I read it a few years ago. At that time, I was writing very scathing, sarcastic  reviews of books I disliked and my ACOTAR reviews got pretty popular on Goodreads; when A Court of Silver Flames came out in 2021, I read it and posted my review very quickly, at which point that review became one of the most popular reviews of ACOSF on the site. So that was fun!

Shortly afterwards, I started to rethink my online presence and decided that I wanted to be more gracious and respectful in my critical reviews. I deleted a lot of the old ones that had gotten popular, including the ACOTAR ones. I’ve had people say that they miss them and I’m sorry to those people! Overall, though, I feel a lot better about how I convey my thoughts these days, and I don’t regret deleting the reviews. 

But my Strong Feelings about ACOTAR have endured through all of that. You might say that I’ve been haunted. In fact, a friend of mine joked that I might need an exorcism when she saw that I had decided to reread the books recently. I don’t think that’s so far off at all. The heart of the matter is that ACOTAR and its popularity are deeply exasperating to me because of what they promise and what they deliver. They promise a lush, sweeping romance with the best book boyfriend ever and an empowering trauma healing narrative. They deliver shamelessly hypocritical double standards, abuse apologism and a healthy dose of bad writing. 

Often when people see the words “ACOTAR” and “abuse” combined, they assume that I’m talking about Tamlin. Yes, Tamlin is abusive, but that’s not my main problem with this series. I’m talking about Rhysand, king of avalanche orgasms and picking lint from his clothes and giving women choices. 

Rhysand is my literary nemesis. I hate him in a way that I may have never hated a fictional character before. That hatred occupies a completely normal amount of my brain space. Today I want to talk about this – I want to talk about Rhysand, our beloved woke king. I want to talk about feminism and abuse, choice and narrative framing and excuses. I hope this will give you something to think about and I hope you’ll understand where I’m coming from, but if you don’t and you hate-read this whole thing instead, that’s also your choice. Look at me, giving people choices just like Rhysand!

If I am indeed haunted by the specter of this Fae smut series, may this be my exorcism. Let’s begin. 

PLOT SUMMARY (feel free to skip!)

A Court of Thorns and Roses is a retelling of Beauty and the Beast and the Ballad of Tam Lin in which a human girl named Feyre is forced to live the rest of her life in the land of the Fae because she kills a Fae in wolf form while hunting. The murdered Fae was a soldier from the Fae Spring Court, and its High Lord Tamlin is the one who brings her to his land because her life would otherwise be forfeit. Over the course of the book, Tamlin and Feyre fall in love while she learns that some kind of terrible darkness is plaguing the land. 

Tamlin is eventually captured by the book’s villain Amarantha because she is obsessed with him and wants him to be her lover. Feyre is then also captured when she tries to rescue Tamlin in Amarantha’s underground palace called Under the Mountain. It turns out that Amarantha has captured all of the other High Lords and stolen all of their power, forcing them to suffer her torture and cruel games. Amarantha makes a bargain with Feyre that she’ll let Tamlin go if Feyre can either solve a riddle or pass three terrible trials. 

Tamlin is forced to watch as Feyre is tortured and brought to the brink of death multiple times. Throughout the trials a certain character named Rhysand starts to interact more with her as well. Rhysand is the High Lord of the Night Court, which has a reputation for evil and depravity. He is called Amarantha’s Whore and we know that he reads and shatters people’s minds for her, delivers threats for her and counsels her on political matters in addition to having sex with her. Feyre actually first meets him earlier in the book when he saves her from Fae who are trying to rape her during a Spring Court Festival. He later returns to Tamlin’s manor to threaten him on Amarantha’s behalf. During this encounter, he uses his magic to invade Feyre’s mind to terrify her and read her innermost desires, which he then shares with Tamlin to taunt her. 

Back to Under the Mountain….during the first bit of her imprisonment, Feyre stays in a cell unless she’s brought before Amarantha for one of her trials. After a while, though, Rhysand starts taking her out of her cell at night, dressing her up in revealing dresses  and having her drink magical faerie wine that gets her high and fragments her memory. When she’s high, he has her sit in his lap and dance in a sexually provocative way for him in front of the court while he touches her.  A few quotes about this:

“Thus I became Rhysand’s plaything, the harlot of Amarantha’s whore. I woke with vague shards of memories – of dancing between Rhysand’s legs as he sat in a chair and laughed…He had me dance until I was sick, and once I was done retching, told me to begin dancing again. I awoke ill and exhausted each morning and…the nightly activities left me thoroughly drained.”

And:

“‘He had you dance for him for most of the night. And when you weren’t dancing, you were sitting in his lap.’
‘What kind of dancing?’ I pushed.
‘Not the kind you were doing with Tamlin on Solstice,’ Lucien said, and my face heated. From the murkiness of my memories last night, I recalled the closeness of a certain pair of violet eyes – eyes that sparkled with mischief as they beheld me.
‘In front of everyone?’
‘Yes,’ Lucien replied – more gently than I’d heard him speak to me before.”

He also comes to her cell to visit her. On one of these occasions, he licks the tears from her face while she’s having a breakdown and then mocks her for having a physical reaction to that. On another occasion, she’s near death because of an arm injury from one of the trials. In exchange for her agreeing to belong to the Night Court for a week every month, he offers to heal her arm. When she refuses, he twists the broken shard of bone in her arm and she ends up eventually agreeing. In addition to healing her, he brings her good food, secretly helps her with one of her trials and intervenes when Amarantha’s guards give her impossible chores to complete. On another occasion, she and Tamlin manage to hide together and are about to have sex. Rhysand stops them and sends Tamlin away, and then forcibly kisses Feyre when Amarantha comes into the room afterwards.

He eventually reveals that he’s playing his own secret game of manipulation, helping Feyre and enraging Tamlin at the same time so that Feyre can break Tamlin’s curse, at which point Tamlin can kill Amarantha. In the end, Feyre solves Amarantha’s riddle and Tamlin kills her as soon as his powers return. Feyre is also murdered and reanimated as a Fae during the book’s climax. 

In the next book, A Court of Mist and Fury, Feyre and Tamlin are deeply traumatized by their experiences Under the Mountain. Feyre is plagued by guilt, self-hatred and nightmares, while Tamlin grows more emotionally volatile and controlling, forbidding Feyre from taking an active role in his court because he feels the need to protect her. At one point, he shatters a room with his magic in a rage, and Feyre’s breaking point is when he puts an invisible shield around the house to trap her inside. She escapes to join Rhys and his Inner Circle at the Night Court, where she begins to heal and grow into her new powers. She realizes that the Night Court is actually a wonderful place – that Rhys’ mask of cruelty and arrogance actually hides a noble, good soul who would do anything for the people he loves and the beautiful capital city of Velaris. In fact, he unwillingly submitted to Amarantha for fifty years in order to protect his court and his beloved found family. 

By the end of the book they are deeply in love and Feyre has discovered that Rhysand is her mate, which is essentially the Fae version of a soul mate who you’re connected to by an extremely powerful, primal bond. In book 3, A Court of Wings and Ruin,  Feyre is forced to return to Tamlin’s court after he allies with an an evil king who is only ever called the King of Hybern to get her back from Rhysand. She undermines Tamlin’s court from the inside and returns to Rhysand when Spring has crumbled. Then they have to unite the other courts to fight Hybern. The next book, A Court of Frost and Starlight, is a holiday novella where not very much happens. The fifth book is A Court of Silver Flames, which is about Feyre’s sister Nesta, who has been turned into a Fae against her will and has to go on her own healing journey. The plot of that one isn’t really necessary to describe and I’ll get into the bits that matter later. 

This is ACOTAR in a nutshell. You’re welcome! 

UNDER THE MOUNTAIN

I want to start out by looking at Rhysand’s actions in the first book and how they end up being framed. Some of his actions are clearly more reprehensible than others and it’s fair to say that a number of them are boundary violations that are mental, physical and sexual in nature and would be traumatic to experience (and which Feyre does consider awful to experience at the time). But in the next book he is revealed to be secretly good, kind and noble – an ideal romantic interest who empowers Feyre and helps her on her mental health healing journey. It’s a bit of a gap to bridge, so Maas and fans had to find a way to reconcile his more reprehensible actions with him actually being a good person. To accomplish this, the books end up arguing that Rhysand did all of these questionable things for good reasons that were intended to help Feyre –  and therefore any of the harmful or abusive elements are effectively negated.

I want to look at these “good reasons” in more depth because there are a lot of them and I think they’re very interesting, particularly because of how little sense they truly make when you hold them up to scrutiny. To begin, the first and biggest justification is that he did things that violated and degraded Feyre because this would distract her and make her angry, effectively keeping her from breaking down completely.  

After the face-licking and taunting scene, Feyre says that “[it] took me a long while to realize that Rhysand, whether he knew it or not, had effectively kept me from shattering completely.” In ACOMAF she reflects that “he’d done it to keep me distracted – keep me angry. Because anger was better than feeling nothing; because anger and hatred were the long-lasting fuel in the endless darkness of my despair.”

I believe Maas was going for here is the idea that additional suffering can sometimes change how someone responds to terrible circumstances in a way that helps them ultimately survive.  In the original version of the essay, I talked about my general understanding that trauma + more trauma ≠ additional resilience and fortitude…and while I think that that’s a rule that may hold for a fair number of people, I did see some responses/comments from people whose experiences didn’t match up with that, and I decided while revising that I wanted to avoid making any kind of sweeping proclamations trauma psychology that might be invalidating here just to win an imaginary online argument about some books I hate. People respond to things in a lot of complicated ways, and resilience looks very different in different combinations of people and circumstances. 

That being said, I hope my point is clear when I say that this is not a case of two bad circumstances just *happening* to coincide and influence a person in a way that’s ultimately helpful. This is the deliberate, specific choice to intentionally enact abuse against someone, and that is still not justifiable because the victim is currently in tortuous circumstances. Rhys’s actions here had a much greater likelihood of further harming Feyre in a way that didn’t turn her into a fighter than a lot of his other extremely logical, feasible options that would have most likely empowered her. This is also one of the text’s first examples of paternalism where Rhys somehow knows what’s best for Feyre without her choice or input in what might be the most supportive or helpful to her at all. It also feeds into the series’ larger pattern of a very punitive approach to mental health interventions, where privation and tough love kickstart a “weak” person into being “strong” person. I hope I don’t have to to say that this, generally speaking, is not a good approach or an accurate way of looking at recovery. It is a widespread misconception inside and out of fiction and it does real damage to people suffering from mental health struggles and/or trying to get support.

My main point, though, is he absolutely and 100% had other choices. Like the general idea is that Rhys didn’t have a lot of options and he did the best he could to help Feyre survive.  But are we really supposed to believe that being a drugged plaything (Feyre’s own words!) in front of her imprisoned lover and a court that revels in her humiliation is actually more constructive and fortifying to her than resting in her cell and working on the riddle just because it makes her mad? It actually astonishes me a bit when people say “He made her drink the wine so she wouldn’t remember” – yes, so she would specifically not remember the experiences that he is specifically choosing to do to her and which she finds violating and degrading. Are we really going to say that drugging someone to blur their memory of being hurt is some kind of magnanimous act? It’s also hard to swallow that he didn’t have any other choices – among other points that I’ll get into, I’ll mention first there’s a scene where Feyre is at a particularly low point and he sends her a magical message so that she hears beautiful music while surrounded by a lovely glowing sunrise. He later says that this was the only thing he could think of doing to help her in that moment. So if he can send these wonderful, soul-healing visions to her cell, why would he ever do anything else to keep her spirits up?

There are a couple other points I want to make about this – if abuse, degradation and trauma make Feyre angry and this helps her, wouldn’t this already be happening given that she’s being beaten, tortured, humiliated and forced to undergo deadly trials? For whatever reason, though, she does later reflect that this anger-inducing abuse helped her survive her mental agony and suffering. But this only is the case when Rhys does it, not when Tamlin does it in the second book. We’ll stick a pin in that for now.

Next justification: he did what he did to keep an eye on her and make sure that no one else did anything worse. The implication is that Amarantha’s guards or cronies would come to Feyre’s cell and rape her or torture her in some other way. 

As I mentioned in my summary, there’s actually a good chunk of her imprisonment before Rhys starts bringing her out at night where she is left alone in her cell and none of this happens. When some guards do start to bother her by giving her impossible fairy tale chores to complete, Rhysand intervenes, tells them to leave her alone and then they stop completely:

“‘No more household chores, no more tasks,’ he said, his voice an erotic caress… ‘Tell 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 yourself. Understood?’
Dazed numb nods and then they blinked and straightened. I hid my trembling. Glamour, mind control – whatever it was he had done, it worked. They beckoned – but didn’t dare touch me.”

Rhysand also says that he degrades Feyre so that Amarantha won’t suspect that he’s secretly helping her: “I made you dress like that so Amarantha wouldn’t suspect, and made you drink the wine so that you would not remember the nightly horrors in that mountain.”

This one doesn’t make sense to me for a couple of reasons. First of all, he’s extremely transparent about helping Feyre in other ways, openly telling Feyre that he’s plotting against Amarantha, getting her food, telling the guards to stop harassing her and healing her. And second of all, him kissing her actually serves to make Amarantha more suspicious of him and she rapes him for it; he eventually says this:

“So that night, after I left you, I had to…service her. She kept me there longer than usual, trying to squeeze the answers out of me.”

I’m just not quite sure why the skimpy drugged lapdances wouldn’t do the same thing. 

Rhysand also says that he’s using Feyre this way in order to make Tamlin mad enough to eventually kill Amarantha: 

“‘Working Tamlin into a senseless fury is the best weapon we have against her…’”

And:

“‘Feyre, for Cauldron’s sake, I drug you, but you don’t wonder why I never touch you beyond your waist or arms….it’s the only claim I have to innocence,” he said, “the only thing that will make Tamlin think twice before entering into this battle with me…it’s the only way I can convince him I was on your side. Believe me, I would have liked nothing more than to enjoy you – but there are bigger things at stake than taking a human woman to my bed.’”

This justification is actually extremely funny to me because it implies that there is some kind of perfect Sexual Violence Sweet Spot where if you objectify and drug and degrade someone’s partner just the right amount, they’ll be angry enough to kill someone but still trust you. And this is also apparently the sweet spot where it’s just disrespectful and awful enough to enrage the victim’s lover into murder while also helping fortify her mental health – makes perfect sense!

Similarly to the point I made before, it’s also interesting to me that Rhysand thinks Tamlin won’t be mad enough to kill Amarantha when he sees her have Feyre beaten, imprisoned, forced to undergo deadly challenges and then tortured to death in front of him.

The next one is more of a fandom justification than an in-text justification, but I wanted to mention it nonetheless. A lot of people were really understandably disturbed by the bit where Rhys twists the bone shard in Feyre’s arm while they’re bargaining. To deal with this, some fans have suggested that he’s in fact taking the bone out of her arm so that it can be healed. Here’s the scene:

“‘Well?’

I bared my teeth. ‘Go. To. Hell.’
Swift as lightning, he lashed out, grabbing the shard of bone in my arm and twisting. A scream shattered out of me, ravaging my aching throat. The world flashed black and white and red. I thrashed and writhed but he kept his grip, twisting the bone a final time before releasing my arm. Panting, half sobbing as the pain reverberated through my body, I found him smirking at me again. I spat in his face.

He only laughed as he stood, wiping his cheek with the dark sleeve of his tunic.”

In this scene Feyre is dying and fevered and desperate, so it’s possible that she doesn’t notice him getting rid of the shard and just believes that he’s torturing her. To that I say, sure, MAYBE, but there are few things that make me doubt this. After she agrees to the bargain, this happens:

“There was a blinding, quick pain and my scream sounded in my ears as one and flesh shattered, blood rushed out of me and then –
Rhysand was still grinning when I opened my eyes. I hadn’t any idea how long I’d been unconscious, but my fever was gone, and my head was clear as I sat up.”

I’m not totally sure what would be happening here with shattering flesh and rushing blood if it didn’t have to do with removing bone, but hey, I’m not a doctor, so who knows! On top of this, though, Maas never mentions this scene later, and given how explicitly she goes out of her way to explain away all the other bad things he did, I’m not sure that she would have been able to resist clarifying this too. 

We also know from the captured human Clare Beddor’s torture and death that Rhysand is able to take people’s pain away from them, and I don’t understand why he would choose not to do this while removing the bone. The argument could be made that it’s in order to maintain his facade of being sadistic and cruel, but that doesn’t really hold weight for me and I’ll explain why in a bit. 

Finally, him removing the bone to help her wouldn’t just magically cancel out the fact that he deliberately does something that causes her excruciating pain specifically in the context of them negotiating when she’s refusing to do what he wants. Or the fact that she concedes once he does this to her. 

Another particular scenario to discuss is the part where Rhys forces Feyre into a kiss after finding her and Tamlin trying to hook up. There is one detail to note here – Rhysand has Feyre’s body painted with these intricate designs that smudge if anyone touches her, and while she and Tamlin are together in this scene, the paint gets smudged. So Rhysand comes in, basically says “You guys are being really stupid, stop it,”  and makes the smudged paint vanish from Tamlin’s hands and clothes and body. Tamlin leaves and Rhys and Feyre are still talking when Amarantha comes in; this is when Rhysand pins Feyre to the wall and kisses her with the justification of distracting Amarantha from the possibility that they were doing anything suspicious and giving an explanation for the paint that is smudged on Feyre’s body. Later, she says that “If he hadn’t been kissing me…I would have gone out into that throne room covered in smudged paint.” But he fixes the paint on Tamlin and doesn’t have to kiss him! There’s no real reason that he couldn’t have cleaned up Feyre at the same time except for the fact that Maas wanted a hot forced kiss scene. The other thing that doesn’t make sense is that we learn later in the series that faerie arousal gives off a specific scent (*shudder*) and individual people’s arousal scents can be distinguished from each other. So simply getting rid of the paint and then assaulting Feyre shouldn’t be enough to convince Amarantha given that Tamlin’s arousal scent would still be there and Rhysand’s wouldn’t be there if he’s just kissing her to protect her. 

So the fallback argument that seems to come up once the rest of these points are brought up seems to be “Well, Rhys had to keep his cover by pretending to be evil” because this is the facade he uses to hide how wonderful the Night Court actually is and also so that he can secretly manipulate Amarantha and reduce the damage that she does. At one point, he says “I needed to keep you alive in a way that wouldn’t be seen as merciful” – presumably to Amarantha and her allies Under the Mountain.

I have a few thoughts about this. While he makes the bargain to heal Feyre in order to make everyone think that he just wants to have more power over her and play more twisted games, he also gets her good food and controls the guards not to hurt her with no apparent ulterior motive as a justification. He also openly tells Feyre exactly how is plotting against Amarantha and that he hates being her whore. With all of this in mind, he spends quite a bit of time being completely transparent about opposing her and helping Feyre in ways that can’t be interpreted as evil by people on the outside. 

The history that is ultimately revealed between him and Amarantha also makes the possibility of him pretending to serve her to undermine somewhat dubious to me too. He and the Night Court opposed her in a previous Fae war and she hated him and his court because of this. He ended up getting captured by her because he came to a masquerade party with the intention of assassinating her and she was fully aware of his plans. Then she specifically made him her sex slave to make him as miserable as possible. As Rhys says, “she decided that she hated me enough…that I was to suffer.”

Knowing all of this, and knowing that Amarantha knows all of this, I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to imply that Rhysand is in any position to influence her decisions or meaningfully convince her of anything. In fact, the only example that we have of him trying to change her mind about anything (the punishment of the Winter Court) ends up with her specifically engaging in further brutality because he tries to convince her to be merciful. As far as the argument that he needs to pretend to be evil to protect the Night Court, let’s stick another pin in that one because I’ll discuss it later. 

(Edit: I also want to share a couple of comments from the YouTube version of this essay that offer more thoughts on why none of this makes sense. From @britnicox3929:

“Someone can correct me if I’m wrong but as far as I’m aware Amarantha had no reason to believe that he had even met Feyre before she was brought under the mountain – at least not long enough for her to make an impression – so if he had just feigned disinterest and subtly protected her (which SJM could absolutely have written for him to do because he supposed to be so smart and devious) he would’ve come off as much better than he did and not have the main characters bodily autonomy and general safety undermined by him deciding to drug her. Also I saw your comment, and i’ll think I’ve only seen two people who have done a review of the first book who have mentioned that he tormented her by twisting her broken bone to get her to agree to the deal. I don’t understand why more people are not talking about that. The very idea of someone doing that to convince me of something makes me wanna puke, and they’re supposed to be soulmates who are so in love later on????? Jesus. Edit: also I don’t really buy the justification that he was removing a bone from her body because he’s using literal magic why would a bone in her body matter when he’s going to heal her anyway?

and from @novembermedusa:

“If Amarantha could read minds like Rhysand can, then I would kind of understand him being written as: doing bad things for her good without her knowing his intentions. But… Amarantha cannot. So what is stopping him from teaming with Feyre? Being open(as he was with his other words and actions) and maybe let her decide some things? Plan together? Like, it would be so much better if it was Feyre whom was the one who came up with some plan on defying Amarantha whenever she could, even while imprisoned? If she told Rhysand to take her there to dance or whatever? Or even it was her just asking him to take her drinking so she could forget? She was UTM for months and it would be interesting to see her mental state change? There was plenty of time between the tasks for plotting and scheming. Idk, as you’ve said, all his (and those of SJM) “reasons” do not stand a chance against scrutiny.”

Thanks to both of them for their excellent input!)

Now I want to look at a few of the common counterarguments that tend to come up in fan spaces when people bring up how his actions don’t make sense or how they actually seem to be pretty abusive. I’ve seen people say that Feyre is actually okay with the drugging and dancing because she drinks the Fae wine when he tells her to, which I think demonstrates a tragically flawed understanding of consent. Consent is not just doing what you’re told – consent has to be given freely without coercion or a power dynamic or context that makes it difficult or dangerous to refuse. I’ve seen people say that the dancing stuff it isn’t really assault because he specifically doesn’t touch her in sexual places while she’s dancing, which again I think demonstrates a pretty limited notion of what kinds of actions can constitute sexual abuse beyond rape or attempted rape. He’s giving an imprisoned woman the faerie equivalent of roofies to make her lose her inhibitions and memory and having her either sit in his lap or dance sexually in close proximity to him while he touches her and she is almost naked. If you really want to argue that that’s not a form of sexual abuse, go ahead, but I am going to disagree with you. This also ignores the scene where he kisses her without her consent. Feyre herself identifies all of these acts as ones that happen without her consent: when she and Lucien are discussing it all in ACOWAR, Lucien says “You kissed Under the Mountain,” and Feyre responds by saying “I had as little choice in that as I did the dancing.”

I’ve also seen people say that Rhysand can’t actually be abusing Feyre because he’s a prisoner and getting raped himself. Again, I think this shows a deeply limited understanding of assault and power dynamics; Rhysand and Feyre can both be prisoners but it is simultaneously possible for Rhysand to still be in a position of power over Feyre. The book makes it very clear that this is the case.  Even if he wasn’t in a position of power over Feyre, it would still be entirely possible for him to violate her boundaries. And finally, the fact that one person is experiencing trauma does not somehow mean that any harm they do to others is negated or canceled out. We’ll talk more about this later. 

As I said at the beginning of this section, the basic message is that he had to hurt her to help her. I hope I’ve done an okay job of explaining why all of Maas’s individual justifications don’t really make sense to me, but at the end of the day, it’s pretty simple. I want to thank AO3 user ThisWillBeFunTheySaid for bringing up the book Why Does He Do That? by Lundy Bancroft in their comment on a little story I wrote that’s basically all about what I’m talking about here. Why Does He Do That? is a book about the tactics and justifications used by abusive men and Bancroft is a therapist specializing in the treatment of abusers; it’s a really good book that I definitely recommend. ThisWillBeFunTheySaid reminded me of this specific quote: “Never believe a man’s claim that he has to harm his partner in order to protect her; only abusers think this way.”

RHYS VS TAMLIN

Everybody fucking hates Tamlin! This is true of fans and all the characters in the ACOTAR books alike. After his descent into anger and controlling behavior in the second book, he is only ever written about as a disgusting figure who almost destroyed Feyre and is worthy of pity at best and utter contempt at worst. I mean, you do find the occasional person who is on the #TamlinDefenseSquad, but I want to be clear that that’s not where I’m coming from in this section. Tamlin’s anger and control of Feyre were definitely wrong and their relationship was not healthy. 

Instead, what I want to point out in this section is actually that a lot of the things that make people denounce Tamlin as an abusive monster are things that Rhysand also does but somehow receives a pass for. In a solid Reddit post,  u/mellowenglishgal identifies this double standard in ACOTAR as moral myopia – basically, to quote TV Tropes, moral myopia is a type of hypocrisy where “the morality of an action depends entirely upon who’s doing it. In other words, it’s a moral  double standard. What’s justifiable for one group is criminal for another in the eyes of the judging character, despite the innate hypocrisy of such a thing.”

Let’s break it down. Both Rhysand and Tamlin do the following to Feyre:

• Have her dress in a way that she’s not comfortable with and treat her like property or a second class citizen to maintain their court image.
• Do abusive things to her when she is struggling with trauma, both with the justification of helping/protecting her when their actions would never reasonably accomplish this. They both make her angry, and in one instance this keeps her fighting while in the other instance it destroys her further. 
• Act extremely possessive and go into rages over Feyre. Rhys breaks Keir’s arm when he insults her, fights with Cassian for an hour when he makes a sexual comment about her, threatens to kill Nesta when she hurts her sister, won’t let her near Eris etc. etc. Maas is very fond of saying things like “He’d rip anyone to shreds if they looked at her wrong.”
• Deny her choices and autonomy – we’ll talk more about how Rhysand does this later. 
• Contain her in an invisible bubble to protect her and restrict what she can do when she’s vulnerable. In ACOMAF, Tamlin traps her in the house, and then in ACOSF, Rhysand puts her in an impenetrable bubble while she’s pregnant.
• Pretend to serve an evil person to protect the people they love, planning to undermine the evil person in the process.

There’s also the matter of how Tamlin doesn’t make her High Lady and expects her to have a very limited role as his wife – shopping and planning parties and painting and having his children. In turn, Rhysand makes Feyre High Lady of the Night Court when that title has never existed before and helps her in her feminist journey to realize that she can do more than be a trophy wife. This is intended to be a reflection on Rhysand being a good guy and Tamlin being a bad guy. 

One of the interesting things about this to me is that Feyre is actually horrified at the thought of being High Lady when she’s with Tamlin and expresses this to him very clearly:  “I don’t want people…I don’t know if I can handle them calling me High Lady.” And while she finds the thought of being a trophy wife degrading in ACOMAF, by the time ACOSF rolls around, we primarily see her spend her time decorating the multiple houses Rhysand buys for her, shopping, painting, having his baby and volunteering for charities. A lot of people have also talked about how the role he gives her as High Lady feels like an empty title that she is not in fact qualified for: she is 20 years old, new to the Fae world with no knowledge of its history or politics or dynamics, was not able to read until just a bit ago, and does not know anything about governing or administration or diplomacy or political decision-making. 

I’ve seen people say that the difference is that Feyre consents to [insert action here] with Rhys and not with Tamlin. First of all, this obfuscates the many times that he does actually deny her choices or do things without her consent – I’ll talk more about some of these shortly. Second of all, it goes against all of Feyre’s characterization and her girlboss trauma healing journey for her to just mysteriously be okay with these things at one point and not the other. Saying “it’s fine because Rhysand does it” is not a satisfactory explanation to me.  How did she get from “Tamlin thinks I’m an object that belongs to him because he locked me up” to “”Typical silly Rhysand putting me in a literal bubble that no one can get through!” How did she get from “Tamlin’s anger is terrifying and violent” to “Males will be males, what can you do?” How did she get from “It’s degrading for me to just have children and paint and shop as a High Lord’s wife” to being happy doing those things as Rhysand’s wife? Why does it help her when Rhysand’s degrading actions makes her angry and not when Tamlin’s degrading actions make her angry? Because she loves Rhys and not Tamlin; because Rhys is her mate?  Is the message we’re going for really that red flags are actually okay as long as you love the person doing them? Some people will say that Maas is doing all of this on purpose to make Feyre an unreliable narrator – as we will talk about later, she’s not. As it stands, it really is just hypocritical, arbitrary authorial favoritism that has no clear basis in characterization or anything else in the text. 

I also want to mention Feyre’s actions in comparison to Tamlin’s. At one point in time, she explodes with magical power in a rage exactly like Tamlin does, hurting the Lady of Autumn and her son Eris. Shockingly, this is not framed as some kind of horrific abusive act on her part. She uses her magic to manipulate the Summer High Lord Tarquin (and otherwise manipulates him without magic) to steal from him, invades Lucien’s mind on purpose and deliberately topples the Spring Court with the motivation of personal vengeance against Tamlin – this motivation is specified in text. This last action actually ends up causing devastation to the innocent Fae of the court and making Hybern’ invasion far easier. When Feyre realizes this, she’s just like “Dang it, I probably should have thought about that before I did it, huh?” When she tells Rhysand that she feels weird about invading people’s minds and manipulating them, he says this: “You get used to it. The sense that you’re crossing a boundary, that you’re violating them.” So, really, they’re quite a duo!

I also thought it would be interesting to talk about the issue of retconning while we’re talking about Tamlin. Some people will say that Maas just randomly decided to switch love interests from book one to book two, but this definitely isn’t the case. Tamlin’s anger issues and desire to protect Feyre are there from book one, and Maas is clearly already planting the seeds for Rhysand to be Feyre’s ultimate love interest and mate. But that being said, there are still some ways that she assassinates Tamlin’s character later on that just feel really lazy and cheap. 

In ACOTAR, it’s clear that he doesn’t enforce rank or toxic court dynamics in the Spring Court, but in book two he’s an oppressive taskmaster who foists unfair taxation on his citizens and punishes them brutally if they can’t pay. In ACOTAR, he and Feyre are both equally passionate in the scene where they try to hook up Under the Mountain: Feyre says “This might be the last time I touched him, the last time we could be together. I wouldn’t waste it. My fingers grappled with his belt buckle, and his mouth found mine again….I wanted him – here.” And it’s clear that he doesn’t do anything or respond in any way to Amarantha torturing Feyre because he’s afraid it will encourage her: “Hasn’t it occurred to you that Tamlin is keeping quiet to avoid telling Amarantha which form or your torment affects him most?” And then once his powers are released, he kills her immediately. 

But in ACOMAF, here is how Feyre frames all of this: “He had sat beside Amarantha on that throne. And he… hadn’t risked being caught until there was one night left, and all he’d wanted to do wasn’t free me, but fuck me.” Rhysand says that Tamlin “sat on his ass while [she was] shredded apart” and you know, he’s right, I guess it would have been better if he had humiliated and hurt her in order to fortify her strength and resilience instead! Finally, Nesta says that Tamlin is responsible for her and Elain being kidnapped and turned into Fae while the person responsible for this is in fact Ianthe. Tamlin has no idea of Ianthe’s machinations and tries to save Elain and Nesta when they’re being forced into the Cauldron. 

I want to share an excerpt from another Reddit post by user u/TamlinDidNufinWrong – you see what I mean about the #TamlinDefenseSquad! Some of the post veers a bit too much into the “his trauma excuses his actions” territory for me so I’ve abridged a bit, but there is a lot left that I think is very worth considering:

“So your loved one saved you and the entire world of long-dicked fairies, went through hell and back, and now you want to keep her safe. Unfortunately, she had to make an arrangement with Lucifer incarnate, the guy who spent the last few decades as a right hand to Hitler on heels…. She has powers now, and you are scared shitless because you know that if other princes knew, especially the Lucifer incarnate, they would hunt her and kill her. On your wedding day, she is kidnapped by the guy who is known for running a Court of Torture and Sex Slavery. You are out of your mind with worry. She keeps coming back but one time she doesn’t, leaving you a note that you shouldn’t look for her. But she was illiterate and, as established, is in the power of a Super Evil Man with mind control powers, so, of course, you assume she is being held hostage and you are going to rescue her. For her you are ready to do anything, even make the pact with the devil – or, to be more precise, with the King of Hybern, also known as The Guy Not Handsome Enough to Get a Name. You are planning to stab him in the back, though, because you are not a bad guy. So you finally get her back, she is terrified and scarred by the experience, and confirms your suspicion that she was the victim of mind control… Then she plays a sneaky yassgirlslayqueen and uses her knowledge of your deepest fears and lowest points to lead you to destabilizing your own princedom. The next time you hear about her, she is playing another prince, gaining his trust and using his hospitality to steal a valuable possession from him. The next time you see her, she is in a full arm-candy-to-the-Lucifer-incarnate mode, engaged to the guy, presenting everyone her “mask of arrogance”, flexing her crown and status when you vividly remember her telling you she is totally not interested in any kind of power. It really seems like she was with you for the benefits and now she moved on to the guy with a bigger wallet, spacier mansion and longer schlong. She is now scheming, ambitious, manipulative and aggressive, coupling with a guy who is known to be terrifyingly cruel and power-hungry, and eagerly served the previous dictator. They both now seem to be playing other princes to cause the war that will benefit them the most.”

FEMINIST KING

In ACOMAF, we discover that Rhysand is actually a misunderstood good guy and he’s really quite the feminist. One of the extremely subtle ways that Maas conveys this is by having him constantly tell Feyre “it’s your choice, ” and Feyre finds this very liberating because Tamlin was so controlling. I think this is a telling bit of writing that shows how limited Maas’s conception of feminism is. There is a quote that epitomizes it for me:

“‘He thinks he’ll be remembered as the villain in the story. But I forgot to tell him,’ I said quietly, opening the door, ‘that the villain is usually the person who locks up the maiden and throws away the key.’
‘Oh?’

I shrugged. ‘He was the one who let me out.’”

The fundamental problem is that Feyre’s empowerment and choices are still things that are being given to her by Rhys. Feminism is not about the favors that are arbitrarily and magnanimously bestowed upon women by men for the purpose of showing that those men are actually the good ones. Feyre’s true agency would be demonstrated by her realizing that no romantic partner – either Rhysand or Tamlin – should be in a position of power over her to either give or deny her choices as he sees fit.

My favorite example of Rhysand giving her choices is when she’s just gotten back from the Spring Court in ACOWAR; she has just had to run for her life and survive in the wild and she hasn’t seen her sisters since they were kidnapped and traumatically transformed into Fae. Rhysand wants to fuck her immediately but he manages to restrain himself and “gives her the choice” to see her sisters before they have sex. This is treated as some kind of massive, noble self-sacrifice on his part:

“‘I can take you to them.’  Every word seemed to be an effort. But he would, I realized. He’d shove down his need for me and take me to them, if that was what I wanted. My choice. It had always been my choice with him.”

The other thing that we have to consider here is that there are also a significant number of times when Rhysand actually lies to people and denies them major choices – some would even go so far as to argue that he only really seems to offer people choices when he’s sure that they’ll do what he wants and otherwise just makes his own decisions. In my reread, I tried to make a list of every time this happened:

• Everything that happens to Feyre Under the Mountain
• He lies by omission about him and Feyre being mates (She ends up castigating herself for getting mad at him over this, which is just…choice)
• He uses Feyre as bait for a monster called the Attor without her knowledge
• He sends her to a dangerous monster’s den without telling her why she’s really going there or what she’s really going to face there
• He lies to Mor about allying with her abusive father and allowing him into Velaris
• He instructs everyone to avoid telling Amren that they’re going to let the Bone Carver out of the Prison
• He steals a magical book from the Summer High Lord Tarquin instead of asking him for it. 
• He and his friends vote not to tell Nesta that her magic has the capability to create incredibly powerful weapons
• He and his friends demolish Nesta’s apartment and make her train and work at the House of Wind with the other option being going back to the human lands, where she is most likely to be hated and hunted
• And, finally, he lies to Feyre about her pregnancy being extremely dangerous

I want to talk more about the pregnancy plot. The long and short of it is that in ACOSF, Feyre is pregnant with a baby that has wings and her hips aren’t the right shape to allow the baby to pass through without damaging them both severely. Rhysand and all of his friends know that this is almost guaranteed to kill her, but he forbids anyone from telling her about it. A couple of quotes about this:

“‘Most females die, the babes with them. There’s no way for magic to help, short of fracturing a female’s pelvis to widen it for the birthing. Which might kill her anyway.’”

And:

“‘No one says a word about this to Feyre. No one.’
‘Didn’t Madja warn her?’
‘Not strongly. She only mentioned an elevated risk during labor.’ Rhys let out a harsh laugh. ‘An elevated risk.’

SO. This is what we refer to as reproductive abuse, where one person exerts power and control over the other’s reproductive choices and agency. I don’t really see this label as being debatable in any way.  In the book he tries to justify the lying by saying that he “can’t bring [himself] to give her that fear. To take away one bit of the joy in her eyes every time she puts a hand on her belly.”

I am unsure how he fails to realize that it’s not justifiable to deny someone crucial medical knowledge with vast implications for their agency and likelihood of remaining alive just because the information might make them sad – that it’s deeply fucked to decide that you get to make 100% of the decisions about to handle an emergency that is affecting someone else’s body.

He also threatens to kill Nesta when she tells Feyre about the danger later in the book, and this threat is serious enough that Cassian and Nesta have to leave the city. This is nightmarish, too, but also, like, what?  Having upsetting medical knowledge is too stressful for her but her mate killing her sister wouldn’t make Feyre afraid and take away her joy? (This also goes against his prior passionate declaration that he would never hurt anyone who Feyre loves. He also makes a romantic declaration/promise that he will never keep secrets from her again after lying about them being mates. So much for that.)

The text tries to mitigate this disaster by saying that there aren’t really any other options at this point – there are no C-sections in Fairy Land and there is no way that magic can help. Except there actually is:

“‘Madja has put a ban on any more shapeshifting. She says that to alter Feyre’s body in any way right now could put the baby at risk. On the chance that it could be bad for the baby, Feyre is forbidden to so much as change the color of her hair until after the birth.’”

If I was faced with a near-absolute guarantee that I and my baby would die or the possibility of shapeshifting with unknown results that could possibly save us both, I would consider the possibility of shapeshifting. The key thing is that it should be my choice. Rhysand has already made this decision for her by not even giving her the ability to consider what she might want to do. 

The other really concerning thing is that the entire problem stems from the fact that Feyre was in the wrong Fae form when the baby was conceived. Rhysand knew that a baby with wings would kill her in that form, so why did they have unprotected sex while she was in that form? Did she even know or was this more information that he didn’t deign to tell her? 

Rhysand is the king of choices, right? You might even say that he’s pro-choice…except no, abortion is never mentioned despite this being a pregnancy with life-threatening complications.  I don’t feel that it’s my place to speculate on Maas’s personal beliefs, but it is interesting that the possibility of abortion is overlooked in a book about female empowerment through choices and sex positivity. I wonder if Maas decided not to discuss abortion because it’s a controversial issue, but in my opinion the end result of not even mentioning it is absolutely bizarre given the specific context and these books’ alleged feminism – and what Rhysand does is far more controversial than the discussion of reproductive choice ever could be. 

 I’ve seen some people say that they wouldn’t want abortion mentioned or explored because they don’t want “real world issues” dragged into their fantasy books. Okay, but Maas doesn’t hesitate to create befuddled analogies for racism and female genital mutilation; she talks about sex slavery and torture and domestic violence and horrific child abuse. There are women getting treated like breeding chattel, women getting gang-raped, women getting beaten to death and women having nails hammered into their bodies. To say that “it’s just fantasy” that shouldn’t be weighed down by real world issues just doesn’t hold weight to me when Maas flings around a ton of sensitive real world issues with the amount of care and nuance that I’ve made clear so far. 

Feminist concerns and Rhysand’s crimes against humanity aside, this is also just some of the worst writing in the books. There is no legitimate reason that faeries don’t know how to do C-sections and don’t have any magic that can help. We know that birth control exists in this world and that shredded wings can be fixed. Cassian gets eviscerated and/or disemboweled to the brink of death three times in the series and is perfectly fine after a minor period of recovery each time. Given how rare pregnancies are, how incredibly protective males are of their mates while they are pregnant, how devastating it is to lose a mate and how magic can be used for basically everything else imaginable, this glaring exception can’t really be attributed to in-text justifications in my opinion. 

Another thing that I want to mention about this is that when Nesta tells Feyre what is going on, everyone gets mad at her and she becomes suicidal because her intention was just to hurt Feyre instead of to help her. So when Nesta does good things with bad intentions, it’s bad and when Rhysand does bad things with good intentions, it’s good. But when Tamlin does bad things with good intentions, it’s bad. You can see that there’s this inconsistency in whether the motivations or actions matter more based on whose actions Maas needs to either justify or villainize in any given moment. 

I also just think that Madja must be the worst healer in the world because there’s no reason I can possibly think of to tell someone that their labor will be risky without actually describing the level of risk and the true severity of the situation. No one would do this; it’s purely a matter of plot contrivance!!!! 

The books regularly do this thing where they talk about how terribly sexist the world is and how horribly brutalized women are in different places, including different parts of the Night Court, and then Rhysand acts all sad about it to show what a good guy he really is. Let’s talk about this!

To start, there is a group of Fae in the Night Court called the Illyrians who live in mountain warrior clans and have wings. They’re considered to be brutal, backwards savages by most of the characters and this is partially because they have very regressive gender roles. They force their women to do nothing but clean and cook, forbid them from learning to fight and clip their wings so that can’t fly in what is an extremely respectful and nuanced analogy for female genital mutilation. We hear a lot of stories about horrible things happening to Illyrian women. Rhysand’s mother almost had her wings clipped and Cassian was conceived as a result of his mother’s rape, after which she was made homeless and eventually killed by her village. Nesta’s friend Emerie had her wings clipped by her father and was beaten so badly by him that he broke her back, and her father also beat her mother to death. 

The best that Rhysand can come up with to help combat all of this is teaching some of the girls in the villages how to fight for ninety minutes and making men help out with chores before the lessons. I think it’s safe to say that this can in no way be considered an adequate response to the complexity and scope of such severe, deeply entrenched patriarchal control and violence. I think it’s another really funny demonstration of the limits to Maas’s understanding of how sexism functions. Rhysand also says this:

“Some camps issued degrees that if a female was caught training, she was to be deemed unmarriageable. I can’t fight against things like that, not without slaughtering the leaders of each camp and personally raising each and every one of their offspring.’”

Like…what? Why is that your only option, self-proclaimed cleverest and most powerful of High Lords?

As far as the wing clipping goes, he has apparently banned it but is just inexplicably unable to actually enforce the ban for some reason. He explains at one point that the tradition returned in full force while he was imprisoned by Amarantha, which implies that the Inner Circle wasn’t able to rule effectively and protect the Night Court’s sanctity while he was gone, which was the whole point of him sacrificing himself, so that’s pretty depressing.  I’ll also mention that this is another instance of the world’s medical inconsistency rearing its head – for whatever reason, women’s wings can’t heal when clipped but when Cassian and Azriel and Rhys repeatedly get their wings shredded and ripped apart by arrows and broken and stomped on, they’re always fine in a matter of weeks. 

The other place I want to talk about is the Court of Nightmares. It’s essentially a splinter sect of the Night Court that Rhysand allows to live underground being evil and cruel and degenerate because they didn’t try to assassinate him when he came to power. As he explains to Feyre:

“I gave [the court] to them for not being fools…they’re happy to stay there, rarely
leaving, ruling themselves and being as wicked as they please, for all eternity.”

And:

“We allow the Court of Nightmares to continue, blind to Velaris’ existence, because we know that without them there are some courts and kingdoms that might strike us.”

So they’re basically allowed free reign because they didn’t try to kill Rhysand and their existence somehow deters other courts from attacking the Night Court – more on this later. In the Court of Nightmares, women are essentially breeding chattel to be sold in marriage and brutalized if they disobey. We learn about this through the story of Mor, Rhys’s cousin, who was going to be sold in marriage to a prince of the Autumn Court and purposefully lost her virginity before then to destroy her “worth” as chattel. Her family tortured her to the point of near death, including driving nails into her womb, as punishment, and she went to live with Rhysand in Velaris. Mor is now in charge of both Velaris and the Court of Nightmares:

“Mor is my…court overseer. She looks after the dynamics between the Court of Nightmares and the Court of Dreams, and runs both Velaris and the Hewn City. I suppose in the mortal realm, she might be considered a queen.”

And:

“‘You preside over the Hewn City, and deal with them all the time.’” She as good as ruled over it when Rhys wasn’t there.”

The question is this: whyever would our feminist king Rhysand and Mor, who knows exactly how horrible it is, allow the Court of Nightmares to continue treating women this way? I’ve seen some fans argue that there are some kind of long-standing agreements in place between the courts that make it necessary for Rhys and Mor to not interfere too much. When I reread the books, I looked for any mention of this and such agreements are specifically mentioned only in the context of the Hewn City’s military leadership and no other context. Even then, though, when it’s necessary for Rhys to get their military support, it turns out that he is fully able to make new deals and disrupt the status quo by changing policies around. 

In every scene where Rhysand interacts with Keir, the ruler of the Court of Nightmares, Rhysand is constantly taunting him, embarrassing him, threatening him and ordering him around. Keir is clearly terrified of him and remains helpless but to obey and follow his orders. For example, there’s this part of ACOMAF where Feyre dresses up all skimpily and almost gets fingered by Rhysand in front of the court as a distraction (which is ridiculous and not really necessary, but we won’t get into that here). Keir calls Feyre a whore and then Rhysand destroys his arm for doing this. Rhysand has enough authority to do this and also mandate that Keir cannot seek medical treatment afterwards. 

While we’re talking about this bit of ACOMAF, I just want to mention how off-putting I find it overall. I don’t really care about the public exhibitionism aspect, but it’s so silly to me to frame this as a sexually empowering girlboss moment for Feyre. First of all, it’s a sexy roleplay of the actual abuse that Rhysand enacted against her Under the Mountain and there’s absolutely no comprehension of that being the case at all. Second of all, it also feels extremely inappropriate for Feyre to be having fun pretending to be Rhysand’s sex toy when they are in a setting where women are actually treated as objects to be sold in marriage and Rhysand is forcing the court to watch them while threatening to torture and kill them all. 

This is just a side note to a side note, but the exhibitionism with distasteful implications comes up again later. Another one of Maas’s attempts to show us Rhysand’s feminism is when she introduces this safe haven library that he’s created for women who have faced sexual violence…only to then have him touch Feyre’s ass and talk dirty in front of one of the survivor priestess there and then suggest having sex with Feyre in this so-called safe haven. This is why I read these books… it’s just the kind of stuff that you can’t make up. 

The last thing I want to talk about in this section is the way that Rhysand purposefully makes the rest of the world think that the Night Court is horrible and evil – even when all of the other excuses fail, this is often used as the final justification for why Rhysand has to do bad things. To give you a brief history lesson, the Night Court used to actually be evil but then they reformed but just kept pretending to be evil to protect how nice they actually became. As Rhys says, “It’s all a front – to keep what matters most safe.”

Except this doesn’t actually work at all! There is very little plot in ACOMAF and ACOWAR, but the plot that does exist consists almost exclusively of the characters having to deal with the regrettable consequences of everyone else in the world thinking that they’re a land of sadistic monsters. They need the help of these human queens, but the queens don’t trust them because of their reputation. They need this book from the Summer Court but Tarquin doesn’t trust them either, so this is when they have to sneak around and manipulate him and invade his mind and steal from him. They stand no chance against Hybern on their own so they have to try to unite the rest of the courts to face him, but it sadly turns out that people aren’t very willing to ally with you after you’ve pretended to be evil and lied to them for hundreds of years. 

And it’s just…not necessary? Rhysand has the most power of any High Lord ever and can decimate entire armies, his spymaster and general are the strongest Illyrian warriors of all time, and his third in command, Amren, is an otherworldly being of indescribable power. Velaris is protected by wards that only fail twice when it’s plot-convenient and there is no proof that any of the other courts pose any kind of credible threat to them besides Spring, which Feyre topples like a stack of playing cards, and Autumn, which they are able to deal with easily by secretly allying with one of the princes. Rhys is obsessed with the city of Velaris and it’s this beautiful embodiment of all that he holds dear, so he is willing to do anything to hide it from Amarantha, including pretending to be evil…but both Winter and Dawn are also able to successfully hide treasured places from Amarantha without the necessity of pretending to be evil. 

There’s a pattern that plays out several times in the books where Rhysand does something horrible in order to make people think he’s evil and then gets all sad about how painful it is for him to have to act that way when he just….doesn’t actually have to act that way; when it makes no sense, is unnecessary and actively makes protecting his people more difficult several times over. There’s also this amazing bit after Feyre returns to the Spring Court to bring Tamlin down – she gets all righteously angry and talks about how Tamlin deserves to be destroyed because he thinks that Rhysand raped her when she’s purposefully telling him that that’s what happened and Tamlin has no good reason to doubt her after the image that Rhys has cultivated for hundreds of years. We hate a man who…believes women when they say that they were raped?

To summarize this section, the problem is that Rhysand is constantly framed as the most powerful high lord who ever existed, strutting around as night incarnate and making mountains shudder and shattering people’s minds whenever he pleases. But as soon as Maas needs to toss in some good old fashioned woman torture in order to amp up the misery porn and make her male leads look better, he’s conveniently incapable of doing anything meaningful about the conundrum of the patriarchy. And when you look at the true pattern of his actions over the series, the king of choice isn’t so pro-choice after all. 

FANDOM JUSTIFICATIONS 

In this final section, I want to get a bit more meta. I’ve already weaved in certain fan interpretations and arguments that were pertinent to specific topics, but this is where I want to take a step back and look at how fans talk about Rhysand more generally.

The first thing you’ll see all over the place is that Rhys is a morally gray character. Typically, when we think of a morally gray character, we think of someone whose actions can’t be purely defined as good or evil. I am willing to agree that some of his actions could be considered morally gray, but the issue is that narratively he is never framed as anything but a selfless, noble, long-suffering martyr and an ideal romantic partner in every book past ACOTAR. That post by u/mellowenglishgal about moral myopia applies here. In it, she also talks about how Rhysand’s morality is not really gray but is what is called protagonist-centered morality – where someone’s moral justifiability depends on whether they are one of the book’s main characters or are approved of by the main characters. To show you, once again, that I spend too much time on Reddit, there’s a comment I want to share by u/ktellewritesstuff:

I suppose the problem I have with Rhys’ behaviour is that it’s not meaningfully challenged. He gets away with pretty much everything and anyone who criticises him is either sorry later or a villain. That is not realistic. For the other High Lords to blindly trust him after he spent his entire life cultivating a mask of evil, for the Inner Circle to nod along and be fine with it when he’s lying to his wife and violating their boundaries, for Varian to have absolutely nothing to say about Rhys mind-controlling him and stripping away the dignity of his family – that’s what doesn’t work here. No real person would ever just be fine with that and let it go, and that harms the integrity of the other characters. At the very least it makes them look foolish.

The problem isn’t Rhys’ actual actions. His actions are his actions. But the absolute unchallenged control that he exerts over everyone around him, to the point where it comes across as manipulative, is weird to read about. Especially when the narrative repeatedly applauds it. Morally grey characters live and die on the way they’re framed, and ironically it’s the narrative itself that pushes the idea of Rhys being good and justified in everything he does. Even Nesta shows her throat to him, and Cassian blithely nods along with Amren’s assertion that he should conquer the entire continent like Genghis Khan. That scene is actually quite a good example of how Rhys’ actions technically aren’t the problem. It’s the way the narrative frames him, by having Cassian, a known fan favourite and someone SJM is pushing the reader to agree with, trill about what good benevolent dictators Rhys and Feyre would be. Additionally, everyone agreeing to work with the Night Court after the High Lords’ meeting in which several members of the Night Court attacked the other High Lords (injuring the Lady of Autumn!) is bizarre.

What makes the humiliation and cruelty unpleasant for me personally to read is that it’s not interrogated by the narrative at all, and there is 0 growth and change. Rhys is the same at the end as he is in the beginning. And I don’t think that makes for an effective morally grey character.

You’ll also see people say that the hypocrisy and inconsistency and weird framing of his actions are because Feyre and Nesta are unreliable narrators. In order to effectively pull the unreliable narrator card, you have to actually have some kind of compelling proof in the text that we are not meant to agree with the perspective character – their mask has to slip sometimes or the narrative has to work in clever ways to show that the book’s overall stance is somehow different from the narrator’s. To me, there is no actual textual evidence at all that Feyre’s blind spots and all the hypocrisy are a deliberate, subtle attempt by Maas to interrogate how she could be misguided by her love for Rhysand or imply that he is actually a sinister figure. For one thing, it is just extremely clear that the books aren’t doing this when you read them, but I also know this because Maas herself is very open about how she feels about Rhysand. In one interview she says she will always be smitten with him and he was a gift to her. In that same interview (this interview is only summarized online, but I’ve corroborated the summaries) she also says that Nesta’s hatred of him stems from how jealous she is of his perfect life and family. 

In text, she can’t even make Nesta hate him for the right reasons:

“Nesta didn’t want to think about…what scars had been so deeply etched in Gwyn that two of the most trustworthy males in this entire land couldn’t put her at ease. Rhysand might be an arrogant, vain bastard, but he was honorable. He fought like hell to protect innocents. Her dislike of him had nothing to do with what he’d proved so many times: he was a fair, just ruler who put his people before him.  No, she just found his personality – that slick smugness – grating.”

All of this makes it clear that her feelings do align with Feyre’s and that she was going for a biased narrator approach with Nesta in ACOSF. But again, we have to go back to the fact that there has to be a meaningful and well-crafted discrepancy between the narrator and the narrative in order for an unreliable narrator to work. It’s not like Nesta hates him randomly and the text otherwise shows us how wrong she is for feeling that way. Rhysand’s objective actions are what make him abhorrent to me in ACOSF. 

You may see people try to minimize all the harm that Rhys does because he himself has gone through significant trauma. First of all, the most important thing I can say here is that having trauma may explain why we go on to hurt others, but it never, ever justifies it. This is just one of the most basic truths about living with trauma. When fans try to soften his actions or absolve him of full culpability on this basis, they are crossing the line from explaining to excusing. 

I also think Maas does this in text in some very manipulative ways. There are a few occasions where Feyre will begin to approach discussing the things that he did Under the Mountain, but the focus is always quickly shifted to Rhysand’s pained reaction to this or the fact that he was abused by Amarantha:

“‘Don’t get me started on what you did to me Under the Mountain.’
Rhys went still. As still as I’d ever seen him, as still as the death now beckoning in those eyes. Then his chest began to move, faster and faster. Across the pillars towering behind him, I could have sworn the shadow of great wings spread. He opened his mouth, leaning forward, and then stopped. Instantly, the shadows, the ragged breathing, the intensity were gone.”

And:

“‘So that night, after [sexually assaulting her in front of Amarantha], I had to…service her. She kept me there longer than usual, trying to squeeze the answers out of me.’”

And:

“‘I cannot forgive anyone who made you suffer.’  But he still didn’t care about those who’d made him suffer.”

It’s interesting that most of the people who frequently raise this argument in defense of Rhysand will not apply it in defense of other characters who have experienced trauma and gone on to do reprehensible things. Why aren’t these particular fans saying that Tamlin’s abuse wasn’t really so bad because he was traumatized? Many, many people think Nesta is just an irredeemable bitch who can never be forgiven for how she hurt and took advantage of Feyre – why aren’t they directing the focus to how horrible her life has been? To be clear, I’m not saying that anyone should actually do these things or that it would be justifiable if they did – I’m just pointing out the double standard.

Another common argument is a classic in my opinion – “it’s a fantasy world!” According to this perspective, it’s not fair to hold Rhysand to real world standards because the books aren’t set in the real world. And, I mean, sure, you can read books this way if you want – removing all connection to real world standards -and, therefore, relevance –  if they aren’t set in the real world.  But then my question is the same as it was regarding trauma as an excuse: why just Rhysand? Why not Tamlin? Nesta? Hybern? Ianthe? Interesting, too, that the things people love about the series are still relevant despite the books not taking place in the real world.

If we do decide to consider Rhysand’s actions based on the standards of the books’ world, I would say that its morality around violence and killing is markedly different from our world’s.  But I would argue that it has conceptions of trauma, abuse, agency and consent that don’t seem markedly different from our own. Yes, there are places where women are oppressed, but this is always framed as wrong and regressive in the text.  When Ianthe tries to grab Rhysand’s crotch, that is framed as wrong by the story. When Tamlin restricts Feyre’s choices and lashes out, that is framed as wrong by the story. When her human fiance crosses Nesta’s sexual boundaries, that is framed as wrong by the story. 

Maas also clearly incorporates her own (limited) interpretation of modern feminism into the world through stories like Feyre’s, Mor’s and the Valkyries – sexual autonomy, independence, being more than trophy wives/men’s subservient partners. The same is true with Rhysand – her intention was very transparently to make him appealing based on real-world standards by making him sad about all the violence against women and giving Feyre choices and taking care of her during her period and creating a survivor shelter etc. etc. He’s sometimes lovingly referred to as the feminist king by fans (and sarcastically so by Not Fans). It feels safe to say that his actions are not only incongruous with real-world standards but the book’s standards as well; the execution is just so deeply flawed that the result is the mess that I’m disentangling now. 

And now for the final argument as I begin to wrap up this deranged rant: the argument that we shouldn’t critique his actions because fiction is a safe place to explore and enjoy things that people wouldn’t want to have happen in reality. That’s the whole idea behind Dark Romance, right? That what’s appealing or interesting as a fictional fantasy isn’t necessarily appealing or interesting in real life; that readers are fully capable of separating one from the other. 

For what it’s worth, I do fully believe that readers are capable of separating fiction from reality. I think it would be quite patronizing to assume otherwise. But as a whole, I don’t view the debate over fiction impacting reality as an objective right/wrong situation where only one thing is true. I think it depends on the works in question and the individual contexts of different readers. The other side of the argument, which I also believe can be true in some circumstances (and which I think it is equally silly to argue against) is that fiction is a reflection of reality and can influence how people think in turn. You can see this with ACOTAR itself – there are stories of people who were inspired to start workout journeys because of the Valkyries, people who left their partners because they reminded them too much of Tamlin, people whose own mental health journeys were impacted by the healing stories. But if we can acknowledge that the books can be impactful in these positive ways, there’s no legitimate reason that they can’t also be impactful in negative ways. There can be people who found Maas’s depictions to be triggering or harmful,  people who came away from the books unquestioning of its message that boundary violations are romantic if there’s a declaration of love and a justification of protection, young readers whose early conceptions of what’s okay in relationships were influenced  in negative ways that they later had to unlearn.

I think the thing that complicates the Dark Romance argument in the context of ACOTAR- and really makes the entire thing so frustrating to me – is the issue of the narrative framing again. Maas can’t just let Rhysand be a Dark Romance Love Interest who does bad shit that is actually recognized as bad shit. Sure, the actual actions he takes could be considered those of a dark romance love interest, but they aren’t treated that way by the narrative at all. If his actions were framed as morally reprehensible by the text instead of excused with convoluted bullshit logic or sometimes not even clocked as troublesome at all, I probably wouldn’t give a single shit. If these books were labeled and discussed as Dark Romances with a bad boy alpha male love interest, I would have just said “Okay, I don’t like those kinds of books” and I would not have read them. But they were sold to me as feminist fantasy with an authentic trauma healing journey and a beautiful love story with the dreamiest book boyfriend of all time who is also the feminist king of choice.

Speaking of that trauma healing journey, I also just don’t think that it works for a story featuring the romantic interest doing the kinds of things that Rhysand does (whether they are acknowledged as bad or not) to simultaneously be about the female protagonist’s beautiful, feminist healing journey. In that regard, I don’t think it works to try to have your cake and eat it too. Going back to my talk of reality influencing fiction and fiction influencing reality, it goes from silly bad writing to really frustrating to me when I think about how Maas did this – tried to write seriously about abuse, trauma recovery and feminism – by shoddily hand-waving away and excusing Rhysand’s actions through the exact same kinds of convoluted, manipulative apologism and dismissal that we see people use around abuse and assault in real life. For such a popular and successful author to dip into that logic, for it to work so well, for her to be heralded as the queen of feminist fantasy romance for it, for the shitty excuses and double standards to be so strikingly apparent to me and so evidently lost on so many readers – these are the things that make me so deeply irritated with this series and its popularity.

 To be clear, I don’t think that she was doing any of this deliberately or maliciously. And I don’t think that fans are either. I’m not saying SJM is a secret Andrew Tate supporter and her fans all think abuse is awesome.  I just think that damaging beliefs about these topics are deeply, insidiously engrained in our culture and our attitudes in ways we may not always realize, and that shows up very clearly in this series. And I think that Sarah J Maas isn’t aware enough of this fact or knowledgeable enough about the topic to write about it with anything remotely approaching success.

I guess I can’t state with absolute certainty that Maas’s work was unintentionally influenced by real world factors in this way; nor can I state with absolute certainty that Maas’s work is influencing the real world in negative ways.  All I can say that at least with this particular character, there are plenty of readers who are not saying “Hey, what he did is actually fucked up but it’s just fiction and I’m going to separate the two.” Some fans will say this, but they’re few and far between. Most are ready to die on the hill of seriously defending and excusing his every action with the most convoluted logic possible; they insist on not seeing any problems with what he does throughout the books at all. Like I mentioned before, you often see posts describing how Maas has ruined real men for these readers, that Rhys is the perfect man and the perfect romantic partner, that people broke up with their partners because they couldn’t compare to him. I fully understand if others feel differently about this than I do, but I personally don’t think it’s ridiculous to wonder why that is the case, what’s going on there, how it could be reflective of broader patterns we see in the real world or how it could go on to contribute to those patterns in turn.

 OR maybe the moral of the story is that that’s fandom for ya, baby!!!!!! In any case, I’ve now talked about fairy smut for all too many thousands of words. I wish I could justify this in some way but I really can’t, so take it or leave it and do your best not to judge me. 

Exorcism over. Let’s hope this brings me peace.