Speaking of the setting, one thing that pulled me out of this book was that the marriage ceremony was exactly the same as ours? like Feyra is put in a poufy white dress for some reason... yet it was established that there are no gods, therefore queen Victoria, the fashion icon, would not exist in this world to make white wedding dresses a thing? Like if you're going to make your own fantasy world, make some cool cultural stuff up too!
The way you are absolutley spittin rn, because once you try to deconstruct the fashion (chucky sweaters, leggings) or huge aspects of fashion history like queen victoria's white wedding dress. Espcially when they placed such like a modern spin on things being a pr wedding, instead of like you said a fantasy world with its own cultural contexts.
If anything, a High Lord and Lady of a kingdom should wear something akin to Royal Purple, Royal blue or Gold/ Silver woven fabric... things that would be hella rare and expensive by mortal standards. A plain, white poofy gown ?? Not very Fae-like .
My sister and I agreed on this when I started reading ACOTAR a couple weeks ago. It’s junk food; we aren’t here for a well-rounded and balanced narrative, we’re here for our yummy trash and it delivers in spades 😂
At 1:36 - everyone wants a man who will “destroy the world for them” until someone actually does it. Tamlin sacrifices his court for Feyre, but he’s the villain.
My gf had a theory that SJM must've had a breakup between books and that explains the shift from Tamlin to Rhys. Glad you guys touched on that theory. Can't wait for you to roast Court of Frost and Starlight.
She’s been with her husband since college (I think they met on like 2004 or something like that). Maybe she based Tamlin off of an ex, but my theory is that she wanted to give her husband a little cameo type thing as rhysand and eventually she just ran with it bc you can’t look at her husband and not think that she based rhysand off of him idk if that makes any sense but yeah lol
The real reason why Tamlin was trashed so severely..was to save Feyre from coming off as a finicky whore... Not that any of the readers would have thought that per say,😊 but it seemed to be a real fear for her main character to not come off as flaky and easy.😬
i, like katie, kind of liked this book and it scratched a trashy fanfiction itch in me, but the one element of retconning that rubbed me the wrong way worse than anything else was the moment where feyre was like yeah lucian healed me a couple of times, but no one, not even lucian, risked as much to help me under the mountain as rhys did. i’m sorry, what? that’s just observably not at all what happened… amarantha would never have actually punished rhys in any way that would actually hurt him, she wanted him to be intact to keep being her whore plus she needed his powers on her side. she never would have tortured or killed rhys, even if she had found out he was “helping” feyre (aka using her to get under tamlin’s skin enough for tamlin to kill amarantha for him). meanwhile, when all lucian did was help feyre from the crowd when she was fighting that stupid worm, amarantha made TAMLIN WHIP THE SHIT OUT OF LUCIAN! if she knew lucian was going into feyre’s cell and healing her, she would have had no issue killing him, or forcing tamlin to kill him, or getting his brothers to do something awful to him. the tamlin slander, i was prepared for, but the lucian slander? that really got to me. lucian risked SO much to help her, and way more than rhys did and with way less shitty motives. ugh whatever. the tamlin and lucian character assassination was so unnecessary, feyre could have ended up with rhysand in so many other ways without this having to happen 🙄
the retconning, plot holes are insane. this series had me rolling my eyes and I couldn’t even make it to the 3rd book. im convinced the ppl who think this series is good would have also thought 50 shades of gray was peak romance in 2010
All right, re-write suggestion: have Ianthe be a double agent for the King of Hybern (who, for the purposes of this re-write, we'll call Nigel since SJM wasn't bothered to name him), have her poison the well between Feyre and Tamlin (which isn't too hard given they're both traumatized after the events of the first book and have trouble communicating with each other as a result), and when the wedding happens, go full on Red Wedding: King Nigel arrives, he wants Feyre as his trophy wife/baby maker since she has the power of all the High Lords, he kills Tamlin, Feyre cries for help without realizing she does it through the bond to Rhysand, and Rhysand swoops in and saves her. Which to her, by that point, would be like being stuck between a rock and a hard place, but between King Nigel and Rhysand you're probably better off running away with Rhysand. Have the Night Court people actually be morally ambiguous or outright grey leaning into black: Rhysand didn't start out as a bad person and had noble intentions, but through protecting Velaris, being sexually abused by Amarantha and doing her bidding, he has become very manipulative as a result and close to the very thing he has vowed to destroy. The Inner Circle are more or less enablers in this, to varying degrees of awareness: Amren is an Old Testament Angel and therefore does not have the same set of morals, making her an enabler; Mor is so afraid of going back to the abusive situation she was in she's willing to do anything to stay where she is, and she hides her ruthlessness under a charming attitude (but she would totally throw a kid to a monster to save her ass); Azriel is an assassin and morality is not something he troubles himself with (or he has his own messed up moral code); Cassian is a genuine bro but he's also not very bright about it all and more or less Rhysand's morality pet. Feyre now has good reasons now to want to go against King Nigel and Ianthe, who's been appointed by Hybern as the new High Lady to replace Tamlin and has manipulated the situation to her advantage and everyone now thinks she's some kind of hero against Hybern while Rhysand is painting as a Big Bad Villain who kidnapped Feyre. After that, you can choose whether Feyre changes everyone for the better, or if she undergoes a corruption arc (which is more interesting imo). On top of her trauma, she now has to grieve Tamlin, while also trying to figure out what her feelings about Rhysand are. And at the end, if you *really* want to up to ante for the next book, have her sacrifice be her accepting to follow the King of Hybern, while also being a spy through her bond with Rhysand and vowing to destroy him from the inside.
Such a better story. Between Nigel and Rhysand, Feyre chose the "safer" devil she knew instead of the devil she didn't. And make Nigel just as sexually appealing as Rhys, so it's not just like she was picking the one with better abs.
100% more interesting and nuanced, still about grief, closer to a Hades Persephone retelling if ACOMAF truly is an attempt at that. I would read it but couldn’t be written by SJM, she cannot do nuance.
You know that something went wrong when Maria and William are both comparing Ice Planet Barbarians POSITIVELY to this series, even if only in some ways.
There is no trope I hate more than fated mates. It takes all the power and autonomy and work out of organic love. There is nothing less swoonworthy and more pitiable than being destined to be with just one person. Like sucks if they're a bad or boring person I guess, your souls are entwined now. Yuck.
I've never read the series, but Tamlin's character assassination sounds so infuriating (Especially as a huge fan of the OG Tam Lin ballad and the many versions of Beauty And The Beast. They did those stories dirty)! I feel so sorry for the people who shipped him and Feyre in the first book. It sounded like the events of ACOTAR were very manufactured by him in order to break Amarantha's curse. You could play into that a lot more, have it turn out Tamlin has no romantic feelings for Feyre and was more or less tricking her to fall in love with him. He feels horrible for it, but it had to be done. Now the secret is out, and Feyre is devastated. Tamlin agrees to marry her as a sort of apology, then Rhys swoops in at the wedding. I dunno, maybe something like that could work?
@@wisconsieee I would’ve preferred a douchey tamlin that adheres to the traditions and morals of Fae over what we got, but what we got was so much worse for both us and him 😭
I honestly thought it was going to be her slowly falling in love with Rhys while spending time with him and her and tamlin gradually growing apart. Instead she ditches him pretty quickly and spends the whole book with rhysand which I thought was so boring
Having Rhysand be a mind reader and them having this "bond" or whatever is so cheap because it's a shortcut so they would not have to work on their relationship and work things out, TALK etc., because he already knows/sees/feels everything so... yeah. I don't like these books(tho I like Lucien and Nesta), but I like them even less bc of the mate thing. It feels so lazy. Also the black and white dichotomy, and hypocrisy, omg. Rhysand (and others!) could have been a grey character, but nah. Plus I would like to know who told Maas that her sex scenes are good, and to carry on with what she was doing... like why.
"Plus I would like to know who told Maas that her sex scenes are good, and to carry on with what she was doing... like why." 🤣🤣🤣 Absolutely accurate savagery
Yeah, I am not a fan of the "*real* love will be easy"/"your *real true love* (mate)will just *know* what you need" thing that seems to be central to a lot of stories in this vein. Having a character who constantly thinks about how their partner doesn't notice things is fine, but it would be so much more interesting to have that expectation interrogated in the story and have the other half of the partnership challenge it. And then they have an actual conversation and learn how to communicate while also having plenty of acrobatic sex when the mood strikes.
I did a bit of digging a few months ago on ACOMAF and how it came to be, because I myself thought Tamlin got the Ron the Death Eater treatment while Rhysand got the Draco in Leather Pants treatment just to make Feyre and Rhysand make sense. So, Sarah J. Maas wrote ACOTAR while she was still working on the Throne of Glass series, and given her publisher wasn't sure whether ACOTAR would sell or not, she basically had to write it as if it could be potentially a standalone even though she wanted to make it a series instead. Reading ACOTAR, I thought it was pretty obvious SJM favored Rhysand (she also mentioned once Feyre and Rhysand were always meant to be the endgame, which was obvious to me even in ACOTAR and despite no actual red flags from Tamlin), but given there was a chance back in the day the book would be a standalone, she can't make Tamlin *too* much of a jerk because if Feyre's story ended there, it would be kind of crappy. There's also the fact that when she sold the manuscript for ACOTAR, ACOMAF was already entirely written by then, but for whatever reason, SJM decided to rewrite it from scratch - and let me tell you, I am MASSIVELY curious to know what the original ACOMAF was like. (As for the breakup theory, she mentioned having been with her now-husband since college and she wrote ACOTAR and ACOMAF while in college, maybe Tamlin is her crappy high school boyfriend lmao. Also, fun fact: she wrote the first draft for Throne of Glass at 16 and it was initially on Fictionpress)
If Tamilin wasn't so butchered beyond repair in the second book he would have perfect for an eventual trauma recovery/repentance/redemption story. Hell knowing how much Sarah retcons anyway I still think it could work. I just feel like she kind of accidentally wrote an interesting character with him, being that everyone else (other than Nesta who gets treated like shit for no reason) is living a fantasy and loved and cared for, except for Tamilin who is a sad lonely failure (lol).
I literally just finished this book yesterday! It definitely scratched an itch for me but the only way for me to completely enjoy this book is if I pretend the first one didn't exist and the first few chapters of this book with Tamlin didn't exist either. Becasue WTF she did Tamlin soo dirty and even Rhys's 180 was jarring. How come when Rhys admits to doing horrible things to protect the ones he loves it's a good thing, but when Tamlin does it he's a villain? Feyre is constantly thinking about how she suffered under the mountain and Rhys suffered under the mountain...but what about Tamlin? He was there too, we don't know what Amarantha did to him off screen and while he was on screen he was too scared to do anything for fear of amarantha hurting feyre, plus the entire 49 years of his curse he had to sacrifice his friends. And Feyre keeps saying how Tamlin didn't try to stop amarantha from killing her but Rhys did, but how was Tamlin to do anything when Feyre literally stabbed him in the heart! Sure he didn't die from it but it was still a bad wound he needed to recover from before he could do anything! And when he did recover he killed amarantha! Ugh, sorry, rant over lol.
She was too hard on Tamlin. Even with him being over protective of her, he had a good reason considering how her new found power was a threat to the other high lords and he had literally watched her DIE in the first book. The man gave her so much and it's so annoying how she ended their relationship for seemingly no real reason. It's obvious that the author just wanted to make Rhysand the love interest
Oh and Will hit it right on the nail! There are things Maas does so good but it's all ruined by the fact she wants to focus on the smutty side or get her ships together to smash! I know her later books are heavier on the smutty things and A Court of Thrones and Roses series is tamer than most people would make you think, but the whole chapter in this book that is decadiated to smut I skimmed and mostly because her smutty scenes are ... I've read better smut in fanfic XD
No, you're correct in the beginning. It was the Anita Blake series. The love interest Richard was based on her ex, and now Micah, the favorite in her poly group, is based on the current husband. She also introduced kink and poly into the story at about the same time she started practicing those too. I read the series for the train wreck factor. I would love to see you guys tackle that series sometime.
I used to be a fan of this series. Enjoyed the first book, more or less enjoyed the second one when it got to the action parts because I absolutely despised Feyre. She was just so boring lol. Never liked Rhysand and he just gets ickier as the series progresses. I got tired of the third book but forced myself to finish it. That wretched novella Christmas special brought me very close to a mental breakdown. Getting dog piled for some lighthearted criticism in an ACOTAR Facebook group made me needlessly aggressive to all things Maas after that. I was basically told if I was going to critique the book, I probably shouldn’t be reading it. My monstrous critique was questioning a plot hole, joking about the excessive use of “male”, “female”, and “mate”, and probably most egregious of all, saying the vilification of Tamlin didn’t make sense. In the Maas fandom, defending Tamlin makes you an abuser by default. Disliking feminist king and savior Rhysand gets people kicked out of groups and ripped to shreds by complete strangers online.
The same happened to me. I tried to bring diehard fans attention to the problems of the books and they blocked me. Couldn’t even have a discussion about it
SJM will introduce a male love interest and then destroy him in the next book, preferring the new love interest. It’s almost like she doesn’t trust herself to introduce a love interest that we’ll like, so she has to have the comparison between “see this guy, he’s trash oh but look how much better this one is” 🤦🏻♀️ I did devour this series initially but in retrospect I had so many problems with it! What i don’t like is that SJM is a manipulative writer, she doesn’t let the reader decide if they like a character or not, she tells you who to like and not to like but this never works out for me.
Doesn't the new dude end up molding into the exact same person that the last guy was? Its like complaining about how your sandwich was made, you throw it out and make the EXACT SAME SANDWICH 💀
I enjoyed ACOTOR (in spite of its flaws), but I HATED ACOMAF. I DNF’d the second they introduced Reysand’s insufferable, grim dark, fan fic OC found family. 😭 Not to mention the way she wrote Tamlin’s heel-turn-retcon is baffling, and Reysand’s face-turn-retcon made me feel gaslit.
@@liaq9615 that’s Fair. I didn’t. I begrudgingly finished this book bc a friend really wanted me to…and then she immediately regretted it. I pointed every weird thing, every plot hole, and she begged me not to read another one b4 I ruined it for her. If I hadn’t felt like the author was trying to gaslight me into liking Rhysand…I might not have picked at it so hard.
@@TLCGreen I think it was easier for me to like it because I was already put off my Tamlin a bit at the end of Acotar. I know he was silenced from the curse but I didn’t like that he was using Feyre to end the curse. It seemed manipulative with a side of oops I fell in love too. Rhysand I could tell had other intentions underneath and was excited to see the real person I knew he was masking. I also personally felt that he was a much better match for Feyre than Tamlin. I’m curious though, do you recall the plot holes you noticed?
I read this book and I wish I hadn't. When friends ask me to describe it I have two answers: #1: "The Beauty becomes the beast, ready your torch and pitchfork." #2: "It's like if Belle wasted a whole movie freeing the beast from his curse just to realize later that she actually wanted Gaston after all." Never again SJM. I gave the next books a chance but you lost me when Feyre has sex with Rhysand's ghost. (At least that's how I saw it, ew.)
The tithe thing being such an issue is insane to me because Velaris also has to have some kind of taxation system to maintain. Where is the IC getting this bottomless money. And also, in the very same book, Rhys is lording over and disrespecting his subjects and it's hot. Feyre has no real values or convictions, stg.
It's so immersion-breaking that Rhysand is somehow immensely wealthy with a ton of houses and Feyre could buy a bathtub of diamonds and not "make a dent in his accounts" and Velaris is this utopian city of perfect architecture and infrastructure and a flourishing artisan culture... yet it's been isolated for 5000 years (so nobody is really doing the fae equivalent of "spending the summer in France" or "studying overseas and bringing back foreign inventions") and the Night Court has such a horrifically bad reputation that no other courts are really willing to do wide-scale cultural exchanges or trade with them, AND the majority of NC land is like, dark cold mountains without much good weather or sunshine. Who is doing the farming to provide food, harvesting the stone and wood for housing, mining the needed resources? AND how much of it is being sent to support the utopian city-state where the vast majority of the Court is banned from entering (the shopkeepers are literally instructed to refuse service to the CoN members by Rhys on the off chance they DO make good on the bargain and want to visit) vs the population at large that exists as a military population in the mountains and is not given the same luxuries and easy living as Velaris? What is the fucking economy like in Fairytopia?!
Oh yeah the Weaver scene with the song she sings (which is nicely written & appropriately creepy), is probably the best writting she's done, even if the ending of it kind of undersells how powerful the Weaver is I think.
The original Ballad of Tam Lin is also much better and more touching material than ACOTAR is despite the over-blown length. (Tam is a Scots hypochorism for Thomas. She named her fairy Tom.)
Had to pause to say: Yes, Anita Blake is the series where the author based the love interest on her husband, then got divorced, and gave the husband character a personality transplant. But it's better than that because she remarried to a new guy, who was, I believe, the president of her fan club, and based a new love interest on him.
I am Turkish and at this point the Greek-Turk thing is largely outdated meme. We are both the weak soyjak citizens trying to crawl out of our governments' boots. Maria's camera is the EU, thank u for ur time
Same here. However, SJM is being roasted all over the internet; so many ppl think her writing is awful. My ex bought me book #1, and I couldn't make it through the first chapter. I listen to these roasts bcuz they're good advice on how NOT 2 write a book! 😉
I literally decided to bite the bullet and commit to writing my book because I read this and went, "if this can have a cult-like fan base and be a best seller... I can fcking make it" 😂😂
OMG finally I meet people who feel the same way I feel about this series. Honestly, I really don’t get the hype. I tried several times and could not get pass a ACOMAF!! I ended up skimming through it. I tried her Crescent city series and nope I could not get pass the first 10 pages of book 1. I am not even going to bother with the throne of glass series cuz I know it’s going to be the same thing. The part where she described the flushed toilet was ridiculous!!! For a couple minutes I was like what? Are we still in medieval or modern times??? Yea and I think she also described one of the house in Rysand’s hidden city as town house( that was just too modern a description) just to tell you guys how less invested I was I can’t even remember the name of the hidden city.Honestly, when I started the series it looked like it had potential. I thought book 2 will be phenomenal bc of how hyped it was and oh boy was I disappointed 😔 is an understatement!!!
My faaaaaaves ❤️ What bothers me most about this book is that Rhys spend 500+ years “ pretending “ to be a villain and is almost surprised when people don’t trust him and his court especially after stealing from summer…. Also why doesn’t the king have a name 😭
the maasening ! i hope you guys get views yall are amazing 😭 im so happy yall talking about how she backtracked everything from the first book also i hate how sjm believes that working out cures your depression
Yes, he deserves better and I wish the author hadn't made it out so that we had to hate him. Like they said, there were so many other ways to go about Feyra and Tamlin's relationship ending that painting him as an awful and horrible person, especially since he seemed nice and chill in the first book(i think, i haven't read it so)
I only read acotar then consumed the rest through cari can read(bless her heart for her perseverance through those books😔 ) and ive also been team tamlin from the start and by team tamlin i mean he deserves so much better along with lucien
You guys nailed this book and series I also loved all the action scenes, the quest scenes, and the few scenes where they are discussing the plot or the actual war. The worst parts are all the smut, trauma, character dialogue, and the mate bond.
I stopped reading this book just under the halfway mark. I really didn't like the way she ended Tamlin's relationship with the protagonist (I forgot how to spell her name 🙃), the reasons where quite ridiculous to me tbh, and she could've done it better. Additionally I was so annoyed with the nightcourt & Rhysand, she really overcompensated with trying to redeem his character when a lot of the things he did to her in the first book (borderline sexual assault) are just unforgivable.
If Miss Sarah J could give us 700 pages of anachronistic bullshit (#cookiesandtownhouses) why couldn't she do us a solid for once and just give Tamlin a fucking therapist 😂😂😂
SJM has no business to write trauma. She writes the most horrible events that can happen to someone so then she can twist it into her romantic plot. I HATED how she handled male grape trauma! But then she never handles any other trauma correctly. It's like she saw something in a movie and she's repeating that in her books
I need to read the last book but I know what happens because I love to spoil myself but Tamlin is a wasted character and used to give Freysand a bad guy. I would love to see Maas give Tamlin a true redemption arch other than what he was given and pushed to the side to be forgotten. The later books also ruin Rhysand as well. Because omg ...A Court of SIlver Flames. Even before, some things Rhys does and is forgiven. Rhysand is the author's favorite character and treated special. Or so how it feels.
As someone who pushed through multiple Throne of Glass books, the thing that infuriated me the most was how Maas cannot write characters growing or changing or just not being right for each other. Whatever the current relationships she wants to write are the ones that always were, no matter what she said before. In the third book she does a surprisingly good job writing a platonic friendship that was lovely to see, and like, I knew he was gonna become the new love interest, because it's a Maas book, but she can't just have that relationship change over time, no she's gotta retcon that beautiful thing she wrote and I'm still fuming.
i agree with you. i'd like to add quality wise, ToG (atleast i strongly believe) is superior to ACOTAR and considering it came out before ACOTAR I can excuse characters haveing same traits to the ones in ACOTAR because they came first. However, ACOTAR feels like a copy past of ToG with the same themes, the same dark powers, the same descriptions of characters that are just always so devestatingly beautiful who have all gone through the same trauma, it gets so infuriatingly repetitive for sure 😭
If you didn’t read the graphic audio version, you totally missed out on the winnowing sound effect. Sounds like a space lazer/teleporter from a 70’s or 80’s movie and it’s fantastic.
This is one series I'm never going to read, but somehow I enjoy watching/hearing all its reviews. It's just entertaining to see well-read people lose their shit over how absolutely boring it is 😂 I'm pretty sure the only reason Katie liked it was because she listened to it and didn't have to read it. Anyway, this was a great review, as always!
If you guys think Az and Cass talk like frat boys, just read Crescent City 😂 MUCH WORSE. Oh and you’ll love the feminism there too and the plus size but not plus size Bryce
I don't know which author started this weirdly specific trend of heroines in historical fantasy settings who inexplicably intuit their way to contemporary feminism, but I'm here for it. It makes me giddy every time
That is actually a really good question. I wonder if YA books promoting contemporary feminism happened as a response to the backlash Twilight got, but I wonder which book was truly influential here. Was it Shadow and Bone? Was it Throne of Glass? 2013-2014 is the moment where I felt a definitive shift away from the Twilight wannabes and the Hunger Games wannabes.
I feel like a big part of the change between book 1 and book 2 is that Maas really wanted to write a feminist book ? It leads to some inconsistancies and soft-retcon of the universe...like one of the characters Feyre interacts with in the first book is a female warrior, and I don't remember that character being treated as an oddity or a minority in the first book - but in the second it's literally said that the mortal world is relatively conservative regarding women's place in society, and that women like that warrior are exceptions - in which case I have a hard time accepting it when this human world is established as having specifically Queens to rule them, and also birth control is pretty easily available (they also have no gods, for some reason). I honestly feel like she was going for a more equal world in the first book, almost without our gender politics (a bit like in Throne of Glass I think), but changed her course to fit the themes she wanted to put in her sequel. The fae world being pretty patriarchal too doesn't jive super well with either Amarantha being a general for her country, or the existence of the (very under utilized) High Priestresses who are supposed to be pretty powerful and influent, almost like a counter-power to the male high lords. And also they're sex-positive ? Or sometimes they're not ? This is all weird. I honestly would have wanted to see a mortal world which is progressive, built by former slaves seeking freedom and equality, while the fae court would be more conservative, still stuck with caste systems and segregation and pretty misogynistic laws & standards. Feyre truly would have something proper to her culture & her upbribging to bring to the Fae world.
It is totally Beauty and the Beast with Twilight undertones and Narnia highlights with fairies and fae. I have been bored the entire series yet I can't stop.
A thing that bothered me alot was how feyre complained about not being a high lady in tamlin's court and prides herself as high lady in the night court, when it's explained that there is a reason high lords get chosen because the magic ties them to their land and picks them because they're physically and magically stronger than their siblings and because all children of the high lords get educated and trained from birth on magic, politics, fighting in battle and running their courts and that's why all high lords perform the calanmai ritual every year. Now is feyre going to perform those rituals or run the court or has the magic picked her? the answer is NO. It's just an empty title that rhys gives her that grants her the privileges of a high lord without fulfilling any duty and responsibility that comes with it and how she also didn't earn it. Also i'm quite upset with tamlin's character assassination and lucien suddenly acting like his bitch when that was never the case in the first book. And i hate the inner circle as they're not interesting characters, are ultimately useless to the story and boring. I actually liked rhysand in the first book because as will said he had an edge and was an alone dickish anti hero, he had the being amarantha's whore title that gave him a traumatic background and i thought thay were goig to explore it , i was interested in what his character would do and how he maybe somewhat redeemed. Instead they made tamlin look bad to make him look good, and if maas wanted to give rhys friends, azriel and cassian were enough or just cassian in my opinion because the rest are useless especially mor. Also feyre was nothing more than a whiny bitch acting like a child throwing temper tantrums to tamlin and lucien when they were just trying to do what's best for. So yeah sorry for the rant but i was frustrated with how underwhelming, cringe and boring this book was.
My new fave thing to say now is “no no. You silly women you dont understand how feminism works.” [and then proceeds to not describe a very feminist plotline tehee]
kinda feels like Maas wrote scenes that she was super proud of, then had to figure out the order they would be in and tried to string them together somehow. It's very disjoined in reading. Also it's should have been, love is needed to break the bullsh*t curse, Tamlin + Lucien
I'm the only person in my friend group who finds flaws in these books and feels like Tamlin got done dirty. You guys are providing therapy for me. 🤣 I'm not crazy
The thing is Tamlin was a great character actually; we saw him in the first book when everybody tells us he's not even the shadow of what he was, but he is still a good leader and a good friend for everyone. Finally in the second book we see him full power, but NO! WAIT! He's now more traumatized than before! But who cares because he can't read minds (also 3 months is a stupidly short time space for literal inmortal beings). I feel that we never got to see the real happy Tamlin except for the calanmai scene where he plays and dances (such a cute scene in my opinion, and everyone says it's cringe because it's not Rhysand). Also the summer court part... oof man... poor Tarquin
At long last! I have been waiting since your review of ACOTAR. Thank you for doing god’s work. I suffered through this on the promise of a “good” book. Highly disappointed and I am pretty sure it took years of my life. I am relieved to see that I was not the only person who felt gaslit by the entire story. ACOWAR is MUCH worse. Maybe a special episode one day lol.
I liked Rysand in the first book but in the second book he felt flat. I loved all your theories of how she could have handled Tamlin. I did not click with found family the first time they were introduced. Everything was basically blah blah. There are better ways to write feminist stories. I agree that she does have good battles and some creepy far. Oh and not to mention all the hype of the sex scenes in ACOMAF. The smut was flat as hell and not hot at all!!!
Ahhh it was the Anita Blake books! Richard the werewolf biology teacher was modeled after her husband. They split up in real life and she proceeded to character assassinate Richard 😂
Velaris is where the happy Goths live. The Court of Nightmares under the Mountain is where the angry Goths live. I say this as an OG Goth Girl. They take Rhys from shady James Spader level bad-boy to neutered, feminist, simp-boy who constantly mopes around with his emo hair in his eyes and hands in his pockets like the misunderstood, high school poet. Even though he’s like 500 years old and should stop acting like a teenager by now!! I hated this book and series so much, but I do love to hear rants about how they suck!
I do have to add though, how you all say rhysand should act after SA…it’s truly not the way you all described every time. A lot of survivors have hyper sexuality from the trauma.
Thanks for being critical of this. I like rhysand in spite of everything but all the gushing reviews get boring. One of many issues is hybern was disappointing as a villain...i actually liked amarantha more
The only way to make everything that doesn’t make sense in this series make sense is for the evil Rhys theory to be true… then I would owe Sarah a huge apology 😂
You gotta tell me who drew the new logo for your UA-cam channel!!! It's so cool! What an awesome job they did. Though raw ruggedness is always going to be top tier.
Oh damn, the book he is referencing is the series about Anita Blake, where a character gets a complete character assassination bc the author split from her ex and got a new hubby. Oh, damn, I would love to hear your opinions on Hamilton and her books. 😂
@alpha1solace I really liked the series because the main character was fun, she was working on her religious beliefs and how she saw intimacy and relationships, correlating with the romantic relationships she is in, the presence of the love interests, whatever. Then it's a BORING sex fest with constantly ever increasing bigger and bigger pile of sexual partners but it feels... hollow. *Lol,.look how liberated and sexually open we are. Anita has not had a conversation which is not about fucking, being fucked or planning to fuck for 5 boons now! Monsters? Yeah, she kills monsters still but let's go back to the gigantic orgy that goes for 97% of the book now". 😂
Speaking of the setting, one thing that pulled me out of this book was that the marriage ceremony was exactly the same as ours? like Feyra is put in a poufy white dress for some reason... yet it was established that there are no gods, therefore queen Victoria, the fashion icon, would not exist in this world to make white wedding dresses a thing? Like if you're going to make your own fantasy world, make some cool cultural stuff up too!
The way you are absolutley spittin rn, because once you try to deconstruct the fashion (chucky sweaters, leggings) or huge aspects of fashion history like queen victoria's white wedding dress. Espcially when they placed such like a modern spin on things being a pr wedding, instead of like you said a fantasy world with its own cultural contexts.
I worked on the Wedding cermony stuff in my book for MONTHS! she slapped Feyre in the dress from the Laberinth and called it a day!
If anything, a High Lord and Lady of a kingdom should wear something akin to Royal Purple, Royal blue or Gold/ Silver woven fabric... things that would be hella rare and expensive by mortal standards. A plain, white poofy gown ?? Not very Fae-like .
Katie is the embodiment of "you can love something and still be hella critical of it" and I appreciate that
This is me also 😂
My sister and I agreed on this when I started reading ACOTAR a couple weeks ago. It’s junk food; we aren’t here for a well-rounded and balanced narrative, we’re here for our yummy trash and it delivers in spades 😂
At 1:36 - everyone wants a man who will “destroy the world for them” until someone actually does it. Tamlin sacrifices his court for Feyre, but he’s the villain.
My gf had a theory that SJM must've had a breakup between books and that explains the shift from Tamlin to Rhys. Glad you guys touched on that theory.
Can't wait for you to roast Court of Frost and Starlight.
This makes so much sense LOL
She’s been with her husband since college (I think they met on like 2004 or something like that). Maybe she based Tamlin off of an ex, but my theory is that she wanted to give her husband a little cameo type thing as rhysand and eventually she just ran with it bc you can’t look at her husband and not think that she based rhysand off of him idk if that makes any sense but yeah lol
Is because acotar is based of
Is because acotar is based on Howl's moving castle, and the 3 boys are the 3 different howl personas. And Tamlins is the black haired one
Is because acotar is based on Howl's moving castle, and the 3 boys are the 3 different howl personas. And Tamlins is the black haired one
The real reason why Tamlin was trashed so severely..was to save Feyre from coming off as a finicky whore... Not that any of the readers would have thought that per say,😊 but it seemed to be a real fear for her main character to not come off as flaky and easy.😬
i, like katie, kind of liked this book and it scratched a trashy fanfiction itch in me, but the one element of retconning that rubbed me the wrong way worse than anything else was the moment where feyre was like yeah lucian healed me a couple of times, but no one, not even lucian, risked as much to help me under the mountain as rhys did. i’m sorry, what? that’s just observably not at all what happened… amarantha would never have actually punished rhys in any way that would actually hurt him, she wanted him to be intact to keep being her whore plus she needed his powers on her side. she never would have tortured or killed rhys, even if she had found out he was “helping” feyre (aka using her to get under tamlin’s skin enough for tamlin to kill amarantha for him). meanwhile, when all lucian did was help feyre from the crowd when she was fighting that stupid worm, amarantha made TAMLIN WHIP THE SHIT OUT OF LUCIAN! if she knew lucian was going into feyre’s cell and healing her, she would have had no issue killing him, or forcing tamlin to kill him, or getting his brothers to do something awful to him. the tamlin slander, i was prepared for, but the lucian slander? that really got to me. lucian risked SO much to help her, and way more than rhys did and with way less shitty motives. ugh whatever. the tamlin and lucian character assassination was so unnecessary, feyre could have ended up with rhysand in so many other ways without this having to happen 🙄
the retconning, plot holes are insane. this series had me rolling my eyes and I couldn’t even make it to the 3rd book. im convinced the ppl who think this series is good would have also thought 50 shades of gray was peak romance in 2010
All right, re-write suggestion: have Ianthe be a double agent for the King of Hybern (who, for the purposes of this re-write, we'll call Nigel since SJM wasn't bothered to name him), have her poison the well between Feyre and Tamlin (which isn't too hard given they're both traumatized after the events of the first book and have trouble communicating with each other as a result), and when the wedding happens, go full on Red Wedding: King Nigel arrives, he wants Feyre as his trophy wife/baby maker since she has the power of all the High Lords, he kills Tamlin, Feyre cries for help without realizing she does it through the bond to Rhysand, and Rhysand swoops in and saves her. Which to her, by that point, would be like being stuck between a rock and a hard place, but between King Nigel and Rhysand you're probably better off running away with Rhysand. Have the Night Court people actually be morally ambiguous or outright grey leaning into black: Rhysand didn't start out as a bad person and had noble intentions, but through protecting Velaris, being sexually abused by Amarantha and doing her bidding, he has become very manipulative as a result and close to the very thing he has vowed to destroy. The Inner Circle are more or less enablers in this, to varying degrees of awareness: Amren is an Old Testament Angel and therefore does not have the same set of morals, making her an enabler; Mor is so afraid of going back to the abusive situation she was in she's willing to do anything to stay where she is, and she hides her ruthlessness under a charming attitude (but she would totally throw a kid to a monster to save her ass); Azriel is an assassin and morality is not something he troubles himself with (or he has his own messed up moral code); Cassian is a genuine bro but he's also not very bright about it all and more or less Rhysand's morality pet. Feyre now has good reasons now to want to go against King Nigel and Ianthe, who's been appointed by Hybern as the new High Lady to replace Tamlin and has manipulated the situation to her advantage and everyone now thinks she's some kind of hero against Hybern while Rhysand is painting as a Big Bad Villain who kidnapped Feyre. After that, you can choose whether Feyre changes everyone for the better, or if she undergoes a corruption arc (which is more interesting imo). On top of her trauma, she now has to grieve Tamlin, while also trying to figure out what her feelings about Rhysand are. And at the end, if you *really* want to up to ante for the next book, have her sacrifice be her accepting to follow the King of Hybern, while also being a spy through her bond with Rhysand and vowing to destroy him from the inside.
Oh so THIS is the book I wanted 🥲
Such a better story. Between Nigel and Rhysand, Feyre chose the "safer" devil she knew instead of the devil she didn't. And make Nigel just as sexually appealing as Rhys, so it's not just like she was picking the one with better abs.
100% more interesting and nuanced, still about grief, closer to a Hades Persephone retelling if ACOMAF truly is an attempt at that. I would read it but couldn’t be written by SJM, she cannot do nuance.
Yes. Yes to all of this! I love your whole rewrite. Oh my goshh
Write this please! Such a brilliant and fun idea. Wish we got this book instead.
Feels so bizarre to see you guys together in person, it's nice knowing you guys do hang out real life! Really enjoying this episode!
You know that something went wrong when Maria and William are both comparing Ice Planet Barbarians POSITIVELY to this series, even if only in some ways.
There is no trope I hate more than fated mates. It takes all the power and autonomy and work out of organic love. There is nothing less swoonworthy and more pitiable than being destined to be with just one person. Like sucks if they're a bad or boring person I guess, your souls are entwined now. Yuck.
Exactly. You cannot control who you are attracted to but you always choose who you love. Big difference
Exactly and keep in mind 90% of these books have this exact trope.
I've never read the series, but Tamlin's character assassination sounds so infuriating (Especially as a huge fan of the OG Tam Lin ballad and the many versions of Beauty And The Beast. They did those stories dirty)! I feel so sorry for the people who shipped him and Feyre in the first book.
It sounded like the events of ACOTAR were very manufactured by him in order to break Amarantha's curse. You could play into that a lot more, have it turn out Tamlin has no romantic feelings for Feyre and was more or less tricking her to fall in love with him. He feels horrible for it, but it had to be done. Now the secret is out, and Feyre is devastated. Tamlin agrees to marry her as a sort of apology, then Rhys swoops in at the wedding.
I dunno, maybe something like that could work?
YES! I love the idea of Tamlin deceiving her to save everyone else. Such a good conflict!
@@wisconsieee it would alos benefit the lore of fae's to use humans for cunning and deceitful purposes but nope 😭
@@jinphany. oh my gosh yes! Missed opportunity to involve fae tradition. You're so right.😒
@@wisconsieee I would’ve preferred a douchey tamlin that adheres to the traditions and morals of Fae over what we got, but what we got was so much worse for both us and him 😭
I honestly thought it was going to be her slowly falling in love with Rhys while spending time with him and her and tamlin gradually growing apart. Instead she ditches him pretty quickly and spends the whole book with rhysand which I thought was so boring
Having Rhysand be a mind reader and them having this "bond" or whatever is so cheap because it's a shortcut so they would not have to work on their relationship and work things out, TALK etc., because he already knows/sees/feels everything so... yeah. I don't like these books(tho I like Lucien and Nesta), but I like them even less bc of the mate thing. It feels so lazy.
Also the black and white dichotomy, and hypocrisy, omg. Rhysand (and others!) could have been a grey character, but nah.
Plus I would like to know who told Maas that her sex scenes are good, and to carry on with what she was doing... like why.
"Plus I would like to know who told Maas that her sex scenes are good, and to carry on with what she was doing... like why." 🤣🤣🤣 Absolutely accurate savagery
Yeah, I am not a fan of the "*real* love will be easy"/"your *real true love* (mate)will just *know* what you need" thing that seems to be central to a lot of stories in this vein. Having a character who constantly thinks about how their partner doesn't notice things is fine, but it would be so much more interesting to have that expectation interrogated in the story and have the other half of the partnership challenge it. And then they have an actual conversation and learn how to communicate while also having plenty of acrobatic sex when the mood strikes.
I did a bit of digging a few months ago on ACOMAF and how it came to be, because I myself thought Tamlin got the Ron the Death Eater treatment while Rhysand got the Draco in Leather Pants treatment just to make Feyre and Rhysand make sense. So, Sarah J. Maas wrote ACOTAR while she was still working on the Throne of Glass series, and given her publisher wasn't sure whether ACOTAR would sell or not, she basically had to write it as if it could be potentially a standalone even though she wanted to make it a series instead. Reading ACOTAR, I thought it was pretty obvious SJM favored Rhysand (she also mentioned once Feyre and Rhysand were always meant to be the endgame, which was obvious to me even in ACOTAR and despite no actual red flags from Tamlin), but given there was a chance back in the day the book would be a standalone, she can't make Tamlin *too* much of a jerk because if Feyre's story ended there, it would be kind of crappy. There's also the fact that when she sold the manuscript for ACOTAR, ACOMAF was already entirely written by then, but for whatever reason, SJM decided to rewrite it from scratch - and let me tell you, I am MASSIVELY curious to know what the original ACOMAF was like.
(As for the breakup theory, she mentioned having been with her now-husband since college and she wrote ACOTAR and ACOMAF while in college, maybe Tamlin is her crappy high school boyfriend lmao. Also, fun fact: she wrote the first draft for Throne of Glass at 16 and it was initially on Fictionpress)
If Tamilin wasn't so butchered beyond repair in the second book he would have perfect for an eventual trauma recovery/repentance/redemption story. Hell knowing how much Sarah retcons anyway I still think it could work. I just feel like she kind of accidentally wrote an interesting character with him, being that everyone else (other than Nesta who gets treated like shit for no reason) is living a fantasy and loved and cared for, except for Tamilin who is a sad lonely failure (lol).
I literally just finished this book yesterday! It definitely scratched an itch for me but the only way for me to completely enjoy this book is if I pretend the first one didn't exist and the first few chapters of this book with Tamlin didn't exist either. Becasue WTF she did Tamlin soo dirty and even Rhys's 180 was jarring. How come when Rhys admits to doing horrible things to protect the ones he loves it's a good thing, but when Tamlin does it he's a villain? Feyre is constantly thinking about how she suffered under the mountain and Rhys suffered under the mountain...but what about Tamlin? He was there too, we don't know what Amarantha did to him off screen and while he was on screen he was too scared to do anything for fear of amarantha hurting feyre, plus the entire 49 years of his curse he had to sacrifice his friends. And Feyre keeps saying how Tamlin didn't try to stop amarantha from killing her but Rhys did, but how was Tamlin to do anything when Feyre literally stabbed him in the heart! Sure he didn't die from it but it was still a bad wound he needed to recover from before he could do anything! And when he did recover he killed amarantha! Ugh, sorry, rant over lol.
She was too hard on Tamlin. Even with him being over protective of her, he had a good reason considering how her new found power was a threat to the other high lords and he had literally watched her DIE in the first book. The man gave her so much and it's so annoying how she ended their relationship for seemingly no real reason. It's obvious that the author just wanted to make Rhysand the love interest
Oh and Will hit it right on the nail! There are things Maas does so good but it's all ruined by the fact she wants to focus on the smutty side or get her ships together to smash! I know her later books are heavier on the smutty things and A Court of Thrones and Roses series is tamer than most people would make you think, but the whole chapter in this book that is decadiated to smut I skimmed and mostly because her smutty scenes are ... I've read better smut in fanfic XD
No, you're correct in the beginning. It was the Anita Blake series. The love interest Richard was based on her ex, and now Micah, the favorite in her poly group, is based on the current husband. She also introduced kink and poly into the story at about the same time she started practicing those too. I read the series for the train wreck factor. I would love to see you guys tackle that series sometime.
Oh I forgot about this series
I used to be a fan of this series. Enjoyed the first book, more or less enjoyed the second one when it got to the action parts because I absolutely despised Feyre. She was just so boring lol. Never liked Rhysand and he just gets ickier as the series progresses.
I got tired of the third book but forced myself to finish it.
That wretched novella Christmas special brought me very close to a mental breakdown.
Getting dog piled for some lighthearted criticism in an ACOTAR Facebook group made me needlessly aggressive to all things Maas after that. I was basically told if I was going to critique the book, I probably shouldn’t be reading it. My monstrous critique was questioning a plot hole, joking about the excessive use of “male”, “female”, and “mate”, and probably most egregious of all, saying the vilification of Tamlin didn’t make sense. In the Maas fandom, defending Tamlin makes you an abuser by default. Disliking feminist king and savior Rhysand gets people kicked out of groups and ripped to shreds by complete strangers online.
The same happened to me. I tried to bring diehard fans attention to the problems of the books and they blocked me. Couldn’t even have a discussion about it
SJM will introduce a male love interest and then destroy him in the next book, preferring the new love interest. It’s almost like she doesn’t trust herself to introduce a love interest that we’ll like, so she has to have the comparison between “see this guy, he’s trash oh but look how much better this one is” 🤦🏻♀️
I did devour this series initially but in retrospect I had so many problems with it! What i don’t like is that SJM is a manipulative writer, she doesn’t let the reader decide if they like a character or not, she tells you who to like and not to like but this never works out for me.
Doesn't the new dude end up molding into the exact same person that the last guy was? Its like complaining about how your sandwich was made, you throw it out and make the EXACT SAME SANDWICH 💀
@@arkkon2740 lol yes, so true. But the fandom will make all the excuses in the world for Rhys, because he’s a feminist didn’t you know🤦🏻♀️🙄
@@campwriter9289 A total feminist who just casually literally owns Feyre 🤦♀🙄
I enjoyed ACOTOR (in spite of its flaws), but I HATED ACOMAF. I DNF’d the second they introduced Reysand’s insufferable, grim dark, fan fic OC found family. 😭 Not to mention the way she wrote Tamlin’s heel-turn-retcon is baffling, and Reysand’s face-turn-retcon made me feel gaslit.
Oh man you missed out on a good plot
@@liaq9615what plot?!
@@TLCGreen I really enjoyed it!
@@liaq9615 that’s Fair. I didn’t. I begrudgingly finished this book bc a friend really wanted me to…and then she immediately regretted it. I pointed every weird thing, every plot hole, and she begged me not to read another one b4 I ruined it for her.
If I hadn’t felt like the author was trying to gaslight me into liking Rhysand…I might not have picked at it so hard.
@@TLCGreen I think it was easier for me to like it because I was already put off my Tamlin a bit at the end of Acotar. I know he was silenced from the curse but I didn’t like that he was using Feyre to end the curse. It seemed manipulative with a side of oops I fell in love too. Rhysand I could tell had other intentions underneath and was excited to see the real person I knew he was masking. I also personally felt that he was a much better match for Feyre than Tamlin.
I’m curious though, do you recall the plot holes you noticed?
I read this book and I wish I hadn't.
When friends ask me to describe it I have two answers:
#1: "The Beauty becomes the beast, ready your torch and pitchfork."
#2: "It's like if Belle wasted a whole movie freeing the beast from his curse just to realize later that she actually wanted Gaston after all."
Never again SJM. I gave the next books a chance but you lost me when Feyre has sex with Rhysand's ghost. (At least that's how I saw it, ew.)
Wow...👏👏👏👏👏👏👏extremely well said
The tithe thing being such an issue is insane to me because Velaris also has to have some kind of taxation system to maintain. Where is the IC getting this bottomless money. And also, in the very same book, Rhys is lording over and disrespecting his subjects and it's hot. Feyre has no real values or convictions, stg.
It's so immersion-breaking that Rhysand is somehow immensely wealthy with a ton of houses and Feyre could buy a bathtub of diamonds and not "make a dent in his accounts" and Velaris is this utopian city of perfect architecture and infrastructure and a flourishing artisan culture... yet it's been isolated for 5000 years (so nobody is really doing the fae equivalent of "spending the summer in France" or "studying overseas and bringing back foreign inventions") and the Night Court has such a horrifically bad reputation that no other courts are really willing to do wide-scale cultural exchanges or trade with them, AND the majority of NC land is like, dark cold mountains without much good weather or sunshine. Who is doing the farming to provide food, harvesting the stone and wood for housing, mining the needed resources? AND how much of it is being sent to support the utopian city-state where the vast majority of the Court is banned from entering (the shopkeepers are literally instructed to refuse service to the CoN members by Rhys on the off chance they DO make good on the bargain and want to visit) vs the population at large that exists as a military population in the mountains and is not given the same luxuries and easy living as Velaris? What is the fucking economy like in Fairytopia?!
The batboys being feminists would have made more sense if Mor and Amren would have kicked it into them over a few decades😂
Oh yeah the Weaver scene with the song she sings (which is nicely written & appropriately creepy), is probably the best writting she's done, even if the ending of it kind of undersells how powerful the Weaver is I think.
Sad to say SJM didn’t actually write the Weaver’s song herself. It’s pretty much a rehashed version of an old ballad called The Twa Sisters.
@@nel1214 Yeah I figured that might have not been hers to begin with.
The original Ballad of Tam Lin is also much better and more touching material than ACOTAR is despite the over-blown length. (Tam is a Scots hypochorism for Thomas. She named her fairy Tom.)
Had to pause to say: Yes, Anita Blake is the series where the author based the love interest on her husband, then got divorced, and gave the husband character a personality transplant. But it's better than that because she remarried to a new guy, who was, I believe, the president of her fan club, and based a new love interest on him.
I am Turkish and at this point the Greek-Turk thing is largely outdated meme. We are both the weak soyjak citizens trying to crawl out of our governments' boots. Maria's camera is the EU, thank u for ur time
Being a struggling writer myself it’s hard seeing books like these get published and have a huge fan base. And now Hulu is making a series on it…..
Same here. However, SJM is being roasted all over the internet; so many ppl think her writing is awful. My ex bought me book #1, and I couldn't make it through the first chapter. I listen to these roasts bcuz they're good advice on how NOT 2 write a book! 😉
@@lindawebb5379 exactly!
I literally decided to bite the bullet and commit to writing my book because I read this and went, "if this can have a cult-like fan base and be a best seller... I can fcking make it" 😂😂
@@applejackisbestpony lol same about my book!
The amount of fury I felt for this book is finally being realized. Thank you lol
Same!! I just finished the book and I am seething!
OMG finally I meet people who feel the same way I feel about this series. Honestly, I really don’t get the hype. I tried several times and could not get pass a ACOMAF!! I ended up skimming through it. I tried her Crescent city series and nope I could not get pass the first 10 pages of book 1. I am not even going to bother with the throne of glass series cuz I know it’s going to be the same thing. The part where she described the flushed toilet was ridiculous!!! For a couple minutes I was like what? Are we still in medieval or modern times??? Yea and I think she also described one of the house in Rysand’s hidden city as town house( that was just too modern a description) just to tell you guys how less invested I was I can’t even remember the name of the hidden city.Honestly, when I started the series it looked like it had potential. I thought book 2 will be phenomenal bc of how hyped it was and oh boy was I disappointed 😔 is an understatement!!!
My faaaaaaves ❤️
What bothers me most about this book is that Rhys spend 500+ years “ pretending “ to be a villain and is almost surprised when people don’t trust him and his court especially after stealing from summer…. Also why doesn’t the king have a name 😭
“You silly women” - Will 😂😂😂😂 I almost did a spit take
the maasening ! i hope you guys get views yall are amazing 😭 im so happy yall talking about how she backtracked everything from the first book also i hate how sjm believes that working out cures your depression
Tamlyn was done dirty, and I’ve never read the books. I don’t want to, but I’m team Tamlyn.
Yes, he deserves better and I wish the author hadn't made it out so that we had to hate him. Like they said, there were so many other ways to go about Feyra and Tamlin's relationship ending that painting him as an awful and horrible person, especially since he seemed nice and chill in the first book(i think, i haven't read it so)
I only read acotar then consumed the rest through cari can read(bless her heart for her perseverance through those books😔 ) and ive also been team tamlin from the start and by team tamlin i mean he deserves so much better along with lucien
You guys nailed this book and series I also loved all the action scenes, the quest scenes, and the few scenes where they are discussing the plot or the actual war. The worst parts are all the smut, trauma, character dialogue, and the mate bond.
and seeing how the latter makes up most of the book it must have been an awesomely infuriating read for you😭
I stopped reading this book just under the halfway mark. I really didn't like the way she ended Tamlin's relationship with the protagonist (I forgot how to spell her name 🙃), the reasons where quite ridiculous to me tbh, and she could've done it better. Additionally I was so annoyed with the nightcourt & Rhysand, she really overcompensated with trying to redeem his character when a lot of the things he did to her in the first book (borderline sexual assault) are just unforgivable.
If Miss Sarah J could give us 700 pages of anachronistic bullshit (#cookiesandtownhouses) why couldn't she do us a solid for once and just give Tamlin a fucking therapist 😂😂😂
as a fellow Armenian, i feel the Turkish camera blurring my face in every zoom call
SJM has no business to write trauma. She writes the most horrible events that can happen to someone so then she can twist it into her romantic plot. I HATED how she handled male grape trauma! But then she never handles any other trauma correctly. It's like she saw something in a movie and she's repeating that in her books
I need to read the last book but I know what happens because I love to spoil myself but Tamlin is a wasted character and used to give Freysand a bad guy. I would love to see Maas give Tamlin a true redemption arch other than what he was given and pushed to the side to be forgotten. The later books also ruin Rhysand as well. Because omg ...A Court of SIlver Flames. Even before, some things Rhys does and is forgiven. Rhysand is the author's favorite character and treated special. Or so how it feels.
This is the last of her books I read, and I have no desire to read anymore. One part I did really enjoy was the Bone Carver. He was creepy fun.
As someone who pushed through multiple Throne of Glass books, the thing that infuriated me the most was how Maas cannot write characters growing or changing or just not being right for each other. Whatever the current relationships she wants to write are the ones that always were, no matter what she said before. In the third book she does a surprisingly good job writing a platonic friendship that was lovely to see, and like, I knew he was gonna become the new love interest, because it's a Maas book, but she can't just have that relationship change over time, no she's gotta retcon that beautiful thing she wrote and I'm still fuming.
i agree with you. i'd like to add quality wise, ToG (atleast i strongly believe) is superior to ACOTAR and considering it came out before ACOTAR I can excuse characters haveing same traits to the ones in ACOTAR because they came first. However, ACOTAR feels like a copy past of ToG with the same themes, the same dark powers, the same descriptions of characters that are just always so devestatingly beautiful who have all gone through the same trauma, it gets so infuriatingly repetitive for sure 😭
the queens together all hail
If you didn’t read the graphic audio version, you totally missed out on the winnowing sound effect. Sounds like a space lazer/teleporter from a 70’s or 80’s movie and it’s fantastic.
Or when he said "high lady of the night court." And there was like thunder rumbling 😂
Can we please make a short of Maria's synopsis? Lol "I'm in lurv" dead
This is one series I'm never going to read, but somehow I enjoy watching/hearing all its reviews. It's just entertaining to see well-read people lose their shit over how absolutely boring it is 😂 I'm pretty sure the only reason Katie liked it was because she listened to it and didn't have to read it. Anyway, this was a great review, as always!
Hearing you outline a non-sexual romance where the guy isn't willing to be touched because trauma - you need to read Six of Crows
LOVE that book and the sequel.
That part about Rhysand having a private cabin in the woods made my brain instantly go to Ted Kaczynski
Mail bombs to Hybern when
Not Feyre having to endure another trial to EARN her wedding ring
Sjm is %100 a pantser who dosen’t do major edits after the first draft.
You know there's another sequel coming out: 'A Court Between A Rock And A Hard Place'.
If you guys think Az and Cass talk like frat boys, just read Crescent City 😂 MUCH WORSE. Oh and you’ll love the feminism there too and the plus size but not plus size Bryce
I don't know which author started this weirdly specific trend of heroines in historical fantasy settings who inexplicably intuit their way to contemporary feminism, but I'm here for it. It makes me giddy every time
That is actually a really good question. I wonder if YA books promoting contemporary feminism happened as a response to the backlash Twilight got, but I wonder which book was truly influential here. Was it Shadow and Bone? Was it Throne of Glass? 2013-2014 is the moment where I felt a definitive shift away from the Twilight wannabes and the Hunger Games wannabes.
If you do a rewrite video, I'll be watching it until I make sure that your version is the only one that I know.
I feel like a big part of the change between book 1 and book 2 is that Maas really wanted to write a feminist book ? It leads to some inconsistancies and soft-retcon of the universe...like one of the characters Feyre interacts with in the first book is a female warrior, and I don't remember that character being treated as an oddity or a minority in the first book - but in the second it's literally said that the mortal world is relatively conservative regarding women's place in society, and that women like that warrior are exceptions - in which case I have a hard time accepting it when this human world is established as having specifically Queens to rule them, and also birth control is pretty easily available (they also have no gods, for some reason). I honestly feel like she was going for a more equal world in the first book, almost without our gender politics (a bit like in Throne of Glass I think), but changed her course to fit the themes she wanted to put in her sequel. The fae world being pretty patriarchal too doesn't jive super well with either Amarantha being a general for her country, or the existence of the (very under utilized) High Priestresses who are supposed to be pretty powerful and influent, almost like a counter-power to the male high lords. And also they're sex-positive ? Or sometimes they're not ? This is all weird.
I honestly would have wanted to see a mortal world which is progressive, built by former slaves seeking freedom and equality, while the fae court would be more conservative, still stuck with caste systems and segregation and pretty misogynistic laws & standards. Feyre truly would have something proper to her culture & her upbribging to bring to the Fae world.
It is totally Beauty and the Beast with Twilight undertones and Narnia highlights with fairies and fae. I have been bored the entire series yet I can't stop.
A thing that bothered me alot was how feyre complained about not being a high lady in tamlin's court and prides herself as high lady in the night court, when it's explained that there is a reason high lords get chosen because the magic ties them to their land and picks them because they're physically and magically stronger than their siblings and because all children of the high lords get educated and trained from birth on magic, politics, fighting in battle and running their courts and that's why all high lords perform the calanmai ritual every year. Now is feyre going to perform those rituals or run the court or has the magic picked her? the answer is NO. It's just an empty title that rhys gives her that grants her the privileges of a high lord without fulfilling any duty and responsibility that comes with it and how she also didn't earn it. Also i'm quite upset with tamlin's character assassination and lucien suddenly acting like his bitch when that was never the case in the first book. And i hate the inner circle as they're not interesting characters, are ultimately useless to the story and boring. I actually liked rhysand in the first book because as will said he had an edge and was an alone dickish anti hero, he had the being amarantha's whore title that gave him a traumatic background and i thought thay were goig to explore it , i was interested in what his character would do and how he maybe somewhat redeemed. Instead they made tamlin look bad to make him look good, and if maas wanted to give rhys friends, azriel and cassian were enough or just cassian in my opinion because the rest are useless especially mor. Also feyre was nothing more than a whiny bitch acting like a child throwing temper tantrums to tamlin and lucien when they were just trying to do what's best for. So yeah sorry for the rant but i was frustrated with how underwhelming, cringe and boring this book was.
My new fave thing to say now is “no no. You silly women you dont understand how feminism works.” [and then proceeds to not describe a very feminist plotline tehee]
Why do people think Rhysand is a feminist when he’s roofied his 🇦🇺”Mate”🇬🇧 multiple times.
Justice for Tamlin
SJM fight/action scenes are soooooo good, and it makes me so frustrated that she isn't know for that rather than her terrible romances and banter😅
the way i just rewatched the ACOTAR video today...so real of me
i don't want to spoil anything but based on this video i think you guys will really like six of crows and i really recommend it
kinda feels like Maas wrote scenes that she was super proud of, then had to figure out the order they would be in and tried to string them together somehow. It's very disjoined in reading.
Also it's should have been, love is needed to break the bullsh*t curse, Tamlin + Lucien
YES to all of this. THANK YOU.
I'm the only person in my friend group who finds flaws in these books and feels like Tamlin got done dirty. You guys are providing therapy for me. 🤣 I'm not crazy
The thing is Tamlin was a great character actually; we saw him in the first book when everybody tells us he's not even the shadow of what he was, but he is still a good leader and a good friend for everyone. Finally in the second book we see him full power, but NO! WAIT! He's now more traumatized than before! But who cares because he can't read minds (also 3 months is a stupidly short time space for literal inmortal beings). I feel that we never got to see the real happy Tamlin except for the calanmai scene where he plays and dances (such a cute scene in my opinion, and everyone says it's cringe because it's not Rhysand).
Also the summer court part... oof man... poor Tarquin
At long last! I have been waiting since your review of ACOTAR. Thank you for doing god’s work. I suffered through this on the promise of a “good” book. Highly disappointed and I am pretty sure it took years of my life. I am relieved to see that I was not the only person who felt gaslit by the entire story. ACOWAR is MUCH worse. Maybe a special episode one day lol.
LOVEEEE hearing y'all read SJM the way I refuse to read her books lol
Thank you for mentioning the flushing toilets I was so confused reading that😭😂
"Trauma under the mountain" sounds like a euphemism and I hate it.
The blood rubies turning into basically nothing pisses me ooooff
fr, i thought that could've been cool but nah guess sarah janet just wanted to give the inner circle more riches 😂
I liked Rysand in the first book but in the second book he felt flat. I loved all your theories of how she could have handled Tamlin. I did not click with found family the first time they were introduced. Everything was basically blah blah. There are better ways to write feminist stories. I agree that she does have good battles and some creepy far. Oh and not to mention all the hype of the sex scenes in ACOMAF. The smut was flat as hell and not hot at all!!!
Ahhh it was the Anita Blake books! Richard the werewolf biology teacher was modeled after her husband. They split up in real life and she proceeded to character assassinate Richard 😂
Velaris is where the happy Goths live. The Court of Nightmares under the Mountain is where the angry Goths live. I say this as an OG Goth Girl. They take Rhys from shady James Spader level bad-boy to neutered, feminist, simp-boy who constantly mopes around with his emo hair in his eyes and hands in his pockets like the misunderstood, high school poet. Even though he’s like 500 years old and should stop acting like a teenager by now!! I hated this book and series so much, but I do love to hear rants about how they suck!
The cauldron part reminds me of this book called The Black cauldron
I do have to add though, how you all say rhysand should act after SA…it’s truly not the way you all described every time. A lot of survivors have hyper sexuality from the trauma.
It was the Anita Blake books.
Assidentaly stopped video at 28:44 and it was the best decision of my life 😂
So excited part of the massening pt 2!
I’m pretty sure the idea is you shoot for the moon because if you miss you keep going past to the stars beyond 😅
Ianthe wanted to embarress Feyra in that wedding dress lmao xD Props to that woman.
I just thought Feyre was so so so immature, and didn’t communicate well enough with Tamlin.
Thanks for being critical of this. I like rhysand in spite of everything but all the gushing reviews get boring.
One of many issues is hybern was disappointing as a villain...i actually liked amarantha more
God, this review was amazing 😂 I had to stop it and just bellylaugh like 10 times.
I have just started the video and I'm a excited for it
The only way to make everything that doesn’t make sense in this series make sense is for the evil Rhys theory to be true… then I would owe Sarah a huge apology 😂
I was so upset about the Toilet as well. I am still mad about it.
This review was profound. I now understand why I disliked this book so much.
How did you guys merge Katie and Maria’s screens?
Textual Tension Intensifies @1:16
Wait... A roast AND it's all three of you?! Christmas comes early this year...
Never read this, but I'm here for the chaos and✨ feminism.✨
I don’t like like Tamlin and I don’t like Rhysand either they are both toxic and bad ‼️💯💖
You gotta tell me who drew the new logo for your UA-cam channel!!! It's so cool! What an awesome job they did. Though raw ruggedness is always going to be top tier.
It’s AI art! I don’t know any artists so that’s the best I can do, so many people and no one drew it
Ai art is unethical and stolen actually
Oh damn, the book he is referencing is the series about Anita Blake, where a character gets a complete character assassination bc the author split from her ex and got a new hubby. Oh, damn, I would love to hear your opinions on Hamilton and her books. 😂
I couldnt split up my characters over what is in my life....
Because they arent self inserts omgsh
@alpha1solace I really liked the series because the main character was fun, she was working on her religious beliefs and how she saw intimacy and relationships, correlating with the romantic relationships she is in, the presence of the love interests, whatever. Then it's a BORING sex fest with constantly ever increasing bigger and bigger pile of sexual partners but it feels... hollow. *Lol,.look how liberated and sexually open we are. Anita has not had a conversation which is not about fucking, being fucked or planning to fuck for 5 boons now! Monsters? Yeah, she kills monsters still but let's go back to the gigantic orgy that goes for 97% of the book now". 😂
The wing thing makes me think of the Ferengi ear thing
Oomox!
--Will
Yes, it was Anita Blake lol. Richard was based on LKH's husband
Gotta love that casual hibernophobia. Gosh i just love it when author include some anti irish bullshit in their books
Any chance for you guys reviewing Abbie Emmons?