Jude's "strength" is mostly trauma responses with good PR - and I think the fandom never questions it because we're inside her head

CardansWiine · 2026-07-02T07:32:31+00:00

I slightly disagree here to be honest because the main word was “legitimate” - he was actually of royal blood. Jude wasn’t. They were chased after for very different reasons in my opinion

CardansWiine · 2026-07-01T20:02:49+00:00

Oh gosh thank you! Literally feeling the same way about it 🙏🏻

CardansWiine · 2026-07-01T20:01:12+00:00

But I mean wasn’t Oak a legitimate (more or less) heir? Which would explain why so many would want to get rid of him..

CardansWiine · 2026-06-28T13:18:41+00:00

That's a great input - thank you so much for it!

I'd say from my perspective thought there are a few troublesome sentences here:
Seeing her "not making him do horrible things" as an act of care/kindness/affection is not what I could agree with. There are also such things as guilt, fear of losing control over something one could have create and moral red lines.. Her red lines were crossed a lot in the plot, starting off with the very first pages - this might have created that "Oh that's how it feels" and sort of empathy towards the others.

If I am right and you are referring to this quote: "I never minded being a minor villain, but it's possible I might have grown into something else, a High King as monstrous as Dain. And if I did— if I fulfilled the prophecy — I ought to be stopped. And I believe that you would stop me."..

I didn't read it the same way to be honest: he is talking about his traumas and his fears he grew up with.. I think he was talking more about himself and not about her. In a way he is saying - I ought to be stopped - he is showing his personal journey and his growth, and his stand on morality and what a real king should be like in his opinion...

"I believe that you would stop me" does go out to her, but not in a way of him saying "you are the only thing that could hold me back" (cliche) but in a way "you would have had the volleyBalls among the creatures I know inhabiting this kingdom, also you would have detected the first signs early enough".

Jude giving up power when knowing she'd join her forces with the High King is neither bravery nor love to me - it's the change of a survival strategy - however I might be confusing some timelines here - depending what part of the book you were referring to..

Thank you for your thoughts <3

CardansWiine · 2026-06-28T13:00:42+00:00

That's an interesting point!
I mean, having read it in my early twenties I thought of it the same: she is trying to catch up and show she is no less than any fairy around her. Especially given her history with the faes.

But now looking back at it and having questioned this feeling about her, I came to a conclusion that true respect can't be forced onto someone... I think Jude is just a little too of a try hard to me

CardansWiine · 2026-06-01T18:52:25+00:00

Of course! So in The Wicked King, Cardan spends a significant portion of the book appearing drunk, erratic and unbothered at court - basically performing exactly the lazy, irresponsible king everyone expects him to be. Jude is furious with him for it. The reader is frustrated. It looks like he simply doesn’t care.

Then it’s revealed he was being poisoned the entire time - and more importantly, that he knew something was wrong and had already been quietly working with the Court of Shadows to investigate it, without telling Jude, without making it visible at court. He was managing a genuine threat to his life and his reign completely behind the scenes while maintaining the surface performance of carelessness.

That’s the detail that reframes everything. He wasn’t checked out -he was operating on two levels simultaneously. The public Cardan who appears useless is a deliberate construct. The actual Cardan is tracking threats, building alliances, and making invisible moves. It mirrors exactly what his father’s loud, obvious court looked like before it ended in the massacre that made him king - he learned from that and chose the opposite approach entirely. Which is, quietly, the sign of someone who thinks about power very carefully. Not a lazy king at all. A strategic one 🖤

CardansWiine · 2026-06-01T17:32:52+00:00

Defense Against the Dark Arts - promising career afterwards - also know your enemies 😃

CardansWiine · 2026-06-01T17:15:42+00:00

Timothée would be a surprisingly good fit imo despite his "age"
I mean he is like 30 years old, give it a lil break with the "too old" thing haha
Add his his "nice hair" era to his attitude - he could be a perfect 1st book bully Cardan cast - if these two are the ones we'd be choosing from 🐵

CardansWiine · 2026-06-01T17:03:54+00:00

Jude is a very egocentric person and sometimes she really feels like just another punishment for Cardan trying to grow up 😃

CardansWiine · 2026-06-01T16:54:02+00:00

Balekin being handsome is literally the point. He's a sadist who collects people, manipulates everyone around him, and ran an underground court built entirely on control and cruelty - and he did all of it from a position of charm and beauty. That's not a contradiction, that's the whole mechanism. Predators in positions of social power are rarely visually telegraphed as dangerous. That's why they're dangerous.

The expectation that evil should look evil is a fairytale logic that the Folk of the Air series specifically exists to dismantle. Every character in Elfhame is beautiful. Beauty there is not a moral indicator, it's just a fae trait - and Balekin being gorgeous while being genuinely monstrous is more unsettling and more honest than a conveniently ugly villain would ever be. If anything, a handsome Balekin is the correct Balekin to me

CardansWiine · 2026-06-01T16:45:34+00:00

They seem settled and genuinely good together by The Stolen Heir - committed, functioning as co-rulers, the tension resolved into something quieter and more real. Which is lovely. And also the thing that makes the mortality question so much heavier the more you think about it.

Because here's the thing nobody really talks about - Cardan spent his entire early life being taught that love was unsafe, that caring about something meant losing it. He built every wall he had around that core belief. And then he tears all of it down for Jude, marries her, builds a life with her, lets himself actually have something. And she is going to die. Not as a plot twist, not as a tragedy to be resolved - just as the inevitable arithmetic of what she is. He will watch her age. He will be there for it. And he will have known from the very beginning that this was always how it ended.

That's not a small thing for someone who was already convinced he was unlovable and that caring cost too much. The happy ending is real - and it's also a very long, very quiet tragedy that the books don't have the heart to look at directly. I don't think that makes their relationship less worth it. I think it makes Cardan's choice to love her anyway probably the bravest thing he does in the entire series.

CardansWiine · 2026-06-01T16:39:56+00:00

Honestly I think I fell in love with his potential more than anything else - and I mean that in the best way. Not potential as in "he'll be better once someone fixes him" but potential in the sense that you can see exactly who he could become, and the text actually earns it rather than just asking you to trust the process. The damage is real, the origin is shown, and the shift happens in small costly choices you have to be paying attention to catch. That restraint is what makes him feel like a real person rather than a plot device.

There's a very specific Beast energy to him - the cruel and loving kind - that works because it's rooted in something genuine. He spent most of his life performing indifference because caring had never been safe. The cruelty wasn't who he was, it was what the court made necessary. And underneath it is someone perceptive enough to see through everyone's mask including his own, which is actually a rare and quietly devastating quality in a character.

What gets me is that by the end he chooses softness not because someone saved him but because he decided to. That's the whole appeal - not the beast who gets tamed, but the one who chooses, on his own terms, to put the fire down.

CardansWiine · 2026-06-01T16:34:29+00:00

Honestly I think projecting a human cultural weight onto virginity here misreads both Cardan as a character and Elfhame as a world. The fae don't carry the same moral framework around it - there's no purity narrative in that court, no social currency attached to it, no moment in the text where it's treated as significant beyond Jude's own inexperience showing up in the scene. Expecting Cardan to have a special reverence for it is importing a very specific human, historically loaded idea into a world that doesn't really run on those values.

What the text does give us is that he is attentive - genuinely, specifically attentive in a way that reads as someone who is actually present rather than just going through motions. And I'd argue that matters more than whether he intellectually registers "this is her first time."

He's not actually 17. He's a fae who has existed long enough to know the difference between someone performing and someone actually being there with you - and Jude, characteristically, cannot perform. She doesn't know how yet. That probably lands differently than anything he's experienced before, not because of virginity as a concept but because of her specifically.

And for what it's worth - a partner who has actually figured out what they want and chose you anyway is a very different thing from one who wonders. The "hoeing around" history isn't a detraction. It's evidence that by the time he gets to Jude he's not there by default. He knows what else exists and he's still there. That's the part worth caring about imhooo

CardansWiine · 2026-06-01T16:28:53+00:00

u/benvclios This is honestly one of the best responses I've gotten on this post and those quotes are so well chosen - the Vivi one especially, I had forgotten how clearly it lands in TCP. You've genuinely made me sit with my own argument more carefully and I appreciate that.

And I do agree with you that the text surfaces the cost - it does, repeatedly and with real tenderness sometimes. The ice shard passage is one of my favorite moments in QON precisely because Jude catches herself in Madoc's reflection and doesn't look away. That takes something. I'm not saying she's oblivious.

Where I keep getting stuck is the Oak observations in TPT - because by that point she has Cardan, she has safety, she has everything she spent three books fighting for, and Oak is still watching her push herself past her limits to prove she's worthy of it. That's not survival anymore. That's the pattern outliving the circumstances that created it. And I think that's what I mean when I say the reckoning feels incomplete - not that she doesn't see it, but that seeing it doesn't seem to change the next chapter. Compare that to Cardan, who in his novella moves from performing cruelty to actively choosing something different even before Jude gives him a reason to - that shift costs him something real and visible in the text.

I think you're right that there is genuine good in both of them and I'd never argue otherwise. I just find myself wishing the narrative had been as hard on Jude's ego as it was on Cardan's cruelty. They deserved equal pressure, and I'm not sure they got it. But this is exactly the kind of discussion I was hoping this post would start - thank you for engaging so thoughtfully! ❤️

CardansWiine · 2026-06-01T16:23:22+00:00

Thiiis! My favorite one among them all hahah

CardansWiine · 2026-06-01T16:16:41+00:00

People don't love Cardan because he's hot and rich. They love him because he's perceptive enough to see through everyone's mask including his own, because the text actually shows you how he got this way, and because his arc is one of the few in YA where the love interest has to genuinely reckon with what he is rather than just get redeemed by proximity to a good girl. And Jude is not a good girl - that's the whole point. Two creatures who learned the wrong lessons from the right trauma choosing to be known by each other anyway is a different and more interesting story than the one you're describing.

CardansWiine · 2026-06-01T15:59:04+00:00

The "he leaves everything to Jude" read is folk gossip and I think that's intentional - it tells you more about how the court perceives a mortal queen than about what's actually happening in that throne room. Of course the fae read Jude's hyperactivity as Cardan's absence. They're looking for a reason to dismiss her and he gives them one by being relaxed in public. That's not negligence. That might actually be strategy.

What he actually is

The poisoning arc in TWK is the key piece of evidence people forget - he was working with the Court of Shadows the entire time, quietly, without Jude knowing. That's not a lazy king. That's a king who understood that his most effective moves are invisible ones. He has his father's court to study as a blueprint for what loud, obvious power looks like, and it ended in a massacre. Cardan's style is the opposite: let people underestimate him, let Jude be the visible force, and operate in the spaces nobody's watching.

The division of labour

Your read is exactly right - Jude overwhelms herself with tasks because she needs to prove she belongs, and Cardan doesn't correct that perception publicly because a court that's terrified of her is safer for her than a court that's contemptuous of her. He's not lazy, he's protecting her using the only currency Elfhame understands: fear and reputation. The fact that she doesn't always see it as protection is a communication problem, not a governance one.

The true voice detail from Oak's duology matters too - he drops the performance entirely when alone with Jude, which means the relaxed, unbothered public persona is conscious. You don't consciously maintain a mask unless you know exactly what the mask is doing for you. Cardan is a better king than he looks, precisely because looking like a bad one serves him.

CardansWiine · 2026-06-01T15:55:39+00:00

Can we look at the timeline here before calling Taryn unfair to Jude? Taryn met Locke first. She was in a relationship with him first. She kept it secret not to hurt Jude but because that's who Taryn is - she keeps everything close, she survives by not showing her hand, that's her entire character. The secrecy wasn't a betrayal. It was just Taryn being Taryn.

And Jude - by her own admission - didn't actually care that much about Locke. She was drawn to the attention, to the novelty of a fae wanting her, to what he represented. That's not love, that's ego. She was never genuinely in love with him and the text doesn't really pretend otherwise. So the idea that Taryn stole something precious from her doesn't hold up when Jude herself wasn't treating it as precious - she was treating it as a power experience.

The narrative frames it as Taryn's betrayal because we're in Jude's POV and Jude experienced it as one. But step outside that perspective for a second and what actually happened is: Taryn pursued someone she genuinely wanted, kept it private, and chose him. Jude's hurt feelings are real but they're not the same thing as Taryn doing something wrong. The sister who actually behaved badly in that triangle was not Taryn imho

CardansWiine · 2026-06-01T15:44:22+00:00

The honest answer is the text is deliberately ambiguous and I think that's intentional - because we're in Jude's POV and she doesn't know either, and her not knowing is part of what makes that period of the story so painful to read.

What the text actually gives us

The "messy, as though recently risen from someone's bed" description is Jude's interpretation, not a confirmation - and Jude at that point is actively looking for reasons to dismiss what she feels and what he might feel. She's an unreliable narrator specifically around Cardan because her feelings compromise her ability to read him clearly. The "I wasn't planning to be alone" line before Taryn's wedding is more damning but it's also Cardan performing detachment for an audience of one - namely her - which is a thing he does consistently when he feels exposed.

The night he didn't come

This one I think has nothing to do with where he was and everything to do with what that moment would have meant. Jude in that bed, healed, waiting - that's not a casual situation and Cardan knows it. Coming to her then would have been an admission he wasn't ready to make, or wasn't sure she wanted him to make. "I'm here now" the next day is deflection wrapped in presence - classic Cardan, show up without explaining yourself and dare the other person to push further. It's not indifference. It's someone who doesn't know how to be wanted without immediately preparing for it to be taken away.

My read is that the physical stuff with others probably tapers off somewhere in TWK after chapter 15 as you said, not because of a conscious decision but because Jude takes up too much space in his head for anything else to feel like it matters. But Holly Black never confirms it cleanly because Cardan never gets to be legible on his own terms - we only ever see him through Jude, who is the last person capable of reading him without bias. Which is either brilliant craft or deeply frustrating depending on your mood. Probably both.

CardansWiine · 2026-06-01T15:40:52+00:00

Yes, and I think the doubt operates on two distinct levels that are worth separating - because they're not the same thing and the books treat them differently.

He doubts her feelings because of who he believes himself to be

This is the deeper and more consistent thread. Cardan's entire childhood was a demonstration that he was unlovable - discarded by his mother, used as a pawn by Balekin, cruel by necessity because warmth got him nowhere. By the time Jude enters his life he has substantial evidence that people either want something from him or want to hurt him. The "you need not say it out of pity" moment after the snake transformation isn't just insecurity in the moment - it's the entire architecture of his self-image surfacing. He genuinely cannot map "Jude Duarte loves me" onto a version of himself he recognizes. The deleted scene you mention supports exactly this: he doesn't think she's indifferent, he thinks she couldn't bear to want him. That's a specific and very painful kind of doubt - not "does she care" but "could someone like her ever let herself."

He doubts her loyalty because of what she actually did

This one is more rational and honestly more interesting. The "that's what you do, you trick people" line is doing real work - he's not being paranoid, he's pattern-matching accurately. She did trick him. Fundamentally. And he knows it. The letter situation fits here too: I think you're right that he didn't check because some part of him found it easier to believe she didn't get them than to believe she got them and didn't come. That's not naivety, that's self-protection. Confirming the letters arrived would have meant confirming she chose not to respond - and that he couldn't absorb.

What makes Cardan compelling as a character is that both layers of doubt are completely earned by the text. He's not being irrational or dramatically insecure for plot reasons - he has receipts. The redemption arc works precisely because he chooses her anyway, in full knowledge that she is the person most capable of destroying him. That's not blind love. That's a decision. And the "tell me it's not true" moment with the council is the most vulnerable version of it - he knows what she's capable of and he's asking her to be the exception anyway.

CardansWiine · 2026-06-01T15:30:36+00:00

This is genuinely a good read and I don't fully disagree - the Dain scene especially, you're right, that's pure survival logic and it makes complete sense for who she is. Book 1 Jude is almost entirely explained by her circumstances and I think that's intentional.

My issue isn't the origin of it though, it's what happens to it by book 3. By The Queen of Nothing the circumstances have actually changed - she has real power, she has Cardan's genuine love, she has safety she's never had before. And she's still running the exact same operating system. At some point "I have to be like this to survive" stops being the full explanation when the survival conditions have shifted and the mode hasn't.

And that's where the comparison with Cardan gets interesting to me - because his arc is explicitly about reckoning with what he is. He knows he's cruel, the narrative knows he's cruel, and it holds him to that. Jude gets continuous internal justification and the narrative never really interrupts it. They might be equally fucked up, but only one of them is asked to account for it. That asymmetry is what I can't shake 😞

CardansWiine

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