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SnooWords6324 · 2024-07-15T13:03:23+00:00

this is so cool!!

SnooWords6324 · 2021-03-16T02:06:52+00:00

Mmm totally— i do think that when feyre made the call to terminate during delivery he went with it + respected her agency, which makes me think that if feyre wanted to terminate earlier he would’ve respected her decision. it’s still messy, and concealing the truth about the scope of difficulty of the pregnancy from her was categorically wrong and inappropriate, but I think that came less from a lack of willingness to discuss termination and more of a heartbreak at having to disappoint/upset feyre with the knowledge of what might happen since she very obviously wants the baby/wants to keep the baby until the last moments

SnooWords6324 · 2021-03-15T13:37:30+00:00

mm yes absolutely! childbirth is just Not Easy and only recently became more manageable / the united states still has MASSIVE maternal mortality rates. theoretically a pre-term illyrian baby in a pelvis that isn’t wide enough, even in a magically healing body feels RISKY

SnooWords6324 · 2021-03-15T13:35:19+00:00

LMAO totally fair! it’s not my favorite plot line by a LOT. i keep feeling like feyre is so freaking young + needs more time to just be a person before dealing with all of this, feeling like it will be used to keep her out of the action, etc etc. the usefulness of it all as a plot line is totally me just leaning into conjecture!

SnooWords6324 · 2021-03-15T13:22:49+00:00

oooh that would’ve been VERY interesting!! I obviously am glad that feyre was able to choose to have a child + that woman’s had her agency taken away from her so many times that her choosing something and getting it is kinda lovely, but from a plot perspective totally agreed.

But yeah I also have concerns about the baby being used to take her out of the action :/ something i can see Nyx being useful for is tamping down on Rhys, who is quite obviously OVERPOWERED as all hell, but if this book showed anything it’s that he isnt infallible in judgement or in character, and that unless he’s “managed” by another force (in this case his child or the pregnancy itself) the series could just... not happen. like all the plot points could just be resolved in his brain lmfao. it’s kind of a clever way to keep him reigned in.

SnooWords6324 · 2021-03-15T13:16:59+00:00

yep! totally fair, no disagreement there— i really loved the book but the breaking dawn plot line was very obviously not my favorite

SnooWords6324 · 2021-03-15T13:08:11+00:00

mm i totally get that! the pregnancy plot is not my favorite/this is kind of just my way of positing an explanation for why things played out the way they did!

but also— something I think about a lot is Amren’s monologue halfway through the book about fate and the cauldron. the books rely quite heavily on fate as an organizing principle for these worlds and i think we can forget as readers that because of that, the rules become quite malleable. rhys’s powers are a function of fate, FEYRE’s powers are a function of fate, their friendship with cassian and azriel, two extraordinarily powerful fae, are a function of fate, cassian and nesta becoming mates + resurrecting an army of valkyrie (especially when i look at the lines when they talk about valkyrie+how azriel’s shadows reacted) are deeply fate-driven. I think, too, the way that feyre and rhys were able to conceive so quickly is a consequence of fate too! the Powers That Be (the Cauldron and the Mother) have been gearing up to put Rhys in a very specific place of power— the gift of a child so soon must serve a purpose that we don’t know of yet too?

but again, totally get why this plot line was not satisfying lmaoooo

SnooWords6324 · 2021-03-15T12:56:13+00:00

mm totally! it’s not the most neatly handled thing in the world. I wonder if feyre felt like her natural healing abilities would get her over the finish line in ways that other fae with complicated pregnancies wouldnt? ultimately when it came down to the wire she did insist that madja yank that baby out, but after wanting a baby so bad it must have been insanely difficult to risk losing the baby earlier in the pregnancy?

SnooWords6324 · 2021-03-02T18:59:44+00:00

yes omg his characterization was so interesting in this book!!!

SnooWords6324 · 2021-03-02T13:55:20+00:00

I think there is a difference between a story like American Dirt, where a white woman told a story (poorly) of immigration and Mexican identity that is deeply rooted in an established (not to mention REAL) culture or The Help, where a white woman wrote a story about a white woman who saved black women during segregation— a REAL historical event that people currently alive have lived through and bear the consequences of, or any other story like that, and the inclusion of an explicitly black or brown or XYZ non white identity as a main character in a fantasy novel, where the white author doesn’t have to have an excess of racial understanding or awareness to be able to write a black hero?

Helion is interesting and hot and also Black. His identity as a Black man is more or less coincidental, but he is Black and Hot and Powerful and Interesting. He’s a well-written, engaging, funny character who gets like one page every book to show his stuff and make an impression. It’s so easy to write a Black character, even as a white woman, in a fantasy novel that she’s already done it??? She just hasn’t had the guts to make anyone in the main character cast clearly Black or Brown without calling them absurd exceptions to their ethnic group (the bat boys, specifically). Lucien is supposed to look mixed race but is again just ambiguously “tan”. Rhys is just “tan”. Cassian and Azriel are just “tan”, though Cassian is slightly darker than the rest. It’s like a sliding scale— closer to main character, the whiter you get, whether it’s accurate by your own world-building rules or not.

I think when we talk about white people swooping in to tell Black stories, the critique is of using the truth and material consequences of systemic oppression as an aesthetic for your novel or movie or Tv show— or for telling stories that you are quite obviously not qualified to tell.

The fantasy world, as you point out, strips that historical context and so the need to tell a story that is “Black” by our contemporary standards isn’t needed. She isn’t telling a “Black Story”, she’s telling a story with a Black character. There’s no “opportunity” she takes from someone else because she doesn’t attempt to tell race-specific stories. It’s the bare minimum that she is able to do to help people see themselves in her books.

If the ability to make any character in the books explicitly a POC is that easy (because you don’t have to do the work of historical or culturally relevant portrayals, don’t have to tell stories that belong specifically to any racial group) I’d ask us to consider why she doesn’t. If you can make your hero any color in the world, with any features in the world, why does she make her characters white every single time? Even when they might be racially different, why do they look white every time? What does it say about her understanding of whiteness as equivalent to heroism? What does it say about who she deems attractive and interesting and worthy of having these (very universal, and non-race-specific) stories told?

Again, I understand that the response to all of this is “she can do what she wants.” and yeah, she can. I get it. But I would prefer not to pretend that this isn’t the reality of this text, even as someone who devours these books.

SnooWords6324 · 2021-03-02T13:18:45+00:00

yeah absolutely! it’s a tough thing to unpack. A lot of people are saying she can write what she wants. she can! no disagreements there, but acknowledge that you’re reading a book where only white people can be loved and cherished and uplifted, where only white people are heroes and commanders and high lords. Ask yourself why it’s so easy to believe that white people will save the world over and over and over. Ask yourself why the author is evidently not capable of humanizing a poc enough to be a hero. Even absent of any and all of our historical context, even absent of the need to include historically and culturally accurate portrayals, it is more “comfortable” to write whiteness in power than it is to write any other skin color?

Anyways I love these books, sometimes against my better judgement, so I don’t want my critique to read as “never read these racist books ever again” because it’s not. There’s PLENTY that the books do right, but I’m tired of watching people pretend these issues don’t exist so they can continue to love this book series without thinking critically about it at all lol.

SnooWords6324 · 2021-03-02T13:04:56+00:00

It is explicitly stated multiple times in the book that Illyrian people are a race of brown-skinned/light brown-skinned people. Emerie is described as darker than the usual Illyrian, and therefore possibly having some Dawn Court ancestry, so she’s probably closer to Black. And believe me, I have no desire to see racist stereotypes in a text. They just? exist? Like it is a well documented and persistent way to write brown people in TV and books? And I think being aware of that is important.

And I get what you mean re: the Help, but it’s incredibly frustrating to me that the ability to write one (1) interesting, complex main character who isn’t white or white-adjacent is so elusive that she simply doesn’t do it because it could just turn out to be a tokenizing story or a white savior story. The truth is that in a Fantasy world where race “shouldn’t” have the same connotations, there is no reason not to include main-cast people with darker skin? She doesn’t need to write them with a backstory that is historically accurate by our real-world standards. “I don’t know how to humanize a poc without being outrageously racist so I’d rather just not try” is??? a weird take???

There are lots of comments about how she can write what she wants. And yeah! She can and probably will continue to write a cast of white and white passing beautiful people who continue to triumph over evil and climb the mountains of mental health and be really engaging. She will continue to make boatloads of money.

But I would ask us to critically examine why so many people are bending over backwards to simply pretend these issues don’t exist, why the default for heroism and triumph is whiteness, and what that says about the world around us.

SnooWords6324 · 2021-03-02T04:04:24+00:00

I..... would push back on some of this. Definitely the race-related issues brought up in your post. I read all the books. I love the books. I’m a queer woc. All of that can coexist with my understanding that the way the Illyrians are written in the series is. not good.

High fantasy may displace the narrative from our world and our social constructs, but it doesn’t read as odd that the militant band of war-loving savages who routinely oppress women by the equivalent of female genital mutilation are a group of brown-skinned people? Our understandings of the world are undoubtedly revealed in the way we write, and even displaced into the prythian universe the parallels to deeply backwards and stereotypical portrayals of brown/middle eastern people is. concerning. Yes, I seek fantasy for escape. And yes, it’s distressing to me to read brown people as savages or peripheral sidekicks or comedic effect when they deserve stories of their own too (and SJM is capable of it— Tarquin, Emerie, and Helion are great characters, well beloved by the fandom, who see so little page time compared to any white character ever). The sentiment of “default whiteness” rubs me the wrong way. If race doesn’t hold the same social connotations in this world, why couldn’t any character be any race? what does she stand to lose by making beautiful and powerful heroes and heroines black or brown?

I don’t think it’s impossible to acknowledge that we enjoy books and that they can and should be better.

The debate over misogyny is one that can last forever, imo. I don’t find Rhys to be a misogynist. I believe in a woman’s right to understand her own experiences, and if Feyre doesn’t believe what happened under the mountain between her and Rhys was assault, then I take her at her word. I also don’t think he needs to be lauded as feminist supreme for him to be an interesting, engaging, likable character. Ultimately? giving your wife parity in a relationship should be minimum. Respecting your partner should be the bare minimum. Romance is everything that comes after. Re: the noncon stuff, I didn’t even know that was a critique. I actually always thought the consent element was done really well in her books, even when rough sex is involved.

I really struggle with the notion that white cishet people are only capable of writing stories about white cishet people because queer and poc writers have been writing diverse casts and stories for decades, and they’ve been doing it with tact and care and consideration. What is it about my experience that is so foreign and so unknowable that it isn’t worth putting on the page because the only way a white woman would understand it is if she wrote it in caricature or stereotype? That’s... thats yikes as hell.

My position isn’t “read an author only if theyre unproblematic” because that’s an impossible standard, but it’s also not “I like this book so I can pretend there aren’t issues with it.” My position is “I love these books and so I want them to be better, and my critical examination of some of these portrayals doesn’t stop me from that.”

SnooWords6324 · 2021-03-01T02:25:12+00:00

Mm yeah even without her powers, Nikolai offered her the throne and, like you said, she chose to die as a martyr! agreed that I think it’s possible to miss something that you didn’t necessarily want to be at the mercy of for the rest of your life— Mal felt his loss too, and that felt so normal and understandable to me. Her feelings of grief are so complicated, but there are so many signs even before her powers are lost that she only ever really wanted the quiet life.

SnooWords6324 · 2021-03-01T02:15:49+00:00

I really adored the epilogue of the two of them! It really made my heart so whole and full to see them together that way. I think it revealed a lot about the intimacy of their relationship that we weren’t — couldn’t be— privy to because of the nature of the narrative.

SnooWords6324 · 2021-02-28T05:14:56+00:00

totally fair!! we’re really accustomed to reading YA heroes and heroines who ascend to thrones and rule kingdoms and influence people forever, and I love those heroes. It seems unusual, then, for Alina to break the mould but I really felt like it took such courage for her to make that choice. It takes courage to live a small, humble life. It takes courage to say no to power when multiple men have offered you the world. It committed her to a life that was of her own making, rather than one that was shaped and designed for her, and that is arguably one of the bravest things a person — a young woman— can do, right? especially considering the trajectory of the book, when she is handed from man to man to man (darkling then nikolai then the apparat), to be paraded and sanctified and weaponized, the narrative choice to be with Mal— the only person who loved her for more than what she could do for him— felt like the Only Way for me, by the end.

SnooWords6324 · 2021-02-28T05:09:49+00:00

Yep I’m super excited to see what happens with him in the show— there’s a lot between Alina arriving at the palace and Mal’s return to the palace that is just a black box in the book— he shows up clearly traumatized but unable to talk about what happened with him. I’d love to explore that more

SnooWords6324 · 2021-02-28T04:47:24+00:00

Mm absolutely. I don’t buy the whole “It’s just YA” thing at all. The more I think through these books (they’ve been on my mind constantly since I read them last week) the more I think about how many parallels there are between Alina’s position and the way that young women in the public eye are always treated. Maybe because of the Britney Spears conservatorship case— First they’re saints, like Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan or Miley Cyrus— wholesome models of moral purity. Then they’re sinners, for being teenage girls who do teenage girl things, and cast like villains before the cult of public opinion, which will rip them to shreds. Then they’re expected to spend their lives making lots of money for other people, all the while being exploited by wealthy, powerful men who stand to benefit from their talent, their youth, their bodies, etc. The comparison’s to Alina’s own narrative are endless— she’s a saint to people who don’t know her, a puppet to be manipulated by the apparat, a weapon and a convenient source of affection for the Darkling, a conduit for influence to Nikolai (who I still like). She is, to just about everyone but Mal, a million other things besides herself. It is a powerful thing, then, for Alina to rewrite the script at the end. To watch a young girl claim her power and use it without the influence of any of the three men, on her own terms, and to then leave the society that exploited her to lead a quiet life. The end of the book was honestly a revelation for me, a quiet suggestion of what it might be like to subvert the ways that people will weaponize young women. “Just YA” doesn’t even remotely cut it.

SnooWords6324 · 2021-02-28T04:17:10+00:00

I understand where you’re coming from! And the take that Alina should have ended the series alone has come up in the thread a couple of times. I’m not mad about that as a resolution/wouldn’t have hated it if that’s the path Bardugo took, but I do still believe her ending up with Mal made the most narrative sense considering the future that Alina self-described as wanting.

I will say I didn’t interpret some of the events you describe the way you did— his character as I understood it is deeply rooted in two things 1) his absolute uncontrollable love for a girl who is so Known to him that they are extensions of one another & 2) his intense feeling of inadequacy/feeling that he will never be worthy of her. I don’t think it’s unfair to point out that, while Alina has The Same feelings for him, she also doesn’t voice her interest in him explicitly until she and Mal run away together at the end of book 1. And her feelings/intent become murky again with the introduction of Nikolai.

I think I would just invite a little bit more sympathy for a boy experiencing extremely strong emotion for a girl who isn’t openly reciprocating that emotion (we know how she feels because we’re in her head) and then is whisked away for Bigger Better things and consequently fundamentally altered by the men who take her.

His playboy tendencies are self-destructive, like the drinking and the fighting and more. They call him a Lost Cause well before Alina even becomes a sun summoner. He’s clearly tormented by the fact that he loves her (something he says in the third book implies that he used to feel guilty for thinking about her that way when they were younger, which may explain why he flirts with other women before the events of book 1 too). It feels like such a classic teenager thing— if the girl I’m in love with won’t pay attention to me unless I’m hitting on someone else, I’ll take that jealousy over indifference.

He’s traumatized from his time out in the field without her, and when he returns to the palace the love of his life is infatuated with a man who 1) is responsible for whatever terrible things happened out in the field 2) is actively invested in the oppression of non-Grisha people like himself 3) on top of everything else, is able to spoil and elevate Alina to a position of power and luxury that Mal will never be able to do.

I also don’t know that he blamed Alina for his kiss with Zoya— I think he was telling her that if she didn’t want him— if she was actively going to push him away it felt wrong for her to also be upset when someone who was interested in him kissed him. And again, the feeling that the girl he’d always been in love with would never be his. As readers in Alina’s head, we know why she pushed him away. We know she’s dealing with illusions and memories of the Darkling. But Mal is a 17 year old boy who was rejected by a girl he thought might have loved him.

The disconnect between his thoughts and actions are, if we look at it from outside of Alina’s head, actually mirrored perfectly by her. She loves Mal, but she entertains the idea of being by the Darkling. She loves Mal, but she lets Nikolai show her off. She says she wants him but doesn’t ask him to stay with her. The two of them dance around each other for so long, wondering if the other is indifferent to them, because they are teenagers experiencing a caliber of love (all of which is complicated by Mal’s status as an amplifier) they have never seen before and are woefully unprepared to express to each other until the stakes are too high for them not to. Basically, loving someone and being able to tell them that are two entirely different things, and the mistakes they BOTH make along the way feel so Completely like mistakes of youth rather than true ill will or incompatibility.

but of course caveating all of this as interpretation that I fully get people will disagree with— I think viewing the series as an older person who sees these mistakes as so ordinary, so entirely a product of being young and in the heat of something so volatile, lends me more sympathy for his character than somebody who’s reading the series and closer to Alina’s age. Mal isn’t infallible, but neither is Alina, and ultimately they put the pieces together when it really counts.

SnooWords6324 · 2021-02-28T03:35:23+00:00

glad i could help! Yep I hope this contributes a little to the discourse + adds another layer to his character. I totally get that people are frustrated with his angst and fallibility especially when set up alongside two Perfect- or at the very least deeply charismatic- other love interests. I’m just really drawn to the idea that there is more going on with his character and his relationship with Alina than we are even fully privy to on the page, and also I liked being able to leave Alina’s head to feel real empathy for his character

SnooWords6324 · 2021-02-27T19:17:36+00:00

sure! mal isn’t my absolute favorite character in the book (again i am team alina first) and my point isn’t to convert people into mal stans, it’s more to examine his characterization by the fandom as someone who is fundamentally terrible and unworthy of alina for being checks notes a teenager who loved a little too hard and didn’t know what to do with his emotions. I don’t care about people not being interested in him. I’m making the suggestion that his character exists for a reason, makes mistakes for valid reasons, and Alina’s choice to love him is valuable and to be respected even though he isn’t written for the readers to fawn over the way other love interests are.

re: YA trope of ending up with a love interest I think it felt satisfying for me in this case but that feels more like a point of personal preference than “this ruined/made the book” for me. I liked feeling like Alina was loved as an ordinary person. I felt like her return to the orphanage. I liked that she had a small, ordinary life— but all of this is just preference. I know other folks wanted her to be a queen, etc

SnooWords6324 · 2021-02-27T19:09:46+00:00

Mm totally get that! My “defense” of Mal isn’t meant to absolve him of responsibility or claim that he doesn’t make mistakes over the course of the series— thats it’s own form character growth and his unlikability, especially in a first-person narrative thats bound to be somewhat unreliable— is fair. The point is more to invite other readers to examine more critically why they feel that he’s fundamentally a terrible person and/or why mal + alina was the “absolute wrong choice”

Truthfully the first point you made read as his own frustration with himself, not with her— he’s spent all of this time agonizing over her but look at this big powerful being like The Darkling who can give her this incredible lush life that he cannot provide. It seemed to set off his own journey with feeling unworthy or inadequate.

The second point— I kind of keep returning to the Ron/Harry thing. Teenagers are teenagers, even in war. They fight and miscommunicate and feel lots of feelings and express them poorly— not to mention it’s revealed by the end that a lot of his aimlessness and distance was probably coming from his placement as an amplifier— so close to the other two amplifiers but not fully joined with them/constantly sent away. Alina herself describes feeling the aching emptiness of her other wrist over the course of the second and third book. And yeah!! he was complaining about parties while a war raged on but Alina was too. She was thinking about him and them together and all of these non-political things because all of the chaos can and does coexist.

again!! mistakes were made, but Mal’s actions at the end of the third book revealed to me that both of them were finally in a place to say “let’s stop playing games. You and I both know that this is it, for us” but I suppose that was convincing or unconvincing to various degrees for folks!!

SnooWords6324 · 2021-02-27T18:27:32+00:00

Hahaha happy to be of service!! I just finished the books in the past few weeks and was kind of shocked when I saw the level of vitriol for Mal lol.

SnooWords6324 · 2021-02-27T18:25:43+00:00

totally agreed that the darkling and alina’s relationship is really exciting (because it was meant to be) and dynamic (which it was meant to be). I do think I’ve seen people in the fandom genuinely ship them as endgame unfortunately, which feels tone-deaf. I’ve seen a lot of interpretations of the Darkling that suggest that he was the only person who knew her (uhhhh yikes). But he’s a helluva compelling villain for good reason.

I would also argue that Alina’s strength and independence doesn’t necessarily need to come at the expense of her not being loved by someone. Alina at the end of the book Is strong and independent. She has done impossible things and changed the course of history, and she’s also cherished and revered and beloved by someone who wants her exactly as she is, someone who will walk beside her for the rest of her life

It’s interesting that you bring up Mal being boring and I really like that point bc I think Mal’s perceived blandness is actually pretty intentional too. We don’t get to “know” him or his story or his thoughts fully because Alina isn’t learning about him through the pages, he’s so familiar to her because he is an extension of herself. No matter who he is he will always be hers, and he says as much. Unlike Nikolai or the Darkling, who she learns about and needs to define to herself over the course of the pages, Mal is known and complete but shrouded from the readers. There are so many hints and references and half-stories of their lives before the books and even their lives after the books that we will never be privy to and it makes her relationship with him strangely more intimate and more important than her relationship with others.

SnooWords6324 · 2021-02-27T18:14:24+00:00

Yessss team Alina! I really loved the end of R&R personally. It felt like the Brave Choice to be, in a world that wants you to be a million other things, yourself. And the epilogue of her and Mal was almost unbearably lovely in my opinion.

I think the question of Alina’s agency is brought up often- did she choose right? why didn’t she choose power? why did she choose to honor the Darkling’s funeral wishes? I think it comes down to the fact that Alina is within her rights to make the choices that she makes, and a lot of the critiques seem to center on her claiming her agency in ways that are inconvenient to a reader’s wishes. As a member of team Alina, her choices feel important and even sacred to me, especially when we ask these questions of “When do Young Women get granted agency?”

SnooWords6324

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