I feel so frustrated right now.
Regardless of ships, I feel us (the fans) have been treated like pawns the whole time. We’ve waited 5+ years for literally any type of small information, and instead of SJM being clear and upfront about the story ahead, she stayed in the shadows (no pun intended), letting us tear each other apart because it would benefit her sales. She let the antis fill all of the acotar spaces and thrive in them, there’s no acotar safe space anymore because of this. To make matters worse, we didn’t even get a good release plan for the awaited books; the covers were leaked, the titles were leaked. She deleted all of her instagram feed and only posted the two covers with a single sentence as a description. We had to get the blurbs from outside sources (Target, barnes&nobles, etc.) and this whole ordeal made us feel stupid and betrayed.
We deserved a long promo if these truly are her last acotar books (the series that made her a millionaire btw): videos, interactions, interviews, illustrations… But we’re basically being treated like we’re just another task to check off her list.
As of right now, we still know nothing, she’s tailoring everything to target all the sides of the fandom: Nesta stans/gwynriels?, they get the Valkyries in the title. IC stans/elriels? They get the blurb. Everything ambiguous enough to contempt us and keep us fighting, like she’s being doing for 5 years.
You can say this is very silly, that this is just a book series and it’s not that deep, but it is. For many of us, this series has been a place of comfort for years. ACOMAF made me go back into reading right when I most needed it, and Feyre and Elain have been my two favorite female characters who I looked up to back when I was a teenager.
So being treated like this… It’s heartbreaking, I don’t feel like SJM thinks about her readers at all. After everything, it seems to me that she just cares about money, and it’s disappointing.