Celrenia

The Eighth House is the house of justice, the house of conviction. The house of a woman who demanded complete bodily autonomy, and another woman who was willing to die to save humanity. But Mercymorn and Cristabel Oct had nothing worth fighting for, just the lies of a would-be God and his endless, pointless quest for revenge. And so the Eighth House, Keepers of the Tome, the Forgiving House, have become empty zealots, fanatics of an empire. Fanatics who use the bodies and souls of their cavaliers as batteries without consideration or consent.

I nod, setting down my chalk and spellbook. “It does sound like there might have been a bit of a misunderstanding.”

“She took against me, that's what happened,” the dead girl says with a scowl. She looks about fourteen, round faced and spotty, with whisps of brown hair peaking out from under her mob-cap. Her face and her crossed arms have a tell-tale bluish tinge to them. A cholera death.

“I been here for don't know how long and never gave any trouble. Nobody ever complained about me 'till her.”

…well, that's not strictly true.

Number 12, Barclay Street has been attracting rumours of haunting since the mid nineteenth century.

Sounds of faint singing and crying in the corridors at night. Cold spots. Doors that open and close by themselves. Animals acting strangely. Harmless, mid to low-level stuff, typical for a bored teenage poltergeist.

Still, pointing that out isn't likely to achieve much, and certainly the most recent complaints of blood running down the walls, screams in the dark and paralysing night terrors seem distinctly out of character.

The ghost toes the chalk again, more tentatively this time. It stays resolutely unbroken.

She could get out if she wanted to. I'm not one of those assholes who brings out their full arsenal of wards and sigils for a first meeting with a level 2 spectre. The summoning circle will keep her in one place for as long as I need her to talk, but it wouldn't hold for a moment if she really fought against it.

I take it as a good sign that she's still here. Pouting or not, she's clearly willing to work with me.

“None of the others could do this,” she says. “None of 'em even saw me.” She looks up. “Are you here to exise me?”

“Exorcise,” I say instinctively, and curse myself when she flinches. “Sorry, no, no! I don't exorcise people from their homes without good reason, not if they're happy where they are.”

“I was happy. Till she started calling in all them ghost hunters.”

Mrs Delaney had been quite persistent in her attempts to 'fix' her haunted house. Most of the people she found were charlatans, of course, but I'd still arranged an appointment as fast as I could once word reached me. It wouldn't have been long before she happened upon somebody with Talent, and unfortunately not everybody in this field knows how to behave like a professional.

“I think we might be able to help each other,” I say, careful to keep my voice calm and level.

“Don't see how. Not unless you can exorcise Her.”

“Not quite what I had in mind.” I pull out my phone and scroll through my photos. “You say that you're not the cause of the most recent incidents of paranormal activity?”

A pause. The ghost gnaws on her lip. I wait, patiently, keeping my body language open and nonthreatening. “I… I knocked her coffee cup over,” she admits at last. “She was being mean and talking on her telephone, saying I done all these things when I never did! So I decided to show her what I could do if I wanted.”

“Hmm.” The ghost eyes me nervously, as if expecting me to pull out a book, bell and candle and banish her on the spot.

“I only tipped it,” she adds. “I didn't break it or nothing!”

“You shouldn't have touched it at all,” I say sternly. “But… I can appreciate that you were frustrated, so let's say no more about it.”

The ghost looks relieved.

“My point is,” I continue, “if you weren't the one making blood rain from the ceiling or tormenting people in their sleep, then what was? There's no other ghosts on the property.” I find the picture I was looking for. “You can get anywhere around the house, right? Including behind the furniture and in the backs of cupboards?”

“Yes'm.”

I hold the phone up so that she can see the picture on the screen. “I'm going to let you go free in a moment, and I need you to see if you can find anything that looks like this.”

The ghost wrinkles her forehead. “What's that when it's at home?”

or a “crush who doesn’t think I’m a lame-o”! credits to @2manyfandoms2count for the translation

it's unfortunate... but hear me out

the salters always say that the lovesquare is toxic codependency, imma show you what real toxic codependency really is, on the part of emonette at least

'he's rude as fuck and disrespects her all the time, there's no way emonette would fall for him' while this is true and i would agree under normal circumstances, toxinelle came from a world where she didn't have anyone, no super awesome friends to inspire her everyday, no best friend in life and in death, no mum who is gentle and calm, nothing. she's lonely and has nothing to fall back on, but you know who she can fall back on? griffe noire

even if he does let her fall

he is the only constant she has in her life, at least ever since she got her miraculous. even if it means getting insulted left and right by him, she puts up with him

why? cause if she doesn't she'll truly lose the only thing she has 'going' in her life

and we can see that after she read marinette’s diary about the part where ladybug and chat noir are partners or rather teammates, she looks at griffe noire, as though she’s thinking of being teammates with him. it’s something she wants, and we know it’s something she truly wants by the end of the special

also in this universe, emodrien has a crush on emonette, so what's preventing toxinelle to have a crush on griffe noire?

toxinelle isn’t happy, we can tell when she poured her heart out to ladyfly about everything and then finally about her crush thinking she’s lame all the time, but there isn’t much she can do if she wants her constant to continue be by her side

loneliness really does some fucked up things to a person huh?

@blur0se’s tags, you’re so right about the insults

till the end, she’s still calling him fleabag, even though they are teammates and calling him that is just plain rude. it could be their own pet names which hey i’m all for, but it could also be her fear of rejection lingering for so long that it’s just second nature to her 🥲 i do wish to see it being used as a pet name for him more than anything though

i also forgot to mention this in the previous post but emonette hates emodrien’s guts. so why do we have things like this at the end, where she flirts up a storm and holds his hand?

@mari-monsta’s tag, i never thought of this but !!!!

if this is really the case then we have a full fledge sweet sweet toxic codependency >:D going on here

kinda like the school bully who does anything (often disruptive) to get attention; we all know how disruptive griffe noire has been throughout the special, never subtle but big explosive displays of power

he's literally a broken boi because no one at home gives him any attention, and we all know gabriel definitely doesn't, not in the universe we follow, nor in this either 💀

and so what does he do to get attention? literally does whatever toxinelle hates to get a reaction, and as much as the fandom want to believe that griffe noire doesn't "need" toxinelle, he does need her, where else is he gonna get the attention from?

but toxinelle wants him by her side always, so she puts up with his antics, as long as he's there, and he's not getting any reaction from her, so he increases the intensity of his insults/disruptive tendencies

toxigriffe's relationship isn't a healthy one, i mean come on they're villains, they don't exactly have the track record of having the most stable of relationship

A Mari/Griffe remix of Partners in Clown by @miabrown007

And with that, my participation in the @mlsquaredance 2023 event comes to an end! This is my final remix! Thank you again @ladyofthenoodle for organizing and for encouraging this little brain worm. Thank you @wield-the-mighty-pen for beta reading!

And without further ado, enjoy some angsty teens flirting badly.

*~*~*

Adrien leaned towards his reflection and tilted his head to get a better look at his neck and jawline, the way a young man might search for a sign of his beard growing in. Instead, jagged lines like lightning spread out of his chest and climbed up his throat. He had grown used to the sharp black lines and had taken to wearing turtlenecks to hide them, but the claw-like cracks that spread out onto his cheek were new. He thought it all looked rather cool. He certainly wasn’t scared of what it might mean, not in the least.

But Adrien was a liar, especially to himself.

one of the most heavily forested states in the country with 20 million acres of forests oh my god poison ivy would be so powerful the second she got outside city limits fuck

there’s 20 million acres of this and she’s got plant powers no wonder they want her on lockdown

there are more than 6,000 shipwrecks in the great lakes how many supervillain origin stories is that good for

there’s a whole class of freighter just for the great lakes

“63 commercial ports handled 173 million tons of cargo in 2006″ aka holy shit that is a lot of opportunities for boatcrimes

mr freeze has a pretty tragic origin story but if you had to put up with michigan winters and then some motherfucker showed up freezing the town outside of freezing season you would have no mercy

MOTHERFUCKER I JUST PUT MY SNOWBLOWER IN STORAGE DO I LOOK LIKE I NEED THIS SHIT RIGHT NOW

imagine batman giving someone directions by pointing to his hand

“we believe killer croc is somewhere around here” he says pointing to the tip of his thumb

good fucking luck finding stats on abandoned buildings in michigan but holy shit are there a lot of them, no wonder they’re always having fights in abandoned factories and empty warehouses

“kitty why are you including that map of the railroads like it’s relevant” because when you’re trying to sleep and you hear a train in the distance it’s fucking spooky okay

i have no evidence that traincrime is an issue for batman i’m just saying the ambiance is there

michigan has plenty of abandoned theme parks for the joker to hijack

our most famous abandoned theme park is dinosaur themed so I GUESS WE KNOW WHERE HE GOT THE T-REX

we have a special kind of ice cream called superman ice cream and i think bruce would be really bitter about it and that’s hilarious

there are nine different species of bat in michigan and they have all lived in my kitchen at some point

michigan is full of mines both abandoned and active and bats love them

put an abandoned train station next to and abandoned mine and you have a totally plausible CRIMEZONE

and none of this is getting into the most compelling evidence

put a city in michigan and watch how fast no one gives a fuck

gotham, MI needs batman because who the fuck else is going to help

here are some more michigan batman facts:

we already have evil clowns

when i was a kid i used to slide down the slopes made by snowplows on my stomach which i feel is relevant to the penguin

there’s always a ton of cars from the 30s driving around gotham which makes perfect sense if it’s in michigan because that’s when we made cars and we’re not over it

rick snyder and his emergency managers are basically supervillains and i want batman to punch them

michigan is closer to kansas which means bruce can visit clark’s parents and then they’re emailing clark about what a nice young man he is and there’s nothing clark can do about it

batman vs superman: the deep dish debate

“who would name a city bludhaven” well we’ve already got bad axe and colon and gaylord and climax and grim and hell and frankenlust and gore and that’s just the first half of the alphabet

if someone said that a city in michigan had been hijacked by an evil clown that was only stopped when a man in an animal costume kicked him in the face would you even blink

this is meadow brook hall in rochester mi

this is the charles t fisher house

here’s the james scott residence

So we know that Ladybug and the Cat Miraculous’s are supposed to be a yin-yang pair, representing creation and destruction. But if they're meant to balance each other, why does the dynamic feel so uneven? Why does the Ladybug Miraculous seem to have much more magical significance than the Cat Miraculous? It’s because it was never meant to be that way.

My theory is that, at some point in the distant past—possibly during Master Fu's time, but more likely much earlier—the Ladybug Miraculous gradually took over responsibilities that originally belonged to the Cat Miraculous.

Okay, but why did this happen? I think the answer lies in changing perceptions across time. The Cat Miraculous embodies destruction - seen only as purely crude annihilation -, but destruction is not merely about annihilation—it is about change. For creation to persist, existing structures must sometimes be altered, dismantled, or removed to make way for something new.

In that sense, the Cat Miraculous is just as essential as the Ladybug Miraculous. After all, what causes akumatizations in the first place? People who are dissatisfied with their circumstances and desire change. The need for transformation is at the heart of many conflicts in the series, which suggests that destruction—as a force of change—may be far more important than it is often given credit for by the writers.

The Ladybug Miraculous derives its power from the concept of creation. Its abilities allow the user to create objects almost instantaneously, rebuild destroyed environments, and—most importantly for this discussion—restore civilians to their pre-akumatization state through Miraculous Ladybug.

However, creation alone has limitations. The Miraculous Ladybug can recreate and restore, but it cannot truly destroy or transform what already exists. As a result, it appears to return civilians to a kind of "save point" just before they were akumatized. While this repairs the immediate damage, it leaves the underlying causes of their suffering unresolved.

This reflects a broader pattern within Miraculous: the root problems that lead to akumatizations are rarely addressed. The victim is restored, the city is rebuilt, and life moves on, but the emotional wounds that made them vulnerable in the first place often remain. In a symbolic sense, creation can repair damage, but it cannot necessarily facilitate growth. Growth requires change, and change often requires destruction.

It was originally the Cat Miraculous's role to re-awaken civilian victims;

This is where the Cat Miraculous may have originally played a complementary role. Rather than simply erasing the effects of an akumatization like Ladybug would, its power would have been used in a restorative way—allowing victims to retain their memories of the experience so they could process what happened, confront the issues that led to their akumatization, and emerge stronger and more resilient. Instead of returning them simply to no knowledge of events or path forward.

Such a role as healer would also fit Adrien's character arc. Where Gabriel repeatedly sought to control, deny, and undo loss, Adrien could embody a healthier response: empathy, acceptance, and personal growth through hardship. By helping people work through their pain rather than simply resetting it, he would become a meaningful foil to his father.

After all, the Butterfly Miraculous influences emotions, not memories. If akumatized victims lose awareness of what happened afterward, that may be evidence that the Ladybug Miraculous is effectively rewinding them to the moment before their emotional crisis overtook them. In that interpretation, Ladybug restores, while Cat Noir would have originally helped people transform. Creation repairs the world; destruction facilitates its change.

And that's why the two heroes continue to struggle against the Butterfly Miraculous: the yin and yang are out of balance. Creation has been left to do the work of both forces, attempting to repair every crisis through restoration alone, while the necessary role of destruction and change has been neglected. As a result, the city remains vulnerable because the conditions that create akumatizations are never truly resolved.

Without change, growth becomes impossible. Nature demonstrates this principle everywhere: old forests require fires of decay to clear away dead vegetation and make room for new life, and strength is often made through struggle rather than comfort. Creation and destruction are not opposites in conflict—they are partners in transformation.

Marinette and Adrien embody this imbalance psychologically as well. Marinette excels at creation, but she struggles to destroy her own unhealthy behavioral patterns. Rather than confronting her deeper issues directly, she often compartmentalizes them, constructing layer upon layer of responsibilities, secrets, and identities to avoid addressing the root problem.

Adrien, on the other hand, is drawn toward change and destruction. Throughout much of the series, he longs to break free from the suffocating constraints of his life and escape the control imposed upon him. Yet while he craves liberation, he often struggles with what comes after. He knows how to break the cage, but not always how to build a life beyond it.

Together, they represent two halves of a process that has been separated. Marinette can create but struggles to let go, while Adrien can destroy but struggles to move forward. Only when both forces are allowed to work in harmony can real healing and growth occur—for themselves, for the victims of akumatization, and for Paris as a whole.

This aspect of the characters would also allow the show to address its own repetitive nature. The cycle of akumatization, defeat, restoration, and repetition could be interpreted as a consequence of previous masters and Marinette's over reliance on creation without its complementary force: destruction and meaningful change. After all, true creation without transformation is impossible; something must be altered, discarded, or rebuilt for growth to occur.

Viewed this way, the series' long-standing sense of narrative stagnation becomes thematically significant rather than accidental. The story has been trapped in a kind of purgatory because its characters have continually restored the status quo instead of confronting the underlying issues that sustain it.

A proper conclusion would therefore require a shift in philosophy, particularly through Adrien. As the embodiment of destruction, he would come to understand that destructive action is not inherently harmful—it can be necessary for healing, growth, and renewal. The end of the story would not erase the damage caused by Hawkmoth, nor would it undo the pain, secrets, and lies that shaped the characters. Instead, it would acknowledge those scars and allow them to become part of the characters' growth.

"Look Charles, there are five of them, four are pretty, they all have different personalities so there must be one who clicks with you, take her off my hands."

"Yes, Mr. Bennet STILL refuses to let me take them all to London. I could get these girls married off so quickly if I could get them there, you cannot even imagine."

You get me @captain-kit-adventuress

I think they might actually get along. Caroline is very good at mirroring people, as she does with Mr. Darcy, and she'd quickly catch on to Mr. Bennet's way of cynically mocking those around him and join in. Caroline is well educated and intelligent enough that Mr. Bennet would probably enjoy talking to her, even if she's not quite at Elizabeth's level. And I think with Caroline getting the house in order, Mr. Bennet might be less likely to retreat to the library.

i always thought that was what louisa hurst was for, besides being her sister, lol.

but honestly, if caroline wasn't in london much because mr bennet hated it, i'm not sure louisa would be so content to stay at longbourn as she is at netherfield, so if the hursts go back to london, i think caroline would naturally look to one of the girls to fill that role, and who better than kitty, who's already had so much experience at it with lydia and is still in some way of being influenced by caroline?

i've always read caroline bingley not necessarily as mean and horrible like a lot of people say, but snobbish and self-centered, which is quite different. she'd want good matches for the girls for its own ends, but she'd be thinking of herself, too, because good matches for the girls reflects well on caroline. after all, what an accomplishment, to get happily- (or at least well-) settled those particular five girls, who started out with so little to recommend them! and as i said before, it's not like she wouldn't use it to help herself, either, by building the added social caché into the caroline empire, because being a person of high influence in society, even if only behind the scenes, was just as important then as it is today. imagine being able to say that you had the ear of the prime minister because your stepdaughter married an important MP or something! now imagine four more super important sons-in-law as well; caroline would dearly love being at the centre of that.

caroline would probably care about their happiness, too, if for no other reason than even one unhappy or ill-suited marriage would reflect poorly on herself, and three or four would put her own social position on much more precarious footing. unlike mrs bennet, who's ready to dump most of her girls, excepting jane, with the first decent man who gives them a second glance; this only reflects mrs bennet's own poor judgment in marrying off her girls, which is also a judgment on her. it's why she says that jane marrying well will put the other girls in the way of marrying rich men, both because of the social networking, and because it will help raise the social standing of the rest of the bennets. even if caroline thinks the same thing, she'd never be so crass as to say it out loud, because people knew how the system worked and didn't need the reminder. it's just mrs bennet bragging about her eldest in ways that actually hurt her chances rather than increasing them.

Anyway, yes, it is in Caroline's interest to get the girls good matches, which reflects well on her and gives her more social networking.

HOWEVER, the AU I originally proposed is ILLEGAL since Charles Bingley would be the Bennet girl's uncle by marriage and I'm pretty sure that is not allowed. So Caroline Bingley could be an older cousin, same personality, still works. Ou, cousin and ward of the Bingley family, so her, Charles, and Louisa still grew up together but everything is legal. And she still has her 20k because I need to work with that.

Still, I have a few thoughts, which bear on but don't relate directly to Caroline's empire-building. I'm much more interested in the dynamics between Caroline and her new step-daughters. I looked in the text, but I couldn't find an age for the Bingley sisters. Maybe Louisa is around 30 - she did marry first. Charles is canonically 22-23 when the action starts. I think Caroline is in between them (but just guessing). Whether she's still their sister, or a cousin, in this AU, I think it'd be very interesting to explore her relationship with all five sisters, not merely with Kitty. A stepmother only a few years older than her stepdaughters is interesting. They're more like younger stepsisters than stepdaughters, but her position as wife of Dad gives her power over them. Again, interesting. I'm especially curious about how she would relate to the potentially ungovernable Elizabeth.

Caroline would not even think of Darcy as a possibility for Elizabeth (well, nobody does, except for Darcy, and even he's resistant at the start). So does it end with them together anyway? Does it go in another direction? And how does Caroline relate to Elizabeth along the way? They're no longer competing for Darcy (in Caroline's mind), so ... ?

Also, what about Mary? How does one blunt or soften her priggishness? A makeover so she's not the plain one? Would that help? Or some sort of manners guidance? Or both? Or teach her herself?

And what about Mr. Bennet himself? How does she light a fire under his lazy ass? Yeah - maybe he'd creep out of his lair emerge from his library because the new family environment is not invariably silly - but what does that look like? Caroline canonically overspends also. Does she use that as a bargaining chip in marrying off her stepsisters stepdaughters?

I'm one of those of the opinion that Mary's biggest problems are that her education has been almost entirely self directed, and she's also been largely ignored by both parents, so she's fallen in to some very annoying habits and lines of thought.

Adult Adrien in this fandom is more often than not portrayed as this whimsical soft guy who’s perfectly manicured. But like. He’s in a rock band. He likes jagged stone. He is literally the definition of teenage angst.

Fae Romantasy comes down to Sarah J. Maas. Maybe (probably) there was more of it going on before her, but she mainstreamed it and got to define the tropes. From that we get fae as sexy, powerful, sort of primal people referred to as males and females, who have soulmates, often look down on humans, use magic, and have an elaborate structure of monarchy and nobility. Sarah J Maas had a successful YA fantasy series that abruptly pivoted in book 3 to include fae, and then her next series was fae romantasy from the start, and also caused incredible discourse due to having explicit sex scenes in a book marketed as YA.

But where did she get this fae archetype from? My argument would be that prior to being romantasy characters, fae were urban fantasy characters. Jim Butcher gets mentioned here for possibly codifying the summer/winter court structure, and also just having a bunch of humanoid human-sized fae nobles in his Dresden Files books. But IMO the stronger connection would be Holly Black.

In 2018, post Sarah J Maas fae romantasy wave, Holly Black publishes a YA fae dark romance which has many many elements that seem recognizable to existing fae romantasy. A human girl raised in the fae realm, a fae prince who hates her even as he can't resist her, lots and lots of court politics and power dynamic swings. The difference here is that Holly Black has been writing these kinds of books since 2002 (which makes her earlier books old enough to have been influences on the beginnings of fae romantasy). She's maybe best known for her Spiderwick Chronicles series of children's books, which feature all kinds of creepy and gross fae creatures, which feels similar to older folklore. But at the same time she's also writing the Modern Tales of Faerie series, which are YA dark romances about humanish girls and the powerful (but vulnerable) fae boys they meet. Notable here is that the fae here are not monolithic in species: you've got humanish fae (iirc most main characters are in this category), sure, but also more classic creatures like trolls (I remember there being others but not the specifics).

Notable for these books is that they aren't secondary world fantasy: iirc the Modern Tales of Faerie books are set in New York. There's also a sensibility about them that I want to describe as punkish? The protagonists aren't relatable everywomen, or destined princesses: they're mostly homeless teenagers, squatting in subways and trying to survive on the edges between fae society and human society.

And so let's go one step further back. What influenced Holly Black? And here we have a definite answer, because she was co-editor of a Welcome to Bordertown, a 2011 remake/tribute to the Bordertown series, done as a collaboration between some of the original authors and younger authors, like Holly Black, who had grown up with them. The original Bordertown books were a 1980s series of anthologies, with each chapter a short story by a different author. They were set in Bordertown, a city founded on the edge of our modern world and a resurgent magical one, full of strange magic meeting modern technology, populated largely by outcasts and runaways. The summary I have pulled up describes Bordertown as "a place of half-lit neighborhoods of hidden magic, of flamboyant artists and pagan motorcycle gangs", which should give you an idea of the vibe.

This is very clearly the predecessor to Holly Black's Fae books. Only this is published in 1986, and so the magical world that Bordertown sits at the edge of is Elfland. And that's where I think the root is, taking folkloric elves, making them sexy feudal intrusions on the world, and then to avoid confusion with the better known elves of Tolkein, pivoting the name to fae. After all, older sources use the two interchangeably: if you look at variants of Tam Lin some of them have a Queen of Fairies, some an Elfin Queen.

I find it interesting that you can really see the difference in reader expectations in a book like Hunter's Moon - Melling can't rely on people already being familiar with 'standard' fairy romance tropes, so she's doing a lot more work to create and build up the surrounding mythology than you see in current publications (and basing it off a great deal of actual historical mythological and folkloric sources) - and the result is a much more grounded and compelling setting, to my eyes. Though I'd have to reread the book to verify this, my memory of Melling's series was that it owed a pretty clear debt to earlier low fantasy YA-adjacent series like Susan Collins's The Dark is Rising (about Arthuriana myths recurring in a modern urban setting; first book published in 1965), and that the author had probably also at least read some of Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry series (a portal fantasy about a group of college students getting sent to a Tolkienesque, Arthuriana-inspired high fantasy world; first book published 1984). So I would link some of the earliest versions of this trope to the growing popularity of Arthuriana retellings in a low fantasy mode.

The explosion of fae romance within YA specifically is also fairly co-terminous with the explosion of YA itself, which took off around the 2000s in large part due to tailwinds from the Harry Potter (first book 1997) and Twilight (2005) booms. (I would probably trace romantasy as a direct descendent of YA more than of any other genre.) Note that Twilight was not just urban fantasy but specifically a YA paranormal romance, which was also becoming a huge category within the adult romance industry at around the same time. The early 2000s are when you get paranormal romance novel writers like Nalini Singh, Kelly Armstrong, Patricia Briggs (who could also be fairly called an urban fantasy writer with a large dose of romance), Laini Taylor, and Kresley Cole etc all taking off; most of the paranormal romances out there began with more traditional vampire & werewolf stuff, but a lot of them start getting very eclectic and 'anything goes' with their mythological references in much the same way Jim Butcher does. (Note that the first Harry Dresden book comes out in 2002, and the first Nightside book - a very similar noir urban fantasy - by Simon R Green in 2003; these authors are all influencing each other, yes, but also all responding to the same trends at more or less the same time.)

Before these authors, the first genuinely popular paranormal romance writers I know of are Tanya Huff's Victory Nelson series (1991), and Laurel K Hamilton with her Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series (1993). Hamilton was in turn extremely influenced by, who else, Anne Rice & her Interview with the Vampire, from all the way back in 1976. Huff herself is also writing in the shadow of Rice, but I think even more than Hamilton owes a debt to the low fantasy tradition of 'fantasy noir,' ie fantasy in the style of noir mysteries like Raymond Chandler's or Hammett's - you see this influence in 70s authors like Roger Zelazny, who was writing from the intersection of high fantasy & 'sword & sorcery' Conan the Barbarian style low fantasy, which is linked, fascinatingly, to the rise of the 'fantasy hero as hardboiled PI' trope. I've heard this can be traced to works like Leiber's The Swords of Lankmar (1968) and Cook's Garrett PI series (1987), neither of which I've read - but this is how you get Huff's hardboiled PI heroine investigating & romancing various handsome supernatural creatures in the 90s, which in turn is how characters like Butcher's Harry Dresden arrive on the scene. Anyway, Hamilton's subsequent Merry Gentry series is one of the first adult fae romances out there, & it started publishing in 2000.

Wen Spencer's 2003 Tinker seems like another key step in the development of the fae romance trend, I agree! I would suggest that Tinker in turn seems very influenced by Mercedes Lackey's SERRATed Edge series (first book published 1992), about magical Tolkien-esque elves living in modern society & engaging in hobbies like car racing, wooing mortal women, etc. (Older fantasy romance authors like Mercedes Lackey are underrated as influences in the current romantasy explosion, imo.) Charles de Lint also kicks off his Newford series with its first book, Dreams Underfoot, in 1993, which I would argue is probably one of the major influences on Butcher & other urban fantasy writers in terms of the sort of classic urban fantasy setting, ie a bunch of magical / fantastical beings from diverse & contradictory myths jostling uncomfortably together in a modern Western city. (Neil Gaiman also copies de Lint fairly shamelessly in American Gods and Neverwhere.) As far as I'm aware, de Lint is the one of the earliest authors to invent this kind of location as a permanent basis for an ongoing series. Holly Black's first book, the fae romance Tithe (2002) owes quite a bit to de Lint, and I think probably also made it to publication in part due to Hamilton's making the fae romance trend relevant via her own Merry Gentry series.

I wasn't aware of Terri Windling's 1986 Borderland series before, so I'm glad I've stumbled across it because of this post! A glance at the authors who wrote for this anthology is pretty interesting - Charles de Lint is published in it, as is Ellen Kushner and, later on, Patricia McKillip and Steven Brust, all of whom are major fantasy writers of the late 20th c. McKillip is a writer best known to me as one of the group of authors who first started to popularize the 'fairy tale retelling' as a distinct form of fantasy in the 80s and 90s, along with people like Gail Carson Levine (Ella Enchanted, 1997), Robin McKinley (Beauty: A Retelling, 1978), Patricia Wrede (Dealing with Dragons, 1990), Juliet Marillier (Daughter of the Forest, 1999), and Tanith Lee (Red as Blood, 1983).

So I would make the inference from this connection that the earliest forms of paranormal / urban fantasy are developing in relation to the popularization of the 'gritty' or 'dark' fairy tale retelling that starts to take off in this era (along with the similar but lighter 'fairy tale satire' which is more in line with what Wrede is doing, for instance; think also Shrek), and that this is directly related to the newfound popularity of writing about faeries who are tall, dangerous, inhumanly beautiful, immoral or amoral, & thus appealing love interests - as opposed to the kind of classic, bowdlerized Victorian / Disney version of fairies as small friendly cutesy creatuers with wands & flowers etc. (Terry Pratchet is doing something similar in his 1992 novel Lords and Ladies, where much of the humor derives from the contrast between the characters' expecations of elves and the unpleasant reality they encounter.) The same cultural push to create 'realistic' adult versions of children's fairy tales seems to be behind some of the earliest books about faeries in urban fantasy settings.

(I think it's also helpful to keep in mind that the elf vs faerie distinction is more or less a modern invention - these aren't really discrete categories in most of the historical mythologies they're derived from, and of course the modern concept of the 'fantasy elf' is pretty much entirely due to Tolkien, who was himself working from essentially the same body of myths that people later went back to in order to reinvent cutesy Victorian faeries as sexy fae lords. As you note above, older anglophone literature often uses 'elf' synonymously with faerie! Obviously this is a bit of a simplication & the divergences between Germanic versus Celtic folklore etc are real - but that's more a matter of interest to actual folklorists. The takeaway is, when Mercedes Lackey or Wen Spencer write about urban fantasy elves, they're often pulling from a similar mélange of source folklore as other contemporary authors writing about the fae. It's all more or less the same trope, imo.)

Anyway, then Melissa Marr's Wicked Lovely series publishes its first book in 2007, and this is, I would say, where the tropes of fae romance that are most popular today really become codified - this is an explicitly romantic YA urban fantasy series about high school girls falling in love with various faerie kings and lords, and the plot beats I think will be pretty recognizable to anyone reading contemporary books in this genre today. Holly Black's later The Wicked Prince series is definitely, to some degree, in conversation with Marr (who of course was in turn writing in conversation with Black's earlier Tithe when she created Wicked Lovely).

All of which is to say that I think it's correct to point to urban fantasy as an influence in the development of the 'fae lord' as a classic romantasy love interest today, but it isn't quite fair to call urban fantasy the 'source' of tropes about the fae - because urban fantsy itself developed in tandem with paranormal romance, which was in turn strongly influenced by straightforward fantasy authors like Patricia McKillip and Susan Collins. I would argue that the real innovation that Sarah J Maas made in turn was to take what was already, by 2015 (when A Crown of Thorns and Roses was published), the extremely well-known paranormal romance trope of the 'fae lord' love interest, and move him out of the urban fantasy setting back into a high fantasy world.

It's the combination of classic high fantasy stakes and setting (every major character is a king or a lord or a general or a royal advisor! their actions have consequences for thousands upon thousands of innocent nameless subjects! everyone bows & curtsies a lot! the continued existence of the world is always somehow in need of saving yet another time! etc) with the narrative tropes of paranormal romance, in particular (every aspect of the plot revolves around the heroine and her romantic choices & desirability! every man she meets is doomed to love her! every problem can only be solved via the correct utilization of her unique magical abilities, ancestral inheritance, piercing insight, or innate personal virtue! which i say with amusement & affection, not scorn), that makes 'romantasy' a distinct genre, imo. Romantasy is the importation of the paranormal romance plot into a high fantasy world. And that's essentially what Maas invented with her fae romance series.

So in summary, I would argue there are two threads here: one is the paranormal romance, which I trace back to originating authors like Hamilton and Huff, and which is strongly influenced by Anne Rice's take on vampires on the one hand, and by the low fantasy 'noir' trends popularized by writers like Glenn Cook and Roger Zelazny (Simon R Green is an early 90s trendsetter for this kind of thing, as well) on the other. Thus all roads lead back to Anne Rice (obviously) and also to Raymond Chandler (less obviously but more or less inevitably for any American author - and the British are not immune! look at Pratchett's Night Watch). I would classify this thread as the stylization and codification of horror, grit, cynicism, urban grime, etc in a fantastical / supernatural context - things that used to be regarded as frightening, inappropriate, ugly, unspeakable, or otherwise transgressive, like murder and corrupt cops (see: Chandler) or scary monsters from folklore committing thinly-veiled metaphors for sexual assault (see: Rice).

This becomes the standard spooky, gritty, cynical, hardboiled vibe for a lot of early books in the paranormal line. The prevalent attitude is basically 'you thought werewolves were a silly children's story? jokes on you! this werewolf is about to eat your face &/or attempt to sexually assault you' (and of course, in the explicitly romantic books especially, this is all highly eroticized). As happens with all tropes, the original transgressive sources of these vibes are eventually lost until only the vibes remain, and we end up with things like the trope of the paranormal PI main character with no clear explanation for why except that 'it's paranormal, of course you need a PI hero' or 'it's paranormal, of course you need a vampire love interest.' Faeries thus become incorporated here as another instance of the seemingly harmless child's story that are, in the story's mythbusting 'reality,' highly dangerous, scary, & socially liminal figures, & thus capable of filling essentially the same narrative role as the vampire or werewolf lover.

The other thread is the urban fantasy setting itself, which is what revitalizes the modern concept of the faerie as a potential style of love interest in the first place, and this I would trace to late 90s - early 00s YA like Melling's faerie series, which draws from Arthuriana and Celtic mythology - and again, dating to 1993, is the earliest publication of explicitly romantic fae novels that I know of (as in the romance is a large chunk of the main narrative, and not just a subplot). (The separate but related notion of dropping your characters into a hodgepodge of conflicting myths and enjoying the chaos as a storytelling method I think is also coming into popularity at the same time via authors like K.A. Applegate in her very underrated 1999 Everworld series, a truly and delightfully insane YA portal fantasy involving, yes, dangerous faeries.) Melling is writing in turn at the same moment that Charles de Lint's urban fantasies are coming out, and both authors are influenced by the popularization of the 'fractured fairy tale' retelling taken up by many major female fantasy authors of the late 20th c. - all of which blend together in a lot of interesting weird ways in the 90s and then play a major role in shaping the YA boom of the 2000s. The role of Arthuriana retellings in the works of writers like Susan Collins and Guy Gavriel Kay I think is also important (both of whom have also, amusingly, admitted to being directly influenced by Sir James Frazer's iconic 1890 work of late Victorian anthropology, The Golden Bough, thus confirming my personal conspiracy theories re: all modern literature. But that's beyond the scope!)

The style of love interest that emerges from this thread is, at least originally, somewhat more in line with much older legends about faeries taking mortals as lovers - that is, these are highly aestheticized and romanticized narratives (as opposed to the 'grit' of early paranormal) that nonetheless derive most of their tension and suspense from the impossibility of any mortal truly being able to trust or rely on a faerie, who are depicted as inherently capricious, inhuman, unfeeling, and unreliable lovers. (Think of the faeries playing games with the mortal characters in A Midsummer Night's Dream - not quite actively malicious, but certainly high-handed and careless enough to feel that way to their victims.)

In the hands of 2000s and 2010s writers like Holly Black, Julie Kagawa, and Melissa Marr (all of whom I would read as some of the direct antecedents to Maas, especially Marr) this narrative merges with the tropes of the paranormal romance to create a kind of gritty fairy tale romance, with fae love interests who take on the narrative role traditionally played by vampires in, for example, Twilight - powerful and compelling supernatural figures who, because of their fundamental nature, pose a danger to the female heroine they are inevitably in love with. (Vampires inherently want to drink your blood! Werewolves inherently want to eat you! Faeries inherently want to fuck with you just for the sake of it! Which makes a human woman attempting to romance any of them inherently fraught & dangerous, & therefore a structurally interesting premise for a romance novel. And, of course, the metaphors for the difficulty of regular human heterosexual romance abound.)

The appeal of the faerie lover specifically over the vampire or werewolf is, I think, that the faerie still retains some of the wondrous, fanastical, romantic glamor by which we tend to define high fantasies and classic fairy tales more generally - they can be magical, capital r Romantic figures in a way quite distinct from the gritty, noir-coded, 'realistic' supernatural appeal of the vampire as depicted in paranormal romance. So the resurgence in popularity of fae lord love intersts today over the vampires or werewolves of the previous decades we might put down to a broader cultural turn away from a kind of emphasis on realism, cynicism, low fantasy 'punk' aesthetics etc, and towards a desire for more idealistic or romantic (or, in the cynical view, more sanitized) narrative figures - which is also, perhaps, echoed in the current parallel surge of the popularity of romantasy over the older paranormal romance.

I think there's also something worth unpacking in the transition from the popularity of socially liminal paranormal love interests like vampires, werewolves, etc - all of whom, in urban fantasy / paranormal settings, tend to explicitly exist in various underworlds, demimondes, on the margins of real or normal society, & so on - to today's version of the romantasy fae lord, who has been transformed from his original urban fantasy character (where, again, he essentially fulfills the same narrative function as the vampire - mysterious, dangerous, liminal, beyond the bounds of the real) into sort of the opposite of a socially marginalized role. Instead of living in the fantasy demimonde & concealing his true nature as a faerie from society etc, the romantasy fae lord (who in most romantasy I've seen - ie the Maas version - is functionally just a pop version of a Tolkien elf; there's very little of actual faerie mythology remaining in these depictions) is fully socially integrated into his world, & inhabits a role of overt social & political power - he's literally a feudal lord. So what's being eroticized & romanticized is no longer transgression or 'the outsider' in any sense, but rather a much more traditional (some might argue regressive) figure of inherited, established (& necessarily masculine) authority. It's a really interesting shift, anyway!

*post script: I'll also add that the various permutations of 'soulmates' and 'mated lovers' & the relentless tendency to call people 'males' & 'females' etc in romantasy I believe comes almost entirely from Maas, who in turn is getting it pretty exclusively from older high fantasy paranormal mashups like Sherrilyn Kenyon's Hunter Legends series (1999) and Wilson's Lord of the Fading Lands series (2007). (So for example the Wilson series is, to the best of my memory, about an immortal shapeshifting dragon king & his romance with his reincarnated true love / fated soulmate, a human woman; I do acknowledge that I read it a very long time ago & so may be wildly misstating the plot - the jacket summary calls him a 'Fey King,' which I simply don't remember at all, but seems even more suggestive!) Anyway, these are all popular tropes in this kind of fantasy romance, & as far I'm aware don't really have much to do with the incorporation of faeries as love interests specifically - it's just a sort of intersection of Maas's particular writing habits & the paranormal romance tradition that shaped them.