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Okay, I know everyone in the anti Rhysand crowd loves to dump on Rhys about how he assaulted Feyre, how he never did anything to stop the wing clipping, etc... but those problems are already mentioned in the narrative(albeit portrayed in a very different light).

You know what ISN'T talked about? Illyrian child soldiers. Illyrian kids are forced to go into war camps at eight years old, they get whipped as encouragement, they have to participate in a bloody death tournament. All of this is only to give the bat boys sob backstories. And yet somehow, the fandom never talks about them half as much as the wing clippings. Like, we all know that Illyrian girls have no choice but to become housewives, and that it's terrible, but hey, at least Rhys acknowledges it's wrong, and is trying, ....well....sort of....(with dubious effectiveness...and effort...) to stop it. Let's talk about how Illyrian boys have no choice but to go into war camps, to become warriors even if they don't want to, and nobody ever acknowledges how fucked up this is in-universe.

Like, I've never seen a fandom WITHOUT a gazillion unhinged ships with 0% chance of making canon(with Tamsand as an exception ofc)

And then… we get three more books, and it still makes no sense.

We’re supposed to believe that Tamlin—who was friends with Rhys—betrayed him by handing that information over to a father he hated… for no clear reason? Even if you argue Tamlin is selfish, that still doesn’t line up. Selfish decisions usually have some kind of benefit attached. This just feels irrational.

I’ve looked through fandom theories, and most of them either feel wildly out of character (like “his father threatened his mother”) or require some convoluted crossover-level twist to work(the Lorin = Rhysand's sister theory). None of them really satisfy the basic question: why would Tamlin do this?

So here’s my take.

Let’s assume Rhys is telling the truth, since we don’t have another perspective on this event. We know Rhys was supposed to be at that location with his mother and sister. We also know Tamlin’s father was weaker than Rhys, but obsessed with proving his strength.

So what if Tamlin gave up the location expecting Rhys to be there—and hoping Rhys would kill his father?

Because that’s the only version of events that actually makes sense to me. It turns the betrayal from random stupidity into a calculated risk: Tamlin tries to get rid of his abusive father by setting him up against someone stronger... and it goes horribly wrong.

Dooku was wayy more delusional that Anakin/Vader ever was. And this is from someone who is very Anakin critical.

Look, I don't support Anakin in rots in any way but like from his perspective there was at least a reasonable chance that Palpatine would actually save Padme, so if you understand his motivation as 'wanting Padme to not die while not giving a fuck about the Jedi' it sort of makes sense not that it's right in any way but you know what I'm talking about

On the other hand, try applying just any motivation to Dooku and no matter what you try, his actions fall apart.

He wanted to expose the corruption in the Senate? Sure, let's work for the guy that is responsible for that corruption instead of, y'know, letting the Jedi/public/just about anyone know about it an remove him.

He wanted to reform the Jedi? Okay, let's work for the guy whose goal is to destroy the Jedi.

He wanted revenge for Qui-gon? I don't know how many mental gymnastics you have to do to justify this but. Dooku. literally worked for the guy who ordered him killed.

Wait, you mean that Dooku is actually evil and he wanted to put himself in power? Yeah, starting a galatic wide war and purposely losing it is definitely the way to do that.

Are we really the same people who boycott Rowling? The same people who shame everyone who buys a piece of Harry Potter merch, because 'supporting a terf is a crime'?

Has everyone just forgotten why we don't like Rowling, and just boarded on the hate train because it looks cool?

Rowling gets criticized because she’s the author of Harry Potter—millions of people read her books, grow up with them, and are influenced by them. When she says something discriminatory about trans people, her platform and her writing give those views weight, whether we like it or not.

And y'all know what influences readers more than what the author says on an interview somewhere? That's right, their actual damn books.

Most people who read Harry Potter as kids don’t follow Rowling’s interviews now. Half my friends who loved the series don’t even know what she’s said. But literally everyone who read Acotar, well, read acotar.

Everyone who read Acotar were meant to find everything Rhysand does to be right including - but not limited to - finding eight-year-old Illyrian kids get thrown to war camps, terrorizing the people of Hewn city to 'keep up a mask' so the super special good people in Velaris can be protected. We're meant to think that Rhysand is being 100% correct when he says 'both sides were bad' pertaining to a war where one side was fighting to escape slavery, we're meant to see taxes as evil and controlling and yet find a rich couple that has five mansions while their people are recovering from a WAR romantic.

When Feyre and Rhysand scam Tarquin—one of the only characters actively trying to promote equality—we’re pushed to sympathize with them instead of him. We're supposed to think that the one guy who supports racial equality as 'too safe' and that he 'doesn't know what it is like to lose people', or whatever, when its canon that his predecessor was killed be Amarantha.

We’re supposed to root for the “good guys” fighting against human enslavement, and yet the majority of humans we get introduced to are assholes, die, or get turned into fae. And we’re supposed to see Rhysand as morally good when he says 'we released all the slaves long ago because 'they breed like bunnies and we couldn't mind control all of them', and not because, y'know, slavery is wrong.

'But its from Feyre's Pov, she's biased - ' well then sjm could have done a better job writing Feysand as flawed, instead of having every good character suck up to them.

…because I liked him in every book before that.

I liked him in Throne of Glass, where he kills a man to save Celaena’s life.

I liked him in Crown of Midnight, where the loyalty he prides himself on leads to devastating consequences, and everything he believes about the world starts to unravel.

I liked him in Heir of Fire, where he joins the rebels—who literally kidnapped him the previous book—to fight against the tyranny he once served.

I liked him in Queen of Shadows, where he struggles to face his best friend being possessed by the Valg.

parenting style: sends her kid to an Illyrian camp where he gets whipped as daily punishment

Ok, so I’ve read a lot of analysis posts on Tumblr pointing out that Throne of Glass and Aelin have a ton of issues. (Like Aelin literally saying she’d colonize a bunch of countries in Kingdom of Ash.) Logically, that should bother me a lot.

But weirdly, it never makes me hate Aelin or ToG the way I hate Rhysand and ACOTAR.

I think the reason is that ACOTAR tries to engage with real-world moral standards—things like abusive relationships (Tamlin locking Feyre in the manor) or criticizing rulers for how they govern (like Tamlin being framed as a bad ruler for, uh, collecting taxes). The narrative clearly signals that these things matter morally.

In fact, that moral framing is literally the justification for the series switching its MMC, so we’re clearly supposed to take it seriously.

The problem is that the story holds Tamlin to those standards but not Rhys or the Inner Circle, even when they do things that should be just as questionable, if not more.

Meanwhile Throne of Glass never really sets up those same standards in the first place. The moral bar in that world is basically: don’t be an eldritch parasite that possesses people and feeds on pain and misery. Compared to that, a lot of other stuff just slides by.

So when Aelin says something wild like “yeah I’ll colonize this continent for my future kids,” my brain just kind of goes: ok sure, I’ll pretend this never happened. The narrative itself isn’t really inviting me to judge it the same way.

But ACOTAR does invite that kind of moral reading—and then fails its own test.

Okay, those of you who've read my posts probably know I'm on the acotar critical side of the fandom. Not in the 'My fave is Tamlin/Lucien/Eris, and they're being treated so unfairly' way but in the 'I just think the whole series is bullshit' way. But then, some people might ask; 'If you didn't like the books, why did you read so many of them?', and here's my answer to that.

So, about eight and a half years ago, I first saw Throne of Glass in a bookstore and bought it, and I really loved it and ended up reading the whole series within a month(or, until Empire of Storms, because Tower of Dawn and Kingdom of Ash weren't released at the time). I won't pretend that it was a literary masterpiece or anything, but it was entertaining, and I liked reading about Aelin and her journey. I fell in love with almost every single character there, and I wanted to read more books like those.

And I went to Reddit.

And at the time, the popular consensus seemed to be that the ACoTaR series were way better than the ToG series. So I read the first book.

And, honestly? It was kind of a meh for me. Feyre was likeable, but didn't click for me the way Celaena/Aelin did. Tamlin was boring. Rhysand was my favorite character in the whole book because he was sort of mysterious and seemed cool(and I had the whole theory about him being part Valg! or Maeve's son! Both of them were sadly debunked in the following books..)

But reddit had convinced me that the first book was more of an introduction, and the series doesn't pick up until the second book! And since my trust in Sjm's writing skills hadn't been destroyed, at that point. So I read Acomaf.

Well... it was entertaining, to say the least.

First, Rhysand was the new love interest, instead of the morally grey anti-villain role I liked in the first book. But, well, Rhys being the love interest meant that I would see more of him, so I considered it a win. Oh, and I really hated Tamlin by the end of Acomaf(what with him being abusive and allying with Hybern), but I didn't like him to begin with, so no loss to me.

On that note, I read Acowar, because Acomaf had been sort of fun to read, and hey, you can't resist reading the next book with a cliffhanger like that!

I turned out that the war with Hybern ended in that book, and that was probably the biggest surprise for me. Like, the Hybern dude seemed to be the big boss of the whole series, and he's suddenly dead? Well, it turns out everything's getting wrapped up. Tamlin turned out to be a spy and got a sort-of-redemption-maybe arc, Feyre made peace with him and goes on to live her life, and everyone goes back home. Oh, and we still don't know what Mor's power is supposed to be. I was a little disappointed that the series was ending, but hey, a christmas special seems to be coming out! Reading a short book about the happy ending would be nice, right?

Oh, how wrong I was.

First, the scene where Rhys went to spring court and just... hated on Tamlin just made me have cognitive dissonance. Now, I know that you're probably thinking, 'OP, didn't you say multiple times that you liked Rhys and hated Tamlin? Why did you have a problem with that?' To answer that question, I have to admit that unlike a lot of wonderful deep thinkers here on tumblr, I am not that deep of a reader. For example, in Acomaf, where most people thought 'Oh, Tamlin has been traumatized in utm which led him to be hyperprotective of Feyre! But that's not what Feyre needs after utm, and the lack of communication between that is what turned him abusive and (insert another page of character analysis or something)'. No, my simple brain just went 'Tamlin bad now. Rhys good.' And in Acowar, 'Tamlin bad' changed to 'Tamlin bad but trying to make amends and has made peace with Feyre'. So when Rhys, who was 'good', went to Tamlin, who Feyre had made peace with and just vented his negative emotions on him, that was just a tad uncomfortable to me.

Also, the ending where Feyre sent Nesta to an Illyrian camp? That was just a '?????' for me. According to my very simple brain, Feyre, who was 'good', sends her sister to an Illyrian war camp, which, if we are to trust Rhys, sounds real brutal. That just felt like Sjm making a cheap excuse to write a book about Nesta in an Illyrian camp surrounded by villains.

Neither of those instances, alone, made me hate Rhys or Feyre or the Acotar series in general, but they did make me apply a more critical lens to the earlier series. And as I went over the earlier books, especially Acomaf and Acowar, I noticed some inconsistencies with the 'Rhys good!' 'Inner Circle good!' narrative that my brain had accepted without a doubt. Especially the part about Rhys supposedly being a great ruler.

Okay, first, Rhys was... not a fair or kind or good ruler to his so-called court. Yes, the Court of Nightmares is fucking awful, and you know what? That's generally what happens when you put all the awful people in one city, cut off their contact with the other non-awful people, and maintain that divide for countless generations. The Court of Nightmares is a consequence of Rhys' ancestor's actions, and I wished that was acknowledged once. And for that matter, Rhys, when you show up just to torture them for shit and giggles, don't wonder why they hate you.

Oh, and the Illyrians. Yes, according to Rhys, the Illyrians are super misogynistic., and that's probably true. And the women of Illyria suffer, and they're trying to fix that. But it also seems that the Illyrian boys are conscripted in to war camps where *checks notes* they are given three lashes for 'encouragement' and are whipped to death when they misbehave? It seems that the Illyrian boys suffer plenty too, and that maybe the war camps they grow up in aren't exactly environments that produce open-minded, fair men. Hey, aren't you gonna try to change it, Rhys? Offer the boys options that don't involve going to war camps and learning how to kill enemies? Or aren't you even going to comment on that at all? And of course, they are expected to die for Velaris citizens.. what has Velaris ever done for Illyrians? Or the Court of Nightmares, for that matter? (Notes: I am not denying that Illyrian women suffer at the hands of the Illyrian men. But my opinion is that the Illyrian system brutalizes both boys and girls in different ways, and yet one half of this problem is completely ignored by Rhys.)

Okay, why does that matter? Because, my friends, in Acomaf, we were constantly told 'Rhys good ruler. Tamlin bad ruler'. Rhys being a fair ruler caring for is court was part of why we were supposed to like him over Tamlin in the first place. And when that fell apart... I guess so did my love for Rhys.

And in case anyone is wondering, I did not read A court of Silver Flames after this, because I just couldn't continue. That's why I never mentioned anything that happened in the book- like the (in)famous pregnacy secret- on my anti-Rhys posts. I didn't feel adequate to comment stuff I didn't read.