Rosee

Rhys flies her back to the townhouse.

I quickly found I much preferred ascending, and couldn’t bring myself to watch for too long without feeling my dinner rise up. Not fear—just some reaction of my body.

So............. if it's not a fear reaction, then what reaction is it, Feyre? I get that sometimes our bodies just react to stimuli without any cognitive or emotional input from us, but. Unless he's doing loop-de-loops or rollercoaster plunges or something, your dinner shouldn't have any reason to move. You aren't the one doing the vigorous activity, after all. So it must be something else. You know, like fear. Or any of the other various distress emotions the book likes to show the severity of with vomiting.

Rhys makes an attempt to justify why his spyware is so wack and also not his fault.

[R]“This bond is … a living thing. An open channel between us, shaped by my powers, shaped … by what you needed when we made the bargain.” “I needed not to be dead when I agreed.” “You needed not to be alone.”

No, she needed to not be dead. She wasn't alone then. She was fighting to free her love and (in theory) her friends from the Spring Court. She was only alone at the Spring Court later, Rhys. You're just making up more bullshit to try and justify what you did. And even if we take this statement as true, your spyware only made her less alone on a technical level, Rhys, in that you had 24/7 access to her head. You never used it to, say, provide emotional support. Only to do things like use pain to try direct her answers in the trials (instead of just fucking telling her), or to plant thoughts like "the love of my life is in this random palace I've never seen" into her head. It's only ever been used for your own gratification. Stop gaslighting her.

You needed not to be alone… . But what about him? Fifty years he’d been separated from his friends, his family …

No. Stop. A sad past doesn't make him any less of a dick. He's not the only one who suffered under Amarantha's rule, Feyre. Given that some of the other courts were having their children murdered (by him, no less), I'd argue that he didn't even suffer The Most.

I said, “You let Amarantha and the entire world think you rule and delight in a Court of Nightmares. It’s all a front—to keep what matters most safe.” The city lights gilded his face. “I love my people, and my family. Do not think I wouldn’t become a monster to keep them protected.”

First of all, that's a bold statement to make, Feyre, given you've seen only one tiny part of the Night Court. And especially since, having spoken to people about the Illyrians and the Hewn City now, you know the Night Court is bigger than Velaris, and, based on what the others have said, you can infer that most of the Court isn't thrilled with the job Rhys is doing. You also know that the only part of the court that was protected was Velaris. He left everyone else to Amarantha's mercy.

“I love my people, and my family.

Bullshit. Like I just said, you abandoned the majority of them. They're all your people, Rhys, whether the book wants to admit it or not. You're a shit ruler, and in any book where the protagonist had any semblance of morals, the story would be about overthrowing you and your nepotistic regime.

“What was the cost?” I dared ask. “Of keeping this place secret and free?” [...] “You know the cost already.” Amarantha’s whore.

I think the choice to use "Amarantha's whore" to describe his position is very telling. Because, as we all know, he did more than just sleep with her. As I pointed out before, he also did things like murder children on her behalf. We saw him break people's minds last book, under her orders. He told her about Clare Beddor. It's clear he was more than just a bedslave. But the book doesn't want you to focus on those parts. Those parts don't make Rhysand a victim, see. And it desperately wants him to be a victim, because you can't blame victims for anything, right? If we accept that he was Amarantha's victim, well, anything he did under her orders can be absolved, right?

Rhys starts telling us all about it, but let's just get out of the way what the book wants us to think but outright refuses to say - Rhys was raped. He was a victim of sexual assault. Amarantha used the threat of violence against his loved ones to coerce him to be her servant, and part of being her servant included sexual favours. And, I'm kind of torn on the inclusion of this issue. On the one hand, it's incredibly rare to see male sexual assault victims in any media. At all. There's often at least allusions to female sexual assault victims - some are handled well, some really are not, but it's something that is very much in the public awareness. Not so for the men. And often, when it comes to representation, there's going to be an amount of shit representation we have to get through first, so that people are aware enough of the issue that they realise it's something that needs to be done properly, if that makes sense.

But..... dear god, do I think it was handled poorly here. For several reasons. Firstly, well, there's the obvious. The book never, ever, admits that Rhys was raped. It does not use that word. Nor does it refer to it as assault, or anything like that. In fact, if anything, it's trying to frame things as if it was all by Rhysand's own design:

"...So I decided that to keep her from asking questions about the people who mattered, I would be her whore.”

And honestly, it could work. Maybe Rhys is just coping with his lack of agency in the situation by claiming it was his decision. Maybe he saw an opportunity to offer himself to Amarantha in order to avoid violence and chose to take it, as opposed to choosing other ways to resolve the situation, and thus, while coerced, it was technically his decision in that regard. There's lots of ways it could work. But I strongly suspect that isn't why the book is doing this. I believe that it simply cannot imagine Rhysand (and men, more broadly) not being in control. It just can't. And thus, it phrases things so that even becoming a sex slave to the Big Bad is something that was a decision he made, instead of something that was forced upon him, completely beyond his control. It (perhaps unintentionally) words things to ensure he has agency in the matter.

In isolation, of course, it's certainly not impossible for such circumstances to occur - where the victim does, in fact, have an amount of agency in the situation. It doesn't make them any less of a victim. It doesn't make what happened to them any less horrible. However. This situation isn't in isolation. We live in a society where male victims of sexual assault are barely even acknowledged, let alone taken any sort of seriously, and this is especially true with respect to their agency in the situation. There's a subconscious assumption in our society that the man is always "in control," whether that's because he's physically stronger, or because of gender roles, or whatever. If he really didn't want it, he could have stopped it, right? That's how the thinking goes. And to further the non-isolation of this situation, it exists in a book where that power disparity between men and women is cranked up to eleven and played for fetish bait.

One of the (many) harmful things about rape is the destruction of and disregard for the victim's agency. But the book shields Rhysand from this. Again, it's not impossible that such a situation could occur. But it is very telling that it occurs for the male victim, and not for any of the (numerous) female victims the book likes to wave around at us. It does not hesitate to completely remove their agency from the situation. Nor does it explore this difference, or use it to make some sort of commentary, no. It's just there, as if it's matter-of-course that the man would retain some control over his situation. And that is a harmful thing to just leave hanging there.

But, even though it's still letting Rhysand be "in control" of the situation to an extent, make no mistake - it absolutely wants us to see him as the victim here. And, by all measures, he is. I'm not arguing that he isn't. He unquestionably is. What I want to discuss, however, is how the book uses his victimhood. Because it is absolutely only here for meta reasons, and not the good kind (which would again be things like making commentary or exploring how such a situation interacts with Rhysand as a character).

In novels, everything happens for a reason (or, at least, it should). Whether that reason is moving a plot, deepening a character, building the world out, whatever. Everything that the author chooses to include is there for a specific purpose (even if that purpose is just to pad the page count, or shock the audience, or because it sounds pretty. It's all still a purpose). This includes things like rape. Now, I want to make very clear that I'm not saying that real-world rape happens "for a reason" - that is obviously incredibly insulting to the victims, and the only "reason" it happens is because there's assholes who decide to do it. But when an author includes it in their work, it means they've sat down, thought about all the possible things they could have included, and have decided that yes, rape is what they're going to go with. They have an intention in mind when making this decision.

Sometimes, that intention is just something like "because it will be shocking" or "I want to make my villain more evil" or "I want to show my world is Dark and Gritty." This is called Gratuitous Rape, and is generally frowned upon. If your story is so boring that it needs a rape in order to "shock" the audience, that's a plot problem. If your villain's plot isn't evil enough on its own to make them a villain, you need to go back to the drawing board. If the only thing that's Dark and Gritty about your world is the rape, you need to re-evaluate if that's actually the kind of world you want to write. And so on.

Rhysand's case has a slightly bigger purpose than this (though I won't argue that it's being used to make Amarantha look more evil, that's more a bonus feature than the main point). In this book, the rape is being used to give Rhysand (in the book's eyes) unquestionable victim status, and to make him look oh-so-selfless for willingly suffering it. That is the primary aim of its inclusion. Rhysand did many terrible things last book, and this book wants to absolve him. Rather than do the character work necessary to pull it off (and we'll get to that in a bit - this isn't the only rant I've been holding off on for Rhysand), it instead makes him a rape victim - the kind of person the book thinks the audience cannot possibly blame for anything. Rape Is A Special Kind Of Evil, after all; in the book's mind, it follows that rape victims are a special kind of victim. Blameless. And, in Rhysand's case, selfless, because (it thinks) he suffered it to save others. You're not going to tell a rape victim that you think he's a piece of shit for the things he did while being raped, are you? If you do, then you are the one who is a piece of shit!

Hopefully, I don't need to point out why this is extremely insulting to actual rape victims.

And I am very confident in this assessment. Like I said, the book has already shielded Rhysand from the loss of his agency in the matter. It wants him to be a rape victim, but it doesn't want him to look "weak" for it. Instead, it wants the rape to show his "strength", to make it a "sacrifice" he made on behalf of others. Further, it never really explores the implications of this for his character. It brings it up just to let us know that it happened, and thus confer his victim status - it only ever mentions it again if it wants us to feel sorry for him. Not to understand how it impacted his character. Not to see him struggle to reconcile conflicting emotions about it within himself. Not to say anything meaningful about the issue itself, or anything like that. It's just a shortcut to absolution.

Indeed, the only part I remember that really mentions any potential impact is when Feyre and Rhys finally have sex - and Feyre suddenly decides that her being on top means that Rhys is "reclaiming" that from Amarantha (which.... ugh. We'll get to that when we get to it). And I remember this because it felt random af, because there had been no lead up to it, no indication that Rhys had any issues with sex or certain positions or anything. His victimhood is not explored in any way. In fact, it's largely absent from the book unless it wants us to pity him.

I could also see an argument that Rhys's sex slavery is also a bit of a fetishisation thing, or at least was meant to make him seem more "desirable" to the audience - of course the evil villain would want him as a sex slave, he's just so damn pretty, after all! But this is admittedly based more off gut feeling and the general vibe of Maas's works than any specific evidence in the text. And I want to make very clear that this is also an insulting reason to include rape in a story - real life rape has very little to do with the "desirability" of the victim, and to suggest otherwise is victim blaming in the extreme, and only serves to absolve the attacker of responsibility. It doesn't stop bad books from using it for this reason, though.

So, yes, in summary - while Rhys is unquestionably a victim of sexual assault (even if the book refuses to use those words), the reasons for the inclusion of this detail in the story are very icky, since it's mostly just there to leverage the victim status to absolve him of his other crimes. God, and I was hoping a short chapter would mean a short post for once.

But. Let's get back to analysing Rhys's bullshit, instead of meta bullshit.

“When [Amarantha] tricked me out of my powers and left the scraps, it was still more than the others. And I decided to use it to tap into the mind of every Night Court citizen she captured, and anyone who might know the truth. I made a web between all of them, actively controlling their minds every second of every day, every decade, to forget about Velaris, to forget about Mor, and Amren, and Cassian, and Azriel.

Not gonna lie, but "actively controlling the minds of every citizen for decades in order to make them forget very, very specific things" doesn't exactly sound like the kind of thing that can be done with just "scraps" of power. Why not concentrate all of those scraps into a single blow, and use it to explode Amarantha's head? You could explode random bit-character heads with just the scraps of the scraps, after all, we saw you do it last book, Rhys. Why not just do it to Amarantha?

"...I had only enough for one city—one place. I chose the one that had been hidden from history already.

Yes. The one that was already safe. In Crescent City, Bryce makes a lot of noise condemning others for protecting "already safe" parts of the city. Obviously, no such standard is going to be applied to Rhysand. He's a hero who had to make a Tough Choice; the other fae are poopyheads who don't like poor people. No argument will be made that Rhysand should have used his decades-of-direct-mind-control's-worth of "scraps" to protect anyone else, or to use it to explode Amarantha's head or anything. Nothing. The book will never frame him as anything but a saint for this.

Note, my main issue isn't that Rhysand didn't do something else with his power, per se. My main issue is with the book framing him as a hero for what he did choose to do. If it wanted him to be a hero, he should have chosen to do something actually heroic. If it wanted him to do this, it should be framing him very differently. Both of those situations are fine - what the book is giving us is not.

"...I chose, and now must live with the consequences of knowing there were more left outside who suffered.

Like those Illyrians you immediately hunted down and executed for "gleefully" joining up with Amarantha after their High Lord did? You don't get to claim pity points for other peoples' suffering when you don't actually give a fuck about the other people, Rhys.

"...Sea travel and merchant trading [to Velaris] were halted—sailors became farmers, working the earth around Velaris instead.

.....Rhys. If merchant boats can find your city, then it's not hidden. Pick one: hidden from everyone for thousands of years, or findable by trading boats at sea. You literally cannot have both.

He’d done all of that, had done such horrible things … done everything for his people, his friends. And the only piece of himself that he’d hidden and managed to keep her from tainting, destroying, even if it meant fifty years trapped in a cage of rock …

Correction: he did some things for some of his people and friends, and left the rest to Amarantha's mercy. He kept her from "tainting" that one thing at the cost of literally everyone else. This is not heroic behaviour. Or rather... hmm. It can be, I suppose, if the person doing it has literally no other options. But Rhysand says this:

"...And because my powers were focused on shielding them all, Feyre, I had very little to use against Amarantha.

Which insinuates that, if he didn't bother shielding the already-hidden city, he'd have been able to use all that power against Amarantha, potentially killing her and thus saving the entirety of Prythian, instead of just Velaris. And, honestly, this is a pretty easy fix. Have him try and fail to use his remaining power to kill Amarantha, and then, with the very last drops, he shields Velaris (ideally in the hope that his friends will continue the fight). That is a much more heroic situation. Instead, Rhys assessed his powers, and decided that shielding an already-safe city so his friends can sit on their asses there for however long Amarantha was around was the best use of it. He didn't even try anything else. That is not heroic at all. Or at least, it's not heroic enough to use to absolve him of all the heinous shit he did under Amarantha, both to Feyre directly and Prythian at large. Which is precisely where this is going. Ugh.

Those wings now flared wide. How many knew about those wings outside of Velaris or the Illyrian war-camps? Or had he wiped all memory of them from Prythian long before Amarantha?

You know, given the wings are basically the only sign of Rhys's mixed-race heritage, I can't help but read this as them being treated as something shameful/dangerous that needs to be hidden? Which is, ya know. Yikes. Especially since I'm sure there's situations where mixed-race people do feel the need to try and pass as one race or the other, for very legitimate reasons. But here, it's just being treated as yet another angst sparkle for Rhysand's hat. It's just so tragic that no one outside Velaris remembers his wings, you guys! Okay, but why? Why does he need to hide them? It's the fact that this is just dropped here as a matter of course and never explored beyond that that makes it sus. Like he should hide his wings because duh, of course being mixed-race should be a secret, and not that he should hide his wings because all the rest of Prythian is racist or something. We have no evidence that it would be received poorly. Except, ironically, by other members of his Inner Circle. They're the only ones we've seen be racist towards Illyrians so far.

.........you know what, actually. In the context of the whole "Night Court makes themselves look evil to everyone because Reasons but are actually secretly good" thing, I can't help but read it like..... you know in internet arguments, when one person accuses another of something bad (e.g. racism), and the accused person whips out the "well ackshually, I'm half black, so you're the racist" on them? Like that, except it's "Night Court evil!" "well ackshually, I'm half Illyrian, so that means you're just looking down on me!" I don't know. Maybe I'm just reading too much into it. This is the chapter for that, apparently. Because we're not done with over-analysing shit yet, oh no.

“It’s a shame,” I said, the words nearly gobbled up by the sound of the city music. “That others in Prythian don’t know. A shame that you let them think the worst.” He took a step back, his wings beating the air like mighty drums. “As long as the people who matter most know the truth, I don’t care about the rest. Get some sleep.”

Hoo boy. It's time, I think. Time to look at Rhysand's "redemption" arc here and compare it to perhaps one of the finest redemption arcs I've read in a work of fiction. I am talking, of course, about Jaime Lannister, from A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones:

No I haven't been dying to make this argument since I started snarking ACOTAR wdym

Also, hella spoilers for ASoIaF, if that bothers you

Now, firstly, why do I want to compare these two? Well, it's for this line here, really:

“That others in Prythian don’t know. A shame that you let them think the worst.”

Because that's what the book thinks Rhys is doing here. Letting others think the worst of him in order to achieve some other noble goal. And, that's basically what ended up happening to Jaime Lannister, though the everyone-hating-him part wasn't strictly a conscious decision he made.

There's a lot of similar beats to how their characters unfold. They are presented to us first as unquestionable villains: Rhysand is the Big Bad's lackey and tortures, drugs and assaults Feyre Under the Mountain; Jaime is one of the haughty Lannisters, and throws a small child out of a window when said child caught him banging his twin sister. Neither of them are presented as good people. And, initially, we have no insight into their side of the story - no POV from them, and no sympathetic characters close enough to them to hear their side of things.

Outside of the specific initial events that cement them as a Bad Guy, both Rhysand and Jaime also have an infamous reputation in their respective worlds. Rhysand is the evil High Lord of the Night Court, where all sorts of nasty unspecified things happen. It's so nasty, in fact, that the first book's villain based her own court off it. Jaime is the evil Kingslayer, man without honour, and honour is Very Important in Westeros. As a member of the Kingsguard, he literally had one job, and so far as the rest of Westeros is concerned he (literally) stabbed the king he was meant to protect in the back in order to benefit himself/his own family. The lowest of the low.

Then, later on in their stories, we get a chance to hear from these villains. Feyre goes to live at the Night Court, and in so doing, becomes closer to Rhys. She hears his side of the story, and starts to realise (or so the book intends) that things were not what they seemed. Jaime ends up getting his own POV chapters, and in addition, is travelling with the honourable Brienne of Tarth, his foil in every way. In being in his head, we learn a lot about how he works, what he did, why he did it. And in learning these things, we realise that things were not as they seemed.

But there is a very, very big difference in how this aspect of the "redemption" arcs was executed. And.... well I mean honestly, if we're being completely fair, the difference is that SJM is a mediocre writer at best while GRRM is kind of in a league of his own for character writing, but let's talk about the specifics of how they wrote it for a bit - specifically, how they leverage their character's backstory to inform their actions (both the Tragic action and their actions now), and how they go about "redeeming" the character to the audience (if, indeed, that's what they even do).

Let's look at Jaime first, just because, well, there's actually stuff to talk about here. Like I said, Jaime is very solidly introduced to us as a villain. And even in his POVs initially, we're not immediately given reason to think he's any different to how we initially perceived him - he doesn't go on massive internal monologues to infodump his Tragic Past to us, for instance (looking at you, Hunt). In fact, we don't really learn much new stuff about the specifics of his Kingslaying event at all, at first because he's internalised shit to buggery and gah, seriously, when I say GRRM is great at character stuff I really mean it. We mostly just see him reacting to things as and when they happen, as people do. And we start to get a picture of a very cynical, bitter man.

But, we don't get the Tragic Backstory yet, and certainly not all in one go. Because to have impact, it's got to be set up correctly. Enter Brienne of Tarth. As I mentioned earlier, she's Jaime's foil in every way - he's the dashing man with a rich family and prestigious title, the golden child, the very image of what a knight should be, save for that one teensy detail where he's got shit for honour because he literally murdered his king. Brienne is an ugly woman from a minor family, the awkward, unwanted child, who struggles to fit in with how a Westerosi woman should be. She's more comfortable as a knight, but obviously doesn't fit in there either, because sexism. But she herself is perhaps the truest knight in Westeros, honourable and idealistic almost to the point of naivete. And, when she and Jaime have to travel together, well, they obviously butt heads.

This is important for revealing layers of Jaime's character to us before the Big Reveal. In his clashes with Brienne, we learn about things like how he (currently) views honour. He mocks her for her idealism and her oaths, and thinks a lot about how the world isn't really like that. But we also learn why he thinks that way. We learn about some earlier parts of his past, when he was a boy who did still believe in knighthood. We learn about certain events that challenged his idealism, fractured it. We saw how he tried his best despite this, but slowly, the cynicism kept creeping in. We see him react, sometimes viscerally, to the challenges Brienne levels at him, particularly around keeping oaths. It's clear to us that this idea of "true knighthood" gets to him... even if he tries to pretend it doesn't.

It all comes to a head in the bath scene. Here, Jaime tells Brienne (and us) the truth of what happened. And it completely reframes the whole event for us. Essentially, the king was obsessed with wildfire (very dangerous and explode-y stuff), and had hidden a bunch around the city, as part of a highly secret (and not entirely sane) plot. When the king realised he was losing the war, he ordered his pyromancer to ignite it and burn the city, killing everyone inside. Jaime had a choice: break his oath and kill the king (and the pyromancers) to stop this, or let everyone in the city (which at the time included his father and the Lannister army) die.

"Tell me, if your precious Renly commanded you to kill your own father, and stand aside while thousands of men, women and children burned alive, would you have done it? Would you have kept your oath then?"

And damn, if it doesn't make everything about his character fall into place. Like, yeah. How could you be anything but bitter and cynical, when what you see as your sole true deed of knighthood is viewed by everyone else as the single greatest moral failing a man could commit? When you were judged guilty before you could even open your mouth to explain, because who would take your word over that of the honourable Eddard Stark? When all the atrocities you stood by and allowed before in the name of protecting the king meant nothing? What would any of these honourable men have done in your place?

And, very, very importantly. None of this is said to absolve Jaime of the heinous shit he's done. He still threw a small child off a building, with the express aim of killing said child. He still banged his twin sister and had incest babies with her. He's still, by most measures of the thing, kind of a dick. But what it does do is show us that the situation is more complex than we imagined. What it does do is make us question the idea of honour in the setting, question the characters we knew and trusted up until then. What would Ned Stark have said, if his Honour-Before-Reason mindset wasn't a factor? What would Brienne have done if she were there? Even she doesn't know. There's no easy answer, in Westeros at least (honour isn't such a Big Deal in our world). But we understand, deeply and truly, why Jaime did what he did, and why he's turned out the way he has because of it. It isn't a "redemption" arc so much as it's just revealing more of the backstory, and giving us the full picture. The "redemption" (inasmuch as anyone in a crapsack world like Westeros can find redemption) part comes later on as he riffs off Brienne and starts trying to find his honour again and the bear pit and gaaaahhhhh don't get me started on those two seriously I don't think I love any fictional dynamic more than these two it's incredible. But even just this revelation makes Jaime so, so much more sympathetic to us. It catapulted him from a character I didn't like very much to one of my absolute favourites.

This, this is how you character conflict.

Now, contrast Rhysand. Ugh. Similar to Jaime, Rhysand is very solidly painted as a villain in his early appearances - he leaves a head in Tamlin's fountain, comes to gloat and make demands and mind-rape Feyre just to mock Tamlin, tortures and drugs and assaults Feyre on a nightly basis Under the Mountain, is the only High Lord who needs to get something in return in order to aid in resurrecting Feyre. There's very, very little cause to think he's a good guy.

But there's a certain thing that kind of undermines the impact of Rhysand's "redemption" arc right from the get-go. And that's that the book simply cannot commit to making him a villain, in our eyes or in Feyre's. This is a very important difference with Jaime - every other POV we've had until then was thoroughly convinced of his villainy, and framed him accordingly. But for Rhysand? His very first scene is him saving Feyre from rape, for no benefit, immediate or later made apparent, to himself - straight away, we can surmise that he's more than he seems and redemption will be imminent. The surprise is ruined. This isn't helped by the tail end of the first book/opening of this book either, where Feyre starts talking about how he "wasn't quite an enemy" and such. The book is already tripping over itself to assure us that he isn't really a bad guy, all while we've gotten nothing from Rhysand himself. Nothing that we know about him has changed, we've learned nothing new, the book is just insisting he's not an enemy now for some reason.

Next, the build-up to the reveal, or lack thereof, in this case. We get an entire book (well. It's one book that was split in two bc it was too long, and we get the entire first half) of Jaime POVs before we get the Big Reveal. In that time, we're learning how he works, how he thinks, what pushes his buttons. In ACOMAF, however, we are... just shy of 30% of the way through the book. In that time, we haven't learned a whole lot new about Rhysand's perspective on things - we've mostly just watched him kidnap and manipulate Feyre, while her narration insists that he's actually not bad, despite a severe lack of evidence in the book to support this, apart from her assertions (which may or may not have been planted in her head by Rhysand himself, remember. We have seen evidence of that happeninng, especially in the previous book).

The Big Reveal, so far as the book is concerned, is this: Velaris exists, and has just been hidden for thousands of years, and Rhys decided to be Amarantha's servant to keep it hidden. But you know what's missing from all this? Why the fuck we're supposed to care that Rhys was willing to become a sex slave to save this one (allegedly) special city. We know why we're meant to care about Jaime's Kingslayer reveal. We've spent two and a half chonky books watching him be spat on for being the Kingslayer, watching every character and their dog call him honourless for it. In the third book, we learn how that's affected him, learned how he once believed in honour and such himself. We understand why the Reveal is important, because it's very, very obvious to us how that event got him to where he is today. How it fits into the evolution of his character, how he's desperately trying (and failing) to use it as a final weapon to cling onto his cynical worldview in the face of Brienne's idealism, at the same time as trying to use it to prove to her that he's not the honourless scum she thinks he is. The whole shebang.

But what do we know about Rhysand, at this point? Fuck all. Why is it important that he decided to be Amarantha's slave? What did it change or reveal about him as a character? Well, nothing, really. He was a certain way before that (asshole that the book wants us to think is a good guy on dubious grounds), and he's the same after it. Does it change how we perceive the title of "Amarantha's whore?" Again, not really. Before, we understood it to mean that he was the bad guy's sex slave; now, we understand it to mean that he made himself the bad guy's sex slave so she maybe wouldn't go digging around about Velaris. Was Velaris actually in danger? Who knows. Rhys says it was, but it had also remained hidden for thousands of years before that, and the bad guy didn't even know it existed. It's not like she'd hidden bombs under it and was ordering them to be exploded right in front of him or something. It's a hypothetical, maybe-one-day danger, maybe, if the bad guy can find the city that has been hidden for thousands of years, or even realises there's a city to look for in the first place. What are the stakes? Jaime's are clear - thousands and thousands of lives, or his honour. Rhysand's are... less so. What are the stakes? The book wants you to think it's Velaris, but remember, Amarantha had no idea that Velaris existed. The stakes are "Amarantha might potentially be motivated to search for Rhys's loved ones if she feels the need to, and they are in Velaris" and the cost of mitigating this stake is "literally the entire rest of the Night Court (and Prythian) being under her sway, and Rhysand is a sex slave."

And unlike Jaime's honour, as I said earlier, the whole "Rhysand is a sex slave" thing is never really explored. We learn, very thoroughly, and from many different perspectives, what the idea of honour means to Jaime. How he sees it, how everyone else in his world sees it, how much it matters to different people. But what do we do with Rhys's sex slavery? What does it mean, to him, to Prythian? What does sex slavery mean in general in this world? And, sadly, the answer is "not much." We presume it's bad because it's bad in our world, but the book says very, very little about the whole thing. It's cheap pity. That's all it is. The situation is no more or less complex than that, and the book is utterly uninterested in changing this.

So, in conclusion. Rhysand does not have a redemption arc. The book thinks he does, but he doesn't. Nothing about his Big Reveal changes anything about his character - before it, we understand him to be evil-but-totally-acutally-not-so-bad (allegedly), and after it, we understand more or less the same. His Reveal exists just to be revealed. It isn't explored. The ideas it brings aren't played with. It doesn't give us an insight into him or the world he lives in. It isn't a smaller piece of the larger puzzle of his character, that explains why he is how he is now. His attitudes and actions after the event are no different to how they were before, or even during it. It's just used to score him cheap pity points so we can brush all the rest of the shit he's done under the rug. That's it. It's not an arc - it's an excuse.

Anyway, thank you for coming to my ted talk.

I wish I could say that was the end of the post, but we're barely halfway through this chapter. It just happened to hit two of my biggest rant buttons already. Specifically, ones that I'd been sitting on since I started snarking this series. Ah, well.

Anyway, we scene break into Feyre having a nightmare about Amarantha. And this nightmare is just a pretext for another scene break where Rhys wakes her up, so we can show that he's so much Better than Tamlin because of it.

“FEYRE.” The voice was at once the night and the dawn and the stars and the earth, and every inch of my body calmed at the primal dominance in it.

God, shut the actual fuck up. I reread some GRRM for my above rant, you're going to have to write a hell of a lot better than that if you want me to believe shit.

Anyway, yes, Rhysand wakes her up, and it seems Feyre summoned flame claws in her sleep and shredded the bedsheets. She runs to the toilet and throws up, because there is exactly one way to respond to distress in this book. But, it's okay! Rhysand is there to hold back her hair!

“Breathe,” Rhys said. “Imagine them winking out like candles, one by one.”

......imagine what winking out like candles, Rhys? She's upchucking in the toilet atm.

Rhys decides that now is the perfect time to say that he sometimes imagines if it was Cassian or Azriel in his place with Amarantha, and how awful he'd feel if he failed them like that.

His fingers were gentle, but firm where he’d fisted them in my hair. “You never failed them,” I rasped. “I did … horrible things to ensure that.” Those violet eyes near-glowed in the dim light. “So did I.” My sweat clung like blood—the blood of those two faeries—

Yeahh, I feel like they're not quite the same thing, Feyre. Killing two faeries to save your love and his whole court =/= condemning two-thirds of your court and all the rest of Prythian on the off-chance that the bad guy might find your special city no one's found for thousands of years. Remember, he said he didn't have enough power to fight Amarantha because he used it to mind-control everyone who knew about Velaris for decades. That was a choice he made, to spend his power that way, knowing what the consequences for everyone else would be.

Anyway, she goes back to bed, wakes up later, and we time skip to... fucking somewhere, I guess. A grassy hill somewhere. Rhys is with her, of course.

...clothed in what I could only assume were Illyrian fighting leathers, based on what Cassian and Azriel had worn the night before.

Yes, people often wear their fighting clothes to dinner, after all. Perfectly natural assumption. And she didn't even need to make it, she could have just asked what the clothes were and been told.

If his attire hadn’t told me enough about what we might be facing today—if my own, similar attire hadn’t told me enough—

Because Rhysand is Better than Tamlin, and lets Feyre wear fighting clothes and go to dangerous places even though she's had 0 training yet, and is still in a very shaky state of mind.

Apparently, Rhys was writing a request to visit the Summer Court before, and it distracted Feyre so much (for a whole hour!) that she didn't think to ask wtf they're doing now. I don't even know. His handwriting is just that pretty, I guess.

Not that Rhys had really bothered explaining why he wanted to visit the Summer Court beyond “improving diplomatic relations.”

When Tamlin doesn't explain stuff, he's the devil. But it's fine when Rhys does. Because *mumble mumble* uhhh idk he's a feminist and Always Feyre's Choice, or something.

Feyre asks where they are.

“On an island in the heart of the Western Isles,” Rhysand said, staring up at the mammoth mountain. “And that,” he said, pointing to it, “is the Prison.” There was nothing—no one around. “I don’t see anything.”

Not the honking great mountain Rhys is pointing at, Feyre? Are you blind?

Anyway, yes, this is the Prison, and it's in the mountain.

Go inside—inside the stone, under another mountain—

Hmm, yes, this does seem like a bit of an oversight on Rhys's part, given that 99% of Feyre's trauma took place Under a Mountain. Why did he insist on her coming here, then? This is why I can't take it seriously when the book tries to have "cute" scenes where he "helps" her with her trauma, like the nightmare-waking scene just before - it turns around and does shit like this right after, and I just cannot believe that Rhysand actually gives a fuck about not traumatising her further. He clearly doesn't. He didn't even warn her they'd be going Under a Mountain until they were there already, so she couldn't make an informed decision about whether she actually wanted to go in the first place. Manipulative in the extreme. Yes, even if he concedes when she says she wants to go back. It doesn't change the fact that he deliberately deprived her of the key information she needed to make her choice until after they'd gotten there already. Like he's hoping for sunk cost/inertia to get what he wants even though he knows she'd have said no if she knew the whole picture from the start.

I didn’t move. “I—” The word lodged in my throat. Go under another mountain— “It helps the panic,” he said quietly, “to remind myself that I got out. That we all got out.”

Great. Glad that works for you, Rhys. Is there a reason you decided to see if it'd work for Feyre without even asking her first? And no, him asking at dinner if she wanted to go to the Prison doesn't count. He didn't tell her it would be mountain trauma therapy. That's kind of an important omission.

[R]“We got out. And it might happen again if we don’t go inside.”

Sure. Maybe. But there's no real reason that Feyre has to go there, specifically. Only the supposition that maybe the prisoners in there will agree to talk to her because she's the uberspecial protagonist, and we need some pretext to take the POV camera with her.

But, Feyre can't do it, and Rhys takes her back to Velaris, and then the chapter ends. Finally. It really wasn't that long, I swear, I was just ranting more than usual.