Some not fully formed thoughts about reading, canon, characters, and my relationship to all of these things...
The ACOTAR series is not yet complete. So many elements of the remainder of the story, for readers, are at present moving targets. Before ACOSF, this was also true of the how of Nessian's coming together, which in many ways is a great case study in the following stuff I'm gonna try to describe.
The fandom at its core is people who love this series for a variety of reasons coming together and interacting in relation to the series. There are moments in the fandom when the moving target-ness of the remainder of the series is the cause of a deep kind of readerly anxiety. I've experienced it myself (just before ACOSF came out I was a feral wreck), so I'm describing it from both my own experience of it and my observation of it around me in the fandom.
But then there are other times I step back, and think about how exciting and generative it is that the series isn't finished yet.
As a reader, I have a deep love for Sarah J. Maas, if only because the characters and stories she has created are helping me heal from a lot of trauma in my real life. (For me, the main character I'm referring to is Nesta.) I also trust her as a storyteller, and do believe she knows her own characters enough to tell their stories to us.
But, I am also a semi-inhabitant of the Death of the Author camp when it comes to how readers experience stories. What comes next in canon does not threaten my experience of the characters so far, both in canon and outside of it in the fandom (fic, art, metas, memes, all of it).
It's a shifting of perspective on what a story is, which is more than just the words on the published page (see also reader-response criticism, one of the most empowering things you may encounter as a reader and lover of stories), a shift I know I'm not explaining well. And because of this shift, I can freely enjoy the rest of the books in this series no matter the decisions SJM makes for the characters I have grown to love, because I'm not putting on SJM the responsibility to continue to construct the versions of these characters in my own head and heart that have grown to mean so much to me. In other words, I'm not giving canon the power to override the reasons I have connected to these characters in the first place. Does that make sense?
And furthermore, because of this, I can lean into, geek out, and totally enjoy the lull between canon books and all the discussion and content the fandom is generating in the space created by the length of time between canon books. And it also means I can enjoy canon itself, in the future, in the same way, because canon is at the end of the day just a new pile of content about my faves.
I have more thoughts I could add, about how given the above way I interact with this series and these characters, what my process of reading canon is like, and the way I use it to kind of test what SJM gives us about my favorite characters against my own construction of them in my head and heart, and how yes I do want them to integrate (because, again, I trust SJM to tell her characters' stories so I want to understand why they act and think as they do in canon because I think trying to determine that is a worthwhile activity, though not everyone will agree with that sentiment and that's totally valid), but I also don't force it (looking at you, Amren 😑), and the kind of reader/rereader I am because of all of this, but this is already long so I'll stop here for now.
