cozisaidso:

The Night Court is a hotbed of cronyism and definitely to its detriment. Cassian has been a “general” for hundreds of years and yet remains admittedly inept at political manoeuvring and socialising with anyone outside of his family; Azriel is repeatedly fed bad information and is so terrible at spying that he resorts to butchering people for information instead, and is extraordinarily racist against the Illyrians; Mor can’t interact with anyone from the Court of Nightmares without having PTSD flashbacks, and yet it’s seen as appropriate for keep sending her there as an ambassador; Feyre is 22, clueless of Prythian’s history, totally reliant on Rhys for biased information about their political neighbours, and after learning how to write 1 year ago I imagine her written communication is abysmal—I don’t even want to know how she manages anything related to maths—and yet “her word is law”; and Amren repeatedly displays a desire to blow up entire cities or engage in conquest and that’s just tolerated.

All of these lawmakers, these all-powerful members of his political Inner Circle, wrestle daily with unresolved trauma. Rhys does not have a single emotionally healthy person in charge. And when all of this untreated mental turmoil comes out as some atrocity or violation of the rights of others, it’s just ~shrugs~. Their own people, and in fact a lot of other people across Prythian, are accepted as collateral for their squabbles with other rulers, or as meaningless casualties of their temper tantrums. Because of the positions of power they hold, their trauma becomes everyone else’s problem, with 0 accountability—and boy do they make the most out of that. Unreal that they haven’t been invaded or overthrown at this point.

Rhys encourages the Velaris locals to ostracise the citizens of the Court of Nightmares—to refuse them goods and services, as a punishment because he dislikes their leader, as if this isn’t a powder keg of social unrest waiting to blow. He steals from and attacks their neighbours with his daemati powers, not to mention openly orchestrating a plot to destabilise a neighbour. He allows (his idea or no, it happened on his watch) low-income housing to be destroyed in Velaris just to make a point to his sister-in-law. He cooks up this image of himself as a villain for 500 years and then expects his contemporaries to just blithely believe him when he says “oh i’m a good guy actually”. He lies through his teeth about everything, even to his wife, and rather than make any attempt to bring Keir’s army onside, he instead actively makes personal enemies of the Court of Nightmares’ leaders and civilians. The law against wing-clipping in Illyria is not enforced (why was Emerie’s father not prosecuted? How can Rhys be powerless to stop the men clipping the women’s wings, yet maintain enough control over the Darkbringer army, even when the CoN locals actively hate him, to send them out to fight on his behalf? He is the most powerful High Lord in history, and yet the wing-clipping is completely beyond him?) and he hoards an obscene amount of wealth, far too much for it to be believable that he is not economically exploiting his people outside of Velaris. In order for one person to be that rich, other people have to be poor.

It’s kind of shocking that Velaris hasn’t yet been besieged. Although it’s explicitly stated that the Illyrians are disenfranchised enough to want to rebel—only they are terrorised out of doing so by threats from Cassian.

Rhys is an awful politician. Truly awful. Dire. 

lucyspenvensie:

Azriel thinking he should and is entitled to be Elain’s mate because her sisters are his brothers mates and he has feelings for her, while Elain has been talking about not wanting a mating bond in the first place for a long time, should already show that he is not thinking about what she wants whatsoever, and that makes me furious.

people are really out here defending s/jm and saying illyria doesn’t make a/cotar a misogynistic series when like??? it does???

there is constant and predominant misogyny in illyrian culture. the men view the women as objects to possess, servants for their households, and breeding stock. the men are “warriors” and “manly men” while the women are “mothers” and “cooks & cleaners”. the women literally get their wings clipped off to prevent them from fleeing illyria and the men that control their entire lives.

no, i’m not saying that having a misogynistic culture in your book makes the book itself misogynistic, but i am saying that what defines it as misogynistic or not is how you treat the misogyny within it.

if you write a book featuring misogynistic views or characters but actively condemn/combat it in the narrative, then that’s not considered misogynistic writing.

s/jm, however, does not do this with illyria. illyria is characterized solely as a “traditional” and “old view-y” country (in a bad way), and it is widely known that women are treated like dogshit.

r/hysie attempts to “fix things” by uhh forcing them to train (which most of them don’t even want to do) and a few other insignificant things that i can’t even remember, but these attempts are literally the most half-assed things i’ve ever witnessed.

so you’re telling me this man can become a tyrant’s slave to save his kingdom, fight an entire war, sacrifice himself at the end of it, and have a whole resurrection like he’s the second coming of christ, but he can’t really do anything to put an end to the sexism in his homeland? where was that energy when he was defending velaris? are the women of illyria not important enough to him to take more action the way he did with the priestesses that live in his library? didn’t he witness firsthand how the illyrians treated his mother? isn’t he supposed to be our resident feminist king? isn’t he also the self-proclaimed Most Powerful High Lord In Prythian™️? are you telling me that teaching some bitchy ass men a lesson on how to respect women is out of his jurisdiction? (then again, r/hysie isn’t exactly the best role model for respecting women, so ig it makes sense. it would be hypocritical of him to tell other men not to control the women in their lives when he’s out here controlling the women in his life everyday).

what’s worse is that the narrative just accepts that illyria and it’s deeply rooted misogynistic culture is a lost cause. r/hys, c/assian & a/zriel constantly comment on how illyrians are so rigid in their ways that there’s nothing they can do at this point, and the narrative agrees with them, forming the view that while they can control virtually everything else in prythian, illyria is, for reasons unbeknownst to any of us, an outlier.

and that’s such lazy fucking writing. it’s so lazy that they can force the other courts to do their bidding when it benefits them, that they can make other high lords and characters inferior to them when they want to, but they give up so easily on their own court and people. s/jm very clearly does not care enough to push her characters to do whatever they must to combat this misogyny, yet she’s out here praising them as the most feminist, morally superior, woke sons of bitches around.

and it’s also funny because she utilizes the illyrians as a) a source of trauma for r/hys & co. to make them “broody and deep and complex”, and b) as foil characters to prove that her fav bat boys are “good men”. the illyrians are all “cruel, bloodthirsty brutes” but the bat boys “worked so hard to ignore how they were raised and to be kinder and softer and ✨not like other bats✨” so we all must praise and adore them because they’re so great.

ma’am, when you’re trying to make a character look good, comparing them to characters that essentially have no positive traits or characterization is like comparing a teenager that shoplifted a pack of gum to a serial killer. it’s not fair to the other characters that they exist solely to make the main characters look “better”. well look what they could have been! how terrible, right? but see, they’re not like that because deep down they have hearts of gold that these guys don’t! they don’t even have hearts!

and isn’t it so knee-slapping hilarious that r/hysie is all iT’s yOuR cHoiCe until it’s actually his choice, or until he doesn’t care enough about you to give you a choice?

ah yes, our feminist king, choosing to sit on his ass and twiddle his thumbs all day while the women in his homeland are suffering the way his mother did and the men are being raised to learn and internalize the backwards views spread throughout their culture.

so all in all, a/cotar is a misogynistic series because it features a culture that actively oppresses women but does nothing about it and even normalizes it to the point where people are just like “yup, that’s illyria, the men are feral animals and the women are chattel. oh well ‍♀️”. don’t stand there and tell me this isn’t misogyny when the author herself wholeheartedly describes it as just that, then refuses to do anything about it.

(for my thoughts on the illyrians’ ethnic ambiguity see here)

ACOSF BONUS CHAPTER [SPOILERS]

IDK HOW Y'ALL DIDN’T FIND IT SO GROSS THAT AZRIEL REGIFTED ELAIN’S NECKLACE TO GWYN. I HOPE GWYN PULLS A CASSIAN AND TOSSES THAT BITCH IN THE SIDRA (to clarify, she would be tossing the necklace) (to clarify again, i wouldn’t mind if she tossed az’s dusty ass in too).