For anyone that’s interested, here’s my goodreads review of ACOSF. I made this the day after reading it, so my thoughts and opinions have been further cemented, but unfortunately I ran out of space to write anymore to it with evidence. Maybe I’ll write a longer review here ♀️ (depends if I can be bothered wasting more energy and head space on acotar )
See, I hated ACOSF because, to me, it wasn’t a story of healing - it was a story of a woman who is slowly brainwashed by her abusers into thinking that she is actually the abuser. She is controlled at the beginning, straight up threatened and manipulated, then slowly her thoughts are twisted into thinking that these people controlling her life know best. Instead of breaking free of these people - she falls further under their control. And she feels happy about it, and grateful to these people, because she believes no one else will accept her. It’s classic abusive tactics. And all of them do that (maybe with the exception of Feyre but Rhys and Armen definitely and in many cases Cassian (which breaks my nessian loving heart)). Don’t believe me, I can pull up receipts (I went through and pulled out every example in the text and the other acotar books) ♀️
i mean this has been said before but let us just revisit. cause it is honestly so weird how s//jm thinks that the only way for women to heal from their traumas is through learning to fight…. like there was honestly NOTHING wrong with the library that was only for victims of sa (in fact it was one of the few aspects of s//jm’s books i actually liked….until f//eysand had sex there, why did that happen….)
instead of keeping the library a sanctuary where victims of sa can just be (exist)… she had nesta doing weird ass shit trying to push, again sa victims, wayyy out of their comfort levels and train with men who…. wait for it….. have canonically sexually harassed / assaulted (??? i can’t remember) women in the books.
- same thing with t0g, like there is honestly nothing wrong with healing through training and whatnot, but s//jm literally thinks the only way to heal is through picking up a sword like PLEASE give it a rest
p.s. — sorry for the bad wording and grammar, i suck at english :/
nesta loosing her powers was so predictable. i knew sjm was gunna do that shit because she did it with aelin too. she literally couldn’t have nesta be more powerful than rhys because that would undermine the very basis of his characterisation and permently ruin the inner circle’s social and political heiracy
it also suggests there’s some part of nesta that inherently bad and less worthy of the power that rhys holds. shes too weak not to do something bad with it meanwhile rhys isn’t. but whtever
honestly, at this point, i can see why humans hate fae so much - like ignoring the obvious reasons like enslavement, you know, the really fucked up stuff.
theyre all up their own asses and quite literally do see humans as inferior. apart from lucien, and i can imagine tarquin too. the former of which is seen as ~untrustworthy~ because he seemingly treats two humans as his equals…
and the constant talk of how weak and pathetic the human lands are. LIKE yes because of you bitches! (and admittedly SJM’s awful world building. i refuse to believe no central human power or rivaling human powers would have taken control of the land in 500 years).
the worst is arguably feyre who was human but very quickly gets a fae superiority complex. like i actually sympathised so hard with nesta when feyre was talking about how shitty human food tastes while in nestas home. like it was so patronisinglike aw my silly human sisters with their shitty food. so sad that they dont know any better.
