A Court of Jealousy and Haters: ACOTAR chapter 24 or “A Chapter of Night Court and Racism”

I’m shamelessly plugging my new Fantasy Romance serial in the intro to an unrelated post. Join the new Patreon tier or my Ream page , or read it on Kindle Vella.

As promised, I’m importing the A Court of Thorns and Roses recaps here from Patreon. These were originally written beginning in August of 2020, so there will be references to upcoming or seasonal events that won’t fit with our current timeline. I am not a time traveler and you’ll never be able to prove that I am. I will also include editors notes like this every now and then as we go, mostly to amuse myself but to give re-read value to those who’ve already been on this awful, awful journey with me.

CW: Racism, Slavery

As someone who has written their fair share of racist fantasy tropes, I think I’m uniquely positioned to recognize them in the work of others. And this shit is looking real, real familiar to me.

Strap the fuck in.

First of all:

It wasn’t the dawn that awoke me, but rather a buzzing noise.

Yes, we’re starting another chapter off with Feyre waking up, having her breakfast, and taking a bath. Because none of us are intelligent enough to assume that she’s eating or bathing or waking unless it’s explicitly mentioned.

She’s expecting Alis but instead there’s a fairy “with skin made from tree bark” who brought breakfast.

Her bird mask was familiar. But I would have remembered a faerie with skin like that. Would have painted it already.

Look, Feyre would have remembered if she saw brown skin before because if there’s one thing they don’t have in Prythian, it’s anybody darker than a sourdough starter. ed.—Maas eventually retconned several characters in this series as being men of color; fans insist that they have been described so throughout the series. One of these characters is the pale man she met at Calanmai. The other is Lucien, described as “tan,” the same way the canonically white characters are described as “tan.” I pointed this out to a Maas fan on Facebook; her response was that the author may not have ever encountered BIPOC people in real life (and there was no way we could prove that she had) and therefore felt uncomfortable writing “diversely.”

The author was born and raised in New York City. The fandom is complicit in SJM’s racism.

Two things to note about the painting comment: This is the first time I can remember that Feyre has seen something in Prythian and thought she would be able to paint it. And it just so happens to be brown skin. Usually, she feels she can’t paint things because they’re so beautiful. But brown skin? No problem.

Why would that be, ma’am? Care to comment?

Also, the way it’s phrased and the fact that the skin is wood made me briefly think she meant she would have literally painted on the fairy.

The thing is, the treebark-skinned fairy is Alis.

It was impossible. The Alis I knew was fair and plump and looked like a High Fae.

The Alis I knew was white!

Then Feyre makes the connection that all the fairies she’s seen so far have been glamoured and she’s now seeing them the way they truly look.

Because I’d been a cowering human, that’s why. Because Tamlin knew I would have locked myself in this room and never come out if I’d seen them all for their true selves.

That’s a pretty loaded statement, Feyre. Tamlin knew that if you saw people who looked different from you, you’d freak out? I mean, he was taking you into the fairy world, so it’s not like you weren’t expecting to see fairies.

And if he meant to protect her from freaking out about creatures…why did he show up at her house in full-on beast form?

Also: if he knew this about her, why didn’t he remove the glamour before Calanmai, when he wanted her to be scared enough to stay in her room? Without the glamour, maybe she would have been too freaked out by the creatures to leave the house.

Things only got worse when I made my way downstairs to find the High Lord.

How did things get worse, you ask? Well, I’ll tell you, dear Patron: she can suddenly see that there are more fairies in the castle than she previously believed, and not all of them look like Tamlin and Lucien.

I was almost shaking by the time I reached the dining room. Lucien, mercifully, appeared like Lucien. I didn’t ask whether that was because Tamlin had informed him to put up a better glamour or because he didn’t bother trying to be something he wasn’t.

Like present in the story?

I’d almost yelped when I looked out my bedroom window and spotted all the faeries in the garden. Many of them–all with insect masks–pruned the hedges and tended the flowers. Those faeries had been the strangest of all, with their iridescent, buzzing wings sprouting from their backs. And, of course, then there was the green-and-brown skin, and their unnaturally long limbs, and—

DARLING COME QUICKLY THE HELP IS SPOILING MY VIEW WITH THEIR DARK SKIN CALL THE SERVICE I WANT THEM FIRED.

I’m sorry, it’s just so weird to me that she wrote this like, “AND, OF COURSE,” before mentioning their skin color. like, OF COURSE the thing that’s freaky about them is their green and brown skin. Now, to be fair, if she’d said pink and purple or translucent, I wouldn’t think anything about it, but now we’re at two different mentions of brown skin freaking out the heroine. And the idea that here’s this blonde white lady “almost shaking” as she realizes there are brown-skinned people around is just hilariously bad. Just so, so bad.

Tamlin tells Feyre that all these fairies have been around the whole time, she just couldn’t see them. Which makes Feyre all freaked out because that meant they saw her trying to escape the night the puca was there.

I thought I’d been so stealthy. Meanwhile, I’d been tiptoeing past faeries who had probably laughed their heads off at the blind human following an illusion.

I read that sentence and immediately followed it with a mental clip of Janis from Mean Girls saying “unfriendly Black hotties.”

“But I could see the naga–and the puca, and the Suriel. And–and that faerie whose wings were … ripped off,” I said, wincing inwardly. “Why didn’t the glamour apply to them?”

Editor: Why could Feyre see some of the fairies and not the other ones?

Maas, probably: Because it would be detrimental to the story and I don’t want to have to scroll up in my Word document.

“They’re not members of my court,” Tamlin said, “so my glamour didn’t keep a hold on them. […]”

A likely story.

“I see,” I lied, not quite seeing at all.

Look, it’s very, very simple: if the author needs you to see a fairy, you see a fairy. If you don’t, Tamlin deus ex machinas them away.

Lucien is sitting there at the dining room table picking his nails with a dagger. It’s a good thing Feyre’s really at second breakfast since she always eats in her room. Someone cleaning their nails where I eat would make me lose my appetite.

Maybe they’re finished eating and it’s not rude. Maybe Lucien and Tamlin just sit quietly in the dining room and wait for Feyre to make an appearance. This and “the border” seem to be the only places these dudes go.

Anyway, Feyre mentions that she hasn’t seen Lucien around much, which of course prompts Lucien to make a remark about her kissing Tamlin and…leave.

I imagine Lucien’s daily schedule goes something like “sit quietly in the dining room, existing only to be present every time Feyre enters the room. Make a shitty remark to Feyre. Cease existing until the narrative demands my presence again.”

Feyre asks Tamlin if she’d see the Attor if it came back.

“You said it didn’t see me at that time, and it certainly doesn’t seem like a member of your court,” I ventured. “Why?”

Editor: Why couldn’t the Attor sense her presence if Tamlin’s spells don’t work on fairies from outside his court?

“Because I threw a glamour over you when we entered the garden,” he said simply. The Attor couldn’t see, hear, or smell you.”

Maas, probably: Because magic. Stop questioning my deftly woven plot.

Hey, guess what I did? I went back to that scene in the garden, where Tamlin allegedly “threw a glamour over” her.

You know what didn’t happen?

She didn’t “taste the metallic tang of magic” or whatever she always did when a spell happened before that.

BUT THIS IS ALL VERY PLANNED OUT AND TIGHTLY WRITTEN YOUS ALL. MASTERFUL.

Tamlin tells Feyre that he’s worked overtime trying to keep other creatures in Prythian from seeing her, but the blight is getting worse and soon they’re gonna be overrun with monsters he can’t do anything about. He tells her that if she sees anybody looking at her funny, to let him know.

This was for my own safety, not his amusement.

I assume you’ll be ignoring him, then?

He didn’t want me hurt–he didn’t want to punish them for hurting me. even if the naga hadn’t been part of his court, had it hurt him to kill them?

No, killing is super cool and barely bothers anyone. You know, like how it barely skimmed your fucking conscience when you learned that you murdered Tamlin’s friend?

Tamlin tells Feyre that she’ll be safe in his territory. Which has not been the case at all, so far. She’s almost died like six times and all of those incidents happened in your territory. But why not? We’ll go with Feyre being safe and just hope that’s not true because I wish nothing but the worst for her.

Since she’s falling in love with him, Feyre is like, oh, it’s not my safety I worry about and then laments the fact that he won’t let her help with the blight. Which, if you will recall, is a problem in Prythian related to magic and which magic users can’t even figure out, but Feyre would be able to fix it no problem, I’m sure.

There’s a section break and:

The next morning, I found a head in the garden.

Wait. Hang on. Did you wake up? Did you take a bath? Did Alis bring you breakfast? I’m all confused now because I did not see these actions take place explicitly on the page. How did you even get to the garden? Are there Sparknotes for this?! Never since House of Leaves has a book so flummoxed and perturbed me with its inaccessible, incomprehensible events.

That line about the head would have been an incredible chapter opening. Much better than “I woke up and took a bath and had a conversation with a servant that meant absolutely nothing and went nowhere but you have to throw in a Bechdel test so White Feminists will rave about your book online.”

Somebody has straight-up previously on Hannibaled a fairy’s head onto the beak of a heron statue.

The stone was soaked in enough blood to suggest that the head had been fresh when someone had impaled it on the heron’s upraised bill.

 More CSI: Prythian going on here.

Feyre had planned to paint in the garden but sudden head obviously unsettles her and she drops all her stuff.

I didn’t know where I went as I stared at that still-screaming head, the brown eyes bulging, the teeth broken and bloody.

I would have gone with “silently screaming head” because, you know, magic and stuff could very easily mean the head is outright screaming. In which case, finding it wouldn’t be such a startling surprise, maybe? ed.—I still occasionally think of this scene and question whether I would rather find a screaming head, so the sound would alert me to spooky goings-on and I wouldn’t be caught by surprise, or just a regular head, which would be unsettling and sudden but not otherworldly. I still haven’t decided.

Tamlin is right behind her, because that’s what Tamlin does. He just randomly appears whenever Feyre runs into some plot.

Neither Tamlin nor Lucien recognize the fairy, at least, and Lucien gets closer to investigate.

“They branded him behind the ear with a sigil,” Lucien said, swearing. “A mountain with three stars—”

NXIM?

“Night Court,” Tamlin said too quietly.

Oh, that’s much funnier.

If you’re not a million years old, you might be unaware that there was once upon a time a show called Night Court, it was beloved, and it had very distinctive theme music. And every time I see the words “night” and “court” anywhere near each other, I think about John Larroquette.

Is he Canadian? I bet he’s Canadian. ed.—He’s not Canadian.

Feyre is all like, why would someone leave a head in your garden? and Tamlin goes:

“The Night Court does what it wants,” Tamlin said. “They live by their own codes, their own corrupt morals.”

How dare you speak ill of wise-acre Mel Torme aficionado and legendary close-up magician the Honorable Judge Harry Stone!

That’s a little tv humor from the ’80s kids for you, folks.

But what a weird answer, huh? Like, why did these people leave a decapitated head in your fountain? IDK, they do what they want. Cool, that’s a very normal thing to say.

I don’t want to make it seem like Lucien and Tamlin don’t care about this development. They do, and Lucien in particular doesn’t like the Night Court. He calls them sadists and says they probably left the head on the fountain to be funny.

And then he takes the head down and there is some amazing description:

[…] I cringed at the thick, wet sounds of flesh and bone on stone as he yanked the head off.

Did you hear that? I heard it. And somehow, felt the resistance of it pulling off the heron’s beak.

Lucien’s theory is that the head was left on the fountain to prove that not only could the Night Court get onto the property, that close to the house, but then pull off killing somebody close enough to get this huge amount of blood everywhere.

But like…

What about all the fairy gardeners? Why didn’t they find the head? And how did nobody see the attack? Just pages ago, we learned that those garden fairies are present even at night. It’s how they would have seen Feyre trying to sneak out to the puca thing.

I guess Lucien isn’t the only fairy that conveniently vanishes when the story calls for it.

Tamlin tells Feyre:

“You’re still safe here. This was just their idea of a prank.”

And she’s like, does this have anything to do with the blight?

“Only in that they know the blight is again awakening—and want us to know they’re circling the Spring Court like vultures, should our wards fall further.”

Sarah. Either this head is a warning/message or a prank. You can’t have the same character who is brushing off the idea that they’re in danger then announcing that these people want to attack them.

This would have been a good place to get out of Feyre’s head a little and let us see Lucien and Tamlin talk it out, with Lucien arguing for his stance that it’s a message and Tamlin believing that it was just a prank. We could have seen more of their relationship and gotten more of Lucien’s character, since he’s either going to end up the love interest or the villain by the end of this thing.

There’s gonna be a twist coming, I can feel it. But no spoilers.

There’s no reason a first-person POV character can’t sit back and observe a conversation without participating in it. In this book, we could have used a lot more of that. Instead, every single time something comes up that would expand on characterization or worldbuilding, Feyre just stands there and asks questions so people explain everything directly to her, and they only ever talk about these things in terms of whether or not the events will impact her. It’s almost like nobody in the book is allowed to interact with other characters when Feyre is in the scene. She is the conduit through with all must flow.

That’s not realistic in terms of how life goes in general. There are times when we’re not the center of the universe and we have to stand by awkwardly while other people reveal who they are through actions that don’t directly involve us.

I didn’t have the heart to say that their masks made it fairly clear that nothing could be done against the blight.

I don’t remember whether or not the blight was the cause of the masks in the first place, but either way “didn’t have the heart” is a strange way to describe not actively insulting someone.

Lucien makes a remark about hoping the blight will take care of the Night Court (’80s sax in the distance), too, and Tamlin tells him to get rid of the head. Feyre has her own clean-up to do, as her painting supplies are all over the ground. Tamlin kneels down like he’s gonna help her, but he holds her hands instead.

“You’re still safe,” he said again. The Suriel’s command echoed through my mind. Stay with the High Lord, human. You will be safe.

Yeah, but safety makes for a fucking boring fantasy adventure story, doesn’t it? But my bets are still on the “high lord” in question being Lucien, based on all the little hints tossed in so far about his background.

My knees shook as I rose. Faerie politics, faerie courts … “Their idea of jokes must have been even more horrible when we were enslaved to you all.” They must have tortured us whenever they liked—must have done such unspeakable, awful things to their human pets.

Okay, let me pick this apart a little.

It took me a long time, as a white American person, to understand that even though slavery existed in other parts of the world throughout history and that yes, even some white people were slaves in various times and cultures (not your Irish-American great-grandfather so keep that ahistorical nonsense outta here), the enslavement of Black people in my country is far too recent for me to be playing with the concept of slavery in fiction. Maybe not everyone feels that way, but it’s a personal line that caused me to toss out a horror novel I’d written and set in ancient Rome.

Regardless of personal lines, it’s still super weird to write a fantasy novel in which:

there do not appear to be any Black peoplethere are brown-skinned people the heroine finds unsettlingthe heroine is a white womanand she’s carrying generational trauma about enslavement

I can’t possibly be the first blogger to notice how uncomfortable that is.

It’s also very strange that this woman who grew up in a culture with a legacy of enslavement is only just now thinking about what slavery would have meant for the people who were enslaved.

Especially since I’m pretty sure she already mentioned this in one of the early chapters. But Maas doesn’t scroll up and she’s not gonna start.

It’s also very weird to be writing a book in which the person from the enslaved race is falling in love with an enslaver and that dynamic is not only playing out between two white characters but is only playing out to be waved away:

A shadow flickered in his eyes. “Some days, I’m very glad I was still a child when my father sent his slaves south of the wall. What I witnessed then was bad enough.”

Some days you’re glad slavery ended? Other days, you kinda miss it? Why just “some days” and why didn’t an editor catch that?

I did not think five centuries would be enough to cleanse the stain of the horrors that my people had endured. I should have let it go—should have, but couldn’t.

Here is our white heroine, written by our white American author, using the same metaphor frequently employed to describe slavery in the U.S., and basically saying that the heroine knows better than to hold the enslavers accountable even in a simple conversation because it’s not polite.

IDK, maybe it was all the stuff about how brown skin is bizarre earlier in the chapter that’s making me react this way to this section but it certainly reads like Feyre knows that it’s good manners to forgive and forget slavery.

“Do you remember if they were happy to leave?”

Yeah, no, this is becoming increasingly uncomfortable.

“Yes. Yet they had never known freedom, or known the seasons as you do. They didn’t know what to do in the mortal world. But yes—most of them were very, very happy to leave.”

Wow, way to accidentally include pro-slavery talking points from the nineteenth century in your twenty-first-century fantasy novel.

No wonder he’d been so awkward with me, had no idea what to do with me, when I’d first arrived. “You’re not your father, Tamlin. Or your brothers.” He glanced away, and I added, “You never made me feel like a prisoner—never made me feel like little more than chattel.”

Yup, there’s our white heroine, telling an enslaver it’s okay because he’s one of the good ones.

Like.

What in the Tumbr is happening here and why didn’t this book get absolutely blasted for this shit when it came out? It’s not like it was published in the ’90s or the ’00s. This book is like five years old.

And for someone who never felt like a prisoner, Feyre sure tried to escape a lot. Usually, you don’t have to try to escape when you don’t feel like a prisoner.

Feyre decides that since he’s so traumatized by his father enslaving people, she won’t ask him any more questions, and the chapter ends with:

Still, I couldn’t bring myself to paint that day.

This is a weird way to end the chapter when literally nothing in the conversation about slavery suggested she would be able to paint now that they’d discussed it.

Like I said, I wrote some really racist fantasy novels (that I would love to be able to rework and fix but alas, they are owned by Harlequin), so maybe I’m just overly sensitive to this or overly critical of this book in general. But something in me just thinks, you know, maybe white American people shouldn’t write about slavery in their books where Black people don’t seem to exist.

Maybe we shouldn’t be using slavery as a plot device, at all.