A Court of Jealousy and Haters: ACOTAR chapter (god help us all) 32 or “The entire plot of Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses, performed by a minor character”

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.

This chapter is hell on earth. And I can say that because I’m from a world where hell is considered a thing. This thing.

You may recall that at the end of the last recap, I talked about how the next chapter would be a twenty-page long info dump. That’s not an exaggeration. Please grab a bottled water so you can stay hydrated. Stretch, potentially.

Feyre walks around the manor, being a crime scene investigator.

It had been a vicious fight––and from the blood patterns, most of the damage to the house had been done during the fight, not afterward.

Okay, Dexter. I’m sure you can just look around and know exactly what happened.

The crushed glass and footprints came and went from the front and back of the house, as if the whole place had been surrounded. The intruders had needed to force their way in through the front door; they’d just completely shattered the doors to the garden.

This is my design.

(I’ll stop making Hannibal references when NBC comes to its senses, thank you for asking.)

Feyre goes into the dining room.

The giant table was in pieces, […]

The giant table was magically smaller when she left. It’s mentioned in the scene with Rhysand.

I studied the trail across the floor. It had been disturbed, but I could make out two sets––large and side by side––leading from where the table had been. As if Tamlin and Lucien had been sitting in here as the attack happened, and walked out without a fight.

That, dear reader, is how boring this book is. An epic fight scene happened off the page and the main characters still weren’t involved.

Which, by the way, means that all the blood in the house is from other fairies. Which would mean that Tamlin and Lucien abandoned all those innocent servants to be slaughtered.

Feyre is using her previously unmentioned tracking skills and blood spatter analysis techniques to tell the reader what happened in the scene that would have been much more exciting if we’d just seen it. And it had been written by a different author. But then:

Something limped into the room and sniffed. I could only see its back––cloaked in a plain cape, medium height … All it had to do to find me was shut the door.

The figure turns out to be Alis, who I guess smells Feyre’s presence because it’s something Alis can do and we never heard about it before. That tracks.

Alis reminds Feyre that she’s not supposed to be there. Alis also has a limp, but Feyre doesn’t give a shit about the injured person who’s been taking care of her for months. She doesn’t even ask if Alis is okay.

“Is he alive?”

“Yes, but––”

My knees buckled at the onslaught of relief. “And Lucien?”

“Alive as well. But––.”

“Tell me what happened––tell me everything.“

She’s clearly trying to but you won’t stop fucking interrupting her.

She didn’t speak as we hurried through the empty, too-quiet halls––all of them wrecked and bloodied, but … no bodies. Either they’d been hauled away, or––I didn’t let myself consider it as we entered the kitchen.

What, you think they’ve been eaten? That’s all I can think of, considering you just walked into the kitchen. Is this some unintentional wink to the camera, Mads?

(I’LL STOP MAKING HANNIBAL REFERENCES WHEN NBC COMES TO ITS SENSES, THANK YOU FOR ASKING.)

The kitchen is all burned up and Alis is here to loot it. I’m just leaving that as a blanket description of her actions throughout the scene because anything she does is just a dialogue tag to break up her monologues of exposition.

“She took him,” she said, and my blood went cold. “She took him to her court Under the Mountain.”

“Who?” But I already knew the answer. 

Then why did you ask, jackass?

Feyre begs Alis to tell her the truth about Amarantha and good news! Alis is apparently the foremost historian/political analyst in Prythian!

“You want the truth, girl? […]

I full expected her to say, “You can’t handle the truth, girl!”

[…] Then here it is: she took him for the curse––because the seven times seven years were over, and he hadn’t shattered her curse. She’s summoned all the High Lords to her court this time––to make then watch her break him.”

Just say forty-nine, for fuck’s sake. Seven times seven, ooooh numbers, spooky numbers. Forty-nine is easily a more terrifying way of putting it than “seven times seven” because what kind of psychopath picks forty-nine instead of just fifty? That shit would keep me up at night. “Why did she choose that number? Fifty was right there? Was it to get in my head?”

“What is she––wh-what curse?”

A g-g-g-ghost!

A curse––the curse she had put on this place. A curse that I had failed to even see.

The poison. The poison for Kuzco. The poison chosen especially to kill Kuzco. Kuzco’s poison.

Also, the c-c-curse you didn’t see? Was the fucking masks. Just because he never said, “I’m cursed,” it’s pretty clear that they were fucking cursed.

“Amarantha is High Queen of this land. The High Queen of Prythian,” […]

The poison. The poison for Kuzco.

“But the seven High Lords rule Prythian––equally. There’s no High Queen.”

You just asked Alis for answers, and you’re going to correct her? Shut your mouth and listen. Nobody wants to hear your bullshit, Feyre.

Alis is like, yeah, no shit?

Actually, she’s like:

“That’s how it used to be––how it’s always been. Until a hundred years ago, when she appeared in these lands as an emissary from Hybern.”

Do you remember there’s a place called Hybern? I didn’t. Because it’s only ever been mentioned in one scene, over a hundred pages ago. The Suriel told Feyre about the king in Hybern, and after that, it’s never mentioned again. Any time the Suriel is brought up, it’s about what it told her about Tamlin and that’s it. We never get any reminder about Hybern until right now, when Feyre acknowledges that the Suriel told her about it and summarizes everything she knows about the king.

Alis explains (to Feyre and to the reader) that Amarantha showed up out of nowhere and was like, yeah, Hybern is really sorry for all the shit we did in the war, let’s talk about trade and let me dazzle you with my beauty. She proposes trade between Hybern and Prythian.

And then Alis gives like, interminably long backstory on Amarantha, who’s apparently a legend. She fought in the war against humans and she had a younger sister named Clythia who was also a fighter but who gave it up because she fell in love with a human. Amarantha knew that the human was just using her sister, but Amarantha wouldn’t kill him because it would cause Clythia pain.

Which really backfires when the human crucifies Clythia and cuts her to pieces while she’s still alive.

So, now Amarantha just fucking hates humans.

Hey…is that backstory for why the villain is totally justified in enslaving and brutalizing people? ed.—It’s also part of what makes this book not High Fantasy; the villains in High Fantasy stories are just evil. High Fantasy villains don’t have relatable qualities, and the evil and corruption of the villains are motivated by a lust for power. “Avenging a brutally murdered loved one” is a relatable motivation, even if that motivation turned the villain evil. Maybe if people didn’t shit on every other fantasy subgenre, correctly categorizing this book wouldn’t be such a controversial thing.

Anyway, for fifty years she’s sneaking people from Hybern into Prythian on trade ships. She did this without the king of Hybern knowing.

What’s the motivation?

“[…]But we all soon learned that, in those fifty years she was here, she had decided she wanted Prythian for her own, to begin amassing power and use our lands as a launching point to one day destroy your world once and for all, with or without her king’s blessing. So, forty-nine years ago, she struck.

Now, at this point, nobody knows Amarantha is evil, right? So, she throws this big ball and invites all the High Lords (including Tamlin), and puts a potion in the wine that’s served. They end up paralyzed, it’s like the Red Wedding but without so much moving around.

“[…]Once they drank, the High Lords were prone, their magic laid bare––and she stole their powers from where they originated inside their bodies––[…]

I choose to believe Alis means, “out their butts.”

Hey, do you notice how often I’m having to […] here? It’s because we got over a full page of just Alis talking in block paragraphs, telling the whole backstory of the entire Prythian deal to the main character OVER HALFWAY INTO THE FUCKING STORY.

At least I don’t have to do math anymore:

“[…] For forty-nine years, we have been her slaves. For forty-nine years, she has been biding her time, waiting for the right moment to break the Treaty and take your lands––and all human territories beyond it.”

So, the idea is that Amarantha snuck her guys in, stole the High Lord’s magics, conquered Prythian, and now she’s like, ah, I will bide my time before attacking.

I’m still so confused about the Treaty. The very existence of the Treaty suggests that the High Lords reached a point where the cost of war outweighed the benefit of victory, right? We’ve heard about how they’re so dangerous and tear through humans like tissue paper, but humans must have been strong enough that fighting against them was no longer feasible and an agreement had to be reached to end the war, right?

So, Amarantha is going to somehow continue to keep Prythian under her control while also invading and conquering a people Prythian didn’t manage to put down before, and she’s going to do this all on her own without backing from either Prythian or Hybern? I mean…I guess.

 And then there’s this absolute bombshell:

“But … the sickness in the lands … Tamlin said that the blight took their power––”

“She is the sickness in these lands,” Alis snapped, lowering her hands and entering the pantry. “There is no blight but her. The borders were collapsing because she laid them to rubble. She found it amusing to send her creatures to attack our lands, to test whatever strength Tamlin had left.”

So…Tamlin made up the blight. The whole thing. Feyre has been worried about this made-up sickness the whole time and Tamlin knew it didn’t exist. And later on, we’ll find out that he was mystically bound from telling her about the curse Amarantha put on him, but let’s wait to pick that apart when we get to it.

“You could have been the one to stop her.” Her eyes were hard upon me, and she bared her teeth. They were alarmingly sharp. She shoved the turnips and beets into the bag.  “You could have been the one to free him and his power, had you not been so blind to your own heart. Humans,” she spat.

“I––I …” I lifted my hands, exposing my palms to her. “I didn’t know.”

“You couldn’t know,” Alis said bitterly, her laugh harsh as she entered the pantry again. “It was part of Tamlin’s curse.”

That’s two people now to blame Feyre for not seeing through the lie they were all in on.

Alis launches into this whole thing about how Tamlin and Amarantha knew each other since they were children.

“Amarantha eventually grew to desire Tamlin––to lust for him with her entire wicked heart. But he’d heard the stories from others about the War, and knew what Amarantha and his father and the Hybern king had done to faeries and humans alike. What she did to Jurian as punishment for her sister’s death. He was wary of her when she came her, despite her attempts to lure him into her bed––and kept his distance, right up until she stole his powers. Lucien … Lucien was sent to her as Tamlin’s emissary, to try to treat for peace between them.”

Isn’t it awesome how Alis just knows all this shit about her boss and his personal life and how he feels about politics and stuff? It’s great that this information is so easily accessible to everyone in Prythian.

Kinda makes one wonder why Feyre never ran into any of this totally common knowledge, despite allegedly having worked so very hard to get answers.

But the important thing to remember here is that Amarantha is motivated by revenge and wanting Feyre’s man. Barf.

Anyway, Lucien went to Amarantha and told her off on Tamlin’s behalf, and that’s how Lucien lost his eye and got his face carved up so bad, Tamlin barfed when he saw what happened.

“After that, she hosted a masquerade Under the Mountain for herself. All the courts were present. A party, she said––to make amends for what she’d done to Lucien, and a masquerade so he didn’t have to reveal the horrible scarring on his face. The entire Spring Court was to attend, even the servants, and to wear masks––to honor Tamlin’s shape-shifting powers, she said. He was willing to try to end the conflict without slaughter, and he agreed to go––to bring all of us.”

The last time she had a “party” she stole the entire fucking kingdom. Like, just drugged everybody and stole their power and seized the entire realm. Then, she carved up Lucien’s face. And Tamlin is just like, “Okay, I’m sure that this time she’ll be nice.”

And the unnecessary em dashes are a weight upon my very soul. None of those were necessary. “A party, she said, to make amends for what she’d done to Lucien […]” Oh look, that one was so easy to eliminate. “[…]and to wear masks to honor Tamlin’s shape-shifting powers, she said.” Wow, they’re dropping like flies here! “[…]and he agreed to go and to bring all of us.” Did I just use a conjunction in a place where a conjunction was warranted and an em dash was superfluous? IT’S MAGIC, YOUS ALL!

“When all were assembled, she claimed that peace could be had––if Tamlin joined her as her lover and consort. […]”

It’s not enough for Amarantha to be evil and all-powerful. She has to be evil and all-powerful and want to fuck Tamlin because that, dear reader, makes her a real villain. Her vagina hungers and she’s going to interfere with the central love story about it.

Tamlin rejected Amarantha, though, telling her he’d rather fuck a human than her, and given how she feels about humans, that wasn’t the smart way to go. Hence, everyone gets cursed to wear their masks and stuff. Why masks?

I’m sure we’ll find out by the end of the chapter, right?

Amarantha decides that instead of punishing Tamlin outright, she’s gonna curse him. He has “seven times seven” years to break the curse or he has to become her lover.

“[…]If he wanted to break her curse, he need only find a human girl willing to marry him. But not any girl––a human with ice in her heart, with hatred for our kind. A human girl willing to kill a faerie.[…]”

Okay. I kind of get this. Her sister was killed by a heartless, cruel human, Tamlin just threw that in her face, I get Amarantha’s angle here. Except for the part where it has to be a human who hates faeries because it sounds (from our limited experience with Amarantha, which is just like, this chapter of Alis talking to Feyre) like Amarantha thinks all humans are that way. But whatever.

There are more conditions:

“Worse, the faerie she killed had to be one of his men, sent across the wall by him like lambs to slaughter. The girl could only be brought here to be courted if she killed one of his men in an unprovoked attacked––killed him for hatred alone, just as Jurian had done to Clythia … So he could understand her sister’s pain.”

Now, this is starting to get a little complicated. If Amarantha wanted to cause Tamlin this kind of pain, why not just kill Lucien outright? Why not slaughter the entire Spring Court except for Tamlin? That’s what I would have done.

Yeah, I’m a monster. I’m comfortable with that.

But what about the treaty that prevented humans from killing faeries?

“That was all a lie. There was no provision for that in the Treaty. You can kill as many innocent faeries as you want and never suffer the consequences. […]”

WHAT THE FUCK IS THE POINT OF THE FUCKING TREATY?! WHY DID THE FAERIES SIGN THE TREATY IF THE TWO WARRING SIDES KILLING EACH OTHER DIDN’T HAVE TO STOP? WHAT IS THIS BOOK? WHERE AM I? I SMELL HOT PENNIES.

When Tamlin said that Andras was out looking for a cure for the blight, what he meant was that Andras had been out looking to get murdered so the curse on the Spring Court would be broken.

You know, the curse that makes everybody wear masks for some reason?

We get to that reason after Alis repeats the entire curse like she didn’t just tell Feyre about it: humans hate faeries, they have to find a girl who would kill one in cold blood, she would have to say she loved Tamlin before the forty-nine years were over, etc.

No, seriously. In a chapter that is twenty pages long and just one character telling the entire backstory of the plot in these huge block paragraphs, Maas thought, you know, I’m being too subtle. Better just real quick recap.

Finally, she gets to the part about the masks:

“[…]Amarantha knows humans are preoccupied with beauty, and thus bound the masks to all our faces, to his face, so it would be more difficult to find a girl willing to look beyond the mask, beyond his faerie nature, and to the soul beneath. […]”

I call what is perhaps the most bullshit anyone has ever called since the beginning of time. Bullshit, I say! And shall say it until the very end of my days.

She wants to make Tamlin ugly to a human, so she lets him stay super hot and built, but GASP, he has to wear an exquisitely beautiful, bejeweled mask on part of his face. Yes, how one would recoil from such a horror.

This is like in The Phantom of the Opera where Gerry Butler is supposed to be hideously ugly but he takes off the mask and he’s just got like, alopecia and pink eye and the rest of him is still Gerry Butler. And I know, I know deeply that I make that reference a lot but that’s just because (extremely Sally Fields at the end of Steel Magnolias voice) I wanna know why!

What’s the point of Tamlin being able to turn into a beast, by the way? What’s the point of him being able to shape-shift? We’ve seen him use it one time. 

Why write a “Beauty and the Beast” retelling if you don’t like the part where he’s made into a beast? Maas is like, you know what the problem with every single retelling of “Beauty and the Beast” is? The Beast part. What if we made him beautiful and fancy?”

AUUUUUUGH THIS BOOK IS SO FUCKING BAD WHY DOES IT EXIST?!

Honestly, yous all, I might hate this one more than Fifty Shades of Grey, because even though the plot of Fifty was super basic, at least it made some kind of narrative sense.

“[…] Then she bound us so we couldn’t say a word about the curse. Not a single word.[…]”

FALSE! FALSE FALSE FALSE! Page motherfucking seventy-god-damn-two! Tamlin says:

“[…] These masks”––he tapped on his––”are the result of a surge of it that occurred during a masquerade forty-nine years ago. Even now, we can’t remove them.”

He can’t say a single word about the curse, but he can tell Feyre about the masks, where everybody was when they got the masks stuck on their faces, and exactly how long ago it was.

Oh, but I guess since he didn’t say, “It’s because of a curse,” then it somehow doesn’t count? As being a “single word?”

I HAAAAAAAATE IT. I HAAAAAAAATE IT.

Here’s my theory about the dumbass mask part of the curse, okay? Tamlin did this:

“When she first cursed him, Tamlin sent one of his men across the wall every day. To the woods, to farms, all disguised as wolves to make it more likely for one of your kind to want to kill them. […]”

Now, if Tamlin were doing that because he was trying to save his own ass, that would be unacceptable, right? If the curse was just, “You better have a human fall in love with you or you have to fuck me, but if you break the curse, you get your power back,” then it would be unconscionable for Tamlin to sacrifice so many lives to fix his own problem, right? Alis says that he does this for two years, so assuming their years are 365 days, that’s roughly seven hundred fairies he sent to die.

But if he did that to save everyone from their mask fate…

The mask part of the curse is there only so Tamlin doesn’t look like a selfish monster as he tries to navigate Maas’s needlessly complicated curse.

You know, one of the most important lessons I’ve ever learned about painting is that you have to know when enough is enough. You have to stop when you get to the point where you can trust the piece to be what you meant it to be. You can ruin a totally fine painting by trying to make it “more” for no reason.

Oh, hey, congrats to us, though, for reading a chapter where Feyre doesn’t mention painting. I guess I just took a little of the shine off that moment, huh?

But back to the point, that’s what Maas did with this curse plot. Amarantha could have just been like, “Oh, you’d rather fuck a human? Fine, go do that,” and make the curse happen. But Maas went, huh, you know what we need? Like, so many more conditions, to the point that the reader must pretend a bejeweled mask on a godly-hot man would be some kind of obstacle to love. And masks on everybody else so he doesn’t look selfish when he’s sending almost his entire court (“all but a dozen” according to Alis) out to die.

Maas reminds me of Stephen Moffat. That’s not a compliment. They’re both guilty of going for big twists and reveals and not caring how they get to them or if they make sense at all, just so long as there are a ton of needless elements packed into them. They’re both tragically stricken with the misconception that “complicated” automatically equals “good.”

Obviously, this is the end of the chapter, right?

HA HA HA HA HA, no, at this point there are SIX MORE PAGES OF ALIS EXPLAINING THINGS.

I’ve been summing up A LOT and I’m going to keep operating that way so we’re not still hashing out this chapter come December. The other High Lords have fought back against Amarantha and gotten murdered, the faeries tried to use the Children of the Blessed to take messages to other faerie kingdoms and got them all killed, and anyone who crosses Amarantha gets imprisoned Under the Mountain.

Then, we hear about Alis hiding her nephews and working for Tamlin for protection and whoops, she made that deal just a few days before the mask curse so fuck her life, I guess. 

Eventually, Tamlin got to the point where he was like, okay, the clock is running down, I’m out of ideas, let’s send dudes over the wall again, and bam, Feyre kills Andras.

But I had failed them. And in doing so, I’d damned them all.

I had damned each and every person on this estate, damned Prythian itself.

I didn’t realize you could have messiah complex and martyr complex at the same time.

“You could have broken it,” Alis snarled, those sharp teeth mere inches from my face. “All you had to do was say that you loved him––say that you loved him and mean it with your whole useless human heart, and his power would have been freed. You stupid, stupid girl.”

I agree with your assessment of Feyre, Alis, but why are we having to read almost identical dialogue as before?

Because I’m in hell. That’s the answer. It’s because I’m in hell.

I’m not sure why everyone is still blaming Feyre for not falling in love enough with her kidnapper. This is the weirdest fucking book and all the people in it are weird.

Feyre asks, hey, uh, what’s up with the king in Hybern while all this is happening? Because you said Amarantha did this all without him knowing and she stole his spells and junk?

Well, this is one thing Alis doesn’t know, so it gets waved away:

“If they’re on bad terms, he has made no move to punish her. For forty-nine years now, she’s held these lands in her grip. […]”

Yeah, guess he doesn’t care, please, have another repetition of information I’ve relayed probably five times already. This chapter isn’t long enough, it needs to be padded out. ed.—Maas gets way too much credit for her intricately woven plots that are so clearly, painstakingly mapped out from page one of the very first book but which somehow, for some reason, always read like she’s making shit up on the fly. The King in Hybern is clearly just tossed in there because she knows she’s writing a series and will need a villain later.

 “[…] But we know––we know she’s building her army, biding her time before launching an attack on your world, armed with the most lethal and vicious faeries in Prythian and Hybern.”

Wait. Feyre asked Alis how the king in Hybern feels about all this, and Alis doesn’t know, but she does know that Hybern’s forces are going to be used against the humans?

“In the human territory,” I said, “rumor claims more and more faeries have been sneaking over the wall to attack humans. And if no faeries can cross the wall without her permission, then that has to be mean she’s been sanctioning those attacks.”

I beg of you, dear patron, if you have a copy of this book, can you look through this chapter and find the part where it said Amarantha controls who does and doesn’t cross the wall? I’ve looked as much as I’m going to look. Because here’s the thing: if she does control who crosses the wall, why bother to allow Tamlin and his men to cross at all?

“Because of the curse” is not a good enough answer, Sarah.

Feyre has these long, overwrought thoughts about how much Tamlin loved her that he would throw away everything and make all the lives sacrificed meaningless, that he would be willing to damn Prythian for eternity, etc. just for lil’ ole her. She decides she’s got to go Under the Mountain to rescue him.

Of course, Alis is like, you’re gonna die, and Feyre is like, I don’t care, how do I get there, and they repeat the exchange in a few different variations because, again, this isn’t long enough, and we get some ableism!

Amarantha must also have taken Lucien––she had carved out Lucien’s eye and scarred him like that. Did his mother grieve for him?

You thought we were going to go a whole chapter without some disgusting ableist bullshit. Oh no, he’s SCARRED and his EYE is gone, his mom must be crying like he’s FUCKING DEAD because SCARRED is the WORST thing a person can be!

Also, super grateful for the reminder that Amarantha cut out Lucien’s eye. The big reveal was only two pages ago. I mean, probably most of us had figured out that she did that to him already, but it’s nice to be force-fed the same information over and over again like my brain is one of those geese with the fatty livers.

“You were too blind to see Tamlin’s curse,” Alis continued.

Yes, how could Feyre have not seen plainly that Tamlin was cursed to fall in love with a mortal, but not just any mortal, a mortal that killed a faery, and not just killed a faery in self-defense, a mortal who killed a faery for no reason, and that he wasn’t allowed to tell her any of that? It’s so simple and obvious! Anyone should have gotten that from context clues that weren’t provided at all!

Amarantha had taken everything I wanted, everything I finally dared desire.

Of course, she did. She’s the evil bitch who wants to fuck your boyfriend. Were you expecting some other kind of villain in this groundbreaking work of outrageous genius? ed.—Saruman. The White Witch. The Dark One. None of them were motivated by the desire to fuck the hero’s boyfriend.

Alis offers to take Feyre back to the wall so she can go home, because there’s no way of saving Tamlin now. I’m sure there is, and I’m sure Maas felt sooooo clever when she pulled the solution out of her ass while writing it. But Feyre tells Alis, no, she’s going Under the Mountain.

If Amarantha ripped out my throat, at least I would die doing something for him––at least I would die trying to fix the destruction I hadn’t prevented, trying to save the people I’d doomed. At least Tamlin would know it was for him, and that I loved him.

Now, Feyre could go back to the human realm and tell them what’s going on in Prythian. She could warn everybody, she could tell the Children of the Blessed, hey, this bad thing is happening, don’t go there. She could raise the alarm and people could prepare for the coming war without being blindsided by an attack out of nowhere.

But she’s gotta go die for love.

Alis is like, okay, and the chapter ends.

Please see the Jealous Patron’s Book Club Book Club post for more of my undiluted rage. Because I just…

This is so impossibly bad.

ed.—I am including the Jealous Patrons Book Club Book Club post here, because I’m still absolutely livid about this chapter. How this book has been included on “best of all time” fantasy novel lists is so fucking beyond me.

Not every single genre can be written with the same conventions. It’s not a hard and fast rule, but I truly, deeply believe that epic fantasy cannot be written from a single, first-person POV. This chapter is why. It always ends up with one character getting a history lesson from another character, in dialogue. It always ends up with long scenes of clunky exposition in dialogue.

Imagine you’re reading Game of Thrones. And the whole book is told from Ned Stark’s first-person POV. We never see anything else in the entire book, just Ned Stark going off to King’s Landing to serve his BFF the king, getting into some trouble there, finding out the queen and her brother are banging from pouring over birth records, then telling her what’s up and getting his head cut off. That’s all Ned Stark really does in that book. Somehow, Martin would have had to get first-person POV Ned Stark the information about the Others from the Wall somehow to reveal that plot point to the reader. I guess Ned could have read a letter from Castle Black about the fact that the dead are rising. We wouldn’t really need to see the part where it actually happens. The entire sequence at the Eyrie? Instead of reading that, we’d have just gotten a scene where someone tells Ned Stark about what happened. And Jeoffry’s cruelty? That would have been entirely off the page in that first book, until the execution scene when he would have gone from a random wimpy character who got bit by a dog to a total sadist in one scene with no explanation.

Wow. Gripping.

Now, imagine if A Court of Thorns and Roses had shown us more than Feyre’s limited perspective. What if we’d been privy to things happening to Tamlin and Lucien when they’re off in the woods? What if we’d been privy to their thoughts, and we could have seen Tamlin’s desperation to break his curse, the clock ticking down, him just hoping she’d say she loved him before time ran out, and then she doesn’t. Even at that last moment, as he’s letting her go, from his perspective… 

In a book with multiple POVs, the scenes can be depicted from the mind of the character who has the most to lose. Imagine the pathos of that sex scene in Tamlin’s head.

Imagine NOT READING A WHOLE CHAPTER WHERE ONE CHARACTER JUST MONOLOGUES ABOUT THE PLOT.