#because nesta is me

[lainalit]

[anchoredgalaxy]

a court of silver flames gets the award for book where i've said "god i wish everyone in this book would die" the most

[bittermuire]

Divorced rhysta angst plsss 🥺🥺

DIVORCED RHYSTA YOU SAID????

.

March 15th.

There are seven yellow roses on her desk.

Nesta runs her thumb over her left ring finger, where the band used to sit. She keeps it in a dish with all of the rest of her jewelry. It has little company. She wears little jewelry.

-

She was waiting in line at the pharmacy when they met for the first time. She’d noticed him blundering around, loitering a bit—it took him fifteen minutes to pluck up the courage to talk to her. But she’d been uncaffeinated and exhausted and he took the brunt of it.

She’d rear-ended him in the grad school parking lot when they met for the second time. She was mortified. He seemed relieved. He was funny. His name was Rhys. He taught in the physics department. She told him her name was Nesta, she taught in the literature department. What do you teach, he asked. She inspected the cars. She inspected him, hands in his pockets, sleeves of his button-down lazily rolled up. Medieval romances, she said.

-

She wanted tenure, so she was up til two most nights, flipping through worn copies of journals and reviews, scouring the internet.

They were serious by that time. They’d been seeing each other for about a year. She was researching, working on a book, working at coffee shops and the library, and he was sitting across from her, working with equations, working with numbers he kept like magic tricks in his mind.

Nesta’s book was on marriage in medieval romances. Ironically that was when Rhys was looking at engagement rings. They had a small courthouse wedding in January. They moved into a little house, a five minute drive from campus. 

-

She should have seen it coming, really.

She married Rhys, after all. Dr. Rhys Irwyn. He was teaching level 300 or 400 or 500 courses called things like Thermal and Statistical Physics and Quantum Mechanics I and Quantum Mechanics II and Stellar Evolution. Gorgeous things she couldn’t touch, couldn’t conceptualize. And he was tall and handsome. He wore glasses. He wore slacks, button-downs.

Anyway—they’d been married something like seven or eight years when she saw him in the car with the TA for one of his courses. Nesta knew who the girl was. She was a pretty, bright student. Her husband was holding that girl’s face, kissing her like he loved her.

-

“What’s so special about it?” He laughed. “It’s a day. Neither of our birthdays, need I remind you.”

She sighed. “It’s just nice, don’t you think? March fifteenth. It sounds right. It’s beautiful.”

“Fine. It’s our holiday, then. It’s a day made for you.”

“I knew you’d understand.”

“I love you.”

“Be quiet, I’m grading.”

-

She didn’t bring it up for a while. Months went by. She didn’t acknowledge it but she didn’t touch him, either. He bent his head to kiss her and she looked away.

On some windless autumn day she’d locked herself in a bathroom stall, squatting, hand clenched over her mouth. That evening she handed him the divorce papers and told him to sign. They had a fight. He lost quickly. He signed them by the end of the week.

-

There are seven yellow roses on her desk.

Nesta checks the calendar on her desk. On her bookshelf she has a small picture of her cat. A rosary, the last gift from her mother. Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Alice Hoffman. Slim volumes of poetry about ghosts, and grieving, stacked atop each other.

She stands there a moment, then grabs the stems, stripped of thorns, and throws them out.

.

[starrbirrd]

Rhysand's sister is named, as you all well know from some of my snippets, Rhaenys (didn't know until after the fact that it was from GOT 😔) and his father is Rhadamanthus just because I like the idea of the Rh being a royal family theme. I also played with the idea of her being named Sidra because of the Sidra River, since in my head his mother is named Velaris and his father renamed the city for her, which is something I talked about Rhysand echoing with buying Feyre all those fancy houses and stuff. Grand but empty gestures for women who came from poor backgrounds and would in theory be disgusted by the excess amount of riches they now possess.

I think I'd name Mor's sister Brighid(Brigid?) also to keep up with the theme since Mor is apparently(?) named after an Irish goddess. I also think it would be ironic and funny to have Mor, named after a goddess associated with "war and fate, especially with foretelling doom, death, or victory in battle." be the dreamer that made it out of the CON while the sister that is assumed to be just as bad as their father and left to rot down there is named after a goddess associated with "wisdom, poetry, healing, protection, smithing and domesticated animals." Keir is also a Gaelic name and like most of the women who aren't the MC of the series, Mor's mother doesn't have a name. I like to think she's from a different region and got sold off ages ago so she's spent more of her life in the CON than her original court.

Cassian's name means "void, hollow" which I think is very telling considering his mother got pregnant through sexual assault. His sister, I think, would be his half sister. Same father, but the legitimate daughter of the warrior and whoever his wife was. She'd have a name like Laetitia, meaning "happy" and "prosperous". A stark contrast to Cassian's name since they'd have exceedingly different circumstances surrounding their births. However, while it can be inferred from the story that Cassian's mother at the very least grew to love him, being a legitimate daughter wouldn't save Laetitia from the fate of every Illyrian woman and she would only be given such a lofty name because a daughter is only as good as the amount of money/status they can make off of her. When Cassian goes on his rampage in the village and slaughters almost everyone, including their father, I think he also slaughters her mother (if you go to his mother's wiki, it says he slaughtered everyone save for the innocent, children, elderly, and some females.) and any siblings they have, which also plays into her name since Laetitia can mean "lucky" as well. Is she lucky to escape her fate even though it cost her entire village and almost everyone she knew?

[lorcandidlucienwill]

Crying today cuz I'm a sucker for romance and all of my couples are extremely romantic and half of them never end up together in canon😭😭😭😭😭

[hiemaldesirae]

actually i talked about this w a friend a while ago but i think the whole acotar series couldve been improved sm more if all the fae were evil and fucked up and it was a silly little romcom instead of wtv the fuck sjm was going for

like imagine tamlin who has flowers growing over corpses in his garden 😋😋😋😍😍😍😍 or a rhys who makes stars to put in the sky after every kill he makes in another court (to cont a family tradition !!!) as a way to taunt every other lord... 🤩🤩 and they fall for this muscled runt of a woman who adds more bodies to both their collections. I mean like. itd still be better if it was sapphic. but still. this would improve the acotar series by a landslide

(also ending like iron widow's love interests :3c)

[quietprocrastination]

Hey so, like, not to be super critical of a piece of media that has a lot of toxic tropes and messages in it but like. I Do Not like Nesta's whole power character arc like

Gains power from a cauldron when after she's drowned (awesome, literally a witch they couldn't drown)

2. Visibly intimidates others (lol Rhysand)

3. Gets a cool mentorship (friendship) with another magical and feared character (Amren)

Okay at this stage you have a Cool Character, what now?

She's depressed and not paying attention to her powers. Fair! She literally just survived a war.

Oh wait her old mentor now suddenly thinks she's a waste despite saying previously to give Nesta time (hm, weird, okay).

They now don't want her to learn more about her powers (too threatening) give her a sword to solve her problems!

She is now handed over to an abusive asshole, while in a vulnerable state, to learn something new. (The asshole is Cassian btw.)

They fuck (?????? Romance ?????????)

Brief interlude to introduce the very evil and very promising evil prince who's like. Hey your powers are cool we could kick ass together.

Hm, no. Power of the Sword. (Is this a phallic thing that dick makes everything better??????)

??????? She now wants to become a mother ???????? Anyways the powers are gone and she is no longer a threat! No longer on equal standing! She's broken in, she is now acceptable :)

Anyways I find it really weird that it goes from potential female friendship with Amren to being shoved under the training (and by extension authority) of her male "romance" partner.

I think Sarah J Maas has an unhealthy thing with women only gaining validation through male approval and training. Like. Why can't they learn from other women? Her power now depends on Cassian (kinda like how Feyre's power depends on Rhysand, how Rhysand gave Morrigan her position, etc. etc.)

Also why does all power have to be physical. Boring.

[talons-and-teeth]

Your Taste, Forever on My Tongue

Pairing: Elain/Lucien

Rating: M

Summary: Elain's office is running a Secret Santa event that coincides with the launch of the new website which she's leading on. She happens to get allocated the last person she could ever think of getting a gift for.

Merry Christmas, @makememakesense ! It's me, your Secret Santa!

Thank you so much being so lovely and giving me so many ideas for this AU, I really hope I got it (somewhat) right!

Thank you also to the @acotargiftexchange organisers for giving me this opportunity. This is my first ever fic and I've been so nervous about it, but I'm so glad to have done it for such a joyful community. Special thanks goes to my wife @mmiscbutterflies for helping me brainstorm and bring my 'Love, Actually' vision to life, and generally talk me down from the proverbial ledge when I became anxious/was not in the right headspace to write. Love you always.

Read on AO3 here

Snippet below:

Elain was late.

Not her usual, sorry I’m late-I couldn’t resist-there was a new cafe I just had to try on the way- late, but a fuck me-I slept through five alarms-maybe I spent too long watching reruns of Bake Off-or was it the bottle of Sauvignon?- tardiness, which left her cursing profusely while she tripped over her tights, slapped on eye cream and was out the door.

[lucienarcheron]

I love that they’re always so keenly aware of each other. It’s so *chef’s kiss*

[vidalinav]

I don’t know how to break it to all of you but I want to write Neris again…

[yaburnae]

do you ever think about nesta reading romance books because she grew up knowing that she would never have love since her only job was to be a wife and that never equated to being loved in the world she knew so she could only escape in make believe stories where make believe women were make believe cared for and respected

[stargirlfeyre]

I have a question and this is open for discussion. When it comes to the familial abuse Feyre’s family put her through why do people have this “she already forgave them so let’s not talk about it” mindset and why it is only applied to Feyre?

Y’all still write essay after essay angry at the fact that Nesta was put in the HoW even though she’s already forgive the IC for it.

Y’all still get upset about Nesta calling Elain boring and blaming her for their father’s death even though Elain obviously doesn’t hold a vendetta against her for it.

Y’all still get mad at Feyre calling Nesta an embarrassment even though Nesta clearly is past it.

So why are Feyre stans expected to just not talk about her abuse even though y’all have no problem talking about the mistreatment your favorite character faced even if said character has already forgiven them? Why are we expected to move on when y’all haven’t? Why is only Feyre’s abuse/mistreatment treated like some taboo topic that people can no longer get upset or dislike certain characters for? Genuine questions.

[c-e-d-dreamer]

It's genuinely so funny to me whenever I see a post that's like "Nesta stans said this" or "Nessian stans said this" because like where??? Where, bestie??? Is the post in the room with us now???

Because I hate to break it to you, but especially in a post-ACOSF world, there's not that many of us on this godforsaken app, and I guarantee that we all know each other in some capacity

[ae-neon]

Nesta Archeron

There's something so lonely about her

[theladyofbloodshed]

What about…

Three sisters

👑🗡🌸

Three high lords

🌌🔥☀️

[achaotichuman]

Me- Yes I am Nesta Archeron, I am Tamlin, I am the character full of rage and spite and hatred and broody broody broody.

Also me- Cannot say no to anyone cause I don’t want to be rude. Will say sorry a million times. Is extremely bubbly and happy in person 99% of the time. Wants to just ride bike, bake, garden, read and write all day. Has dreams to have a tiny cottage in the mountains one day-