#idk man i just read one of those aita posts and I'm like :/ that's kind of obviously shitty even if you were a teenager

[mrbutchdyke]

kinda hate the whole idea of "u were 13/14/15 etc. u were a kid how were u supposed to know better" like idk. do other 13 year olds not have feelings that can be hurt? maybe you didn't know better but you still fucked up. and honestly maybe you SHOULD have known better even if you were a kid/teen

you were 13 but you were still the asshole even if you didn't mean to be. intentions are important but how you affect other people is important too

those are formative years! when I was a kid/teen my peers said shitty things to me that have affected me so deeply it still sticks with me a decade later. their intention didn't really matter. your intention or lack thereof doesn't make you not the asshole

[bookofmirth]

i know a lot of people dislike nesta. but honestly as a fandom who are (most likely) majority women we should come together to discuss WHY ON EARTH nesta was made out to be the big bad villain in the pregnancy situation

it’s actually just unacceptable and sjm needs to talk about what possessed her to have rhys and cassian laugh about punishing nesta with that death hike and blame her for everything while rhys is … never held accountable for anything

i know rhys is her favourite bla bla bla but reading that hike scene made me so disgusting. are we just going to allow sjm to put NO BLAME on rhysands horrid behaviour and blame everything on nesta?

idk i need more people to be talking about why a woman was once again blamed for a man’s own actions. do i think nesta told her the right way? ABSOLUTELY NOT. and obviously she needed to be held accountable for that

but the way she was just humiliated, degraded and punished on that hike while rhys laughed with cassian over it was honestly vile and misogynistic

nesta told her in an awful way. she lashed out in a moment of anger. but she is not the villain in that situation and sjm trying to push that narrative for even a second is so disturbing when she has rhys come out squeaky clean. no one blames him for anything. no one reprimands or calls him out.

everyone head canons that feyre yelled at him or whatever but they were absolutely fine the next time we see them. he probably just gave her another sob story and she forgave him

i dont hate rhys at all really. he’s one of my favs. i think his treatment of nesta in acosf doesn’t make him a villain

but sjm making nesta at fault in that situation is just horrendous and we need to talk about sjms internalised misogyny as a fandom more and why acosf is praised as some sort of feminist book when the blatant misogyny is always so clear every time nesta is made as if she is some sort of horrible evil person that kills children in her free time while the inner circle are always so righteous and amazing and kind

idk sjm needs some objectivity in her writing and she immediately needs to get rid of that horrid bias towards rhys

I've been putting this off until I reread acosf, but it's been months so... fuck it.

I think there is a difference between how the characters interpret one another's actions, and how the reader does. We have the benefit of relative objectivity, especially when the narration is third person. Of course Rhys is going to be angry because Nesta made him look like the asshole (now I'm imagining him posting this whole scenario on AITA), but his anger is misplaced, and we the readers don't have to agree with his anger. We don't have to agree with anything that the characters are feeling, nor do their feelings necessarily mean that sjm condones them. I think it's a good idea to separate our feelings from the characters' feelings, as well as from the author's feelings. Those aren't the same, and one doesn't have to influence the other.

And tbh... I don't fault people for being mad at Nesta telling Feyre the way she did. She came in swinging with the intent to wound. It wasn't about fearing for her safety, or being concerned for her autonomy and agency. Nesta was pissed off and wanted to make someone else hurt. Even if the end result was that Feyre had knowledge about what was going on with her own body, Nesta did it with shady as fuck intentions. So yeah, that's an issue, like you said, but it's an issue that stems from her habit of lashing out, so it was On Brand for Nesta to have done something like that.

HOWEVER. Rhys is clearly at fault for getting this ball rolling in the first place. He's 100% a dick for hiding that information, he's 100% a dick for making everyone else hide that information for him, forcing them to choose between their High Lord and Lady, their High Lord and sister/bestie. (I still want to pay closer attention to who knew, in acosf, when I reread.) He's a dick for prioritizing his own fear above Feyre's ability to make informed medical decisions.

The IC also fucked up for keeping that information from her for Rhys's sake. No one came out of that situation looking like a saint, but I don't think that sjm intended for them to? Otherwise it wouldn't have been a conflict, it wouldn't have come at the climax of the story, and it wouldn't have worked as a way for Feyre and Nesta to reconcile, which is why I think it was done, personally. I don't think the main reason was to make Nesta into the asshole, or Rhys, that was just incidental as sjm was making her merry way along the plotline of "I need Feyre and Nesta to reconcile but idk how".

(I do think they could have reconciled without all this bullshit tho. It would have been so easy for Feyre to have KNOWN and decided to not shift and still end up almost dying. Or it would have been so easy for them to think the whole time that the pregnancy was fine and then have the birth be traumatic, and have Nesta enter and save them. We didn't have to go... there, making every character do shit that is so out of line with how they've treated each other before.)

Anyway, my point is that I think enough readers have interpreted Rhys as indeed being the asshole that we can question whether Nesta was intended to be "the bad guy" in that situation. I wish to fucking hell that we could see Feyre being mad at Rhys, I wish that we could see Mor/Cassian/Azriel tearing him a new asshole for putting them all in that shitty position. But that's the nice thing about being readers, we don't have to take things at face value, and we can also say "hm, I think the author intended X, but i'm gonna interpret Y." (As long as there is actual evidence for it, let's not get crazy.)

If anything, I think that acosf did Feyre dirty, which is really disappointing considering everything she's done for all the people around her.