There was a scene in acosf where Nesta thought that Elain took some training either with Azriel or the twins and many people have assumed that Elain, Azriel and the twins do secret spy training..
But the fact is that Sarah does a lot of telling than showing. So Sarah would have scattered more crumbs that would make us believe El/riel do something off page. Sarah could have written a scene where Elain looks at Azriel and Azriel nods and they both excuse themselves from the room or something. But there was nothing else. It was mentioned that Azriel helped Gwyn with dagger handling, which informed us that he does help her off page, so why didn't Sarah do that with El/riel? We have only read about Azriel being overprotective of Elain and him underestimating her.. What people also don't get is that Nesta didn't know if Elain actually does that. She WONDERED.
However, what gets me so sure that El/riel don't have secret spy training is the bonus chapter. Azriel said that they hadn't done anything beyond finger brushes and shy glances. We were in his head, why didn't he mentioned the training that he does with Elain? The answer: they don't fricking do anything off page. Nothing.
I believe that it was more to show that Elain does something shady behind the scenes but Nesta would never believe that Elain would do that so she goes for the safer option. Cassian has noticed Elain's strange behaviour, which tells us that Elain is doing something off page. I'm curious to know what all that behaviour was.
I am really curious what Elain is up to as well. I just cannot see Elain, who wants to be seen, who mourns the fact that her former fiancé saw her, would want to take on a profession - or even a hobby - that requires her to not be seen. To be underestimated, or to obfuscate her in any way. It has to come down to what is motivating Elain right now, and since we've never had her pov or a chapter where an omniscient narrator follows her, we really don't know what her motivations are. If we knew what she wants right now, it would be much easier to make guesses about what she is up to. There are just some options that would be out of character, and being a spy is one. I don't think it would be anything evil or nefarious, not in canon. I think that acting in a way that would harm her sisters would also be out of character for Elain. So... to me, it's easier to tick things off the list of what she wouldn't do, than it is to guess what she is doing. Especially given her powers and the fact that we don't know what she has seen and kept to herself, and that's if she was even able to decipher it.
idk, the amount of stuff that people are assuming happens OFF PAGE with them is... a lot. Especially when, like you said, we have actual content telling us that nothing has happened in that way. And why, why in the world would Az, or the omniscient narrator who was telling us the scene in his chapter, not have a single thought about Elain that wasn't related to his dong. His chapter gave us every single opportunity to see what was going on between them, if anything, and it gave us "he hadn't thought beyond his fantasies" or whatever. That's it.
I mean we had an omniscient narrator in acosf. That's the thing people keep ignoring or not understanding, idk. We don't need Cassian or Nesta to be observant and notice anything going on between Az and Elain. There is an omniscient narrator who can fill in the blanks for us. But no blanks were filled in, because nothing has been going on.
I agree with you that Sarah does more telling than showing. She has a habit of slapping us in the face with things, which is reason 1 of 231214334 why I don't do much theorizing. Like her "could have sworn" or "fate stood up" or "as if" etc. She's not subtle. She can't be subtle when she's telling us how beautiful and powerful and clever and mean and sexy everyone is all the time. Which is fine! There are other authors where we can subtlety, if that's what we're looking for.
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keep seeing undergrads on social media saying “oh if a prof has a strict no-AI academic integrity policy that’s a red flag for me because that means they don’t know how to design assignments” like sorry girl but that just sounds like you’ve got a case of sour grapes about not being allowed to cheat with the plagiarism machine that doesn’t know how to evaluate sources and kills the environment! I have a strict no-AI policy because if you use AI to write your essays for a writing course it’s literally plagiarism because you didn’t write it and you’re not learning any of the things the course teaches if you just plug a prompt into the plagiarism generator that kills the environment, hope this helps!
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first day as a small-town sherif and you discover that some of the convicts you're transporting managed to escape in the night and since the penalty for letting prisoners escape is death, and the penalty for being late because you were looking for escaped prisoners is also death, you decide to free ALL of them and go hide out in the wilderness for a bit, except the convicts are super grateful so they make you their leader and it turns out they're decent guys who were exploited by a tyrannical government, so long story short you're crowd-sourcing for a peasant uprising and would anyone like to chip in?
3650th day and due to a series of unforeseen events you are now the emperor and founder of the han dynasty.
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