Jude's "strength" is mostly trauma responses with good PR - and I think the fandom never questions it because we're inside her head
Before anyone comes for me - I know Jude is supposed to be morally grey. I loved her the first time around. But rereading the trilogy as an adult, I found myself genuinely uncomfortable with her in ways I didn't expect, and I think a lot of it comes down to one thing: the narrative frames her defence mechanisms as power, and we never question it because we're locked inside her perspective.
The "I'm not impressed by anything" performance
This is the one that gets me most on reread. Jude's permanent unimpressed exhaustion is sold to us as strength - she's not dazzled by magic, not seduced by glamour, not swept away. But she's also a 17-year-old raised in trauma by the man who murdered her parents, surrounded by creatures who have existed for centuries. The idea that she has not just adapted but outplayed them all at their own game is a lot. And the tell is that she maintains the performance even inside her own head, when no one is watching. That's not strategy. That's an identity built entirely around never being caught caring. It has a name, and it isn't confidence - it's the faerie world equivalent of pick-me energy. I'm not like other mortals. I don't need wonder. Watch me be more fae than the fae.
Control as trauma response, sold as ambition
Her obsession with power is framed as political genius. And yes, she's smart. But her parents were murdered in front of her at seven years old by the man who then raised her. The hypercontrol - the scheming, the refusal to trust, the need to always be three moves ahead - is a completely understandable response to that. What's strange is that the narrative never names it as such. The famous speech to Cardan in book one >!- "you have much to lose and I have nothing" - !<is presented as an iconic power move. But it's a dissociation from fear, not the absence of it. A person who genuinely isn't afraid doesn't need to give that speech.
The hypocrisy with Cardan
She spends book one hating Cardan for how he treats her - fair enough - and then spends the rest of the series doing equally questionable things to him, including >!binding him to her will entirely.!< The fandom romanticizes this. If the genders were reversed we'd be calling it what it is. She deceives almost everyone she claims to love, the narrative rarely calls her on it, and we forgive her every time because we're inside her head hearing the justification in real time.
>As you can guess from my username - you know exactly where I'm coming from. I love Cardan enough to be frustrated by what happens to him narratively. He's a fae prince with a genuinely complex inner world and one of the best redemption arcs in YA - and so much of it gets filtered through the lens of what it means for Jude. The wonder of existing in a world of actual magic, of being him - treated as background noise. Meanwhile Jude meets all of it with permanent deflection, and we call that strength. But Cardan is the one character whose mask the narrative actually acknowledges as a mask. Jude's mask is just called her personality. That asymmetry bothers me more every reread.
None of this makes the books bad. But I think we give Jude a pass we wouldn't extend to a male character doing the same things, and I think we do it because we've spent three books justifying everything alongside her. Curious if anyone else felt this shift on reread.