u/azulassimp

just finished ACOSF for the first time and i've been hearing about this shipping war for years without knowing what it was actually about. now that i've read the bonus chapter i fully understand how eleven pages caused all of this. coming in completely blind, no outside takes beforehand, so everything here is purely how i experienced it.

the bonus chapter kind of confused me

him lusting after elain just...doesn't make sense to me? going back through the series there was never really a clear reason the two of them gravitated toward each other, they just kind of did, and he was there when she was going through everything after the cauldron. but after reading the bonus chapter it just seems like lust to me, and i can't figure out where it even came from.

and here's the thing, i always thought of azriel as someone incredibly calculated and guarded, someone who keeps everything locked so far down that even the reader barely gets access to it. we literally watched him pine after mor for 500 years and never say a word about it to anyone. 500 years of buried feelings and complete silence. that's who azriel is to me. someone who will carry something quietly for centuries before he ever lets it show.

so if anything, i would expect him to be the absolute last person to sit across from rhys and say the things he said in that chapter. like lucien doesn't deserve to be her mate, and that it wasn't fair that cassian and rhys had two of the archeron sisters and he didn't have elain. like...what? that's not calculated. that's not the person who said nothing about mor for half a millennium. that's almost petty, and it felt so jarring coming from him specifically. the azriel i thought i knew would have taken those feelings and buried them so deep nobody would ever know they existed, including rhys. he wouldn't be sitting there complaining that it isn't fair.

and the actual reasoning itself is what really got me. because it's not really about elain as a person at all. it's about the fact that she's the third archeron sister and his brothers have the other two. that's possessiveness, not love. that's not "i know this specific person and i want her," that's "i feel like i'm owed this because of what the people around me have." and for a character who i thought was defined by how deeply and privately he feels things, reducing his feelings for elain to essentially that was so strange to me.

and the necklace thing?? him just regifting it to gwyn like wtf lmao what did he think was going to happen there

on gwyn and the repetitive pattern

i do think gwyn and azriel have a more interesting dynamic, and i know people say three brothers three sisters is lazy writing, i get that point, but i also kind of disagree. my issue isn't the symmetry. it's that we've had five books of feyre and nesta's stories and the bat boy romance formula is starting to feel repetitive. i would genuinely love for azriel to be the one who ventures outside of an archeron sister and explores something different, and gwyn would be such an interesting character to do that with. she's charming, funny, dare i say a slightly better version of elain (don't take that too seriously lol). because like...i have literally seen nothing from elain across these books. all i know is she likes gardens. zero personality. i'm excited to hopefully get more from her in her own book, but with nesta we saw so much of who she was even before ACOSF. elain is just...blank. and that's a big part of why i'm less excited about azriel and elain, because i'm scared it'll just be a repeat of everything i've already read.

okay but here's my actual theory

we know azriel pined after mor for 500 years. five hundred years. and i think that tells us something really important about who he is: when azriel loves someone it completely consumes him. quietly, privately, for as long as it takes.

i think what's happening with elain is the exact same pattern. but when i actually look at their moments together there's not a lot of real intimacy there. it's more lust than anything else, and his whole "the cauldron should have given me the third sister" reasoning reads less like someone who deeply knows a specific person and more like someone who has latched onto an idea and let it take over. which honestly, based on the mor situation, tracks completely for azriel.

but then there's gwyn. and here's the thing: azriel barely registers what's happening there, it's almost an afterthought to him. but his shadows moved toward her. and azriel's shadows react before he does, they're tied to something deeper than his conscious feelings. the fact that they responded to gwyn in a way he didn't even fully notice feels like it means something.

so my actual theory: what if gwyn is azriel's mate and he rejects the bond for elain?

azriel is consumed by elain the same way he was consumed by mor. he's not going to notice a bond pulling him somewhere else when his focus is already completely locked. and SJM loves a rejected mate arc, elain is literally living one right now with lucien. what if azriel ends up on the other side of that exact situation, missing something real because he's too fixated on someone else to see it?

the tragedy of that would fit his character perfectly. 500 years pouring himself into something that was never going to happen, and then when something real is right there, almost missing it because he's doing the exact same thing again.

i know it's probably not gonna happen and he's ending up with elain. i'm just hoping it's done well. those are my thoughts, curious what people who've been in this fandom longer actually think

TOG & ACOWAR SPOILERS!!

100% a random and late post to the fandom but I just finished ACOWAR for the first time and have some thoughts. And just to preface this: I haven't looked up any takes or discourse around this book, so everything I'm about to say is purely my own opinion formed in a vacuum. I have no idea if these are common complaints or if the fandom would completely disagree with me, but here's where I landed.

I read ACOTAR and ACOMAF about 2-3 years ago, got halfway through ACOWAR, and never finished it. Then I read TOG, absolutely loved the series, and when ACOTAR 6/7 were announced I decided to reread the whole ACOTAR series and finally finish it. Little did I know I'd feel very differently about it now that a) I'm a little older and b) I've read TOG.

I thought the first half of ACOWAR was really well done, but there were so many small things that made me realize how much better written TOG is. TOG has its flaws, don't get me wrong, but compared to ACOWAR it handles action and high-stakes moments so much better. The biggest issue for me was the plot armor every single character seems to have.

I love the characters in both series, but it's genuinely hard to feel any real tension in ACOTAR because every time a character gets hurt or dies, they get resurrected or healed with little to no consequence by the next chapter. I started noticing it most with Azriel and Cassian. Whenever one of them got injured there would be all this emotional build-up about whether they'd ever be able to fly again, and I'd actually be worried, just for them to be completely fine the next chapter. And it wouldn't bother me if it only happened once, but it happened repeatedly. By the time we got to the war I was just breezing past anyone in the main group getting injured because I genuinely stopped believing there would be any real consequences. Cassian and Azriel had their wings destroyed mid-battle and were completely fine the next day. Okay, I guess!

I just wish there was more weight to these injuries because it would add so much more emotional intensity and depth to the characters. Imagine Cassian or Azriel actually losing their ability to fly because of what happened in the war, and us getting to explore how that changes them going forward. That's the kind of storytelling that makes characters feel real and fallible. Chaol in TOG is such a good example of this done right. When he lost his ability to walk it became a whole 600-page journey of him trying to accept it and fight to get it back, and in the end he never fully did. He remained bound to Yrene. That was so beautifully done because it showed how war leaves permanent marks, and how sometimes you just have to face what you've lost head on. That injury changed Chaol for the better, and it made him so much more compelling as a character because of it. Going into ACOWAR after TOG I was expecting that same kind of weight, but the bat boys are apparently indestructible.

And then Rhys and Amren "dying." Rhys dying was genuinely the cherry on top for me. I literally gasped and was wondering how they were going to handle it, and then not even a page later he gets resurrected by all the High Lords the exact same way Feyre did. So they can just bring someone back to life with zero consequences? It felt like such a cheap death. I don't hate fake-out deaths in general. Feyre's was actually done well because there was real buildup and it meant something. But Rhys dying for less than a full chapter felt completely unnecessary, like it only existed to shock the reader. I rolled my eyes when he came back. And then him randomly pulling Amren back too? That made even less sense to me. I think it would have been so much cleaner if Amren had stayed dead because she genuinely served her purpose in the story by that point, and letting her go would have given the ending real emotional stakes.

Compared to TOG where deaths carry actual weight and ripple effects, ACOWAR just doesn't hit the same. Again, this is purely my own take with zero outside influence, so I'm curious if anyone else felt this way or if I'm completely alone here. anyway i will read acofas and acosf and hopefully i enjoy those better :)

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