Cruelty is the Point: Tamlin Haters and Disproportionate Retribution
This subreddit is no stranger to Tamlin haters. It’s a heavily advertised stance to have on Tamlin in the fandom in general. In Feyre’s perspective during the second book, the story works as a larger campaign to suspend the reader’s disbelief into thinking Feyre would genuinely leave Tamlin for Rhysand.
The transition works as such: Tamlin locks Feyre in the house, Feyre leaves Tamlin for Rhysand, Tamlin loses Feyre, Tamlin redeems himself to the audience by being vital to the war victory, Tamlin and Feyre do not get back together but they each wish each other to be happy on their own paths. Tamlin’s story is not resolved but the chapter of his life with Feyre is over. The equation is rather simple. Tamlin messes up, Tamlin faces consequences, Tamlin apologizes and goes to action, closure is had, Tamlin moves on. So why isn’t the fandom satisfied? Why must Tamlin continue to suffer?
I believe that most of the ACOTAR fandom suffers from an empathy block and they default to the Just-World Fallacy. The Just-World Fallacy is the widespread assumption that the world is objectively fair; good things happen to good people, bad things happen to bad people. But Tamlin is a contradiction to this idea. Tamlin is a severely traumatized character. A man suffering from paternal and fraternal childhood abuse. Tamlin also suffers from the inherent guilt of sending his men to die during Amarantha’s curse, unintentionally revealing Rhysand’s mother and sister’s location, and being a bystander to Feyre’s abuse under the mountain. Tamlin suffers mental abuse under Amarantha’s torment as well. Tamlin’s trauma is not caused because he is a bad person. It just happens to him. He is a person having bad things happen to him. Tamlin neglects Feyre’s own trauma as a trauma response itself. Tamlin is lashing out because of bad things that happened to him. This directly contradicts the just-world fallacy.
So what do people do in response to this contradiction? Instead of reshaping the just-world fallacy like some people would, they will instead strip Tamlin of his victim status. The idea of a victim unintentionally causing pain on another person is absurd, thus Tamlin cannot be both, he can only be an abuser himself. Any feelings of sympathy that may have been held for Tamlin are erased. In the mind of someone who has done this, the call for justice against Tamlin no longer feels like senseless malice, but right.
“Justice” for Tamlin would realistically be the loss of his relationship with Feyre. Tamlin narratively does get worse than that. His home is destroyed and he is consistently verbally berated by the IC. Tamlin is not a perfect victim and so the sympathy well has all but evaporated. Even more than that, because Tamlin is a victim, his neglect of Feyre is seen as an even more egregious betrayal than if Tamlin was just a bad person without trauma. Thus the hate for Tamlin becomes a mob mentality. It is seen as a badge of honor to so valiantly stand up and mock Tamlin for what he did and continue to wish that he suffer because of it.
Funnily enough we see this manifest in Rhysand himself. When he confronts Tamlin and verbally berates him after Tamlin saved his life, Rhysand is speaking on behalf of the audience, justifying the feeling of righteousness when Tamlin is kicked down. Suddenly it becomes acceptable to abuse the abused because you only think of them as an abuser.
This is where I think the cruelty stems from. We will see theories about Amarantha being Tamlin’s true mate, Tamlin getting mated to a horrible person or a child to make him look bad, Tamlin dying and someone taking over the spring court… I could go on. People receive a rush of nearly sadistic pleasure in the idea of this character suffering because it makes THEM feel like a better person, a defender of the weak and injured.
It won’t ever be enough for them, and any good that comes to Tamlin’s life will be perceived as an abusive man getting a reward. It is such a warped violent perception of a story that it defies the actual story that the author is trying to tell with the character. How can we interact in a fandom with people so fundamentally empathetically numb? I don’t know.