Just to make it clear for anyone reading this, although bookish made it perfectly clear already: arc and plot are not the same.
A character in a fantasy novel and a character in a contemporary novel can have the same arcs. ex. Both need to overcome (or at the very least learn how to healthily manage) their anxiety.
But their plots are going to be vastly different. The fantasy character would need to take their rightful place as ruler to defeat the bad guy and free their people while the contemporary character searches for their birth mother.
So yeah, Feyre’s romantic arc in ACOTAR2 was with Tamlin. Which means the trauma from UTM really affected their relationship to the point where it needed to be built up again. Throw in that she intended for a love triangle with villain!Rhys and the fact that the series was supposed to be A Tam Lane/Beauty and the Beast retelling all the way through, the arc stays the same, but the triangle ends with Feyre picking Tamlin. This only works if the plot she originally thought of stayed the same. It didn’t. She changed the plot to make it easier to change the endgame.
She did this with TOG. She admitted it. She literally said verbatim she kept trying to find a way to change the endgame, but it wasn’t working with the original story so she had to change the plot in order to do it. And if you read everything pre-Queen of Shadows (the first three books, the novellas, the short stories she released), the plot hinges on Dorian and Aelin together. In power, both politically and magically, which obviously leads to their romance (which started in the first book and was slowly developing from then). All the threads are there. Until she had to change the story to change the endgame. So then QOS, much like ACOMAF, and then EOS completely reset almost everything before it.
Hi anon! I'm not sure if you're the same anon who mentioned Sarah saying she added Rhys in or not but either way: welcome!
Yes, thank you. Arc=/= plot.
Again while I do have receipts for the changes in Throne of Glass, I am merely speculating that this means the original ACOTAR endgame was Feylin. And from what little we have, that makes sense: as I said in my other post, NestaxLucien was the original ship, not Nessian. Given Sarah has said Nessian was not a thing until she wrote the scene at the dinner table, this suggests that A) Cassian and Nesta meeting was not a part of the original plot of ACOTAR 2, indicating that ACOTAR 2 wasn't originally as heavily involved with the Night Court or the Inner Circle as ACOMAF was B) more of the plot was concentrated in the Spring Court, with enough of the plot occurring in the Spring Court for at least one Archeron sister to fall in love with a member of that court (Lucien).
But yes, the knowledge that Sarah changed the plot of ACOTAR 2 and wrote ACOMAF instead, along with the bits and pieces we know of ACOTAR 2 (such as Nesta and Lucien being endgame) do point towards it being more likely that Feyre was predominantly in the Spring Court in the original trilogy. If the romantic arc stayed the same, but Feyre spent more of her time in the Spring Court, then putting two and two together it seems more likely that her romantic arc was with Tamlin.
