How boring and anticlimactic would it be for Sarah to wait all this time for Elain to reject her mating bond with Lucien and choose Azriel instead? I know a lot of casual readers think the next book will include a love triangle between the 3 but I just really don’t think Sarah has any intention of causing so much unnecessary harm and pain to Lucien. She already swapped Nesta with Elain as she felt Elain and Lucien were exactly what each other needs and whatever that is they need hasn’t even started yet! I can’t see her deciding oh actually Azriel is better for Elain now! Forget Lucien! Considering the way she’s already wrote Azriel treating Elain? How he dismisses her? How he’s only sexually attracted to her? Only wants her because he’s lonely and wants a mate like his brothers? Yeah a great start to a loving relationship….
Okay, first off, I gotta say, I always see antis going “well of course she’d reject it in her own POV!” And I have to say, I don’t necessarily agree with that.
I feel like if it was gonna happen, it would’ve happened before now, even despite not being in Elain’s pov. Then if we were still following the old formats of the books, I feel like in her pov it would’ve been the prime time to explore if she made a mistake of not—either way that could’ve gone. It would’ve come with her own personal growth and her journey of becoming her own and perhaps falling in love with Lucien or even deciding she didn’t want to be his mate and being with someone else.
But we are far too late in the game for this.
I think the issue I have with a lot of antis having this tunnel vision of the love triangle of Lucien/Elain/Azriel is that we don’t really have time for all of this relationship drama.
Yeah, there’s gonna be almost 1,300 pages in these next two books alone, but have they stopped and considered all the fantasy plot alone, we have to cover?
There’s the crossover stiff, the prison/Dusk, Asteri/Daglan and all they learned from that, the fact other individuals can easily fall into their world. There’s Koschei, the remaining mortal queens, the mortals that are growing restless, Beron, an internal war brewing, the heir of Autumn trying to overthrow a High Lord by means of another High Lord. There’s the continent, Vassa’s curse, Mor trying to get Vallahan to sign the treaty, the Valkyries. Like this is all just off the top of my head.
We quite literally don’t have time for Elain to go back and forth.
What we do have time for, is the very real possibility that our main cast of characters to likely be split up and off on different missions to accomplish the same end goal. Which in turn will likely put Elain and Lucien in close proximity and Gwyn and Azriel in close proximity. Both couples will be falling and love and working with the ongoing story instead of against it like most anti’s views for how a love triangle or an E/riel story could go.
Even if—and this is a big if for me right now as I think the bonus chapter made things pretty clear on pathways—there’s some chance Elain and Azriel try something, I anticipate by the end of ACOTAR 6, they’ll be going their separate ways. Likely figuratively and literally.
Yes, there’s romance involved in these books but not quite to the level I feel like we’ve come off of ACOSF from. I feel like it’s gonna return to the old format of Feysand and the equal amounts of fantasy plot of the original trilogy.
Now of course I can always be proven wrong and I’m happy to be, but with the way Sarah has talked about these books and the plot exploding, I feel like that’s much more on the fantasy front than anything else.
