can i ask what really turned you off of throne of glass? bc i used to love it too but looking back on it im like Um Yikes but im always curious to know what did it for other people (for me it was nehemia's death & the aftermath of that plus book 3 was the nail in the coffin)
PSA: this is an anti-tog/shit post so if you don’t wanna hear what i have to say, please just scroll past this and move along with your day
honestly where do i even begin? because there is so much that i just look back on that makes me question how i even liked this series. if this ends up being a long post i’m sorry but i have a lot of feelings about this.
firstly, one of the biggest reasons why i no longer love this series is because of how problematic it is and sjm’s refusal to acknowledge the criticism of it and just own up to the fact that she fucked up. because almost every poc character she has in tog was killed off for the sake of white development (nehemia for aelin & sorscha for dorian) and lgbt+ characters are sidelined (emrys + malakai in hof), villainized (manon’s grandmother), the one canon bisexual character is called the “whore of adarlan” (aedion in eos), or paired off with broody “males” (malide should’ve happened) not to even mention how all of the guy characters are a caricature of the hyper aggresive sexy “male” who simply cannot control himself since it’s in his “nature.” because what’s human decency and respectful behavior towards your significant other?
secondly, i do not like the direction where she took this series in at all. nehemia didn’t need to die to get celaena/aelin in the emotional state she was in hof. you know what could’ve happened? celaena feeling lost and broken because she was in a foreign country by herself away from everyone she had learned to love in adarlan (nehemia, chaol, dorian) and facing the fact that she was the lost princess of terrasen. the series could’ve been about celaena accepting both parts of herself (assassin & queen) without becoming arrogant and dismissive of her troubled past? can you imagine how great it would’ve been to have nehemia and celaena ruling erilea as the best of friends? dorian and chaol being the cute cinnamon rolls they were? instead we got a very white series, very straight and cis characters (all of them), special snowflakes (aelin), shitty sex scenes (velvet-wrapped steel), anti-climatic deaths (arobynn & king of adarlan), sunken ships that should’ve sailed (chaolaena & doraelin & malide), buthered character development (tbh who wasn’t ooc?), and more sex this time with fire (so hot it will turn sand into glass) because what’s logic.
lastly, i cannot for the life of me stand her writing anymore. i feel like this partly due to the fact that she keeps writing huge ass books and they aren’t going through a long enough editing process and partly because its overdramatic and lazy in my opinion. everytime she uses “male” and “female” to describe a character every five seconds i want to through my book out the window. is it really necessary? (also very cis again) there has been multiple people pointing out how she’s plagarized lines (rattle the stars from treasure planet & to whatever end from lord of the rings) which may be unintentional but a quick google search could’ve prevented this from happening in the first place. also she uses the staple lines(she was the heir of ash and fire and she would bow to no one) that most series have way to often, so much that losses all of its weight? she is incapable of switching romantic relationships without buthering the previous love interests character (chaol in qos/dorian in eos). also empire of storms and a court of mist and fury basically have the same ending which is just super lazy?
i’m probably forgetting so much more that i hate but i’ve already spent way too much time writing this. while i may not like throne of glass anymore, i did like acomaf even though its not much better and still problematic (are we even surprised?). i actually like the characters and they haven’t gone to shit yet but we’ll see how i feel after acowar.
