@ohifonlyx33 replied to your text post
Sorry about your apparent lack of reading comprehension, but Alina doesn't say HE sees her as sour, silly, and difficult. That's how SHE sees herself. And then she adds "and lovely in his eyes" because despite the flaws she sees in herself, she's able to see now that he loves all of her. He accepts her as she is. This scene is soft and intimate because they are in love. It's not meant to be spicy. Also it's understandable that it should be PG-13 in a YA book.
Then it would be “sour, silly, difficult, but lovely in his eyes.” Otherwise it reads as if Mal thinks all of this too (review modifiers!), but it doesn’t matter because all of it makes her lovely in his eyes. Regardless, this interpretation makes it so much worse; we’re in the third and last book of a trilogy and Alina, despite being a powerful Sun Summoner, still sees herself as ugly, and not even her true love Mal can make her see herself differently.
As for the spiciness of sex scenes in YA novels, I’m well aware of the constraints of the genre. Not only that, but I feel the lack of explicit detail should have made it more sexy, not less. A good, canny author would how to use those constraints to squeeze the maximum juice of an encounter. Alina’s and Darkling’s kisses in the same book had more intimacy and passion. Bella tracing Edward’s face and arms in the meadow scene of book one had more intimacy and passion. Kaz and Inej’s bathroom scene in the later duology had more intimacy and passion. You want classic examples? Literally centuries of writers writing love scenes under explicit and non-explicit constraints. My man Shakespeare is always a good start (if R&J is too basic for you, he also wrote wholesale erotica without even so much as an explicit kiss). Notice how in all these examples there is no sex, and yet it is everywhere. YA, take notes.
My real issue was that this was the love scene between a True Love OTP on the run since the end of book one and who have known each other since literal childhood and who have thirsted for each other explicitly throughout these books…and then when it finally happens, it’s just shy of a Lie Back and Think of Ravka scene. Alina cannot put aside her insecurities for one goddamn second because she is not overwhelmed by the passion she should by all rights feel—nor, I suspect, truly aroused.
