i have never read anything by sarah j maas but i would like to know why she sucks (if you have time/inclination)
okay, i need to preface this that there are some actual deeper things I could talk about (and might! who knows! maybe i'll get there) but this is primarily about my 11+ year long personal grudge with this woman. my negative opinion of her is incredibly rooted in the fact that I am a grudge-holding person and for the past 11 years people have been trying to convince me her books are good when they aren't. they just aren't. on a craft level, she is a bad writer and her books are bad. she is, tragically, a storyteller who occasionally comes up with interesting and inventive ideas that will never ever reach their full potential because she doesn't need to invest in her own skill to sell the shit she writes and so she doesn't. she will occasionally create a cool and interesting character, but because she has the attention span of a goldfish, all of her characters get personality reassignments every 1.5 books in a series. since i was SIXTEEN people have been telling me how good she is.
tbh the only reason i ever read anything she's written is because she happened to do an author event at a library near me and i attended because i attended every library author event, and acquired the first 3 books in the throne of glass series. she seemed like a legitimately nice person when i got my books signed. this was circa....2014? there was then some unpleasant scuttlebutt i learned about her after that due to being a teen bizarrely in-the-know about YA publishing at the time, but I shan't repeat any of it because I do not have access to any sources other than the citation: (I Was There, 2014) and i am uninterested in practicing citationless behavior. due to acquiring her books and having an impressive teenage wherewithal for reading things I didn't like that much, I read them. I thought throne of glass was mid at best, i hated crown of midnight (the twist at the end is so stupid it's mind-boggling), and i actually loved heir of fire, which, in retrospect, i'm 95% sure is because the main character got tortured during it and i really hated her. she might be my least favorite YA protagonist perhaps ever, actually. which is saying something, as a person who's read a lot of bad YA.
this was the beginning of my spiral. because, you see, i liked heir of fire. that meant I read the next book and, in fact, the only book in that series i never finished was the last one. i gave up, i couldn't do it, tower of dawn (book 6) sapped the life from my body and i couldn't even hate-read anymore. in between the throne of glass books, i read the acotar series as it was coming out (the original trilogy, I have not subjected myself to any books past those). and the thing was: some of those books were better than others to the point that i could convince myself she was improving. and then she'd publish another book that was so bad I wanted to burn it out of existence (tower of dawn). this was pattern. it lured me in. i didn't escape the demonic pattern until 2019, i think. to this day, if i say sarah j maas's name in my household, my mom goes "not her AGAIN" because i've complained about her so much. i think she was my first toxic relationship, actually. we had a 5 year long toxic relationship
beyond my own petty grudges and admittedly parasocial toxic relationship, there are some serious problems with her books that go beyond craft-level bad writing. not to keep harping on tower of dawn (it deserves it, though), it's pretty egregiously racist imo, not to mention ableist in ways i can't get into without spoiling plot points. i don't think her stories are even in the ballpark of feminist, and certainly not the way some people think they are, particularly some of the more recent ones that carry some really unpleasantly conservative messaging about like. informed choices around childbirth (again, can't be specific without spoilers) and...let's not even talk about the male characters. that would need to be it's own post. after receiving critiques about a lack of people of color in her books (not even TOUCHING on the Nehemia of it all) out of nowhere there was official art of two different characters exclusively described as white in the books as being Asian. it was a whole thing. and don't even get me STARTED about her decision to include intentionally titillating, sexually explicit scenes OUT OF NOWHERE in the 5th book of a YA series that had exclusively had fade-to-black sex scenes in the past. like, i'm of the opinion that sex (explicit sex, at that) 100% has a place in YA fiction, but smut does not. I don't care if your YA protags are 19-20; outright smut is for a different age-range. and to do that in the MIDDLE of the series, with no warning, was appalling and arguably has negatively affected the genre ever since, but that's a different conversation.
like she's a bad writer who puts out bad books and really really wants to pretend to be good and feminist and empowering and it's not true and her popularity KILLS me because i've been on that "she's not even close to as good as you all think she is" grind since I was a literal teenager. it's haunting, she haunts me. i could be mad about this ALL day, she is my nemesis and i WISH i was kidding
