So hear me out...*hides from both sides of the fandom*
I don’t think the narrative wants you to forgive Rhysand and hate Tamlin. I sadly think a lot of people do lack media literary and I'm not trying to sound insulting but I'm seeing that from both sides of the room.
(Side note this is coming from a Rhysand hater)
With Rhysand, to me if Rhys was meant to have this "forgive him plot line" the narrative would not show or mention the problems with him and how he runs his court.
You don't need to be told "rhysand was wrong for lying to feyre" to know he was wrong for lying to feyre in Silver Flames.
The text does not have to explicitly say that an action is wrong for us, the reader, to understand that it is.
The reason why we as anti IC/Rhys and the pro Rhys see this is because for 3.5 books we are mostly in the head of Feyre.
Feyre who is a very niave and biased character and an unreliable narrator. Her views of Rhys are very biased. Not only that, her PoV is first person , and if you're not careful, you can fall into the trap of reading the books with Feyre's emotions.
So let's go to Tamlin. Because Tamlin is always brought into this "sjm wrote Tamlin worse to make Rhysa better" and on a base level it very much seems this way.
But if you look at the motivations of Tamlin and why he acts how he does you start to see that his and Rhysand's motivations and flaws are very much the same.
If SJM was going to write off Tamlin then in ACOWAR his fake alliance with Hybern would have been real. Tamlin would have died in that book. Tamlin keeps getting brought up, and now this is near speculation but from SF where Eris is telling Cassian and Nesta that Tamlin is remaining in his beast form in a castle covered in rose thorns.
Remind you of anything? I know the common consciousness is that book one is the Beauty and the Beast retelling but for me it's more a kin to The Scottish Ballad of Tam Lin.
I think the Beauty and the Beast time line is Tamlin's story as a whole.
I think in a way both Amarantha and Feyre play that role of the Sorceress that curses the Beast. Amarantha is a physical curse where Feyre is a metaphorically curse.
Tamlin does something to anger both Amarantha and Feyre and he suffers because of it. With Feyre it's so bad that he has now decided to stay in his beast form, similar to what happens in B&TB. So Feyre was never Bell.
Who Bell is? I could make an entire post on my theory on that but I won't here.
Now I could be wrong, obviously, but I do have wondered that with all these clues, if perhaps there is more than what is on the surface of the text.
andulkaphoto
vaporwave
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