Sarah J. Maas Ruined a Generation of Women

“High Fae mostly marry, but if they're blessed, they'll find their mate --- their equal, their match in every way. High Fae wed without the mating bond, but if you find your mate, the bond is so deep that marriage is . . . insignificant in comparison”
A Court of Thorns and Roses, pg. 175-176

“And now me! It is me you love, and you will ordain for me as for them!”
Gilgamesh finishing his rejection of the goddess Ishtar, tablet 6 of The Epic of Gilgamesh

By Mongoose

Hello again.

I let the intrusive thoughts (and intrusive thots) win, and so I went and bought the seminal “romantasy” (read as smut) novel A Court of Thorns and Roses and subsequently hate-read it in 10 hours (including my annotations). I purchased the 2020 2^nd edition hardback, hoping that maybe when I was done with this review project I could hollow it out and use it as the worlds most evil gun case. I find myself questioning my own intentions back then, and my annotated copy may be the single most cursed object I own (speaking as a man with multiple anime statues, both volumes of the monstergirl encyclopedia, pagan religious artifacts, Japanese model aircraft magazines that for some reason needed to include gravure photo shoots in them and a couple firearms made in China).

If you are looking for a yea or nay recommendation and little else, stop here. This book may damage your soul, it will steal your vril, and is outclassed both as literature and slop entertainment by Dan Abnett's Guant's Ghosts. If you still need easy reading literature, Conan, Solomon Kane, C.S. Lewis, among many others will satiate your need for unchallenging-but-enjoyable literature. If you are looking for romantic fantasy that meets basic writing quality standards, I would recommend Fate/stay night: Unlimited Blade Works, or the clean versions of the original Fate visual novel. I also would recommend literally anything else outside this genre.

Also worth noting is that I'm not going to be explaining a ton of the jargon I use here, so please feel free to search up any neologisms you don't recognize; we are operating well outside the intended use case of the English language (like using a dremel as an end lathe). For those interested in the contents/cultural import of this accursed tome, venture onward as I guide ye forth into the vile world of porn made by women, for women.

A Court of Thorns and Roses (ACOTAR for short and how I will be referring to it for the rest of this review) was originally published in 2015 by “fantasy” “author” Sarah J. Maas, and if your senses are tingling, check her wikipedia page, they're right (every time). Considered the most popular novel of the “Romantasy” genre (a portmanteau of romance and fantasy), ACOTAR has served as the gateway drug for many a woman who would later lust after Count Oorlock from Nosferatu (2024) as well as most of the denizens of “BookTok” (young women talking about these romance novels). It is here, dearest and most beloved reader, that I need to make a discursus to discuss the concept of “pornography,” because I cannot delve the topics broached further without making it clear how a proper view of “porn” works and what is and isn't “porn.”

Porn most typically is thought of in the popular context as titillating images or videos of a sexual nature. Some colloquial usages of porn may invoke other forms, such as r/natureporn (good pics of nature) or the old Warhammer 40k pejorative “bolter porn” (referring to 40k fiction that is little more than pure combat and ultra violence). These themselves lack the erotic and sensual context of the popular conception of pornography, rather merely using the concept of “porn as explicit titillation” to expound upon an idea or critique in a vulgar manner. So I would propose, to truly encompass the novel itself, we expand our understanding of pornographic materials to include anything intended to titillate in an erotic concept, with or without explicit content. There is no reading of Chapter 21 of ACOTAR that isn't erotic, and rape/BDSM adjacent. As such I would argue that the entire novel merely serves as pornography or framing for pornography. This itself undermines much of the booktok discourse on the novel itself, which I will be going over after a plot and character analysis.

Before I provide a synopsis and discourse on themes (or the lack thereof), I would like to also take a moment to paint a picture of Sarah Maas' prose. Simply put, she writes like a middling fanfiction author. The chapters are extremely short, giving the impression of vignettes written in 3-5 day stints by a Literotica, AO3, Tumblr or Wattpad writer. I'm no stranger to fanfic—there is a weird overlap between weird fanfic and tabletop games—and I'm old enough to remember old /tg/ culture on 4chan (this isn't factoring the weekend smut thread from old /tg/). My point here is simple: I've read some shitty fanfic in my time, and this is basically your average fanfiction with a professional editor.

Maas feels the need to describe everything, regardless of its importance to tone or themes. This left me so confused at first that I physically stood up, walked to my study and open random books to random pages to ensure that it did not stick out due to how long it had been since I last read fiction, rather than just being a characteristic of a poor writer. I was not mistaken. Maas lacks inspiration and confidence in her audience's ability to imagine anything other than the most graphic sex scenes (which are soft-balled likely for mass market editorial reasons). I would propose the radical proposition that any vivid descriptions of things should go towards building the tone/theme of a work, rather than merely painting a mental picture, such as how Dostoevsky depicts Petrograd in Crime and Punishment. ACOTAR's descriptions serve to rotely portray a fantasy world for the audience, like a D&D setting book, rather than weaving the pieces together for the purpose of conveying tone. I'd even go so far as to say that the work itself has the general energy and mood of a poorly-retold but acceptable tabletop roleplaying game campaign, interspersed with smut.

So what is the basic premise here? If you look at ACOTAR's wikipedia page, you will find it much like the wikipedia pages of things like the holocaust or vaccines (lacking key information, self-contradicting details, or as minimal specifics as possible). The premise that this novel has sex in it at all isn't addressed and the plot isn't expounded upon beyond the blurb given in the dust cover. The blurb does poorly in addressing what the plot actually is, so I'll try my best to summarize it here. I will also warn the reader that I'm going in chronological order for the novel, not the actual plot itself, because its easier and less complicated.

About 1/3 of the novel is predicated on the main character not knowing anything about Tamlin and the lore, which in turn makes a lot of stupid stuff happen. So basically on the planet there are humans and faeries. The Faeries were mean to the humans (slavery and whatnot - it’s vague) and at some point (~500 years ago) that starts a war. One of the faerie generals, Queen Amarantha, had her sister tricked and killed by the humans. She then goes on a murder spree and develops a psychotic hatred of humans. Queen Amarantha wants to bang an underage faerie, Tamlin, and keeps coming on to him, but because she was le mean to the humans after the war (killed all her slaves) he doesn't like her (also she's kind of mad about a human killing her sister, but the lore, again is just a set up for fae kidnapping and “not” rape). Also worth noting that this takes place on “not the British isles” so Amarantha is from Ireland and Tamlin is from middle England, this garbage has a wiki if you need more details, but I'm not going into more detail for a British Islands trace.

So Amarantha goes to the Faerie portion of the British Isles (Prythian, not Prythia, but Prythian) and deceives everybody into buying her bullshit until she magically enslaves them. In this process Tamlin and his people are invited to a masquerade ball in which Amarantha curses them to forever wear their masks and have their magic weakened if Tamlin can't find a human who hates faeries to love him in 7x7 years. To this end, Tamlin sends his friends disguised as massive wolves into the human area (Cornwall) until one of them is killed by some retarded woman who hates faeries (the main character, Feyre, pronounced in book as fey-ru but in English as fairy).

Feyre kills the wolf and so Tamlin kidnaps her. This then entails a bunch of angst and a weird scene at the end of a sex spring ritual where Tamlin bites her erotically but doesn't rape her (undertones clear tho). Eventually they fall in love but before she can confess her love, Tamlin sends her away to protect her, which ultimately results in her returning to protect him from the evil Queen Amarantha and going through her trials to prove her love and save him. During this, a different Fae Lord, Rhys, sexually humiliates Feyre in front of Tamlin to please Amarantha and work on being a triple agent, but Tamlin can't do anything or show any emotion because it might give away what tortures him the most.

This mostly involves a lot of weird BDSM-adjacent stuff where Feyre is forced to put on a skimpy dress, wear body paint (to show whether Tamlin touches her or not), gets drugged, and has to dance while drugged in front of everybody. Fey beats the challenges by realizing the answer to the world’s most obvious riddle (the answer is love) and she goes to get with Tamlin whose mask falls off and she sees that he's just as good-looking as she'd dreamed (literally paraphrasing an exact line). That's where ACOTAR ends. There are other books, but this is where the first one in the series ends.

I'd like to analyze a couple of the characters for a bit before we move on to the later lore I gleaned from the wiki and female readers of this slop. Mainly I'd like to talk about Feyre and Tamlin, the heroine and main love interest (Rhys appears later and in the second book, Feyre dumps Tamlin for the more powerful, more handsome, more ancient, more sexy, and more dark “shadow daddy” Rhys, leaving Tamlin to rot in his estate. More on this later). Feyre could best be identified as the most woman-brained woman of all time. She describes her looks on pages 202-203 as “I had looked pretty. Feminine. I wouldn't go so far as to call myself a beauty . . . I hadn't cringed.” when being complimented by Tamlin (Maas does this super annoying thing with periods and dashes, bear with it). This comes after Tamlin compliments her beauty, which comes after the weird neck-biting scene (which itself is the first moment Feyre is truly horny for her super-handsome, super-powerful, shapeshifting faerie kidnapper), which is where Feyre and Tamlin's relationship truly begins to be reciprocal. Prior to this point Tamlin had developed (at the very least) lust for her, which he acts upon when possessed by powerful magic during the bite sequence. Back to Feyre's character, the adjectives I would choose describe her would mostly come from my annotations: dumb, retarded, stubborn, and “:|”. Feyre will repeatedly do dangerous and foolish things, ignore direct orders, endanger herself and others through foolishness, and so on, while never facing consequences beyond titillating BDSM-adjacent stuff (her tendency to do this drives most of the drama and events of the novel). She evokes the heroine of Pride and Prejudice, if Jane Austen either had too many or too few chromosomes. Feyre, also worth noting, is never objectively described or depicted as weak. Rather everyone around her coincidentally possesses powers far beyond her own, abnegating the classic woman-written-by-man trope of “woman weak” (it’s the same thing, the disparity in power is depicted, but Feyre is never explicitly brought down).

Meanwhile, to me Feyre's love interest, kidnapper, and—technically speaking—liege lord Tamlin remains the most interesting character and facet of the novel (especially considering context), so I will ask the reader to forgive me if I belabor any points here. Tamlin is a man (albeit a High Fae man) written by a woman. Tamlin forms a locus of interest for a wide range of reasons. To start with, I should comment on how Tamlin is described. He's muscular (this forms basically a 3^rd of all descriptions of him or what he's doing), tanned (mentioned all the time), green eyed, dirty blonde, strong jawed, and more interestingly NEVER described as handsome. Tamlin is described as beautiful or captivating, or sensuous, and if he's not described like that he's given attributes more commonly given to predators, mostly feline to be precise. He slinks about, coils, etc. Interestingly, Maas never describes attractive men as handsome. Gorgeous, sensuous and beautiful seem to form her repertoire of adjectives for attractive members of the ironically fairer sex. Tamlin also finds himself near constantly contrasted with Feyre's first sexual partner, Isaac Hale, with whom she would fornicate with as a reprieve from the drudgery of taking care of her father and sisters. Tamlin essentially mogs Isaac, indicating that Maas' love interests exist in a sort of Dragon Ball Z esque power scaling of hypergamy, Tamlin is more powerful and hot than Isaac, Rhys moreso than Tamlin, and so on.

Tamlin's character beyond his physique is intriguing, mostly because the fans of Maas hate him, giving him the derisive name “Tampon.” Tamlin's primary motivation throughout the book, as High Lord of the Spring court (jurisdictions are courts b/c women like intrigue I guess), is to protect and provide for those who live within his jurisdiction and as a result are his responsibility. Amarantha curses his court so he makes the strategic sacrifice to find a human woman who hates fae (willing to kill a fae unprovoked) and attempt to get her to fall in love with him to prevent their total subjugation by the evil queen Amarantha. To this end, he sent a ton of his friends into the human realms to be killed until Feyre kills one. When Feyre learns this was his actual game plan she has a level of disgust, as if attempting to forestall the evil wiles of a wicked witch to the benefit of one’s citizens lacks moral character because Tamlin was willing to make the immense sacrifice of letting personal friends and confidants die in the process.

But also remember that Tamlin himself is a man written by a woman. So while he possesses heroic and self-sacrificial qualities, he also possesses all the subtlety as a romantic interest as an anime woman with O-cups, if you know what to look for (well I'm underselling my case here, Hitomi Tanaka does exist, no man caters to female desires as well as Tamlin). He's attentive and always knows whats on Feyre's mind, how she's feeling, and what she wants, and in fact the writing depicts this so poorly that I legitimately spent ½ of the novel under the impression that as a magical faerie boy, he can read her mind. I had to go to the ACOTAR wiki to figure out his true powers, which do not actually include mind reading. When he's not doting on her, he's doing important faerie hot boy stuff like being a ruler of an area that covers roughly 1/3 of southern England and personally going out and killing eldritch horror faerie monsters which Amarantha has sent to mess with him. Speaking of, Tamlin's power level is quite high, but in fact is diminished by Amarantha's curse. Which in turn makes his feats even more powerful in a power-scaling sense. Ironically enough, the ACOTAR wiki does textual power-scaling, making it reminiscent of literary greats like the Naruto or Dragon Ball Z wikis.

Back to Tamlin, at the end of the novel when Feyre has to prove her love via trials, he maintains a stoic visage and does nothing while triple agent Rhys drugs and sexually humiliates her. Tamlin, of course, does his bit of self sacrifice for his people and to prevent Amarantha from finding what needles him to torture Feyre more. He even does his best to have his surrogate and emissary help Feyre, invoking Amarantha's wrath. This set of actions forms the origin of the fandom's hatred of him, he didn't act irrationally to try to save her, even when doing so would've gotten basically everybody killed. By the second book the entire ordeal forces him to suffer a mental break and lock Feyre in a basement, causing her to defect to the (don’t forget!) more powerful, more handsome, and more dark and mysterious Rhys, seeds of which are already planted in the final 100 pages of ACOTAR. This context to me reads as Maas setting up context to justify Feyre dumping a man that did nothing but do his best to protect his people and Feyre from harm for Rhys, a man that saved her from rape once at a ritual but in the last 100 pages sexually humiliates, drugs, extorts and psychologically tortures her. Tamlin is written to theoretically be her mate, but by the second novel is left as a psychologically broken husk, Feyre having been “mated” (femgooner for soul-mated, allegedly) to Rhys. (I couldn't work this in anywhere else, but by marrying Rhys, Feyre becomes the Queen of Illyria, by the end of the series she rules femgooner Albania. Also femgooner Albania is Scotland. Thought that was funny. If you doubt me check the fan wiki). I would implore the reader to consider that this book is not only the gateway drug for “romantasy” (porn), I would also point out to the reader that in the hentai (anime porn) community the open secret is that NTR (cheating) and rape content possesses an out-sized female fanbase.

ACOTAR exists as an altar to the red-pilled gods of hypergamy and rape fantasy (only when its chad). Often in man-o-sphere circles, that one study about women's rape fantasies is cited and feminists will respond with criticism on sample size et cetera and so forth. I grant that the study is flawed, but on a different basis. It relied on self-reporting, which creates a selection bias. As we all know, revealed preference remains king, queen, fairie lord, vizier, and master of all sociological analysis. Everyone moves to the least black neighborhood they can in the USA, even in 2025, after all. You want to know how many women will indulge their rape fantasies? Take the under-30 women you know and ask them about several key words: faerie books, faerie smut, BookTok, A Court of Thorns and Roses, Fourth Wing, and so on. They don't perceive of it as porn, so they'll out themselves.

If anyone believes this book doesn't consist of a series of rape fantasies, they're lying, retarded, illiterate, delusional, or next-level retarded. In my experience, it’s something like 38 out of 40 roughly. That is to say there’s a higher proportion of women outing themselves as rape-enjoyers than men who would admit they really like big tits in mixed company. Imagine a world where Monster Musume, High School DxD, etc were put on prime time and people had the temerity to suggest that not all men love giant tits and toned bodies. Which is to say that the real crazy thing here remains that women will just admit and discuss their pornographic tastes in public.

I'm going to assume 99% of my readership is male by this point, which is probably true. Have you ever talked with the boys or in public about your porno preferences? I'm not talking about the tits vs ass debate which perennially happens, but rather specific analysis of characters and scenes from porno. Have you ever suggested to random women that they consume your preferred porno? Have you ever talked about porno to a complete stranger? No? Well its safe to say you have a Y chromosome, because I only know this book exists because someone mentioned it to me at a work event, on the clock. I've been recommended it by women. These women also believe it will help “men understand women better.” When I bought my hardcover copy (which I may destroy via tannerite) the cashier didn't even think it was odd, which to me indicates there's enough simps buying this slop because of girlfriends that it isn't even surprising to see a guy buy it. It's a mainstream novel. I purchased my copy barely 10 paces from the entrance to the bookstore. Sure the TV deal on ACOTAR fell through with Disney, but Maas assures us she's looking for a new deal in mid-2025. (To avoid aging this I'll put in an aside, I think this will be made into a TV show and I hope the femgooners have to intersect with the anti-woke people over race swaps, given everyone in this novel is white).

While nonfiction retains its lead over fiction by a 3:2 ratio, 80% of all fiction novels are marketed and sold to women, and it’s clear that this slop constitutes a major reason why. It is worth considering that genre crypsis and obfuscation are occurring here; Young Adult, Romance, BookTok, and Sci-Fi/Fantasy basically exist on the same continuum and—just like regular porn—the less explicit (spicy) stuff feeds into the harder stuff. ACOTAR might not feature explicit actual rape and BDSM, but the stuff that these women end up reading 8 months after probably will.

This points to the most frustrating aspect of discussion surrounding ACOTAR and its genre-sibling titles. There exists a rhetorical shell game that's played anytime this comes up. It's never called porn. It's “smut,” “spicy literature,” and “it's not the same, it’s reading.” They’re all euphemisms to soften the blow that they’re reading 416 pages of rape-adjacent sexual domination fantasy with baked in masturbatory hypergamy, monkey-branching, and sexual competition over women where men are described as “gorgeous” and “sensuous.” We somehow managed to re-engineer “I read it for the articles” but worse, and for women (playboy, as far as I'm aware, was never really rape-adjacent).

“It's not the same, it’s reading” reveals a lot of willful ignorance and blatant lying. For one, men absolutely read and write porn; 4chan's traditional games board had a weekend smut thread before the troons destroyed it, and you bet your ass the market for Warhammer 40k smut authors and readers is majority male (less male than 40k players, but only marginally). I'm not saying this to lionize, valorize or defend male porn consumption or creation, just noting that it is absolutely within the conceptual horizons for a man to consider written material titillating. It is “the same,” and arguably worse, as most guys start with relatively tame shit compared to what I read in chapter 21 of ACOTAR, and the characters in that hadn't even engaged in sexual congress yet.

The fuzzy conceptual shell games give the consumer of this media the illusion that its not what it is, which in turn erases the taboo around it. I would not have written this article had I not first learned of these books from a coworker at a work social event. She said she was into reading such that she reneged on a social engagement to read a book, and given her level of attractiveness I figured I'd continue the conversation, especially given that I too have done that (I stayed up until 3 AM reading 85 Days in Slavyansk). Well, after a tad bit of prodding, my female coworker admitted to reneging to read the sequel to ACOTAR (keep in mind, dear reader, that this is the book were Feyre dumps Tamlin to be with Rhys). I would point out that—of the females I work with—this one was the most attractive, so the premise that these books somehow exist as cope for uggos absolutely does not test muster. You can use the keywords I mentioned earlier and you'll get zoomer women to tell on themselves; its a near universal phenomenon.

Given the permeation of this material, one must consider the social implications. If Tamlin gets viewed as a bad boyfriend, what chance do you, a non-perfect, not-immortal, not-princely, not-faerie, and not-mind reading dude have? Before you accuse me of sexual insecurity consider the reverse: is a woman not unreasonable for taking umbrage with her husband’s porn addiction? A lot of hay is made in right-wing circles freaking out over porn, but I'll be honest, you have to get pretty deep before you start finding shit that's as rape-adjacent as ACOTAR. Men are pretty self accountable on this too: nofap was invented by men, and most men recognize porn addiction as a serious problem to be addressed. Society has turned a blind eye here and actively discourages discussion of this topic. The average age a man is exposed to porn is now 12 years old. The average age a girl discovers this slop is 13. Damn near the same.

The ACOTAR boom started in 2023, but it’s not limited to certain age bands; a girl born in 2010 is going to get hit just as hard as one born in 2000. I'd like to comment more on the implications this has for behavior, but very few people study this at any level, so I'll point to several things. Firstly, women are never going to escape the rape fantasy and violence fantasy allegations. I'm convinced it’s lizard-brained. To be entirely honest, this book and its popularity has lead me to believe that women do not honestly feel anything close to what men understand love to be. Secondly, I feel this will set an entitlement spiral that will cause women to constantly raise expectations to such ridiculous degrees that society will have to hurt on a massive level as a result. Thirdly, I regret that civilization exists such that it can promulgate these works, I sincerely hope and pray that God blesses us with the circumstance necessary for a chud crusade, cleansing the earth and leaving behind a tiny population of humans to repopulate the wasteland. If I am killed in this effort, I am fine, I would rather join my creator than live in a world where any random woman I come across is subconsciously comparing me to her pretend rapist faerie boyfriend.

I would like to thank ethanol, Yuki Kajiura, Duran Duran, Insomnolant, and 2 of my co-workers for helping me with this review and helping me get through it. If this article does well enough for the American Sun to pay me for a sequel I'll suffer through Fourth Wing. God can't come back soon enough.

Expect a follow up documenting my destruction of this accursed tome.

“Men we have been outgooned”
X user and artist @romulproduce reacting to gatcha games targeted towards women

“And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God's righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.”
Paul's Epistle to the Romans, Chapter 1, Verses 28-32