i am very tired of the idea that if your question is unresolved and unanswered that means that sjm doesn't think about her writing
like
yeah some of the issues with acotar have to do with sjm potentially not thinking through plot and world building holes but a lot of the time it's more that we/fandom/you have just interpreted something differently from how the author meant it? like the way that Nesta's arc ends up revolving around physical exercise and didn't delve into her being an alcoholic or addicted to sex is different from how many of us envisioned it but like
the text explicitly addresses those things? and it's literally not sjm's fault or a crisis of her being a bad writer when character arcs do not resolve the way you wanted them to?
there are valid things to critique ofc, but the line between that and "well this didn't work out the way i wanted or envisioned so sjm is a shit writer" is...thinner and thinner these days.
like. i personally hate gwynriel as a ship and have a lot of very valid reasons for why i personally think they wouldn't work irl but...if/when they do I'm not going to sit there and say SJM "wrote Az's arc incorrectly" or whatever. like. she is just going to write it the way she envisions and....just because it doesn't add up to who I understand him to be doesn't like.....mean she didn't plan it correctly or carefully
I always have questions about things, it’s just how my mind works. In general I think it’s important to remember that she might have the answers and she might have written them down - we just don’t know. Everyone has this deficient type of thinking, if it’s not in the book then she hasn’t even thought about it.
So going back to my neverending world building questions. If I was been given world and magic answers that didn’t relate to my ‘romance novel reading/interpretation’ I would be annoyed. If it was just thrown in to show the audience - hey I’m so clever look at this thing I did! - I would be mad. I would be asking her editor why they didn’t cut out the words that weren’t relevant to the story in the moment. Big reveals wouldn’t be revealing if we already knew how everything worked and it would be a boring story.
I don’t think we give SJM enough credit because a lot of people think it’s fun to hate on popular authors. I’m not saying she’s perfect either, I just think sometimes as a fandom we can get a little extreme in our generalisations about what someone is or isn’t doing in their books.