I’ve been in sjm fandoms for seven book releases and I have never experienced this thing, where a portion of the fandom seems to have read a completely different book than the rest of us.
And this isn’t even just about ships, it’s about Nesta and the IC, too.
Is it because we’re farther along into the series and people have their minds made up about who will be endgame or which characters they (dis)like and so they read with those things in mind?
It’s just wild.
I honestly have to ask, was it like this for Throne of Glass too?
No!
I joined ToG later, when EoS came out. But the big discussion then was if rowaelin was or wasn’t abusive, and that was mainly coming from sjm antis, if I remember correctly. We definitely had different favorite characters and ships and disagreements about those, but none of those were based on a completely different interpretation of what the books said? People weren’t trying to go back to CoM or HoF or something to rewrite history?
But now it’s like you can point to a character and people will have WILDLY different interpretations of that character, to the point where they might as well have read different books. I don’t understand 😭
I think after acowar there was this much activity but it was all different things that kinda exploded and people got tired and left fandom.
Some examples of the “discussions” that were had and had people on both sides....
- Mor and azriel and the death of moriel
- Mor coming out and if it was or wasn’t ok or genuine.
- ace characters being described as the bad guys. (Unsure if ace - of if interpretation.
- death pact being fucking dumb.
- rhys should have died
- amren should have died
- why did the Suriel have to die? What was the point of all these old characters and now they are just dead.
- the war seemed anticlimactic - enemies were easier to kill than originally thought.
- why wasn’t there more nessian on the page!
- the plot was bad/unwieldy
Um I know there is more. But the debates around the first few were super heated.
A lot of the Mor debate had personal stuff too and people’s own experiences so it was a lot of people invalidating eachother which isn’t great. I think now we are at this sort of acceptance that everyone has different experiences and while some of us would have loved Mor’s story to be a little different was have accepted that this is canon and her life story.