This kind of discussion that the other side of the fandom has about Lucien they also have about Azriel?
Because the arguments they use and talk about what Lucien is doing, Azriel spent 500 years doing with Mor and it was even Azriel who objectified Elain, even Rhys lost the color of his face when he heard his thoughts, but they see it as love.
Hypocrites.
So honestly, I think the thing that is the most telling in this whole entire discussion, is the failure to see that Azriel is being painted in the exact same (problematic) light as Lucien is. By sjm.
I'm going to go into a deep dive on this okay, because I've frankly been surprised that no one has (to me, at least) brought up the idea of Azriel's portrayal in the book being way worse than Lucien's, and so them both being POC, Azriel being more markedly so, should be a similar problem. Talking about either of them being angry or threatening to either Mor or Elain should be the same problem, right?
Wrong.
This is going to be super long. Under the cut explanation of why the fandom describing Azriel as angry is not at all the same issue as saying that Lucien won’t leave Elain alone, and how while Azriel’s characterization is fucked up on sjm’s part, the fandom’s interpretation of Lucien is fucked up and that’s on the people who insist on reading him a certain way.
I agree with all of this
I just want to say that the issue with Az, and the Illyrians in general, is that SJM really thoughtlessly does representation. So she wrote the Illyrians as a warrior race with various shades of "tan" skin, and then she later made it more clear that they all have various shades of brown skin. This made is clear that they are PoC, as well as the fact that they are othered by the high fae and looked down on. But rather than providing the books with good representation it just gave us some pretty shody rep. It might have even been better (idk less problematic?) for her to just leave the Illyrians as vaguely tanned white people (which it what they could have been in acomaf) who were a different "fae race" but would not necessarily experience racism if they lived in our world.
With Az, his story has the potential to be transformative and interesting, we could see this very angry, troubled man realize how his actions have affected the women in his life. We could see him grow and change and self reflect. We could see him be accountable for his actions.
This would be powerful because there are a lot of men in real life, of every race and ethnicity and nationality, who are angry and toxic and try to control the women around them.
But SJM has so little positive, well done representation for people of color (dare I say none? Like yes Helion and Tarquin and Rhys and Cass and Luc are positive characters, but I wouldn't say they are well done in terms of rep), that Azriel being both a man of color in our sense of the word and an othered "lesser fae race" in the in-universe sense of things, just comes off really terribly when we consider his problematic actions and anger.
It comes down to SJM not thinking these things through, or building her representation carefully, so these messes occur.
There's a world in which Az can both be a man of color and also have the issues that he has. But that's a world in which the representation of people of color has on the whole been done well, and is nuanced, and clear.
Instead, we get every Illyrian aside from Cass and Rhys being a war mongering misogynistic asshole, and that group currently includes Azriel.