#about how sarah's white feminism translates into feyre developing white women syndrome(TM) later in this series

[bookishfeylin]

I've been thinking that the reason the ACOTAR fandom is so toxic is because Mrs. Maas applied real world standards to a fantasy series, creating a conundrum where some characters are allowed to exist in and operate within a fantasy-based morality (like Rhysand, the Inner Circle, and Feyre) whilst others are held up to a stricter, real-world morality and are vehemently critiqued in text for failing to meet the moral standards of our world (Tamlin, Nesta, even Lucien), leaving fans of the latter group of characters to call out the hypocrisy in text for their characters being evaluated by standards that the former aren't held to whilst fans of the former set of characters happily indulge in such hypocritical writing even while promoting this series as an excellent example of handling of real-world themes like abuse; but now I think it's more than that.

Feyre has all the powers--she can shapeshift AND read minds AND control all the elements AND control light AND shadow. Everyone loves her, men of all races want to have sex with her, she can fetishize men of color and have mixed children and participate in cultural appropriation without consequence; she can brutalize men of color and look down on and belittle the appearance of women of color whenever she wants with impunity, because she is the eternal victim. She can do no wrong; people can only wrong her. She can never hurt anyone; people can only hurt her. Feyre is all powerful, but she's an eternal victim--she's a white woman's power fantasy. That's why this series reeks of white feminism so badly. Feyre is a white woman's power fantasy.

But some white women, and many women of color, don't identify with that power fantasy--especially Feyre's "being able to oppress others with impunity" schtick--so they reach out for other characters instead. But because Feyre is the eternal victim, because Feyre is the embodiment of white womenhood, that means many of the other characters are written as Feyre's oppressors or antagonists, and the white women who identify with Feyre hate them, because how dare those characters and their stans ruin their power fantasy? How dare those characters impede Feyre, their self-insert, from being the embodiment of idealized white womanhood?

So those characters, and those who stan them, are resented. In this essay, I will--