Guys.  There’s a lot of cursing and sexual assault in this one.  Sorry. 

So after the threat of sexual violence is used for bullfuckingshit nothing except to let some fucking fuck-faced pretty boy show up and fucking white knight the fucking hell out of this fucking book, fuck fuck fuck.

If you can’t tell, I’m not exactly over it, but we’ve got more fuckery to get to, so on with the fucking show.

Anyway, so this is our resident Bad Boy for the book, as is easy to tell by all the different ways the book tries to scream HE’S SEXY at you.

Going on about dude’s “sensual” grace right after an attempted sexual assault is just really the FUCK YOU sprinkles on top of that whole fucking sundae.

They banter, Feyre is afraid of him but not in the same way she was afraid of the other monsters and

God fucking damnit, this book is going to make me stay with this, isn’t it?

I had never seen anyone so handsome—and never had so many warning bells pealed in my head because of it.

To anyone who has literally one fucking lick of awareness, this is scarier than anything that happened last chapter. Because this, THIS, is what sexual assault looks like. Ugly creepy strangers who pop out of bushes are a miniscule percentage of assaults that happen; most of them are good looking acquaintances who SET OFF WARNING BELLS because it turns out women are actually good at spotting danger and their subconscious (or conscious) lets them know. And then here comes these shitfucking failcake fuckityfuckfuck books saying “no, that’s not danger, the ugly creepy bushstalkers are danger, this is just mystery and tantalizing drama set up for exciting romance later” and FUCK THAT FUCKING SHIT.

It’s twenty-fucking-sixteen. We’ve got the internet. Google is almost a decade old. Social media is abundant. A fuck-ton of studies have been done. Articles have been written. Rape survivors have fucking screamed their stories into the world just begging people to pay the fuck attention to what rape and assault actually are, so that something can fucking be done about it. There is no excuse. There is zero fucking excuse for bullshit like this. I don’t care how many tropes came before you, what you’re copying, what market you’re appealing to, I don’t fucking care. There is no way to excuse this kind of bullshit in this day and age and say you don’t know better. FUCKING LEARN. The sources are out there; if you’ve been on the internet for five consecutive minutes you’ve seen them. Stop ignoring them and do fucking better.

But who the fuck am I even talking to, eh? My lovely readers? You already know; if you didn’t you wouldn’t bother to be on my blog. So I’m just preaching to the choir and nothing changes and good god no wonder I’m exhausted.

Anyway, after that bullshit, we get more sex bullshit.

Lucien finds Feyre in the crowd and gets super freaked out about it, picks her up, and runs her back to the house. There, he calls her ten kinds of idiot and lets her know what the “Great Rite” is, finally. Apparently Tamlin (and the other high lords in their own festivals) will suck a lot of magic into his body, basically get possessed, and the magic will pick a lady for him to screw, and then sex magic will fill the land for the year to come. Or something. The idea of sex and passion being a force for life/magic has plenty of basis in all sorts of myths, and all the ladies at the cave are there by choice.

But, uh, Tamlin apparently doesn’t have a choice in all this? If he doesn’t do it his land is magicless and apparently that affects “crops” (who farms these crops?) so if he doesn’t do it everyone will starve. But he has no control over his body during the Rite and doesn’t even get to pick his own mate. That’s still rape. It’s rape via magic, not via an actual person/perpetrator, but it’s still creepy as fuck. And all those lady fairies gathered around and giddy with glee hoping to be picked…but the nonconsenting puppet…damn, y’all creepy as fuck, too. “Yay, I hope the functionally unconscious person lets me do things to their body that they’re unaware of, what a great honor!” Say what you want about the magic puppeting thing – it’s fantasy, it doesn’t count, it’s not real, the rules are different because fairies and magic and necessity – but everyone gleefully participating in this whole ‘ceremony’ is super fucking creepy.

Even Feyre doesn’t care, because once she hears Lucien say that Tam would have picked her if she’d been there, she gets all shippy and shit.

Except

The magic will seize control of his mind, his body, his soul, and turn him into the Hunter.

[…]

“Tonight, Tam won’t be the faerie you know,” Lucien said. “He won’t even know his name. The magic will consume everything in him but that one basic command—and need.”

[…]

but it’s his instincts that select her.”

So Tamlin isn’t really Tamlin, except when it’s convenient to the ship and then yeah Tamlin’s totally in there influencing the selection process.

And another thing, why did no one tell Feyre this? I mean, it seems common sense to say “look, there’s going to be a full-on fairy orgy going on at this festival, if you come one someone’s going to assume you want to participate, and look you just don’t want to see some of the literal monster penises that are going to be flying around. If you thought duck dicks were bad, they got nothing on fairies.” Boom, easy-peasy, Feyre doesn’t wander into the festival.

And, I mean, sure, if she doesn’t wander in we don’t get our festival scene, but if you can only make your plot work by having everyone forget common sense, you need to rework your plot. Also the only effect of her going was to meet Hot Bad Dickface, and he could have just as easily come to the house for something.

Later that night Feyre feels some magic moving about and figures it’s the sexytimes, then gets super jealous because ship stuff.

I wondered whether she was glad to be chosen. Probably. She’d come to the hill of her own free will. And after all, Tamlin was a High Lord, and it was a great honor.

So you’ll talk about the lady’s consent, but not about Tamlin’s? Because, what, he’s a dude and getting sex so of course it’s no bother to him? Fuck this book.

Oh, the hits just keep on coming! Feyre goes down to the kitchen for food, assuming the house is empty and it’s safe enough here, but lo Tamlin is there. Still juiced up on magic and anxious for some Feyre.

I can’t. Tamlin “isn’t himself,” Feyre is scared, the language is so, so fucking creepy and supposed to be passed off as hot and steamy and I JUST FUCKING CAN’T.

SO ON TO CHAPTER TWENT TWO. I don’t even want to know what happened in those two pages I skipped.

But I get to find out anyway because the chapter opens with Feyre inspecting her bite mark. She goes down to breakfast, where Tamlin calmly states that it’s her own fault.

“While I might not have been myself, Lucien and I both told you to stay in your room,” Tamlin said, so calmly that I wanted to rip out my hair.

Considering the language being used, I hate to agree with the dudes, but…uh, puppeted by magic? Literally not in control? And this wasn’t one of those bullshit warnings like “keep your thighs covered or boys will be boys.” It was a pretty explicit “hey, shitfuckery going down, lock your doors until morning.”

Again, I kind of hating even looking like I’m on a side, because Feyre (before I stopped) was the focus of some pretty aggressive behavior and had a couple big shocks that night; she doesn’t have to be rational here. She doesn’t have to sit down and “oh, well, you do have a point.” But the scene doesn’t play off like two shitty sides; Feyre is offended over his rudeness. It even ends with everyone laughing about their spat, because that’s all this is to them, a little breach in etiquette.

And I’m still pissed over the implied “eh, Tamlin’s a dude, they’re always up for it so who cares.”

God, this book is so fucked up. And I say this as someone who enjoys writing erotica, even the darker stuff. There’s a lot you can explore with magic and consent if you just fucking acknowledge what you’re doing. You can’t just throw in magic and then treat it like a normal interaction.

We apologized at dinner. He even brought me a bouquet of white roses from his parents’ garden, and while I dismissed them as nothing, I made certain that Alis took good care of them when I returned to my room. She gave me only a wry nod before promising to set them in my painting room. I fell asleep with a smile still on my lips.

For the first time in a long, long while, I slept peacefully.

…riveting.

Also, you sure did get back in the habit of making your servant do everything, didn’t you?

The next night, Feyre wears a pretty dress and goes down to dinner with Tamlin, and shippy. She takes him to her painting room and shows him her paintings, saying she did one of the starlight pool to give him as a gift. It’s not a bad scene in isolation, though coming off the heels of all that shitfuckery from before it’s a jarring tonal shift. Not that the book seems to have any clue about this fact.

Tamlin says he’d rather have a snowscape painting instead. Says it reminds him of the whole ‘it’s lonely at the top’ thing.

“I’ve had many lovers,” he admitted. “Females of noble birth, warriors, princesses …” Rage hit me, low and deep in the gut at the thought of them—rage at their titles, their undoubtedly good looks, at their closeness to him. “But they never understood. What it was like, what it is like, for me to care for my people, my lands. What scars are still there, what the bad days feel like.”

Dude, you telling me that warriors and princesses don’t get it? Like…why not? “God, it’s so awful having a title. The ladies who have titles clearly have no capacity to understand.” “Man, killing things is so hard to do. The ladies that kill things for a living just don’t understand.”

All just to make Feyre feel special. Throw the ladies with actual experience under the bus, who cares about them, got to make it clear that they couldn’t possibly be as deep and angsty as Tamlin and Too-Good-For-This-World Feyre.