Tefir's parents 💙

Bonus full baby tef concept and my chicken scratch thinking about my coastal togruta ideas (bigger pieces abt this....one day 💚)

Togruta who live along the coast evolved to have patterns that let them blend in more easily with the water, since their biggest predator (a big ol dunkle lookin thing) lives just outside of the underwater coral barrier

I imagine more inland togruta who live around lakes/marshes have similar adaptations, less significantly tho (like not always having flatter, rear facing montrals, or longer lekku)

Not much else is different because I can't pretend to Actually be knowledgeable enough for that but as we all know i just adore making alien designs KSCJSKV

sorry to bother you but i didn't know who else to ask but was it ever explained in tog how aedion (who's father is fully fae) somehow isn't considered fae at all, aka he isn't immortal and can't shapeshift, while aelin (who's parents are both human) is somehow half fae? is it because that one goddess was her ancestor?

Celaena is actually part fae on both sides: on the Galathynius end she gets it from Brannon, and presumably whenever Elena's descendant marries back into the Galathynius line (the only way for Elena to be a mutual ancestor of Celaena and Dorian) so the amount of fae blood there is minuscule but extant. Through her mother and the Ashryvers she is directly and more recently descended from Mab, who is per the text Celaena's great-grandmother (there is one line in Kingdom of Ash where Mab is suddenly a more distant grandmother, but since that makes everything make even less sense I ignore it. If you want the quotes lmk), which makes Celaena just a smidge more than 1/8 fae, plus, as you mentioned, whatever lingering godblood is in there from Mala via Elena and whichever of Elena's siblings ruled Terrasen.

On the other hand Aedion has exactly the same amount of fae blood from Mab, since his unnamed mother was Evalin's cousin and for him to have Mab's eyes he must be descended from her, making him also Mab's great-grandson. On top of what he inherited from Mab, as you said, his father was fully fae. This means that Aedion is, assuming there was no other fae intermarriage in the Ashryver's past (and it seems like we would know about it given how hot under the collar these books are re: fae), more than half fae, or, specifically, 5/8 fae.

So yeah.

(Like I said, there is room for more or less fae blood in here, but the only two different interpretations in the text mean less fae blood for Celaena and/or more for Aedion, which... *shrugs helplessly*)

I enjoyed the ACOTAR books when I read them and love a lot of the characters but I definitely see where people are coming from with their criticisms.

I would say TOG is better though it comes with its own set of problems. And I was kind of enjoying the CC series until the ACOTAR crossover.

I think the main difference, for me anyway, is that TOG and CC felt like they had a lot more meaningful sacrifices. SJM wasn’t afraid of killing off characters.

But who died in ACOTAR? Feyre’s unnamed mother, Clare Beddor, and two unnamed fae. And in ACOMAF? A few unnamed citizens in Velaris, and a mortal queen.

And ACOWAR is perhaps the worst offender with thousands of unnamed civilians and soldiers of Prythian, the bone carver and the weaver who were literally introduced as antagonists, Brennan and Dagda who were also antagonists, three unnamed children of the blessed, Feyre’s unnamed father, the King of Hybern (is he unnamed or is his name literally Hybern?), and the Suriel (the only death that elicited any sort of emotional response from me).

[I’m on a train and don’t have my books to refer back to so forgive me if I got any names wrong, mixed up the books, or missed a death or two.]

Compare this to losing characters like Sam, Nehemia, Gavriel, the thirteen, even Ren (especially Ren) the impact just isn’t the same. And of course a lot of unnamed soldiers and civilians died too, so it just makes sense that with all the battles and bloodshed in all of SJM’s series that we would lose a main character or two, but in ACOTAR we didn’t. Also there’s characters that were already dead before the events of the prequel took place, specifically Aelin’s parents, that we still kind of feel a sense of loss over just because it affects some of the main characters so much and the events of the series as a whole so much.

And in CC there’s Danika, Connor and the rest of their pack, Lehabah, even Hunt’s friends Justinian and Victoria. I don’t recall any deaths in the second one except Cormac and Sophie but that’s where I lost hope for the series anyway, with the ACOTAR crossover.

But I would say my least favourite thing SJM does is try to convince me that her characters “sacrificed” their mortality. Aelin, Feyre, Nesta, Elain, Bryce. I understand that they didn’t necessarily want to be fae but I don’t think becoming one is much of a sacrifice because they were written as so ridiculously superior to humans in every way.

And Amren’s sacrifice could have been a beautifully heartbreaking moment in ACOWAR but was ruined by immediately bringing her back to life. And it also kind of ruined how Feysand came full circle, from Rhys convincing the High Lords to revive Feyre in book one to Feyre doing the same for Rhys in book three, to have another character also come back to life, it just felt overdone. (And of course Feyre died again in ACOSF and so did Nyx but I’m not going anywhere near that god awful book, it was so disappointing). I don’t think SJM even knows what to do with Amren’s character anymore, like oh god you’re slightly less immortal you’ve sacrificed so much for us 🙄.

So yeah, ultimately for me it comes down to how much a book can make me feel something, and TOG achieved this far better than ACOTAR ever could. But even with all that said I still like ACOTAR, I just think TOG is better in terms of what I want from a book.

ACOTAR Review, Chapter Two.

This chapter introduces us to Feyre’s family: her father, who remains unnamed in all currently published ACOTAR novels for some reason, and her sisters, Elain and Nesta. Nesta is the eldest and Elain is the middle child.

However, despite Feyre being the youngest of the bunch, all responsibility for feeding and keeping the family alive falls to her. Her father is an invalid who makes wood carvings and angsts about the past, Elain is framed as infantile and ridiculously naive, and Nesta is spiteful and unnecessarily mean to Feyre. The entire situation gives off a vibe that implies that Feyre’s family were written solely to make life harder for Feyre. It gives off a lot of Cinderella vibes: young girl forced to do all the work for a parent and two sisters, which is strange because this is supposed to be a Beauty and the Beast retelling. ToG is supposed to be the Cinderella retelling, yet this one scene feels more closely related to the fairytale than that entire series.

Feyre’s father is scared because Feyre killed the wolf. Feyre uses inclusive language to talk about gutting the deer, but no one so much as lifts a finger to help her. They just sit around doing god knows what and watch the baby of the family gut a deer all by herself. There’s an offhand comment about how Feyre’s mother told Feyre to look after the family while she was on her deathbed, and it seems that the whole family took that promise as law and let a literal child (I believe Feyre was 11 when she started hunting?) go into dangerous woods by herself to hunt because everyone else was too lazy to do it. Not only is this entire idea absurd, it’s downright insane. What parent, or older sister, in their right mind wouldn’t assist their sister in these endeavors? Feyre hunting is the only reason they haven’t starved to death, and the text implies that her family know it, but Nesta refuses to even chop wood to help Feyre, so Maas’s goal with this whole situation becomes clear.

Aesthetic. Again, Maas writes solely to produce a particular aesthetic for the book. She wants this chapter to show us how hard life is for Feyre so she can contrast it later on, but she does it in such an obtrusive way that it doesn’t feel natural or even logistically possible. Why would her family never help her? Helping her should help them, it keeps them fed and it keeps them safe. For selfish or selfless reasons, helping Feyre should be quite high on the to-do list. This just feels nonsensical and foolish.

Maas also can’t seem to decide on how she wants to characterize Elain in this chapter. She portrays her as docile and dreamy, but also says that Nesta and Elain “parade around as if the young peasants of the town made up a second-rate social circle,” which seems to conflict with the other information we receive about Elain. This sentence in particular feels very out of place.

For the length of this chapter—12 pages—absolutely nothing happens. They eat dinner. There’s a little bit of conversation about Nesta getting married. Nesta is mean. Elain is stupid. Their father is useless. Feyre is the only one framed as competent.

Maas displays another obvious lack of research in this chapter. She says that Feyre is an artist (does the protagonist have a hobby? If the answer is yes, proceed. If the answer is no, spin the wheel and have one randomly allocated to provide “character depth”) and owns three cans of paint. These are obviously red, yellow and blue. She doesn’t have white or black. However, she’s still somehow perfectly capable of doing nice paintings of flames, flowers and the night sky on a chest of drawers. Flames? Okay, I guess, but without white they’re not exactly going to look nearly bright enough. Flowers? Feyre describes them as roses and violets, but it would be immensely difficult to paint flowers without being able to make shadows and highlights. I’m picturing the versions of flowers that little kids draw; the ones that are just coloured blobs with a blob of yellow in the middle right now. Feyre paints the night sky on her drawer with the yellow standing in for the white (which would literally just be yellow dots.). It isn’t stated whether or not Feyre has painted a blue background onto the drawer first, which is probably a good thing. If she had I would’ve had to talk about the fact that most blue paint is way too light to use a background for the stars. Either way, Feyre’s drawer is covered in yellow dot and little crosses to emulate stars, but i suspect it looks rather terrible given her lack of materials. Side note: where did she get the brush? Good ones can be expensive ad cheap ones need to be replaced quite frequently, so how exactly does Feyre handle this?

A lot of information from the first chapter is just repeated. It’s dull and unnecessary.

This chapter is even worse on em-dashes than the last: Fifty three in 12 pages. Most notable is page 19 that had a grand total of NINE on it. NINE. Naturally, it’s also full of sentence fragments and feels like it needs a new editor, because whoever was hired to edit this thing has no clue what they’re doing. From what I’ve seen so far, this book could be cleaved in half if all of the useless material and some of the purple prose was removed. It doesn’t bode well for the rest of the book if i feel the first 20 pages have no business being as long as the are, does it?