Romantasy's Morally Ambiguous Men (ACOTAR Series Spoiler Alert)

 

Image Credit: https://fictionfanart.com/acotar/rhysand-fan-art/

“And I wondered if love was too weak a word for what he felt, what he’d done for me. For what I felt for him.”

― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Mist and Fury

The genre of Romantasy is having a cultural moment. Women who were not formally avid readers are picking up book series like A Court of Thorns and Roses (ACOTAR) and restructuring their whole personalities around their newfound love of the Maasverse. The craze is a classic example of fandom culture, with an exploding book-tok where fans analyze their favorite characters and theorize about the storylines.

The love interests of Feyre Archeron follow a narrative arc common to romantasy: the characters, plots, and fantasy elements are saturated with the genre's very similar literary tropes. One of these tropes is the genre’s dark and mysterious male protagonists. Edgy— often morally ambiguous— men are featured alongside strong female protagonists. The major male characters support the female heroines while they search for their destinies and fight ancient monsters in mystical faerie realms. 

There’s something to be said about the men these romantasy women fall for— and what their riveting bad-boy prototypes reveal about the genre's attempts at promoting strong female characters. Fans of the Maasverse, for instance, debate Rhysand's moral status, offering a range of opinions from hero— to morally gray— to villain. In different spaces, in different times, and to different people, Rhysand is arguably all of those things. 

What is more interesting, in my opinion, is what Rhysand's ambiguous, chameleon-like moral status says about Feyre's overall liberation and personal growth in the five-book-long story while simultaneously contributing to her oppression in subtle ways. Is Feyre a strong, feminist female lead, or does her character perpetuate the damsel-in-distress archetype? The answer is more complicated than what the audience experiences while reading through the series for the first time. 

At times, Rhysand’s character uplifts Feyre, allowing her to come into her own and heal after Tamlin cages and emotionally abuses her. When I first read the series, I read Rhysand’s character and interactions with Feyre as liberatory: he teaches her to read, helps her learn to master her powers, and always offers her the choice to do what she wants to do. 

Yet, even within those choices, Feyre is not fully the agent of her own fate. Her gratitude to the male protagonists that steward, save, and contain her convey her role in the patriarchal structures of the Prythian Faerie realm. It's true that she becomes the first High Lady, but she also has to survive her time under the mountain by performing as Rhysand’s whore, dancing almost naked in sheer clothing while drinking Faerie wine that makes her forget the entire encounter. 

Rhysand frames these moments Under the Mountain and in The Court of Nightmares as performative. Rhysand’s actions, in his eyes, are justified because he claims that making Feyre perform like he does protects the hidden Court of Dreams where he resides with his inner court. 

The rest of Prythian believes Rhysand to be the distant, cold, calculated High Lord of the Night Court that shows up in book one of the series. While Rhysand is written as the good guy in disguise, fans have speculated whether or not Rhysand is truly a good guy or if the books only convey Feyre’s unreliable perception of him. Criticism increases as the books progress and Rhysand makes some rather questionable choices regarding keeping crucial information from Feyre to protect her state of mind and wellbeing, further making the case that Feyre views Rhysand from her own rose-colored glasses. 

For me, personally, I like to think of Rhysand the way that Feyre does: he is the perfect book boyfriend. However, it would be naive to completely buy into the romantasy trope of male perfection— there is more to Maas’s characters than what’s at the surface. I think that it is meant to be that way.