This has been pissing me off for years but I finally made a tiktok about it and I’m just posting it on here too. So here are a lot of inconsistencies in ACOTAR that piss me off to no end, and one of them is this thing about daematis. And it is sucha small thing but it is just one out of the countless inconsistencies in SJM's writing that makes me personally not enjoy the series as much anymore.
In chapter 54 of ACOMAF, Rhys explains in his really long "I'm a good guy I swear" monologue that he took away Clare’s pain Under the Mountain while she was being tortured.
Chapter 54 of ACOMAF:
“I broke into Clare’s head when they brought her Under The Mountain. I took away her pain, and told her to scream when expected to. So they…they did those things to her, and I tried to make it right, but…After a week, I couldn’t let them do it. Hurt her like that anymore. So while they tormented her, I slipped into her mind again and ended it. She didn’t feel any pain. She felt none of what they did to her, even at the end.
But in ACOFAS, Feyre gets her first menstrual cycle, she finds out that it’s so much more painful than a human period, but there was nothing Madja, Mor, or Rhys could do for the pain.
Chapter 5 of ACOFAS:
“In place of those monthly, human discomforts, was a biannual week of stomach-shredding agony. Even Madja, Rhys’ favored healer, could do little for the pain short of rendering me unconscious.”
...did we not remember that Rhys has the ability to take away pain? This just tells me that SJM forgot, because that would be an excellentttt opportunity to show more of Rhys being a loving mate with these awesome powers. Rhys is tending to her every need, cleaning Feyre off, switching blankets, stroking her hair:
“Rhys had stayed with me the entire time, stroking my hair, replacing the heated blankets that I soaked with sweat, even helping me clean myself off. Blood was blood, was all he said when I’d objected to him seeing me peel off the soiled undergarments. I’d been barely able to move at that point without whimpering…”
If SJM remembered what she wrote I feel like Rhys would have leaped at the opportunity to take away her pain.
And people can say “Oh but what about this”, “well Rhys could just be manipulative and evil or something”, “Well I don’t think Feyre would have let him anyways”, and other such excuses, but when I break the fourth wall, it just looks like Rhys taking away Clare’s pain with his daemati powers was to make him look better in the situation. It was not a proper bit of world-building or magic system-building, because SJM just…forgot. It is solely to make Rhys look like a good guy in this specific moment and is used for nothing else because she. Forgot. And I’m pretty sick of SJM just…forgetting about stuff, even if it’s something as small as this.