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How would you describe a court of thorns and roses to someone who has never heard of it? Okay, it's a series of Romantic-See books which means that they are big fantasy world books but they have a lot of romance stuff happening in them. And it's about a young initially human woman who falls in love with a super sexy old fairy daddy and he can shape shift into a lion
beast thing. And the first book is sort of beauty and the beast inflected but after that, everything goes off the rails in a good way. This is the Culture Study Podcast and I'm Anne Helen Peterson. And I'm Catherine Feneridonk
and I'm a critic at Vulture. Then I am like positioning myself right now at the beginning as someone who loves romance but does not consume a ton of it and I think we can maybe unpack some of those reasons why as we go through but I have been enthralled by various franchises over the course of the last however many years of my adult life. But then we should backtrack just a slight amount and say that today's episode is all about specifically the romance fantasy series
Accord of Thorns and Roses which we're going to call I call it Akotar. How do you pronounce it? Akotar, yes. Akotar by Sarah J. Mass. And part of the reason we're doing this is that every time I post what are you reading thread for subscribers on my newsletter, there's always this really interesting and I think very familiar to both you and I conversation about why do I love this series? Why do I feel certain ways about this series? Like just complicated feelings about this series.
I think a lot of affection for it, a lot of defensiveness which makes sense and a lot of ambivalence and I think that leads me to how I have been describing it which I think undersells it but leads to interesting conversations which when people say what are you reading I say oh this
fairy porn book right? Which like that it is so so much more than that but we kind of like seen people's reactions when I say yeah yeah yeah the TikTok preferred term that I see a lot is fairy smut and you know I'm sure we could we could spend a lot of time breaking down the difference between smut and porn as like a concept but they kind of are pointing at the same idea right? Yeah and there is in both this pre-defensiveness about like I know what you're thinking and what
that could mean a bunch of different things right? Like I know you think that this is like dirty and shameful I know that you think that this is silly and sort of frivolous and empty I know that you think that it's mostly about sex scenes and whatever that implies about me I know that you
think that it's for girls only and is mostly about like there's just like a lot of different stuff but regardless calling it that up front is this way of being like okay I know it's dumb but yeah right or to be like I know maybe you think it's dumb but I don't think it's dumb yes so I should
also say just for listeners to the pod we are going to do our very best in this first part of the episode to be spoiler free first of all and also to try to root our discussion in a way that makes it accessible to people who have not read the books because we want this to be a conversation that
is more than just about like the very specifics of these books and then in the second half of the show we're going to get down and to the week and talk about the details and have a mini book club discussion that's going to be just for paid subscribers so if you're listening to this and
already know you want to hear that part head to culturestudypod.substac.com and join the ranks of paid subscribers so I kind of want to talk like first where you are coming from yeah with these series yeah and root yourself just in terms of literary criticism like we both
have pretty interesting backgrounds when it comes to this yeah yeah so my background is kind of bifurcated one half of me is I'm a critic at vulture I spend a lot of time thinking about like texts with that word meant pretty broadly I spend a lot of time thinking about TV in particular
and actually comedy I write about a bit as well I have a PhD in English Lit from a fancy place and my dissertation was about serial fiction so I spend like a lot of time thinking about like very high-minded approaches to like literature and you know golden age prestige television or
whatever and also I read a lot of essentially precursor fairy smut as like a 14-year-old yeah it was not fairies it was dragons I read obsessively every end McCaffrey novel I can get my hands on not all of those are dragons some of the smuts are more like telepathy smut yeah there's something
super sexy about telepathy like because it's at the heart of some lowest dunkin that I really loved as a kid so yeah and so like I I have always been really a fantasy person but like if I actually go back now as an adult and think about the ones that I liked the most they usually
also had romance elements to them a lot of them were the stuff that Sarah J. Mass points to as the things that were that she was reading at the same point books like Garthniks' Sabriel Robin McKinley books which I loved deeply deeply deeply she was watching Buffy like that that
kind of a thing and then I have been a romance reader you know certainly not with the kind of incredibly lovely attention that like the really intense romance people are but like on and off you know I have gone through periods of my life for like the only thing my brain can
really read is romance and like what grad school I remember sitting and reading all of outlander and being like I should be eating dick and straight no you know let's say the outlander has been a point of conversation with my friend group in terms of how the series has kind of gripped us
some of the more mature and female focused emphasis on pleasure that sort of thing my background I have a PhD in media studies I did part of that in English like it was my masters was in English and I really loved Star Trek novels as a young person and I think that that's where a lot of
our wars person person yeah that was my brother that was my brother and like if I think about it my favorite of all of the Star Trek novels was Imzadi which is about that mated connection essentially to use an avatar term between Riker and Deanna Troy who's the
counselor and so it's all about like that romance that gripped me and then I have periodically and I think importantly also during grad school come to different romance texts as like a real way of rediscovering my love for reading rediscovering that love of reading the way that I did when I was
a teen and I and I did a lot of exploration of like what was going on with my fascination with twilight I wrote what would eventually became an academic article in feminist media studies about feminist negotiation of that text specifically so I've thought about this a lot but like you I am not
like a the deep deep reader of romances and fantasy that I think if I had more time I absolutely would be and I think I actually am in a moment where I'm thinking about it more for me like during the pandemic when I struggle to read I turned to a lot of thrillers which served like a different
purpose and some ways yeah but I am I'm having so much fun right now I'm nearly done with book five ah and it's so hot um so I am in a really great place right now that is I think going to be a jumping off point for more things so that situates us that's our positionality as we would say okay
as as former academics okay so uh let's go to our first question to help us out a little bit more here so this is about the general landscape of book fandom right now this is from Elise why does everyone seem to collectively lose their minds over book series and authors these days in a way I
can't remember from the past Harry Potter notwithstanding whether it's Ellie Hazelwood calling Hoover or a bunch of people telling me the writing isn't very good but you just need to read them regarding AkaTar why are we so cultish about books now life is so short I really don't think
fairy's fucking would interest me why am I crazy for not wanting to read it yeah uh so what do you think is this I'll just tiktok what's going on here well there's definitely a tiktok element um and I do think that tiktok is really good at creating this sense of community where it's like you need
to read the thing everyone's talking about in order to participate in what that commute like any other community building thing you have to have some kind of shared texts so that you all are speaking the same language and using the same reference points and because tiktok is so good at
just creating that like we are all in this place together we're all responding to each other and so you do feel this this omnipresent sense of like this is the things everyone is reading but I do think actually that although social media makes us more aware of and gives us more of a
more of a heavy sense of that feeling that authors that like people are cultish about authors that this is this is a tale is old this time right like I mean I hate to get all 19th century on this shit please do please do like people were absolutely losing their minds about Charles Dickens
and if you were not up to date on the old curiosity shop then you were streets behind and it was like he was the celebrity of the day you know like we have people have been like this about books since books existed and I think although again in the same way that Instagram makes us feel like
everyone else's lives are more aesthetically pleasing than our own book talk makes it feel like everyone's reading all these books and we have to read them together it's just the perception that is that is harder to deal with and not the actual cultishness of it yeah yeah I always tell people
when they argue that like we are more into celebrity now it's just that the ways that we are into celebrity are more visible yeah it's not any different than the same sort of like fandoms that were around 20th century like classic Hollywood stars that sort of thing and then the other
thing I would note though is I think that books are coming out faster and some of that just has to do with like we have computers so it takes less time to type right then like the speed of production that someone like Dickens was going through in order to get some of that man could produce but
but yeah no but I mean the other thing about that is like marketing right our marketing cycles are much much faster yeah so it's not just that you can write books faster but that the industry because also writers get paid very little and like you can't make a living unless you're actually writing
many books in a fairly short period of time so I do think there's like a lot of different forces here that are kind of all colliding yeah and I do think to like all social media does a very good job at making us feel bad if something doesn't seem interesting to us and like I would say that I
also avoided this series like Melody R producer told me about it a long time ago and I saw various posts that were like oh I saw someone reading in the coffee shop like what I would give to be reading it for the first time and because I had never like read fairy stuff before that was
something just about the idea of fairies that like was weird to me as this person says fairies fucking and it's okay to not think that something might be your thing I also think it's worthwhile to try something out and that's I I came into the series thinking I don't know what I'm gonna think
right I'm very open to what I'm gonna think about this and if I hate it after the first book then that's enough but I did not so you wrote this great piece for Vulture about Sarah J. Mass in particular so can you say a little bit about your theory about why people are specifically so
into her books because it's not just this series she has two other series and why there is this like this perceived pressure maybe for someone like Elise to read them even if she doesn't want to yeah I mean I think those those I mean as with everything there's like there's like several
things going on here one of them is there have been waves of romanticy authors that whether or not they have been marketed as such which they really have not been until this point yeah but like there are precursors and everyone just kind of quietly reads them and everyone goes like that's my smut
and nobody pays attention to it but yeah but she was really just at a early but well positioned point in this current wave of interest in them and because she was writing so early and so much she's very prolific yeah that like if you were kind of going to be into these books like she was one of the people who would she would just be who you turned to yeah but I do think there are other things specific to her writing that actually makes them why they have soared to the level of popularity
that they do one of them is she she writes from particularly Akatar but the other series a little bit as well this reconstructed fairy tale kind of space which is very much from Robin McKinley who she cites where you're taking what feel very very very familiar fairy tale kinds of tropes
but the relationship shapes that she's dealing with the kinds of female characters in particular what they want what they care about are are more like contemporary yes women yes so you're with this fairy tale thing you're in you get the magic of that world but then also you get the person
saying like wow it's really fucked up that you won't let me leave this castle right and so that the the immediate kind of accessibility of that to contemporary readers I think is important one of the other things that I think is really going on here is we are a generation of readers
and sort of culture consumers who have become very very familiar with the idea of trauma plots and the the sense that the things that happened to us shape us and until we can fully integrate themselves into our understanding our story ourselves we really can't move forward and Sarah J.
mess just some of the most cany I don't know I think she is a very intuitive writer so I'm not saying this like she sits down and then carefully says like this was how I will own culture but she is able to use that trauma plot to stitch together this big high fantasy structure which is
very challenging on its own and a romance structure which is also people think is easy and it is really hard to do well and she is able to use these particularly the heroines sense of trauma plot to say that like the the keys to this fantasy world are not going to be unlocked until you are able to
deal with this trauma that you have which is also then going to enable you to connect in a romantic relationship like they are structurally tied together and so there it is just so effectively built into the way those books work that your brain just goes like ding ding ding ding like it is
they're very well craft you use this term of turn you remember the exact sentence but you said the basically like the romantic processing and also the the trauma processing culminate similarly and it turns into what you call a simultaneous orgasm of structural devices and I mean that's great
for many reasons how did you write that the first draft of your editor come help you come up with that oh no I wrote it very early and then I texted it to like three people and I was like this is the only line I care about actually making it into this final version of this piece but I think you're
totally right right like it's very much in line with the you have to deal with your shit which is similar to like you have to love yourself right you have to figure out how to love yourself and see yourself clearly before you can deal with this other stuff and I think that a complaint that I
have heard about the books and about her writing and again I haven't read the other two series but is that her pacing is off or that it's it's weird right I think maybe when people say that that's what they're talking about is that these characters actually it's not just oh I process
and act one it's like I process in act one I process in act two I process like almost all the way through act three and then an act like four and five we get a little bit of that culmination and it's orgasmic like it is hot in terms of like the sex of it but it's also I think very gripping
and propulsive in terms of the other plots that are happening in terms of the larger fairy world yes yes and it is it is a part of all of her series but it is distinct in act guitar because those books are so the first three act guitar books are have first person narrators
and this is I think a huge deal a huge deal she started writing thrown of glass when she was 16 which is her first series and she was really publishing it on an out sort of outspirt of a fan fiction website right and she was really coming from much more of a big high fantasy structure at
that place where she was like multiple character groups spread across the big map there is that single protagonist and there is absolutely that trauma thing but I think there is something about the first person narrators of the first three books of act guitar that are better fit to the kinds
of processing trauma plot structure that she has in those books they feel more rooted in her experience and then by the time you get to books well I'm gonna be honest I don't think four is actually a real book that's my biggest Sarah J. Mass it I think it's a piece of fan fiction
yes it's a Christmas AU published yes but book five which there is a lot of feelings about book five which maybe we can talk about in the second half of this but like that one's now you have a third person narrator but you are already so rooted in this world from this like very bodily first person
experience yes and so that I think is also a big part of why I think act guitar actually works better structurally than her other two series which have these third person narrators that's such a good point okay let's talk a little bit about this new word that people are using for this genre
romant to see this question comes from Jen what is the deal with fantasy romance as a genre I'm thinking of a court of thorns and roses and fourth wing where did it come from are these Harry Potter fans grown up and wanting erotica so I think it's interesting that she comes out of the Harry Potter
fan fiction world right where there is a lot of erotic fiction happening uh but then I also and you point this out very definitely in your piece like this is not the first time that romance and sci-fi or fantasy elements have intermingled there's a great line in the piece where you're like
there's a difference between sci-fi and fantasy but we could go there but it involves talking about spaceships so we don't need to and I'm willing I was like this is the one part I would love to fight with people about nobody came for me on how we define these terms you did a great job of like
talking that through so what do you think about the current popularity of this particular genre yeah I mean as I mentioned before I do really believe that there have been waves of some expression of this desire in like for decades and women have been figuring out how to get whatever the closest
version of various mud is since we had mass market paperback like publishing right yeah it is really striking how mainstream it is right now how fully target and cap we are with these books that like if you were to actually flip through them you would be like oh wow that's okay that's a
lot going on in here and I think it's I think it's a lot of different things I think there is something about the fact that people can read books on their kindles that has allowed people to feel comfortable reading the kinds of books that they might not otherwise be seen reading I think
which was a sort of part of the Harry Potter thing oh and 50 shades too right and 50 shades absolutely yep and but also just generally that sense of like it's okay to read YA fiction if you're older and like YA books with more adult looking covers on them so people weren't like ashamed of reading
them I think there's that I think there is a kind of the book talk element that we've been talking about this pandemic element that I know a lot of us are kind of coming suddenly we felt like I can't read anything but I'm stuck at home and the only thing that can absorb me is something
that fully takes me away and so there's something about those that as well I have this other probably wrong theory but I I'm kind of fascinated by it which is that nerd culture and the sort of mainstreaming of Marvel as the only shared text yeah pop culture happened about a decade ago
and it made the male version of like the thing you wanted to read when you were 14 into the most mainstream possible text and so it is not shocking to me that it has taken a decade but that now the version of this that appeals to women is suddenly marketed in everywhere yeah
and there's some old school you know like why do we seek out romance and fantasy because our world is broken and where do you want to play out some of your ideals or experiments and what a different world could look like like this gives us a tapestry to play in that space right like I can be like
oh everything everything about our world feels like just really really intractable in this moment in particular I think like politically right both domestically and internationally and so where can you imagine a different world a world that has problems but that like there is some
sort of catharsis there is possibility for change there are good men that's I think a big part of this and then also there are men who and this is like the fantasy of one of our protagonists there are very powerful men who also think a lot about structural changes that empower women
yeah these books are so much more about overthrowing authoritarian regimes than tends to get coverage but yeah authoritarian masculine like patriarchal regimes right like and some of this I think can sometimes feel slightly obvious right like yeah our female protagonist is the first
high lady but then there's also the fact that like some of our protagonists have been through sexual trauma like they are dealing with vulnerabilities that are often not allowed to other male protagonists so I think that's part of it for sure and then once you get one of these books right
and if you read through the entire series then you want more so people say oh if you like to acutair like try a fourth wing yeah yes absolutely where I go next I mean we are at the play I say like target and cap which is true but the reality is where is where past that like we are in a place
where it's her but then it is also seven other authors who are there only because of the groove the marketing groove that these books carved first yes absolutely how much do you think is that like people want to take joy in reading like that I sometimes I think that that's just like under
disgust wait it's a huge it's a huge part of it it's a huge huge huge part of it they are completely absorbing in in and at the end of my piece it's like it they these books work when they are able to make you feel like you are a teenager again as you were reading them yeah and
the pleasure of them is absolutely the only reason that like everyone around us it TV works this way too we would not all be watching millions and millions and millions of people would not be watching young children if there wasn't something about young children that was like but it feels
good in my brain right right it's not like these these shows like have like I don't know like inject us with drugs that make us like them no no right just like oh it's like sexy and also it like makes me want to read and makes me want to stay up and like that is exciting right I love I love
that feeling like I'm not even looking at my phone right that is great to have that sort of absorptive experience and it's very seldom that we we have it in this absolutely yeah yeah yeah yeah if you're a leader at a nonprofit you're asked to do more with less all the time it's a burnout
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Our next question comes from Jennifer and it's about the framing of acautare broadly speaking is acautare feminist I am a voracious reader but new to the fairysmart genre I just devoured the series in a week it was recommended by my college students from around the
world and while reading it everywhere I found that everyone else was also reading it including all the dental texts at my son's orthodontist appointment I've never read romance that puts female pleasure in the foreground so unabashedly and focuses on egalitarian relationships I keep telling
my husband that I want the next book the one where they're married and have kids and life gets boring and complicated but still incredibly sexy so are the books feminist or they just incredibly form me a white cis hetero middle class woman I will say I was at the hairdresser
earlier this week and I was reading it on my kindle when usually I just scroll my phone and I'm like no I'm breaking my kindle and she my hairdresser asked what I'm reading she's like oh and halfway through book two so I had one of those experiences and she said to like I'm not
usually much of a reader but I you know me and another hairdresser are super into these I think it brings us back to this moment that both you and I remember from like I don't know 2008 2009 when like the most popular thing that you could ask a female celebrity was are you a feminist right like does it on another level like does it pass the best out test like which is a test to see if like two women talk to one another about something that is in a man is that the wrong
question is that an interesting question what are your thoughts here I mean I am a believer in feminism so I think it's a useful question to ask in the same way it's a useful question to ask like it just the way the kinds of messages that we get from books are always worth probing right yeah and
I think there are elements actually of it that are starkly unfeminist particularly in book five which I am ready to fight about as soon as we possibly can but I also think that in the same way that we turn to fiction especially to create these playgrounds as you were talking about these
kind of escapist places where what's happening is not necessarily that we are reading some kind of tracked about how we should be living our lives but instead we're playing out various fantasies of who we are what we like what we don't like I mean the internet is chalk a block with people calling
these books problematic and they are like there are so many places you can point to if what you're interested in is thinking about problematic elements of these texts people point to race things people point to feminist things people point to gender trope there's just and also people find it
like age gap things she's 20 he's 300 and like yeah that's very problematic and also very sexy and also a lot of the things that people find sexy and interesting to think about are like not great from a from a feminist perspective and like maybe that's worth thinking about for ourselves
and also the things that we know are taboo or also things were interested it like it is so much more complicated than sort of check mark yes or no situation for these but also any fiction yeah to me it seems like something that is going to be fascinating to look back on by scholars at some point
in the future as a means of studying a particular understanding of what feminism looks like yeah in this moment right for sure yeah because there's a lot I mean it's not a pure reflection by any means but it's a refraction both in terms of like the way that the sex unrolls the way that
desire unrolls the way that like power is accumulated and distributed all of those things are really interesting and so for me I think like that's why I said is this the right question like I think Sarah jaymas is a feminist like yeah that is not like a question for me the way that she is
writing these books it's on like it's woven through all of the fabric is this something that like to me it underlines that feminism is constantly under negotiation and I don't think it's just for middle-class white ladies what do you think I I mean the fact of feminism being under
negotiation as I think true for everyone and for men as well and for everybody yeah yeah whether these books are just for middle-class white ladies is I think a different question I don't think they're for just middle-class white ladies but I do think they are produced almost entirely by
middle-class white ladies which is not you can't be dismissed now that's not complete like there are absolutely black women who write romanticy there are all kinds of people who write romanticy and read romanticy but absolutely like the the levers of capitalism have only raised up the white
ladies and so there is a bit of an echo chamber that probably is happening between author and reader there but as far as whether the thing that the actual text is is only for middle-class white ladies I mean first of all I know so many gay people who read these books so like right this is not
just straight cis people yeah right right totally yeah I think sometimes if you are reading it and maybe your friend group is reading it it's easy to think that you are the only people reading it but like I think that the appeal goes much much broader yeah right so next question and this is
where the comments get heated in the newsletter let's hear from Molly why is there so much judgment about reading romanticy like Akaatar or fourth wing shouldn't the definition of a good book be based on what brings a reader joy and captivates their attention and imagination who to I mean this
is a long old conversation right like and we should say just by definition fourth wing is another popular romanticy series by an author named Rebecca Yarros so I think so much of this has to do with like feminization of the genre like association with mass market paperbacks like
all of those things and some discomfort as you mentioned that now these books are being more openly consumed yeah and part of the discourse and it's also I think it's not cool to shame people about reading them anymore and so some people who still have those internalized
shame mechanisms are grappling with those feelings so what do you think yeah I mean all of that is happening here it also reminds me of like a TV economic conference that I was at this was I think in 2010 where it was it was truly like why are we all talking about madmen when we should be
talking about the thing everyone's watching which is big bang theory but nobody wants to talk about big bang theory do they and just just the way that we as a species are obsessed with creating these hierarchies of taste in class in the media and the culture that we produce and the only way that we are able to have any kind of sense of who we are is by saying we're not them and there's like just all of that is happening here and the shame comes out of all of the things that you are talking
about the sexiness of them the sense that only women read them the genre fiction forever has always had this sort of lesser than status then fiction that is realist that sort of purports to represent the world as we live in it which is supposed to have a better and more valuable way of reflecting
who we are as people and it has also seen as harder to do which is bullshit and and so yeah like this is this is unfortunately just the newest iteration of the fact that TV was shameful and novels were shameful and fiction is a concept was shameful and plays were shaped like just go all
roll it all the way back movies pulp magazines like gossip celebrity gossip in general like we're just it's fascinating to me that I think some in some ways we have moved towards a cultural understanding that like it's okay to consume these things but we still say like
oh this is my trashy thing that I consume like we still there is still that desire to label it or to like push it away or to put it put your avatar in a stack with a literary book to show like oh wait also incapable of course you're capable of reading those other novels you can read right
didn't yeah yeah yeah yeah or just the sense of pleasure itself which I think we as Americans have such a has such a deeply ingrained puritanical issue with right yeah like part of the problem is that the books they just feel so nice and we're just like well that can't be good that's that's
that can't be right oh that sex scene was really fantastic like probably bad right we also got to be all sex all sex scenes like this is what game of thrombause it's games of game of thrones and like other I don't know so many other quote-unquote prestige television
prestige novels all this sort of thing is like oh it should always like the sex should always be bad it should always be trauma and a lot of sex is bad and traumatic but a lot of sex is good and hot and like that's doesn't mean that it's shameful to read about a description of it in that
way yeah yeah I love your point too that like this is a real skill right building like a slow build the way that mast does it I think is an incredible accomplishment and undervalued the one of the things that drives me the most absolutely bonkers are comments like I I really think I could write
one of those if I tried and it's like yeah okay yeah please try and you know like as I've been reading I've been texting back and forth with Melody about some of like the the language tropes that come up again and again like the watery bowels like whenever something scary her bowels turn
watery which sounds disgusting and you know I love that the beginning of your piece you take a sexy you like put the sexy to the beginning and you're like you know what like every sexy right basically in any capacity but especially in one like the this like it sounds ridiculous yes
like it seems so weird like there's talk about wings and there's a weird in you window and all sorts of things and like they're growling at each other and and these books tend to get reduced to the sort of out of context sense of like it's very smut and you're like yeah but every any
romance novel even the hottest best written romance novels you take that sexy now and you're gonna be like that's a stupid word for penis you know or even like I think of something like normal people which is a very quote-unquote literary book by Sally Rooney that also I think has hot sex in
it and also a lot of trauma but if you take out one of those sex scenes and just put that all there it's gonna sound weird too cuz sex is weird yeah you have to have it contextualized within the like the romance itself I think yeah absolutely yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah
if you're Fred Aktar you know that there is so much more to talk about if you want to listen in on the mini book club discussion we've had about the characters personalities about Sarah Jay Massey's writing style about female pleasure on the page about what to read next that's the
best part head over to culturestudypod.substac.com and become a paid subscriber I cannot tell you how fan this like lived up to all of my expectations it was fantastic yeah yeah I really you know I recommend people go and read the piece and also just read all of Catherine's
writing she's one of my favorite you are one of my favorite culture writers so it was just a real pleasure to have you today if people want to find more of you on the internet where can they find you I am on a blue sky I guess that's kind of where I've been hanging out recently yeah
I also have an Instagram a work Instagram that I don't update all that much and you can find me at vulture.com I had a piece about why bluey makes grown-ups weep recently that you may enjoy amazing thank you so much it's my pleasure what a fun time
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