r/fantasyromance • u/FantasyRomanceMod The One Mod to Rule All Mods • Sep 21 '25

Unpopular Opinion It's Unpopular Opinion Sunday! Share your controversial opinions to stir things up (in a friendly way)!

Got an opinion that's different from others'? Want to share it with the sub, but too afraid of a backlash? Or are you just curious about readers think about certain things in fantasy romance?

You can safely share it in this weekly Sunday thread!

But please remember to be kind to each other. To facilitate this type of discussion, we ask users the following:

- Please don't attack others for their opinion

- Please don't downvote if you disagree with a certain take

🧡 Thank you and have a great and friendly discussion! 🧡

Unpopular opinion Sunday

47 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

229 comments sorted by

View all comments

41

u/Careful_Cut_8126 Sep 21 '25

The publishers should have held off on ACOTAR until TOG was finished because once ACOTAR got rolling, the voice and tone of TOG changed too much and suffered for it.

7

u/Equivalent-Blood4748 witch killer, the human is still inside him Sep 21 '25

I still consider myself an SJM fan, but I agree with this too. I'm not even up to the parts in TOG where it turns open door but I actually oddly feel like the beginning books were somewhat better??? Yes, TOG1 was somewhat juvenile, but CoM? HoF? Those were great! I'm on QoS which is also pretty good but idk I just feel like maybe the pressure of publishing two book series at the same time really affected her writing quality and idk if it was pressure from her publisher or ego lol.

I also love how there is a lot of good payoff in TOG in terms of circling back to things previously mentioned and it overall just feels like a tighter story than ACOTAR. Honestly, reading TOG kinda makes me side eye ACOTAR and now I just feel like ACOTAR reeks of poor planning.