The ACOTAR Chokehold

Culture Study Podcast

Anne Helen Petersen

Fashion & Beauty, Society & Culture, Arts

4.6 • 637 Ratings

🗓️ 6 March 2024

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

If you’ve been in a bookstore lately, you’ve undoubtedly seen it: A Court of Thorns and Roses, better known as ACOTAR, ruling over the paperback bestsellers with all its sequel pals. These books are behemoths. They’re massive. They’ve sold millions upon millions of copies. They’re about faeries. And they’re very, very hot.

Culture writer (and lifelong fantasy reader) Kathryn VanArendonk joins me to talk all things ACOTAR, from “is the writing bad” and “is that actually an interesting question” to “is Feyre secretly a horrible painter” and “wtf is happening with book four.”

The podcast conversation is neatly divided, so you can listen to the first half without spoilers or without any previous knowledge of the books, and the second half (behind the paywall) is more of an ACOTAR book club, where we work through specific questions about plotting, characterization, and Feyre’s aforementioned painting skills.

And if you want even more ACOTAR content, head over to the Culture Study newsletter for everything I’ve been thinking about that didn’t make its way into this episode.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Today's episode is sponsored by Ross Signal Group. Workers are not all right. A lot of people
0:07.9	are struggling in their careers right now, whether they're bouncing back from layoffs or staring
0:11.6	down a hard market or just thinking about what's next. It can be really, really isolating.
0:16.6	And it doesn't help that so much of the workplace writing out there is self-aggrandizing broatry,
0:21.8	or just straight up bad advice.
0:24.3	One of my favorite sources for no bullshit work advice is Melissa and Jonathan Nightingale's newsletter.
0:31.0	They are, very honestly, my guiding lights for all things management and work.
0:35.6	Their newsletter is free, it's biweekly. It's always
0:38.4	eerily spot on. They call it the world's best newsletter, but out of respect for my great
0:43.2	newsletter, you can find theirs at world's second best newsletter.com. Thanks so much to
0:50.1	Friends of the Pod, Raw Signal Group, for sponsoring this episode.
1:00.4	How would you describe a court of Thrones and Roses to someone who has never heard of it?
1:08.4	Okay, it's a series of Romantasy 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,
1:16.6	initially human woman who falls in love with a super sexy old fairy daddy. And he can shape shift
1:27.2	into a lion beast thing. And the first book is sort of beauty and the
1:33.6	beast inflected. But after that, everything goes off the rails in a good way.
1:43.7	This is the culture study podcast and I'm Anne Helen Peterson.
1:48.0	And I'm Catherine Vanarindonk, and I'm a critic at Vulture.
1:51.1	And I am like positioning myself right now at the beginning as someone who loves romance but does not consume a ton of it.
1:58.5	And I think we can maybe unpack some of those reasons why as we go through,
2:03.3	but I have been enthralled by various franchises
2:07.5	over the course of the last however many years of my adult life.
	...

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