A Court of Wings and Ruin

Content Warning: This section discusses sexual assault.

The struggle between good and evil is a quintessential theme in high fantasy, and Maas emphasizes the “struggle” in her exploration of the compromises war asks characters to make, sometimes in direct conflict with their values. Throughout the series, Feyre struggles with the need to perform violent acts in self-defense or the defense of others, and confrontation with the exact kind of brutality she fought to prevent manifests in an out-of-body experience for Feyre. Returning to her own mind after committing mass slaughter and witnessing Rhys destroy entire ships in Adriata, Feyre “[tries] to remember the usual fit of [her] soul in [her] body, the priority of things, [her] way of looking at the world” (367). The extreme violence in the name of justice upends Feyre’s sense of right and wrong and leads to an ethical dilemma for all of the novel’s characters as they discover the boundaries of what they will do for victory and how to ensure that victory is a righteous one.

Cassian pithily expresses the moral quandary of justifiable violence when he tells Feyre, “[T]his is war. We don’t have the luxury of good ideas—only picking between the bad ones” (234), and no avenue the Night Court pursues is without compromise.