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. Rhys’s alliance with Keir and Eris betrays Mor’s trust; Feyre’s bargains with the Bone Carver and Bryaxis are extremely risky; securing Tamlin’s help later means trusting someone who hurt Feyre deeply, and even winnowing humans to safety costs a tremendous amount of power that the Prythian alliance can’t afford to spare. Maas portrays these compromises as unavoidable, and the difficulty of the decision correlates to the degree of ethical murkiness.

Maas also explores how espionage exacerbates the moral ambiguity of war by further complicating the characters’ ability to trust each other and their own determinations. Upon learning that Jurian is a double agent, Morrigan notes, “It’s so much harder […] When enemies turn into friends. And the opposite, I suppose. What didn’t I see? What did I overlook or dismiss? It always makes me reassess myself more than them” (504). Not knowing who is an ally or an enemy raises the dramatic stakes of every decision, as characters must make choices without understanding their full ramifications. Maas shows the effects of this through Feyre’s misguided sabotage of Tamlin’s court, which ultimately helps Hybern. The question she leaves unanswered—but poses through Mor’s speech above—is whether it was Feyre’s responsibility to recognize Tamlin’s secret plans or Tamlin’s responsibility to communicate them to Feyre. The difficulty in both cases is that openness and honesty leave them vulnerable to the enemy’s own spies.

By contrast, it is only by revealing their true natures—Rhys’s compassion, Nesta’s sense of justice, Feyre’s power—that the Night Court is able to secure the Prythian alliance against Hybern. With their success at the council, Maas posits that the only way to navigate moral ambiguity is through the unequivocal statement of values: This allows the like-minded defenders of freedom and compassion to find each other and band together against the forces of evil.