The bar is on the floor: How Feyre’s parents and her life in poverty make her susceptible for Tamlin’s love
- jamiebuchkremer
- Dec 9, 2025
- 5 min read
In A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas, Feyre learns to love from her family, especially her parents. She sees both Nesta and her mother in her own face: “I couldn’t bring myself to look at my slightly uptilted eyes. I knew I’d see Nesta or my mother looking back at me” (p. 69). Feyre associates this face with the promise she made to her mother, to care for her father and sisters, and with the way her mother modeled love for her.
The way Feyre describes her mother directly parallels Tamlin’s behaviour. “My mother. Imperious and cold with her children, joyous and dazzling among the peerage who frequented our former estate, doting on my father – the one person whom she truly loved and respected. But she had also truly loved parties – so much so that she didn’t have time to do anything with me at all save contemplate how my budding abilities to sketch and paint might secure me a future husband” (p. 16).
Tamlin paralleling Feyre’s parents’ love
Tamlin, too, can be seen as imperious and cold. He exercises control over Feyre from the very first day, making her eat what and how much he deems appropriate for her. He refuses to explain himself sufficiently, even forcing her to sleep when he gets tired of her questions on the way to Prythian. These actions add to the unevenness of their power dynamic, exacerbated by the circumstances: Tamlin is physically stronger, older, a different species, he has more knowledge and she is in his home, depending on him for food, information and the care and provision of her family.
His coldness shows not only in his inability to be civil to her but also in his physical attire: The mask he is wearing covers half his face and makes him hard to read. Even though Tamlin needs Feyre to fall in love with him, his one-word replies (“sit,” “eat,” “fine”, p. 51) would make it hard for anyone to find something worth loving.
But for Feyre, a lack of time and effort being invested in her just reminds her of her mother’s ‘love’. While her mother did not spend time with Feyre at all, she became mildly interested in her painting – because it might attract a future husband. It is no wonder, then, that Feyre is charmed by Tamlin’s minimal effort: “The marble floors shone so brightly that they had to have been freshly mopped, and that rose-scented breeze floated in through the opened windows. All this – he’d done this for me. As if I would have cared about cobwebs or dust” (p. 167). We all know Tamlin wasn’t up bright and early to mop the floors in order to woo the human woman he kidnapped – he has servants to do that for him. But Feyre, who has been providing for others for half her life, has felt unworthy for so long that this almost overwhelms her.
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Tamlin’s love is monopolised as well – and he expects Feyre to feel the same. He has neither family nor friends, really – only subjects. Lucien is emissary first, friend second, and whenever he leaves the house in ACOFAS, Tamlin stays alone, with only Rhysand visiting him once. When Tamlin is worried about Feyre’s safety in ACOMAF, he expects her to be content with staying inside and being loved by him, nothing else. She can’t be High Lady, she can’t help his people, and she can’t go outside. Yet he expects their love and safety to be enough for her, and for a time, she believes it might – until she gets to know Rhysand’s life and his friends, who show her a different kind of love and care than that which she learned from her own family.
How the Archeron family models love
We can see the direct impact of her family’s way of showing love in the way they handle goodbyes. When Tamlin takes Feyre from the cottage, the sisters don’t hug, there is no profession of love from her father, no “we’ll miss you”. What they do instead is exchange orders: Feyre explains how to get food and once again forbids Nesta to marry Tomas Mandray. Her father tells her not to come back but to make a name for herself. Feyre later mirrors this behaviour when Tamlin sends her back to her family. She does not say goodbye to him nor does she reply when he says “I love you” (p. 251). In fact, she tells Alis: “I don’t like goodbyes. If I could, I’d just walk out and not say anything” (p. 249).
Her family also teaches her that dependence is a part of love. They need her to provide for them and it is the only way she shows them love – not with words but actions. However, these actions are not born out of a desire to show love; Feyre is bound by the promise she made to her mother and dreams of the day when her sisters are married off and she does not have to provide for them anymore. So it only seems natural that she would eventually come to see Tamlin’s seeing to her physical safety and keeping her fed as valid expressions of love rather than an uneven power dynamic.
Love and violence
What, then, does it mean for Feyre and Tamlin to bond through violence? In the scene where he comes to rescue her from the naga, they parallel each other’s behavior; where Feyre ‘bellows her fury’, Tamlin ‘roars’, where she slams her knife into a naga’s neck, Tamlin’s claws “shredded through his companion’s neck” (p 134). This display of partnership then leads to a violent kind of intimacy: “He reached a hand toward me, and I shuddered as he ran cool, wet fingers down my stinging, aching cheek” (p. 135). Killing brings them closer together, heightening the sexual tension while also allowing Feyre to derive comfort from Tamlin’s presence: “I pulled on Tamlin’s tunic over my own, ignoring how easily I could see the cut of his muscles beneath his white shirt, the way the blood soaking them made them stand out even more. [...] I shivered again and savored the warmth that leaked from the cloth” (p. 136). The physical signs of his violence only make him more attractive in her eyes and they proceed to display their partnership by briefly holding hands: “I stared at our linked hands, both coated in blood that wasn’t our own” (p. 136).
This scene also shows how protection and intimacy go hand in hand for Feyre. At first, she flinches away from Tamlin’s touch twice, and it is only when she realises that he came to protect her that she allows him to touch her. She believes that he came to save her without any benefit to himself (which we know is not true) and this perceived effort puts him far ahead of anyone else because she is not used to others doing anything for her sake.
While Feyre is susceptible to Tamlin’s way of loving her because her parents served as role models in this regard, Rhysand, as her mate, enables her to show love differently, in a way more aligned with her own personality instead of to her past. As High Lady of the Night Court, she can take on responsibility, be a protector, and give everything she has of her own free will.
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