I keep seeing people say the Archeron dresser has always been canonically Elain → Nesta → Feyre, but when I went back and checked the actual wording, that’s not quite what ACOTAR says.
In ACOTAR, Chapter 2, Feyre describes the paintings as:
Elain → flowers
Nesta → flames
Feyre → stars
But she never says those are the top, middle and bottom drawers. She’s simply listing what she painted on each sister’s drawer.
ACOMAF Chapter 49 does the exact same thing. Feyre explains that the old black dresser had one drawer for each sister and again describes them as Elain → flowers, Nesta → flames, Feyre → night sky, but still gives no physical order.
Then we get to ACOSF Chapter 55, and this is where it gets interesting.
Cassian is actually touching the dresser and SJM explicitly establishes the physical order:
Top: Feyre’s stars
Middle: Elain’s flowers
Bottom: Nesta’s flames
Cassian’s fingers move to the second drawer and identify Elain’s flowers, then “drifted lower” to Nesta’s flames.
So the actual physical order established in canon is Feyre → Elain → Nesta.
Which makes me wonder: was the Elain → Nesta → Feyre order in ACOTAR simply the order Feyre happened to mention them in, or did SJM originally imagine the dresser that way and later change it?
Because there’s another interesting wrinkle: in ACOFAS, Elain’s birthday cake is decorated flowers → flames → stars, which is the same order Feyre uses when describing the sisters in the earlier books. But that’s obviously a cake, not the dresser.
I don’t think we can honestly call this a confirmed plot hole because ACOTAR never explicitly says Elain was on the top drawer and Feyre was on the bottom.
But I also don’t think we should pretend there isn’t an odd continuity issue here. SJM went from repeatedly describing the designs as Elain → Nesta → Feyre to later physically establishing the dresser as Feyre → Elain → Nesta.
And considering how much symbolic meaning SJM eventually attached to these paintings, I’m curious what everyone thinks.
Was the earlier order just narrative/listing order, an accidental continuity change, or was SJM intentionally clarifying something with the ACOSF arrangement?