r/throneofglassseries • u/Additional-Camp4831 • 33m ago
Hate towards Chaol
No one is going to admit this, but I genuinely think the reason most people hate Chaol is because they can’t stand when a male love interest has his own autonomy. Hear me out before I get downvoted.
If you look at the reactions to Chaol in this sub, and then look at the reactions to male love interests in general, you start to notice a pattern, fans seem to hate it when the love interest isn’t blindly obsessed with the female lead. They basically want them to be lapdogs. A lot of people self-insert when they read, so their criticism of a character quickly turns into “I dislike this character because I wouldn’t want someone treating me this way or I would never stand for that.”
They want every male love interest to be perfect, have no flaws, and have no real agency outside of the female lead. They want someone who will blindly agree with the FL and support everything she does. And if you actually look at the series, almost every male character who had an emotional connection with Aelin was, to some extent, completely enamored with her. Aedion, Dorian, Rowan, Fenrys. Chaol was one of the few who actually challenged her, disagreed with her, and had his own perspective, which I think the series more interesting.
For so long, people have complained about female characters being written as revolving around or being centered on their love interests. But for some reason, people seem to love that dynamic when it’s a guy doing it. When a male character’s entire personality becomes protecting, worshipping, or being obsessed with the female protagonist, it’s romanticized. But when a male character actually has his own opinions and refuses to blindly validate her, suddenly he’s “the worst.”
In fact I actually found Chaol treatment towards Aelin entertaining. Did I find him annoying? Obviously. Was he wrong? Yea. But from a writing perspective, I found it way more entertaining to watch two characters genuinely clash than to read hundreds of pages of Rowan standing there snarling at anyone who looked at Aelin while they communicate through that weird mind-link thing. At least reading Chaol pov was interesting, every thought or word that came from Rowan was just Aelin, Aelin Aelin. Extremely boring and repetitive.
I could obviously be completely wrong, and maybe I’m just biased, so feel free to disagree. But I do think there’s an interesting double standard in how people respond to male and female characters in these relationships.