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In addition to the high romance and fairytale trappings that create the compelling face of A Court of Wings and Ruin, the heart of the novel also engages with serious moral and political questions. Feyre is no longer a young mortal who looks on the glittering faerie palaces of the Prythian kingdoms with fear and awe. Now, she sees the various forms of inequality and violence that plague both faerie and human lands. As the High Lady of the Night Court, imbued with the powers of all seven High Lords of Prythian, she feels a great moral responsibility to redress these wrongs and create a better and more equitable world. For her, then, power and authority confer a sense of obligation to others. She is encouraged in her mission by the Suriel, whose dying words to Feyre inspire her to change their world and to leave it a better place.
For all the power and wisdom held by the faeries, their society is still marked by strict and unjust hierarchies. Lower faeries, for example, do not enjoy the same rights as High Fae in some parts of Prythian, and male faeries continue to wield power over females. The novel contains many examples of gendered violence, mirroring social problems that exist in the real world. In Velaris, for example, Feyre meets the mute priestess Clotho, who was brutally assaulted and tortured by a group of men who cut out her tongue and mutilated her hands in order to prevent her from identifying them as her attackers. The other priestesses at the library are victims of similar crimes, and the library therefore serves as a space of security and community for them. Rhysand, Feyre learns, gave the priestesses the right to decide who enters the library, and when they can do so, granting them a sense of autonomy over their environment and signaling his commitment to establishing, in Velaris, a more egalitarian version of faerie society. Velaris, in this novel, represents equality, and in the previously hidden city, faeries from across Prythian coexist peacefully despite their differences.
Not all the other rulers of Prythian, however, share in Rhysand’s vision. Tamlin, for example, thinks of Feyre as his property in the beginning of the novel, and his possessive and domineering attitude pushes Feyre away from him. Occasionally, Feyre exploits the sexist attitudes of others, taking advantage of their expectations. In the Autumn Court, she presents herself to the public as a sweet and innocent victim of Tamlin’s bad temper, slowly turning Tamlin’s own people against him. Occasionally, she pushes back against sexism, demanding that others take her seriously and respect her authority as High Lady of the Night Court. However, Feyre is also strategic. When she observes, for example, that Rhysand’s Illyrian soldiers seem to ignore her, directing all of their attention to Rhysand instead, she decides to address this after the war, picking her battles carefully in order to ensure that the troops are ready for the fight ahead. Though she privately resolves herself to reforming the army in the future, admitting female soldiers to the previously all-male ranks, she and Mor nevertheless sit out a major battle, aware that their presence might disorient the troops in a crucial fight.
Though Feyre believes strongly in female equality, she also believes that a ruler must think ahead and be strategic. In the previous novels of the series, Feyre gains a great amount of magical power which she can wield as a blunt weapon. In A Court of Wings and Ruin, however, she learns that politics requires more subtle tools. As High Lady of one of the faerie courts, she learns how to fight in the political arena, not through physical force, but through strategy and manipulation. In The Court of Thorns and Ruin, a strong political leader must think ahead and subordinate their own wishes and desires to the security of their people.
If Velaris represents the more equitable, just, and diverse future that Feyre hopes will come to fruition, then the island nation of Hybern represents oppression and inequality. In the past, Hybern and other faerie kingdoms prospered economically due to their exploitation of human slave labor. In the bloody civil war that divided their world, Hybern fought to preserve the system of human slavery, opposing those, such as Rhysand, who sought to put an end to it. After the defeat of Hybern and the loyalists, a magical wall was put in place to divide the human and faerie lands, protecting the humans. In this novel, Hybern again turns to war with the faerie courts in order to tear down the wall and re-enslave humanity.
Hybern has stagnated economically since the civil war, and now its King and people seek to restore their former affluence. Feyre observes that the Hybern soldiers are motivated by strong feelings of resentment and entitlement, as they believe that they have a right to exploit others just because they are more powerful than them. The people of Hybern look back upon their past with nostalgia, and this tendency to linger in memories of past glories blocks them from finding other ways to improve their society or move forward. Ultimately, the war is not just a physical conflict of armies, but a conflict between two very different beliefs about how society should be organized.
The destruction of the wall seems to signal, at first, a return to the exploitation of the past and the oppression of humanity. Despite their differences, the High Kings of the Seasonal Courts and the Solar Courts unite in order to fight Hybern. Still, Feyre is shocked by the indifference that many of the High Lords display toward human life and human suffering. Indeed, in the many years since the wall divided them from humans, many faeries reveal an apathy or even prejudice against humans. In turn, many humans, such as Lord Graysen and Lord Nolan, hate and distrust all faeries. Those who are half-fae and half-human, Feyre learns, experience profound prejudice and violence in both worlds due to this mutual intolerance, reflecting the struggles faced by many who find themselves between cultures. As a former human who was transformed into a faerie, Feyre has a unique potential to bridge the gap that has divided these worlds. After Hybern is defeated, she calls the faerie Lords and human leaders to a meeting to discuss their shared future. In the final battle against Hybern, humans and faeries fought and died together on the battlefield. In the meeting, Feyre pleads for a re-negotiation of the former treaty that separated humans from faeries. Though the various groups do not reach a conclusion then and there, Feyre feels optimistic that humans and faeries can live peacefully without a wall separating them. In this regard, Feyre’s unique background as an individual with an understanding of these very different peoples and cultures allows and motivates her to imagine a future in which both groups can coexist, without the violence and oppression that has marked their shared history.
