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“Whatever you are physically, male or female, strong or weak, ill or healthy –all those things matter less than what your heart contains. If you have the soul of a warrior, you are a warrior. Whatever the color, the shape, the design of the shade that conceals it, the flame inside the lamp remains the same. You are that flame.”

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Okay, I need to talk about this passage from City of Bones

Something that comes up a couple of times in regards to the Circle era is that all the modern kids kind of look down on the previous generation for buying into all of this bullshit, much like the readers probably do. Clary is a modern American teenager, of course she hears about Valentine and immediately sees the obvious parallels to white supremacy, of course she can't believe that her family would go along with that and knows that she would do better. And Luke doesn't argue with her, or try to defend his assertation that Valentine wasn't always evil. Even if Valentine was Luke's friend at first, he still should have known better than to let things go so far. Jocelyn should have known better, the Lightwoods should have known better, they all should have known better. But they didn't, and neither does Clary.

Even though she's able to identify Valentine's rhetoric as hateful when she's learning about it as "things said by this mass murderer," she still repeats the same stuff after picking it up from people she trusts. Clary falls into the classic progressive pitfall of lumping opinions into right and wrong; people into good and evil. Luke isn't trying to convince her that Valentine was actually a good person or that it's okay to do a little violent hate crime as a teenager, he's trying to point out that knowing which people to label as "evil" doesn't actually do anything to make you an ally to the people being oppressed. She can hate Valentine, but can she see werewolves and vampires as people equal to herself?

The answer is yes, obviously she can. But it's only because she has people like Luke there to call her out when she does something out of line. Luke fell for that stuff too as a teenager, but he took the time to unpack all those hateful beliefs, and so has a much better understanding of how to live up to his ideals than the kid who's never done anything wrong in her life.

In addition, I really like that the book wasn't afraid to acknowledge how Valentine is definitely analagous to white supremacists. Most stories with some sort of fantasy discrimination act like this is the only bigotry and their characters have never heard of racism, but that automatically flattens the world. Clary thinks she knows enough about racism to apply those lessons from history onto a new situation, but she clearly isn't actually ready to practice what she preaches.

Also, this is by no means a Clary hate post. I love that she's a flawed character and that the narrative acknowledges this and lets her grow from it. A lot of stories would be afraid to look at the protagonist (who's kinda a reader insert) and go "you are not immune to propaganda," but it's an important thing to make the kids reading these books aware of. Clary isn't evil, but she did do some harmful things and has to reckon with that potential for hate within herself before it goes any farther.

It's not perfect and it's not a complete education on anti-discrimination, but it's better than what you might expect from a YA urban fantasy novel published in 2007. Hell, it's better than you expect from a lot of people active online today.

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Bad news for the haters of the world: Clary Fray is based as fuck. Literally everything she does is justified, and frankly I would have been worse.

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thinking of helen blackthorn and how she is the only blackthorn sibling to have been named after a character in greek mythology rather than a roman emperor/empress, like all her other siblings. do we think it symbolises her not "fitting in" w her siblings? not just in regard to her half-siblings, but also mark. helen's mother was nerissa, a faerie who fell in love w her father. but when her father found out about what happened to his brother, he fled back to the mortal world, leaving behind his to children, helen and mark. nerissa thought her children weren't enough to "compensate" for andrew's absence and sent them away to him. soon after, nerissa chose to die.

so she lived w her many siblings, all (except for one) sharing a different mother to her, but that didn't matter. she loved them as any sibling would, and would sometimes have to take care of them almost as a parental figure when eleanor died and andrew couldn't.

but she was too much of a faerie for the shadowhunters. to the point where she was later exiled for something completely out of her control. if exile is not the most obvious way to show you don't fit in, idk what would be.

the event in which she finally reunited w her family permanently was also the event in which livvy died. using dru's pov as an example, helen used to be close to dru but is now being seen as a replacement for livvy. even when she came home, she couldn't be herself, she had to occupy both her and her sister's place and she had to be glue, attempting to keep everyone together.

conclusion, almost: she's been thrown around for as long as she lived, and hadn't been able to be w the people she loved and will never be able to be w them all.

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remember when baz thought simon was dead and immediately went apeshit and ripped off a vampire's jaw with his teeth

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In the meantime in leaving all my belongings unsupervised at the table but it's okay

Spending my entire savings account on sweet treats for during doom scrolling studying cause that degree isn't gonna learn itself

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Spending my entire savings account on sweet treats for during doom scrolling studying cause that degree isn't gonna learn itself

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I love Dru and her sense of humour because I know that by the last prince of hell, when she can finally remember who Ash is at like all times- she’s 100% going to prank him and be like “wait…do we know each other” and he’s going to so viscerally upset abt it and she’s going to laugh her ass off

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ANOTHER thing we don't talk about enough is that Jia Penhallow was Jia Ke before she was married, making Aline also a Ke! You know who else is also a Ke? Jem! Do we think they're closely related or from completely separate branches of the family? I personally want to believe they're from the same part of the family.

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#24 on ur spotify wrapped describes how 2024 will go, how screwed r u

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i wanna know everyones #13 song on their wrapped playlist

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Can I quickly appreciate how amazingly I wrote this π

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no mourners, no funerals

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growing up being the least favorite friend in a group really messes w u. Like someone will ask me to hang out and even if I’m busy I’ll be like “omg i have to say yes when have I ever been the one being asked to hang out before. I can’t ruin my big moment.”

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I love how in one of the buildings of my uni one of the locks of 1 toilet is broken and all the people have just decided that the unspoken rule is to leave the door open when you leave and when it's closed that just means someone is using it

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college aus are kinda crazy. they would not be doing all that. There's midterms

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before spotify wrapped comes out i just want to let everyone know that i am very very very normal and sane and happy person