#I'm not writing a story about how clan culture needs to be protected from change. It needs to be torn down. It needs to be fixed.

[bonefall]

Are you doing anything particularly interesting with Sagewhisker or Raggedstar?

(also I love somebody else who appreciates Stormcloud, should've been a pov, I mean the Firestar parallels-)

Erins stop neglecting your side characters challenge. Stormcloud gets done soo dirty ://

Anyway!

Yellowfang’s Secret is getting redone into Brokenstar's Cataclysm. Much as I love Yellowfang, Brokenstar is getting suuuuper reduxed in BB and he needs to be the POV so I can tell his story. She has the opening and the rest is him.

What I want to set up in that opening, though, is at least a little bit of how hard people have made Yellowfang’s (Shroompelt at the time) life. Raggedstar isn't AS bad as he was, but their relationship was still pretty volatile. Sagewhisker pressured her into the role, just like canon.

I don't regret gutting YS though, to be honest. The original book is pretty freakin' miserable exactly because of Sage and Ragged, without any catharsis for how much torture the main character goes through. I think it works a lot better as an opening, thematically.

"Here's the culture which Brokenstar is being born into. See how his mother is absolutely miserable under this system, being forced to give up her child, pressured into her position. Happiness is offered between friends but there are deeper issues here that love won't fix."

So even though I'm pretty fascinated by Sagewhisker and think the fandom really sleeps on how terrible she is, I'm planning to use her as a minor but emotionally significant character.

And RAGGEDSTAR is going to be explicitly used as the father who Brokenstar loved very much, but someone he is willing to kill in the end. His enabling is also going to get exploited by Runningnose and his schemes. He's a major supporting character in a different way from YS.

[ladyhindsight]

Oh, don't worry, real life stuff is obviously more important, although also more boring. I made the decision and I started to write the crossover fanfic I have on my mind for long time, but I was afraid it'll be horrible. You encouraged me. Thank you for it. I'm struggling with geography and inventing new cultures and their customs. Because once I fill the blank world the opportunity for plot lines will emerge.

I think Clare didn't want to write about sexism explicitly and that's why she didn't address the change. It would be work for her to write it and some people would be angry at her. Because in our day and time a lot of people like sanitary books, without social issues of past - even if the plot is in past.

Can you eleborate about the other changes? What else Clare changed?

You are totally right. It's weird downworlders didn't have any voice in Clave before. The thing with one person for entire race is also very weird. Especially when we look at what we know about vampires and werewolves. Werewolves live in packs. Vampires in clans. Packs fight with other packs and clans with other clans too. Therefore how exactly can they come up with one person to speak for entire race? Other weird this is the two courts of Faerie. Only two? It isn't a lot for entire population of faeries.. I came to conclusion, the two courts are the only ones who communicate with Clave and who sign Accords and the others are hidden in Faerieland minding their bussines. It's weird to imagine the entire race would sign Accords at all. Maybe there are kingdoms of vampires who are independent and are on thin ice with Clave, because they didn't sign Accords, but also don't hurt any mundanes nor do any mayhem between races. I have idea on my mind for chinese vampire kingdom lead by empress, who aren't under rule of the Clave.

How many shadowhunters do you think are out there? It's said the Council Hall can hold all the Clave members. So I have to ask how big is the population? It doesn't seem like nephilim would be able to protect world from all the demons if their population isn't at least 50,000. It's my wild guess, but I think it's minimum force needed to maintain authority and protect world.

I managed to forget Praetor Lupus exist, 😅 such a big impression it made on me...

If they kill Livvy, they would have actual problem to handle. Opportunity to grow, Clare would be able to show angst, but also the power of mercy and pity. They wouldn't kill just Livvy, but other innocents during the battle. I would add one more threat to the series, Emma and Julian take the risk and they would surely die completing their task in desperate need of forgiveness. Then their family and friends show up and save them. They didn't forget, but they are merciful, love Emma and Julian and they don't want to lose them too. It would be nice, if after all Emma and Julian won't even finish their task. They get injured and others do it instead. They don't need to be heroes. It's not the lesson of their story, it's story about tragic love not about war heroes.

That’s so cool, happy writing! 😊 I often find it soothing to have ideas and thoughts written down, even if I’m going to do absolutely nothing with them. But then again, I get them out of my head and stored somewhere in somewhat coherent form.

What I’ve gathered so far on changes made in TMI:

Change in lines

The revision on female Shadowhunters

The scene with Pangborn and the other guy whose name I totally forgot (though I think this was due to the original being a bit confusing)

Magnus’s age: In in the original 2009 version Magnus tells Alec he is 700-800 years old, but this was changed in the 2015 edition to 400-500 instead.

Some of Sebastian’s lines in CoG were changed: At the Gard, Sebastian says to Alec that he had already taken care of one of them (the Lightwoods) that night, which implies he knows he only killed Max and not Isabelle. But when Isabelle later comes to Jace’s aid and attacks Sebastian, Sebastian says to Isabelle: “I should’ve smashed your face in with that hammer until I was sure you weren’t breathing anymore—“, meaning he intended for the both of them to die. What made this nonsensical was the fact that the line was changed. The original 2009 version was: “I should have smashed your face in with that hammer when I had the chance—”, meaning Sebastian never intended to kill Isabelle, which in its own right leaves a plot hole: why did Sebastian just kill Max and not Isabelle?It seems that there was an attempt to cover this plot hole by having Sebastian intending to kill both of them but failing to kill Isabelle. But because only one of the lines was changed (and not the one with Alec), Sebastian’s intentions and words become contradictory.

The demon blood: Many have criticized the whole reason for Sebastian’s evilness being the demon blood in him because the warlock are also part demon and they aren’t evil because of it. The original 2009 version of the scene where Clary says this exact same thing doesn’t address the fact at all or try to explain it:

Clary pushed away the memory of Valentine’s voice saying, She told me that I had turned her first child into a monster. “But warlocks are part demon. Like Magnus. It doesn’t make them evil—” “Not part Greater Demon. You heard what the demon woman said.” It will burn out his humanity, as poison burns the life from the blood. Clary’s voice trembled. “It’s not true. It can’t be. It doesn’t make sense—” “But it does.”

In the 2015 edition the dialogue goes instead like this:

Clary pushed away the memory of Valentine’s voice saying, She told me that I had turned her first child into a monster. “But warlocks are part demon. Like Magnus. It doesn’t make them evil—“ “But they are born that way. Having demon blood put into you is different. It’s like being exposed to radiation. It changes you.” Clary’s voice trembled. “It’s not true. It can’t be. It doesn’t make sense—“ “But it does.”

What makes me conclude also once again that the world-building sucked is because of the original line “Not part Greater Demon” because, wait, huh, aren’t Magnus and Tessa both offspring of greater demons? Isn’t there like a whole series named after this? Magnus wasn’t the eldest surviving son of Asmodeus nor was Tessa the daughter of Belial.

Again, Clare could’ve said that Lilith’s blood in particular does this, but like with Raziel, these opportunities were wasted and made only worse and more nonsensical by making these edits to the writing. I’d like to know if there is a list of things that have gone through changes in the original trilogy to fit better the subsequent series, or if there isn’t one then do one, but I don’t plan on reading this book ever again.

There were probably couple more but here are at least the major ones I could think of and find on the blog.

And yeah, the Shadowhunters are constantly squabbling with each other, branching into different sects when the story demands it, but all the vampires and werewolves have no beef with each other? There’s no faerie that isn’t happy with their rulers and creating their own realms with other like-minded? It’s too simplistic and unrealistic to have such large, homogeneous groups of people. I haven’t actually thought about how many of the Nephilim exist, because it seems there’s very few of them and everyone at least seems to have heard of others by name or some other way. So it’s hard to think that there’d be tens of thousands of them, which again, like you said, would be far more effective on global scale.

It was highly convenient that the True Nephilim Emma and Julian only killed bad guys and only slightly injured Jace. Becoming a (war) hero of some sort seems to be an on-going theme with every major character. There’s always a big battle to be won and the world saved by the protagonists. Livvy’s death could’ve been utilized far better, that’s true, because in the end it was more about Julian’s grief than that of Ty’s or any other sibling’s. Livvy’s death contributed majorly to Ty’s actions in QoAAD, but Julian really was the whole star of it all, with angst and everything.

[bonefall]

If you could rewrite any character arc and change any cat from villain to hero or just to a petty gossip who would it be?

I have two, actually: Ashfur and Darktail. Three if you also count Scourge.

Ashfur

I'm a huge fan of what they did with Ashfur and he's one of my favorite villains in the entire canon, but if I was starting from scratch, I wouldn't have made him a villain.

It was a great way to fix the age-old mistake of sending Ashfur to heaven, and I LOVE the idea of having an incel villain who could never let go of wanting to possess Squilf... it's just that I really liked Ashfur in TPB and TNP. I liked him as being Cloudtail's ride-or-die buddy happy to cover for his lies, his passion in redirecting the dogs, being Squilf's buddy and suspicious of Hawkfrost with her.

Ideally, I would have liked him in a sort of Stemleaf-but-Reversed role, where he was rejected and salty about it, causing a rift in their friendship, but ultimately reconciling with it.

Plus; if it were me, I would want to write about Clan CULTURE being the main villain of Warriors. The sorts of stories I like telling simply would focus on different types of antagonist from what the Erins like writing... even though I do like what they did with Ashfur!

Darktail

I don't even know HOW I would do this, since Darktail's kind of the big villain of AVoS and I wouldn't want to remove that... but man. I feel for Darktail super hard.

I mentioned I would want to write stories about clan culture being the true villain of WC; Darktail is the antithesis of that. If you need a single contrasting example of me as a writer to the Erins, that's it. I NEVER would have written Darktail the way he is.

I would have written him as creating his own Clan in some attempt to impress Onestar, trying to force the clans to see him as legitimate. Eventually, he gets disrespected on the level of Squirrelflight's Hope, realizing they will NEVER take him and his people seriously, and deciding he will beat them at their own game.

Eventually he'd leave the lake completely, taking a bunch of Clan cats with him, and go found WarriorClan. Or, at least establish a presence back at Chelford. Also it would be VERY funny if he took on a name to insult Onestar. Behold, Allstar of WarriorClan, BEST name any cat ever had ever.

Scourge

He's too cool to have only been in one book, though I get why they killed him off climatically. It's why in my rewrite he's part of ThunderClan up to OotS, where he dies in a rematch with Tigerstar.

I KNOW this is self-indulgent and diverges from canon significantly but, hey, sometimes you gotta do stuff for yourself.

I think Rise of Scourge didn't make him bad enough, though. The Scourge in Darkest Hour is significantly more brutal than the Scourge shown at the end of RoS. But anyway, I like the idea that what ends up changing Scourge is being shown actual mercy and nobility through Firestar. A change that's truly radical, to extend the protection of the code to outsiders as well.

Scourge is my beloved little guy, "I played TPB to 100% and unlocked the secret ending where I add the final boss to my party"