#but. is it just me or is the wiki illustration showing up with light skin???

[ladyhindsight]

Something I just realized,

In TMI, the few important female characters are: Clary, Isabelle, Maia and Aline.

Clary: green eyes and red hair

Isabelle, Maia, Aline: dark hair and eyes

Incidentally Isabelle and Aline are set up as Clary's "competition" when it comes to beauty and male attention.

(The only other female character with light hair and eyes is Jocelyn who, as Clary's mom, is no competition at all and on the other hand serves the role to show where Clary got her beauty 🙄 I think even Lily and Maureen, the vampires, have dark eyes)

As for the boys,

Jace: gold hair and eyes

Alec: black hair, blue eyes

Magnus: black hair, green eyes

Interesting how male characters have eyes of different light colors, but female characters have dark hair and eyes...

as to not outshine Clary????

Even more interesting, Jace's "competition" are Simon and Sebastian... both with dark hair and eyes (only later on will Sebastian change hair).

Light hair and eyes: protagonists and a few other (male) characters

Dark hair and eyes: competition for the protagonists, and villains

CC really thinks that brown/black hair and eyes are bland and unattractive, and will give them to the female characters around the beautiful speshul protagonist, because gods forbid someone be actually prettier than her! (and in CCs mind light eyes = pretty)

In TID, Sophie has brown hair and eyes, Charlotte has red hair but brown eyes, Jessamine has blonde hair but brown eyes... Tessa is the only one with light eyes (gray).

Will ofc has blue eyes and black hair. And since Jem couldn't play the role of competition with bland, unattractive dark hair and eyes, CC changed his hair to white (but left his eyes dark, because Will must be the prettiest boy always!).

In TDA CC won't stop talking about the Blackthorns blue-green-whateverthefuck eyes. Emma is Jace's female version and her moral support, token poc is Christina, with brown hair and eyes.

And so now in TLH where CC finally has main characters who are poc... of course she gives them improbable light eyes and light hair. Something must balance out the fact that they're not white, after all!

Can't have an MC with dark skin, eyes and hair. Even white people are boring and ugly like that!! A poc would be just horrible!

(I'm black btw just in case this sounds racist lol I'm in no way agreeing with this, just trying to see things for CC's point of view!)

Fucking hell.

It's also evident from the fact that Clare finds gazillion ways to wax poetry about Jace's eyes, Will's eyes, James' eyes, Blackthorn eyes, Alec's eyes, Magnus's eyes, whatever eyes that are not dark. And hair. God fuck the hair.

This and the messages about Cassandra Jean's art got me thinking about the coloring of Clare's characters. I did a dive into the Shadowhunter wikipedia where I could find lists of all the Shadowhunters who'd been illustrated by Jean (flower cards, tarot cards etc.). I made tables of all the Nephilim characters that had an illustration made by Jean and then picked each color used in said illustrations and compared them to the physical descriptions Clare had written about them.

I went a bit overboard, maybe, but here's what I figured:

Each table contains the members of one major family in the series, except the last one in which I've compiled all the miscellaneous characters. The gist is, each column list the skin, hair, and eye color of each character. The "descent" one is a bit arbitrary in the sense that is roughly gives the idea from where around the world the family or parents of any particular character is from.

Each background color is picked from the art made by Cassandra Jean. A white background means that there wasn't art available that had any color from which to lift. Any color in italics has not been listed in the physical description on the wiki pages, and they are based on the color picked from the illustrations. Otherwise each color has been stated by Clare in some form or another and also found on the wiki pages.

Proceeding alphabetically, the first one is the Blackthorn family.

Looking pretty white here. I've written white in cursive as Clare never really describes her white character as "white" rather than pale and ivory and those are the only two words she has used that I can come up with.

With the exception to Andrew and Arthur and maybe Tavvy, all of the Blackthorn children are in major roles in The Dark Artifices, from main to supporting and switching in-between.

Cartairs family is the only one that stands out compared to the other major Shadowhunter families. What stands extremely well out too is Cordelia's skin color which Clare describes as brown but Jean has colored very light. The picture of Cordelia in the article is brown-skinned but it was also made by another artist. There were quite a few illustrations of Cordelia by Jean where her skin was light. I don't know how old the art is, but it seems this is where retconning Cordelia's heritage can be seen.

All white-skinned and green-eyed. Red hair with the exception of Matthew who is blond. Also Matthew's eye color kept changing in every illustration except the new, more contemporary ones made by other artists. All of these members of the family are also important characters in their respectable series.

There is a theme going on here...

Some of the Lightwoods have served antagonistic roles, but it's interesting to note that, as you said earlier, Isabelle as Clary's competition and Benedict as an overall bastard both have dark eyes.

Barbara and Eugenia both had illustrations made of them but neither had any physical description, hence both their rows are in italics.

Yep, yep.

Here the colors don't match to their descriptions. Jaime's hair is the wrong color, Cristina's eyes are too light, and they all have the same skin color in the illustrations when they are described been darker in color.

There were plenty of the Shadowhunter characters, but the ones that did not include didn't either have illustration made by Cassandra Jean, the only thing described about them was hair or eye color, or they were minor characters. For instance, some of the Centurions and Clave members that have made an appearance but lack proper description or character.

There is 75 characters listed here in total. All of them are more or less notable in the series (or several stories) they appear in. Of those 75 characters at least 57 were European descent. That's over 75% of the characters. I can't also help but notice that the characters belonging to other minor families are mostly dark-haired and dark-eyed whereas most of the characters in Blackthorn-Fairchild-Herondale-Lightwood-Morgenstern axis have light colored eyes and more variety in hair color.

3 of the 75 characters were half-faerie but all with light complexion

1 of the 75 characters were of Middle Eastern origin

2 of the 75 characters were half Middle Eastern and half European descent

5 of the 75 characters were of Asian origin

2 of the 75 characters were half-Asian, both also half-white

1 of the 75 characters is unknown (Beatriz Mendoza, couldn't find info anywhere)

1 of the 75 was African

3 of the 75 characters were Latin Americans

That is pretty fucking little.

When comparing the final table to the other ones, Clare's bias becomes obvious. Like you said, dark hair and dark eyes combined seems less worth page time. Also you can see that Clare doesn't really describe her white characters as white, like I previously said, which means she could get away by saying, imagine it however you like. Only if it weren't for Jean's art that's pretty official anyway that this whole thing unravels and fast.

I also did list warlocks, vampires, werewolves, and faerie characters that had illustrations or adequate physical descriptions, but they were far more patchy and the info was far more scarce than with the Nephilim. And what does that really say about Clare and her Downworld characters. 🙄