#i think the bowlcut is a symbol of how he holds on to his childhood

[pinkeoni]

There will be bts photos leaked of Noah in costume and he will trend on twitter because his hairstyle will be different 🔮💆🏼

[jcmorgenstern]

jcm meta 2020 edition

not to be fake deep on main but i think i may have found a way to make some vague amount of sense of the 3b edom flashbacks and the wild inconsistency between 2b and 3b’s versions of jonathan’s backstory. this quickly devolved into tracing a reading of Jonathan’s character arc identity through his appearance. Rambling and “i can do #deep lit crit takes on a fire exitinguisher” nonsense to come

So in 2b, Jonathan says to Valentine that “the demons” burned him because he was “too beautiful for this world, too human.” This clashes poorly with the 3b flashbacks that show Lilith burning him out of a misguided sense of love (when she says she is his true mother when he first arrives in edom and holds him and and it burns), or for disobedience (he talks back to her in the throne room and she burns his face, seemingly purposefully).

The first backstory, told to Valentine, can easily enough be written off as a lie or an unreliable narrator situation. Jonathan isn’t particularly good at telling the truth or expressing himself even when he wants to (unless he’s talking metaphorically about himself while giving spurious advice in 2b?). I don’t think it’s particularly realistic for him to tell Valentine the full truth, anyway, especially when he plans to kill him. His axe to grind in that scene is with Valentine, anyway, not Lilith, so it wouldn’t make sense for him to focus on her as his abusive parent figure (also it’s pretty clear they hadn’t even thought about her yet). One traumatic past at a time, so to speak.

The big inconsistency is the crispy elephant in the room. In 3b, Jonathan has some nasty but mostly cosmetic burns; in 2b he, well, IS a burn. Additionally, at 28 years young, Luke does not make a very convincing 13-15 year old. Bowlcut or no.

I’m not defending what was clearly laziness or lack of budget to hire an actual child actor. But if you think about it, blonde bowlcut 8 year old Jonathan may be the last image of himself he has before escaping Edom and taking on Sebastian’s face, as past that his face and identity have been completely burned away. Sebastian looking like a grown-up version of his younger self (blonde, blue eyes, fringe) supports this reading—before waking up as a redhead in 3b, the last self-image he has is of himself at 8 years old.

Thus, Luke being in the 3b flashbacks can be read as Jonathan filling himself as he is, trying to fill that gap, the years of not even knowing what he would look like between childhood and adult rebirth. (How’s that for a shitty puberty?) I’ve likened the body horror of being a Walking Burnt Drumstick to Frankenstein’s monster—he is viscerally hideous to others, cut off from human connection, and made monstrous by that isolation. It’s also a representation of the lack of identity—his identity as Valentine’s demon son is destroyed and eventually replaced with that of Lilith’s son (and, as the red hair suggests, Clary’s brother, something that is….uh, overwhelmingly important to him). It’s also an embodiment of the fundamental childishness of his character—his identity, emotional ability, and self-conception is physically stuck between childhood and adulthood, and he isn’t fully either one.

He’s narrating the 3b Edom flashbacks to Clary, actively constructing and interpreting his own past. These aren’t reliable narrations by any stretch of the imagination—in fact, I think they function better if read as a construction or fictionalization of his experience. Bits and pieces of many memories: tossing a ball in the throne room, Lilith saying she will love him like no one else, telling him about Clary and the Morningstar sword, a prince trapped in a tower, being burned. Revising his past to see himself not as Valentine’s son, or Lilith’s, or even just his own person, but Clary’s brother.

Thus, bowlcut Luke sulking around with mildly convincing prosthetic burns pretending to be 15 can be read as Jonathan’s attempt to fill in the gaps in his own memory, to construct for himself an appearance that draws from both and bridges the gaps between his childhood self and his reborn adult self. The (very bad) bowlcut from his childhood, the face and hair color of his adult self. In doing so, he attempts to reconcile the two identities, the two separate parental traumatic experiences (Valentine and Lilith).

We can see in live time how absent any strong parental force in his life, he turns to the next best thing—his sister—and begins enfolding her into his constructed identity. Clary is the only one who can save him from Edom with the sword, their shared blood being the key, never mind he escapes completely on his own with Clary none the wiser. The childish fairy tale of princess rescuing the prince in his tower from the evil stepmother.

There’s a sad kind of way the twinning bond is an echo-chamber of sorts—Jonathan is looking to Clary to complete him, to give him direction and purpose, the way Valentine and Lilith did. Except the way the bond works, she can only parrot his own unfulfilled motives and wants back at him. (See the fic ouroborous by xanisis, be sure to use promo code crispyboy at checkout). This is why both Jonathan and dark!Clary become increasingly hysterical about protecting the bond—each are profoundly unfulfilled by the increasing loneliness and solipsism of Jonathan’s longing for connection, which makes them both hold on ever harder.

Through this lens, it’s almost apropos that Jonathan’s worst fears—becoming something truly inhuman, truly monstrous—comes to pass. All struggles and suffering cease when he’s reborn yet again as a “god” in the Seelie Court, bleached blonde, sprouting wings, and emoting like a brick wall. He takes up the Queen’s ambition to rule and pursues it soullessly, mixed with a confused conception of revenge—against Clary, seemingly now the avatar for the world that wronged him, not much more than a ghost of himself. (Incel territory is neighboring).

Ultimately, Jonathan and Clary’s only moment of connection where she isn’t projecting his own emptiness back to him is as he dies. Her kindness isn’t killing him, but validating the one human connection he thinks he has, completing the fictionalization of their relationship he’d developed to make sense of his experience (which, honestly, is a lot of disjointed abuse backstories held together with dental floss). As if symbolizing this completion, Jonathan’s body (in true YA fashion) magically turns back from the white-haired emptiness to his original reborn appearance, the red hair and green eyes that marked him out in his eyes not as the unwanted child but as Clary’s brother.

tldr i missed overanalyzing this damn show specifically churning out thousands of words on this stupid mother sisterfucker