#not the decaf version we have in tlh

[zoyalannister]

Long rant, aka:

The criminal treatment of Cecily Lightwood (née Herondale) in TLH

Premise: Cecily is my favourite character from TID, so I won't be impartial. At all.

Cecily is a wonderful character, but even since TID her traumas were always glassed over. I remind you that, in like a week, she lost all her family: Ella died, Will left to London, her father became an alcoholic gambler (he will eventually lose the house) and her mother fell into depression. It was never shown how much all this affected her, especially if you think that in 1800s people didn’t know about mental health, so Cecily would find herself with a mother who doesn’t talk to her like she used to and she wouldn’t even know why st the age of ten.

We barely know how she spent the next five years, most of the things I assume are either my headcanons or @livia-dovehallow reflections.

Five years later, she arrives in the Institute and finds out she loves fighting and she's also very good at it. She gives the final blow to Benedict Lightwood’s worm, but Tatiana will always blame Will and Jem. This would have been fine if it was just Tatiana being overly sexist and not accepting that a woman killed her father, but all the narrative goes on ignoring the fact that Cecily killed Benedict.

At the end of TID, Cecily tells Gabriel that she wants to be more than just a mother and a wife, and indeed at the age of 40 she is... just a stay-at-home mom when her husband, and moat importantly, her children risk their life.

I think this just happened because CC wants to give space to the new gang, ignoring their parents, but it doesn’t make any sense to me.

Firstly, Cecily never wanted to be just a mother and a wife. She always wanted to be a fighter, so it's stupif she just stopped. But the most stupid thing ever is Cecily not fighting but being perfectly okay into sending Anna and Christopher risking their lives.

A person like Cecily, who lost all her family in a short time, would never stop fighting, on the contrary, she would fight even hardher to defend the family she created with Gabriel. She would never let her children fight alone when she’s home/at the Institute, she would fight alongside them.

But if Cecily stayed IC we wouldn’t have had TLH because she would have sorted out the plot in no time, probably insisting on having Tatiana killed the same moment they all found out she was behind Barbara's death.

So why give Cecily the space she deserves when you can enjoy 2100 pages of boredom, miscommunication, other boredom and insults to your intellect?