#they either have magical immortality contraceptive powers

[nimblermortal]

Okay so Tea and I have come up with a wonderful terrible... thing: Schrödinger’s Immortal Baby

you see

We have hundreds and thousands of years of proof that immortals can’t have babies once they become immortal. But. Andromache and Yusuf and Nícolo have all been practicing homosexuality, and Booker’s too depressed for anyone to figure out what he might be attracted to.

So Nile comes along, and Andromache tells her, “Welp, immortality, it sucks, but congratulations, you’re immune to VD and pregnancy. So have fun.”

And Nile does. And then Nile has a pregnancy scare. And she comes back and yells at Andy about it, because Andy told her this couldn’t happen:

“You told me I was immune to this!” “I didn’t think you were going to be STRAIGHT about it! There’s no precedent for a STRAIGHT immortal!” --dubious eyes at Booker-- --further commentary on haven’t any of you slept with a trans person? or a nonbi- okay, whatever, moving on, back to Andy-- “Well, if you don’t want it, just abort it. Women’s rights. Prost.” ENTER BOOKER “She can’t abort it. What if it’s immortal?”

(This is the point at which the theory requires that in addition to dying not sticking, they don’t age. Which is pretty intuitive - they heal, so logically they would heal against ageing too. None of them seem to have aged particularly in the last thousands of years. If they aged between healing, they would gradually get old and start repeatedly dying of old age, which none of them have done. So either they don’t age at all, or every time they die they return to the age at which they first die.)

And this is the part where this crack theory gets nasty, because. Immortal aborted fetus. That would be bad. Constantly dying and coming back to life, even if you consider it just a cluster of cells, that’s horrible. And if you do manage to get over that: it’s a security risk. Science project. Sooo... now we’re stuck with Nile carrying to term, which she strongly objects to, replay the previous argument about immunity vs. who imagined you’d be straight about it?!

(with a small side of, hey, maybe Booker’s straight or straight enough that he might want to try the family thing again, but none of them are the type to just randomly pick someone, so there’d be some dithering to go about it and then they run into)

The Second Stumbling Block: Schrödinger’s Immortal Baby, or, A Continuation of Booker’s Question.

Now they have a baby that may or may not be immortal. How do you find out? Are you going to just kill a baby to find out of it’s immortal? Nile’s baby? Their baby? No! Are you going to injure it to find out if it’s immortal? Did any of them do super healing before they died? Nile’s the only one with medical records, and odds are good that either she didn’t, or she might have healed slightly faster than other people, but not unusually so. Or people would have noticed sooner.

And if you did kill the baby to find out, you’d be stuck with an Immortal Baby. Two months old forever. You would literally never sleep again. So maybe if you wait until it’s a toddler, but it turns out the twos are terrible! And the threes are worse! And then they start talking and reading and developing interests and if you weren’t bonded to it before, you are now, and if you never bonded to it, well, it never reaches a good age. So you have to keep it alive to adulthood so that it can at least have a reasonable age to exist in throughout eternity (if it’s immortal), see all the Vampire Child meta ever.

Which makes the five? six? of them the most helicopter parents ever to helicopter, because this child, of all children, has got to survive to adulthood.

At this point, let us assign it a gender, and for the sake of further crack, it’s female. She’s having a pretty weird upbringing, what with the swords in the umbrella stand and the parents not ageing and the constant family arguments about when to tell her that they’re immortal. (By the time they do, she’s known for. A while.)

But this is normal for her, and they send her to a fancy boarding school full of diplomats’ kids who have bodyguards and they also have lessons on how to quickly incapacitate and/or kill anyone who bothers you if the bodyguard is not around, so when Daughter comes home one day and tweets something like, “Ugh, I hate it when you trip over the umbrella stand coming home and cut yourself in the shower of swords,” her friends all reply “lol mood” for one reason or another, and she only gets in trouble with her six parents for cutting herself, she could have died.

So it keeps dragging out, for years. “When do we get back to having missions?” Andy laments. “I haven’t killed anyone in years!” “I have,” says Nicky casually. Heads pivot. He shrugs. “There was a guy stalking Daughter. I sniped ‘im.” “Dad Three. You can’t just kill boys!” “It was unhealthy, and now he’s dead. Problem solved.” Possibly they have gotten a bit blasé about the sanctity of life some time in the last thousand years of killing people constantly. And somehow the logical conclusion of this is helicopter parenting.

And what happens when you totally helicopter a child? Rebellion. Acting out.

Which is how she winds up under the bleachers with a boy (because doing something that is not physically harmful is a lot easier to get away with, and at least two parents are very casual and encouraging about the whole thing).

Which is how she winds up with a teen pregnancy.

Which is how the lot of them realize that they now have to do this again because what if this baby is immortal? They won’t know until/unless Daughter dies! And even if she makes it to adulthood (please let her make it to adulthood, just to twenty-one, then we will have Succeeded at parenting) they don’t want to just kill her to find out, what if she’s not immortal?

And so we return, my horrified friends, to the prospect of Schrödinger’s Immortal Baby.

[ladyhindsight]

Don't you feel that CC's main characters always get what they need to succeed in a contrived way? I was thinking more specifically about COHF when Isabelle gets a really bad injury that might kill her and than we suddenly discover that Simon's vampire blood has magic healing powers, and the more I think about it, more situations like that I find. Like, warlock magic and Clary's power of creating runes follow what specific rules? it seems like they just do whatever the plot needs them to do

I’ve talked about it when it comes up in some context, so yeah. I don’t recall that specific example about Simon’s magic blood, but given that it is in the book, it’s actually the most basic form of a contrived plot there is–this before unmentioned but instrumental element in the story that will solve a problem. Whenever a story takes that form, unsolvable suddenly becoming solvable because a character suddenly has the solution though said solution has never been present before it becomes relevant in that scene, it’s painfully obvious that it is contrived.

The keyword here is ‘plausibility’. Plausibility suffers because the story/plot lacks those elements that are crucial for the story to feel “organic” or natural. Being introduced to them once they become handy or relevant for the plot or a scene only speaks of poor attempt at plotting a story–and no attempt of fixing it in editing phase.

Contrivance also takes away any stakes that could be present. Clare’s plots are awfully cushioned, especially when certain characters are in question, while presenting Super High stakes. Even when characters “lose” something they actually lose nothing. I’m not saying happy endings suck, I’m saying contrived happy endings suck. They are not earned.

I’ve been pretty heavy on TID lately, and I’ve already mentioned this before, but Tessa’s story arc remains still the best example of blatant contrivance there is in these series. So, as I’ve said before: 

“My issues with Will/Tessa/Jem triangle have nothing to do with the notion that it was “a different kind of love story” or as if Tessa isn’t allowed to have multiple relationships. Be my guest. I take issue with the fact that the way Clare plots her stories is obvious and always convenient. It is almost as if she weasels her way out of things, bends the rules of her own world, and creates loopholes so the characters like Clary, Tessa, and Jace get to be – perhaps too excessively – special whereas other characters are not. Just because young adult literature may be easily overlooked genre, it doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have standards.

As it is, you can see miles away where she is going with her writing, and it does not cause excitement or oooh noises. It causes deep frustration and eyes rolling so backwards they might never roll back again. Jem being ill and eventually becoming a Silent Brother sets him aside for a while so Tessa may have children and her great love with Will. Of course, as convenience dictates it, because of yin fen Jem may never become fully a Silent Brother, “mutilated” with mouth sown shut and no hair or eyes, so he may continue being handsome as hell and later be magically cured and have his great love with Tessa. You see where I’m going with this?”

Clare’s Shadowhunting world wasn’t in the beginning of the series (especially then) and still isn’t fully developed which can be seen from the way new things just pop up without any previous mention. Shadow Markets, centurions, Brother Zachariah who wasn’t included in TMI until Clare had the idea of TID, etc. For whatever reason, like you said, she has also failed to establish this whole Nephilim world with specific rules. Warlock magic and Clary’s powers know no specific limitations because they are either used to solve an otherwise unsolvable situation or to prevent or block off certain story lines, i.e. immortality runes and such. But oh, rune as contraceptive is a thing that certainly exists. When I read that part I had to put the book down and go do something else for a while. The silliness and embarrassment because of it broke something in me.

Contrived elements in Clare’s books seemed to incline towards romantic scenes. That scene between Simon and Isabelle says as much. They need to get close, you know like, really close, and do all kinds of nasty stuff the author thinks is Hot. …Or something like that. Other contrived things:

Tessa and Will’s Magic Dungeon Sex

Jem being The Hot Silent Brother so Tessa wouldn’t have to date a mangled-looking man

When Jace and Clary get through that portal to the happening and leave Isabelle and Alec behind because fighting with Clary improves Jace’s fighting abilities rather than fighting with his parabatai for, you know, the sole reason that concept even exists

Jace and Clary’s Safe Sex in the hell cave

Any scene with Oops, ahaha, how did /we/ end up here? Just the two of us? How uncanny!

Whenever something is a hunch or a whim or just meant to be

Any fight with Alec and Magnus as participants

Simon being able to revert his immortality via Asmodeus because the Rules dictate that the time you have not spent aging is actually spent aging. Just not on the outside, silly

Clary and Jace’s kiss in the Seelie Court in front of Simon (while Clary is dating Simon and thinking Jace is her brother and they still go for it like, hot diggety, go for it.)

Anytime there is sex in weird places, at inappropriate times

I think it’s safe to say that these aren’t terribly intelligently plotted books.

[tacofarts]

Part of a story about a possessed IUD.

WARNING FOR ADULT THEMES. 

As Alex reached her climax the lights flickered. The air got heavy and warm. Tad or Todd or whatever his name was hesitated as something dripped from the ceiling onto his shoulder. Was that blood? Another glop, right next to the first. It was so hot in there suddenly and that looked an awful lot like blood. What was happening? Panicked, he stopped and looked at Alex. She looked back at him. Plop. Plop. Plop. There was a hissing, squishing sound and something moved down the walls. It traveled in droplets, running downwards and leaving a red trail behind it. He pulled out.

“What the fuck is going on? Alex, what is this? Did you drug me? Is that blood?” he ran his hand through his sweaty hair in a panic.

Alex sighed and sat up. She looked at the walls and his shoulders. “Yeah, probably blood.”

“What the fuck? Why is there blood?”

“I don't know. Whats the problem? Keep going. I was almost there.”

“Are you fucking kidding? It's like a million degrees in here and there is blood coming from your walls and... is that fucking drumming? Why do I hear drumming? it... it sounds like a heartbeat and oh God, is that MY heartbeat? It's so fast!” Tad/Todd was hyperventilating. He moved away and reached for his pants.

Alex Scoffed. “Don't be a little bitch.”

With a last look of horror and a whimper Tad/Todd fled the room.

“Dammit!”

“Was that too much?” a deep, earthy voice rumbled from inside Alex.

“Well not for me, but clearly it was for him. I was so close, too. Why now? Why coudn't you have waited until after?”

“Well I don't exactly understand the sexual relations of you humans. I don't know when after is, I can't read your body language or whatever.”

“Well fucking learn. That's the third one this week you ruined it with. I mean, I am glad it wasn't rats again, or that time you sent a bunch of dead baby heads rolling out form under the bed, I mean what the actual fuck, but still, can't you just keep the curse shit at bay for a while? You are fine while I am at work and out around town, why do you gotta turn it up when I am in bed with someone?”

“Well I mean, it is my job to keep you from getting pregnant, and frankly, I think I am doing a great job.”

“No, it's the copper's job to keep me from getting pregnant by thickening my cervical mucus or whatever. You just happen to be attached to the copper-”

“I was TRAPPED  in the copper! My immortal soul attached to the vein that happened to be mined and turned into YOUR magical slut device-”

“EXCUSE ME? You take that back right now or I will reach in there, rip you out and flush you, and your immortal soul can spend fuck knows how long in the sewers! I am responsible! I got birth control to stop from populating the earth or whatever it is God wants good Christians to do! You should be on my side! It's not my fault you got cursed to haunt an IUD!”

“Fine. Truce. You keep up your wicked succubus ways, and I will try to turn down my demonic charm, though I don't know how you plan on finding a man who will stay without a few gruesome trials...”

“I don't want a man who will stay with me, I just want a freaking orgasm!”

“Fine, I will back off. You do you. Not like I haven't spent half of eternity in Hell. Not like I don't know a few things about lust. Not like you aren't interested in some Satanic Rituals with your black lipstick and pentagram dresses and claw like nails. Not like I wasn't thinking of you when I made the walls bleed. You just go ahead and be ungrateful-”

“FOR CHRIST'S SAKE!”At the mention of the Lord Alex's vagina hissed, “Look, I know you are a demon, and it's not your fault you got trapped in a vein of copper in the earth by some priest and then mined and turned into a contraceptive device, and honestly, I do appreciate how badass it is to have you, an actual demon, inside me, and maybe, MAYBE I did appreciate the blood and the rats were kind of cute, but for fuck's sake, can you stop being such a drama queen!”

“...”

“Ceruicex?”

“...”

Alex Sighed and got up to go to the bathroom. She peed, and cleaned herself up, and put on some clothes. Ceruicex, the demon that possessed her intrauterine device, remained quiet. Since she got the device inserted six months ago, she and the demon had gotten along relatively well. She loved horror and the dark arts and all things macabre. He had been upset to find out that he had been reduced to a contraceptive device, but considering he couldn't really see anything, and he didn't really understand exactly how humans mated, he had calmed down and struck up a strange friendship with her. Alex could communicate with him, though no one else could, and he could make things happen around her that were pretty strange and brutal. She had gone to a few metal concerts together and the raw excitement, violence, and insanity had sated his demonic nature more than his hundreds of years stuck in the earth.

But as Alex had started to meet men and bring them home, Ceruicex had taken the opportunity to stretch his powers. He made a big show for all the men, and perhaps overdid it, as they all ended up running and screaming before Alex could find release. One or two ended up in the hospital, emotionally distressed and perhaps criminally insane. The one who had the misfortune of experiencing the baby heads had been found in a dark alley, covered in his own blood after trying to chew all his fingers off. Alex felt a little guilty about that one. It wasn't fair Ceruicex did this to her either. She had gotten the IUD after a bad break up, and was ready to rebound, and make some poor choices she would regret later. Now her poor choices couldn't be fixed with penicillin, but instead had to be treated by heavy doses of sedatives.