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Ok, but the actor who has been cast to play Daeron Targaryen in HOTD (Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen) is giving strong Ash vibes....

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I've got 99 problems but having TSC Funko Pops would solve 98 of them.

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Where is my chibi!dru comic Cassandra? Where???? Please, I need it 😭😭

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So, do we all agree that the last TEC book being pushed back because it would spoil the last TWP book means that one of the TMI gang is definitely dying?

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"Ash," she said, slowly. "I know your name-"

- The Last King of Faerie (2026)

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dru & ash - the last king of faerie

Dru frowned. Something was stirring at the edge of her mind. Some memory, just out of reach. But it was like trying to remember a dream, long after you'd woken up. The shape of a memory was there, but none of the details.

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Forever bitter about the fact that we never got to see this scene in any book. 👆👆

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LUKE/JOCELYN NOVELLA IDEAS

valentine taking luke under his wing thus making jocelyn spend more time with him as consequence and slowly falling for him.

valentine/jocelyn wedding and her being totally clueless of luke dying inside like mentioned in TMI.

jocelyn learning about luke becoming a werewolf.

jocelyn and luke reuniting after his becoming a werewolf and them starting to plot against the Uprising.

luke offering to marry jocelyn after she told him she was pregnant again & her refusing and going into hiding in New York alone.

luke finding jocelyn in New York.

valentine taking luke under his wing thus making jocelyn spend more time with him as consequence and slowly falling for him.

jocelyn telling luke she's marrying valentine.

valentine/jocelyn wedding and her being totally clueless of luke dying inside like mentioned in TMI.

jocelyn learning about luke becoming a werewolf.

jocelyn and luke reuniting after his becoming a werewolf and them starting to plot against the Uprising.

luke offering to marry jocelyn after she told him she was pregnant again & her refusing and going into hiding in New York alone.

luke finding jocelyn in New York.

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Say what you want about them, but the Luke/Jocelyn and Sebastian/Seelie Queen stories are the ones I'm most excited about.

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From Cassandra Clare's Instagram: If you’re on my newsletter you already saw this, but it’s too pretty not to share! @/loweana.art did a lovely fanart of Jace (you can find it in my Stories right now) so I asked her for this companion piece of Ash Morgenstern. Swipe left to see the whole thing. Love the wings! They’re definitely important in TWP. #thewickedpowers

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Father and Son

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Esme who?

Here's my take on the Fairchild family tree (+ TMI! Morgenstern family as bonus), made using the informations we got in the books so far and some old Tumblr asks.

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What are your thoughts on Grace in chain of thorns?

I overall liked how the fallout of the bracelet was handled, although I feel her inclusion in the group was a bit too rushed. I just wish CC hadn't pushed the whole "well, you could have refused to help Tatiana, you could have run away from her" because...no. She was a literal child when her powers were forced on her and even if she ran away the Clave would have surely brought her right back to Tatiana like we saw happen to Celine in GotSM.

And I also think Jesse could have been a lot mor understanding towards her, rather than jumping on the 'monster' bandwagon right away. If it's true he stayed close to her after his death then he must have seen how much of her actions were forced by Tatiana.

I also liked her scenes with Christopher and I like that CC gave her a more intellectual role since she wasn't trained.

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Post Chain of Thorns Rant pt.2

[pt.1]

Now that she no longer was busy treating Ari like shit and using women like objects, Anna was a lot more tolerable. I even liked the glimpses of her relationship with Matthew we got. Maybe if she could react like a person whose brother just died in her arms I would like her a lot better. And if we got to see her mourning in her own POV rather than in Ari's buried between paragraphs of her wanting to kiss Anna. 

Jesse came back from the dead, literally everyone and their mother knows it, yet his literal family barely bats an eyelid. The very same folks who had begged him to come live with them when he was a kid. Now to them, he's just 'Jesse the new strange boy'. The whole Jeremy Blackthorn plan was just cheap, I cannot believe it worked for as long as it did. This guy here is the spitting image of his father, yet when he showed up at a party full of people who had known him for years, they just drink up the American relative excuse just because apparently all Blackthorns look the same???? Also wouldn't they know Jesse as well considering he was running around London, possessed by a Prince of Hell and murdering Shadowhunters just yesterday??? Nobody found it even a little suspicious that a new Blackthorn just showed up right after that??? Whatever, the necromancy plot was just an afterthought and it showed. #Jesse and James best brothers-in-law. 

I absolutely loathed how everyone villainized Charles just because he wanted to keep his relationship with Alastair and homosexuality a secret. And then, to make things worse, he was literally forced into coming out by his own brother and his friend, and got treated like shit because he dared prioritize his career over any relationship he might have in the future. God forbid someone doesn't put romance in the first place right??? And don't even get me started on how everyone just dismissed him after he did come out. Because apparently 'nobody cares if he fancies men'!!! Where did Charles get the impression he would get ostracized if the truth ever came out??? That's so silly of him!!! I'm raging.

A few more thoughts about the book/plot in general:

Elias' funeral anyone???

CC totally forgot one of the characters was supposed to end up exiled at the Scholomance.

The Carstairs owe the Herondales because????

Wasn't there supposed to be a surprise baby that needed adoption?

Ariadne changed her name to Ari/Arati but we never get a last name. Does she keep Bridgestock since she made up with her mother?

After four completed series and six (that I can remember) dead siblings, I can safely say that the one who got the most (and better written) amount of mourning is Sebastian, of all the people.

These characters have such a black and white perception of the word and it's just annoying.

How TF did Charlotte manage to get pregnant, she is like 50… And twins.

Bridget coming into the fray last minute and starting to slay demons was insane. I love her for it.

New Belial's pact about him and Herondales staying away from each other is totally tying in either the last TEC's book or TWP.

Anna and Ari already planning to adopt a baby feels incredibly rushed.

Forever be bitter that we never got to see Gideon's reaction to Jesse resurrection and them interact.

Congratulations to Sona for making it out alive when so many people (me included) gave her for dead.

Cordelia's relationship with both Herondale is totally rushed and built around nothingness. I wish CC would stop trying to sell either as "childhood friendships turned into more" because… it's simply not that. It's blatantly obvious that despite writing to each other for years (plus the occasional meeting) Lucie and Cordelia barely know each other, and James doesn't even have that… Am I really supposed to believe that it took him as little as her reading to him when he was nearly comatose with fever to make him fall in love with her?

It was very nice to see all the characters finally come together and interact as a group.

Lucie and Jesse best ship.

If Tessa hadn't been so stubborn about keeping her head under sand about the identity of her father and had acted accordingly (especially when Jem did all the research work for her and clearly warned her that her father was one of the Princes of Hell) all that mess about getting the Institute removed from their custody would have been avoided. Not to mention, she could have had her children learn how to defend themselves, insead of leaving them to fend off alone until the problem became too big to ignore.

The falling out for the necromancy plot was incredibly underwhelming.

I don't think we are ever getting another (accurate) family tree.

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Post Chain of Thorns Rant

Just finished the book and I have lots of thoughts.

Split in two parts because of word limit.

I'm starting with Lucie, the real MVP of this book. The way she managed to keep Lilith trapped without any pentagram or protective spell but just using her powers was some QUEEN shit. It's safe to say that in this book she totally outshone Cordelia in terms of badassery, I mean she was responsible for both holding off the Mother of all Demons all on her own and defeating Tatiana and her army of Watchers and thanks to her powers the Watchers were defeated. Of course, CC couldn't help herself and she had to throw in some drama that prevented her to be with Jesse properly until the very end, and the fact that to reach the souls of the dead Silent Brothers was to make out with him was a tad weird, but given the level of badassery she reached in this book I feel like I can close an eye on it for this once. 

Now onto Cordelia.... First and foremost, she needs to cure herself of the obsession she developed towards Grace. My God, for 23 chapters it was like she couldn't go a whole paragraph without bringing her up somehow. James looked thoughtful??? Surely he was thinking about Grace. James was going to Curzon Street?? Oh yes, the house he surely bought for himself and Grace. Lucie has been distant lately?? Surely because of her new best friend Grace. Girl, get a life. Another thing that I noticed and annoyed me was how she still found every little reason to feel estranged from her group of friends, even after the conversation they had about this exact subject at the end of CoI. With Grace, it's because James has "feelings" for her (he doesn't and he told you that) and now Lucie is now dating her brother, and somehow that means that Grace is going to steal all the affection either of them felt for Cordelia??? As if people aren't allowed to have more than one friend??? And then again with Ariadne. She was engaged to Matthew's brother and she is close with Anna so they must be all friends and Cordelia literally says she feels left out because of it. Why????? You have had people falling over themselves to help you since the moment you stepped out of your carriage and you still have the courage to say they don't consider you their friend or that they would ditch you on the first occasion??? And let's not even mention her fight with Lucie!!! Lucie not telling her about the necromancy is totally justifiable and not only I'm sick and tired of people pretending it wasn't but also I really do not understand why on earth Cordelia had to go and bring up Grace (again!!!) when it's blatantly oblivious that if Lucie had been caught Cordelia would have been in deep shit too (especially since she had conveniently fled for Paris too). Meanwhile, Cordelia spent the entirety of the last book going from one place to another to solve her problem with Cortana and the only reason Lucie knows about it is that she was there when it all went to shit and Cordelia couldn't hide it from her anymore. Let's not even mention the fact that Cordelia herself told us the closest people to her were Matthew and Anna. Oh, and her using The Beautiful Cordelia against Lucie was a shitty move. Your best friend wrote you a whole-ass novel because you told her you felt lonely and bored and now you accuse her of being childish for the fantasy world she created with the sole purpose of cheering you up??? Screw You. For someone who is supposed to be the absolute protagonist of the series, she did absolutely nothing for the entirety of the book besides pining after James and unnecessarily prolonging the love triangle because she decided that maybe she was in love with Matthew instead. At first, if she couldn't lift a blade it was the paladin's excuse, but even though people kept hyping her up as the great hero who would get kill Belial when the moment comes... all she does is pass the blade to James for him to do the job himself and it's still James who tricks Lilith into freeing her from her paladin's oath. An absolute delusion.

I liked James a lot better in this book. Not that I hated him before, I just didn't really care about him. Now that CC has gotten him rid of the bracelet and was forced to write him actually interacting and caring for his friends we got a few scenes I really liked. I liked how he bonded with Jesse and how he and Matthew started opening up to each other more and how they started picking their parabatai bond back up. I also really liked the talk James and Lucie had in Cornwall after she woke up. Too bad that, for all their talks of sticking together more didn't really go far since they still didn't interact much during the rest of the book.

I overall liked how CC handled Matthew's problem with alcohol, that she showed that it's not a smooth path and that people often have relapses but I think that, to have him happy and healed in the epilogue she should have started his abstinence in the second book. Weird but not unsurprising that the other characters (especially Alastair) didn't have the same patience and kindness extended to Elias. Third consecutive book where we're told by one of his friends (in this case Anna) how they had noticed Matthew was suffering for years and yet nobody bothered to do anything or even just talk to him about it. Love to see it. I'm a bit sad to see him going off alone in the Epilogue, especially when everyone else has a companion. Not that I wanted him to be shoehorned into a super rushed romance, but I would have liked to see him travel with a friend. 

If it's true that Cordelia needs to cure her obsession with Grace, then she must take Thomas with her and help him get rid of his obsession with Charles. How many times will Alastair have to tell you he doesn't care about him anymore before you stop bringing him up in every conversation you two have??? Oh, and some of his internal monologues whenever Alastair was involved felt rather cringe. I get being flustered in front of your crush but there's a limit to everything. Other than that there isn't much else to say, considering most of his plot was about his relationship with Alastair. 

I feel Christopher's death could have been really interesting. By far the most interesting death in all TSC. When you think about it, by killing Christopher, Tatiana got what she had wanted all along. Revenge on her brothers. With Gideon losing Barbara to Belial's demons and Gabriel losing Christopher to Tatiana herself, both her brothers lost a child just like she had lost Jesse (in her mind because of them) all those years ago. Too bad his death scene was.... well, I'm not sure how to describe it exactly. The first word that comes to my mind is rushed. We get this super tense battle scene where you know you cannot win because your opponents keep resurrecting, you even get a scare about him (he nearly got hit by a blade) but no he's fine so we get back to the battle. Then when finally the enemy finally disperses, Lucie turns around and Anna (very calmly, absolutely chill) informs us that her brother is dead. We don't even get to know how he died right away, we need to wait for Cordelia's POV for that, and when calm settles nobody even bothers to mourn him properly because James and Matthew have been taken and that gets all the spotlight away from him... And sure, Christopher was pretty much a 2D character whose purpose was to speak of science and experiments (and being Grace's advocate in this book) and that didn't help his case, but yeah, his death was rather underwhelming. A special mention goes to the whole "James turned out fine so we should forgive Grace" thing? What the hell was that about Christopher??? 

[part 2]