#chot

[layla-carstairs]

oh so when Lucie Herondale, a 16 year old shadowhunter with unusual powers, raises her boyfriend from the dead it has no major consequences and when she goes to Edom with her bestie and future parabatai the worst thing that happens is that they have to share a secret but when I, Clary Fairchild-

[pansexual-lilychen]

”we need more complex female characters“

y‘all couldn’t even handle her

[queenmollixofshadows]

Christopher I love you

[allthestories]

Charles to Alastair, Thomas, and Math: No, none of you understand, my secret is too shamef—  

Thomas: You dumb bitch every person in this room right now is gay

[seatawinan]

[rinadragomir]

I spent 3 days colorizing Chain Of Thorns arts, please tell me it looks good🙇🏼‍♀️

I know that someone has already made a similar post and they inspired me to make my own version, but I don't remember their username😭pls let me know if you remember, so I can tag them

[tys-kitty]

That one scene in ChoT…

Thomas: Alright, so I‘m in love with Alastair

Matthew:

Thomas: Thoughts?

Matthew: And prayers

[butterflysclaws]

“we are married, and we will remain married, and in love, until the stars burn out of the sky.”

Cordelia and James from Chain of Thorns by @cassandraclare

[c-herondale]

In TID Gabriel says that Gideon is an unsung comic genius and I think he 100% passed that on to Thomas.

That boy is the funniest mf in the series omg.

A child raised by him AND Alastair Carstairs? The comedic power it would hold.

[agnes-draws]

imagine having the best big brother in the world

[alastairstom]

No, but Gracetopher is Thomastair's tragic mirror and I think it's time we talk about it.

We have Alastair Carstairs and Grace Blackthorn. Both abuse survivors; both in unspeakable situations. Both people who have done horrible things at a young age because that's what they had to do to survive. Both very alone, with no one to love them but a sibling that they have a forced distance with.

Both perceived as monsters.

And then there are the Lightwood cousins, inseparable since birth. Thomas, a poetic dreamer with his head in the clouds, and Christopher, a scientific innovator who's well up there, too. (Both are also almost certainly autistic imo, but I don't want to derail this canonical analysis with my headcanons.)

They forgive.

And they're the first people in Alastair and Grace's lives to show them kindness, to reach out a hand and give them the grace they need to grow.

Thomas sees the best in Alastair, teaches him that he is loveable, that he deserves to be happy and share love, because love is the best thing we do.

And Alastair, as he deserves, is now "perfectly happy with everything exactly as it is." In Thomas's eyes, he has found hard-earned joy; he has found peace he never had.

Christopher sees the best in Grace, too. Where Thomas sees the pure and unfiltered love that Alastair holds, the selfless sacrificial affection, Christopher sees in Grace a will of iron and a beacon of strength. Grace, who has never been valued for anything more than her beauty, is finally seen as intelligent and passionate in Christopher's eyes. And, because she is these things, because he asks for the "honor of her opinion" and believes her "brilliant," she is, for a short time, herself.

And then Christopher dies.

Thomas and Alastair grow closer, and they have the chance to bring out the best in each other. Alastair opens up emotionally; Thomas becomes more confident. In the end, they become who they truly are because they find solace in each other. But Grace...

Well, Grace is right where Christopher left her. He left her no choice but to stay there forever, dust collecting on her pinned-up hair.

Without Christopher, she no longer has that mirror. She loses the only person to see her as she is - a strong, smart, brilliant girl with unfiltered and unlimited mental potential.

That's the tragedy of Grace Blackthorn. With a mirror, with those eyes (or crooked spectacles) that she could see her true reflection in, she too could have been happy. Alastair is the proof. But now, she does not get that. She is alone again. Dare I say that she is doomed by the narrative.

And yet. Yet.

There is a glimmer of hope, because Grace saw who she really is in Kit's lavender eyes, if only for a moment.

It's a far cry from Alastair's happy ending, and the story of Grace Blackthorn is in my opinion probably the most tragic in TSC.

But still.

She knows, deep down, that she can be more than a monster.

She can be a scientist.

[cassandraclare]

no mourners, no funerals

spoilers!!

poesflowercrown asked: Why didn't we see kit's [Christopher Lightwood's] funeral

Okay, so quite a lot of the questions I’ve gotten are some form of “Why wasn’t there a funeral for Christopher?”

And the answer is that Christopher surely did have a funeral — but that it strikes me as fairly obvious why he didn’t have one that took place during the time when London was under attack by Belial. Also, had they had a funeral in Idris during this time (where his body was, and where they have funerals), we have no POV characters who are there to see it.

After that, we jump ahead six months, and obviously his funeral isn’t going to be after such a long period of time has elapsed — instead we see grief at the stage of what it is often like after half-a-year: the most active part of the mourning is over, and the Shadowhunters are moving into fitting Christopher and the grief for him into lives that go on and go forward. James dreams of dead Christopher almost every night, and yet he is still moving on with his life: they are Shadowhunters, this is how they live, knowing life can always be interrupted by destruction, battle or war, and knowing (in a way mundanes don’t) that any day carries with it the possibility of immediate death and loss.

Now, could I have shattered the structure and timing of the book to shove in a funeral between the coda and the wrap-up of the epilogue? I think it would have been a lot of more jarring and weird than people realize, but I also think that it wouldn’t have offered anything. I get a lot of questions that seem to think a funeral for Christopher would have offered “closure” somehow — either to the characters or readers — and the fact that I don’t think it would have done anything like that, or offered anything useful or meaningful, is partly why I didn’t include it.

Shadowhunter funerals aren’t like mundane (human!) funerals: they’re not for closure, but rather for generally honoring the dead of war, because the Shadowhunters live in a constant state of war. What would have happened at a funeral for Christopher is that he would have been burned on a pyre along with Elias and those who died freeing London; people would have come up and given polite condolences to Gabriel and Cecily, the Consul would have given a general speech, and that’s about it. We see this with Livvy’s funeral. — how it is entirely unspecific to Livvy. We see how much closure her funeral offers her family (none, basically.) I think what people are imagining as “Christopher’s funeral” (everyone cries, makes speeches, has feelings) is not what a Shadowhunter funeral is.

There is one more thing I would say, which is that death, as depicted in art and fiction, is not required to offer closure. Sometimes the point is to sit with that lack of closure, and feel the absence of that person, that character, because living with the death of someone close to you is often living without total closure: sometimes for a long time, sometimes forever. That is okay. It is not required of books that emotions be neatly put away at the end of them, like guest towels. Sometimes they are just there to be felt afterward.

[I have also seen people say that Christopher’s friends didn’t mourn for him — which is so bizarre I haven’t decided whether to address it or just leave it as a Thing We Totally Disagree About, like the many questions I get about how we “never see that Tessa loves Jem” or “Isabelle doesn’t care that Max died” etc. Sometimes you just can’t see eye to eye about things; I don’t really get how Thomas being so stricken by Christopher’s death that his physical appearance is literally altered forever, or Anna “turning to stone” with grief, or Matthew being unable to even say Christopher’s name without flinching in pain, is “not mourning”, but we all have our different ideas of how things should be depicted. I tend to believe in a less-is-more philosophy about showing intense emotion, but we are not all that way!]

Anyway, closure. The intense mourning for Christopher in the Sanctuary is short-lived not because the Shadowhunters have gotten bored mourning intensely, but because of Belial. Because they are at war, and then and forever their grief for Christopher must fit itself within the interstices of them needing to save the world. In looking at research into Shadowhunter mourning, I looked at the way people mourn when they are either civilians in war, or soldiers on the front lines, because all Shadowhunters are all least one of those things. A great deal of intense compartmentalizing is required, because the preservation of life going forward must be the priority. The Shadowhunters know this; they are raised knowing this. They know that not only may you be called upon to sacrifice your own life to be what you are, but that it is likely you will lose other people, and if you lose them in battle, you have also sacrificed the ability to stop the world and engage in just grieving. You sacrifice, sometimes, even the ability to bury your dead or to know where they died. As Lucie observes:

“And now they were back at the Institute courtyard, which was empty and quiet, as it always was. There was no scar here, no sign of the dreadful things that had happened there such a short time ago. Lucie envisioned a plaque: HERE IS WHERE IT ALL BROKE APART. Matthew and James’s vanishing, Christopher’s death—they seemed both very close, a trauma still ongoing, and yet far away.

On the other hand, she thought, this courtyard had been torn up by Leviathan a couple of weeks ago, and there was no sign of that, either. Perhaps to be a Shadowhunter simply meant drawing runes over one’s scars, over and over.”

They mourn, they grieve, they have to go on — to “draw runes over their scars” — because the other option is wallowing in grief and doing nothing to prevent Belial winning. Lucie is feeling these things as “far away” because they have to be shoved down in order for the Shadowhunters to continue doing what they need to do. They can’t lie on the ground and scream NOOOOOO for days; they honor Christopher by going on, by seeing his project through to the end and using it to save countless lives. Which is what Christopher would have wanted — not a cold and monotonous funeral in Idris.

So short answer: I didn’t think a funeral for Christopher would have provided anything worthwhile to the story, but rather would have made it worse. In the end, that’s usual the answer to the why of any decision. :)

[carstairs-simp]

Alastair repeatedly asking Cordelia about her love life but then immediatley jumping off a moving carriege as soon as Cordelia mentions Thomas will never not be funny to me

[lesbocrocker]

Insp below cut

[allthestories]

Okay but like Tom and Kit seeing the awkwardness after James and Math came back from Paris and just being like 

*sigh* okay I’ll take one you take the other 

will never not be hilarious to me 

[rinadragomir]

Additional letter from Matthew to James from ✨Chain of Thorns ✨ Waterstones edition

I still need a letter from Jesse to Lucie from LitJoy edition, if you find it - please share!🫶🏻