The Bones Would Break Like Hearts

pfp: cassandra jean

[kitty-gray]

Hi guys. I'm Jules, I use she/they and I'm just here to talk about TSC :)

[cassandraclare]

Hey, Cassie! How are you? Do you ever worry about characters who don't get a ton of page time, like Anush? Sometimes I wonder what they're doing while the story follows everyone else.

I've gotten a ton of questions about characters and page time (all of them from people who don't want to take page time away from Dru, Kit, Ash and Ty, but are I think hoping that it would be possible to equally feature the mains and some others and just add more pages, so this kind of addresses that) — but you are the first person to ask about Anush, so what the heck. Also I think this ties in to my previous answers about characters.

Being a main character doesn't mean the author likes you more and not being a main character doesn't mean the author likes you less — often they don't! I think people, including authors, often fall in love with side characters precisely because they have freedoms that protagonists don't. A supporting character can burst into the story with an enormous personality, make spectacularly bad decisions, say outrageous things, disappear for a hundred pages, and still remain delightful. (Not that Anush has actually done this, I think people like him because he had some fun business in TDA and he's Ty's friend but he is largely unknown.) A main character doesn't have that luxury. They're carrying the emotional weight of the novel. Readers live with their decisions, their flaws, and their growth for hundreds of pages, so they're written to sustain that journey while side characters are not. So in a way, wanting to have more of some side characters is not a bug, it's a feature.

Could you rewrite and rebuild the entire structure of a series to feature side characters as just more mains? Not without it becoming an entirely different series. Kit, Ty and Dru and Ash would all just become less significant, and all the stuff already built in for them to do would have to stop being particularly important. Kit is the Heir, but that would matter less; Ty's relationship to Livvy would matter less; Dru being who she is and having the power she does would matter less; Ash being Sebastian's son and the heir to the Seelie crown would matter less. They're all real tradeoffs.

It's also true that side characters can dip out before the consequences of being whatever kind of person they are have to be explored over 500 pages. Characters who were never written to sustain 500 pages of the consequences of their decisions can't, and the book collapses if you try. For side characters you want to see more of (Magnus, Simon) spinoff novels and short story collections are great, because those books allow for them to have protagonist business without winding up with one of those series where at the end you can no longer tell who the main characters are, and the protagonist's hamster gets a resolution the protagonist does not. (I am thinking about a very specific rodent, but I will never tell you what series, never.)

I think there is a sort of fear that since this is the end, the possibility of say, some characters having spinoff novels or short story collections or whatnot no longer exists and everything we ever want to know about them must be mashed into TWP. But that is just a recipe for turning TWP into a series in which no character is developed enough to care about, and and that is a much worse problem than wishing you saw more of some of the supporting characters, which is very normal and honestly a very positive thing. Better to want more than less or none at all, and we never do know what will happen in the future.

I suppose it's just good to remember that at a certain point, every character who isn't a protagonist is taking pages from another character. Characters people have requested page time for include: Clary, Jace, Isabelle, Simon, Alec, Magnus, Jem, Tessa, Emma, Julian, Helen, Aline, Maryse, Cristina, Mark, Kieran, Anush, Lily, Maia, Thais, Diego, Jaime, Luke, Jocelyn, Ragnor, Cameron and Paige Ashdown, Zara, Manuel, Caterina, Adaeon, the Seelie Queen, Max, Other Max, Rafe, Tavvy, and people who are very dead. Alas, they cannot all have significant page time, and that isn't even limited by the number of pages a book can be, it's limited because the ability to emotionally invest in characters is limited. At some point it's not creating a story in which more people matter, it's just creating one where no one matters.

Think of it this way: a book is not a city, it's a house. It cannot expand outward forever. (A fictional world can; a novel can't.) Every room added is a strain on the house's underlying structure, until eventually it stops being a house at all and collapses, tragically crushing all the lawn gnomes underneath.

As for what Anush is up to, he is probably enjoying not being a main character. Terrible things happen to protagonists. Anush can watch from a safe distance with a cocktail.

(Also when I say significant page time, I mean significant page time — pretty much everyone I listed gets a mention at least and some do in fact have significant roles. They just don't all have significant roles.)

[cassandraclare]

Hi Cassie

As we know magnus dru and kit are aware of livvys ghost , do other characters become aware / have a feeling that they are hiding this secret?

It can't stay a secret forever. Either Livvy disappears forever or other people will find out; those are really our only options!

[cassandraclare]

Hi Cassie! I am such a fan of your books, they mean a lot to me and I’m currently rereading TMI and Tales from Shadowhunter academy. This is only like my hmmm 7th reread probably!

Anyways, my question is does Ty “regret” what he did, like does he understand he unbelievably messed up by trying to raise Livvy? Or will we see all this unfold in TLKoF?

In Qoaad, Thule!Livvy encourages Ty to let her go and he says that’s not his Livvy, his Livvy would want to be alive. Not that this should hold him back in a way, but I think I would be sick with guilt and grief if I changed my twin sister’s soul in some Limbo like that and had to face it every single day.

Thank you so much—and seven rereads is amazing!

I don't know if "regret" is the word for Ty in this situation. He absolutely understands that trying to raise Livvy had consequences he could never have predicted or controlled, and that Livvy is now caught in a state neither of them would have chosen. He has to live with the knowledge that his grief and desperation played a part in that. But.

But I don't think he regrets loving Livvy, or wanting with every part of himself for her not to be dead. Those feelings were never wrong. Ty was a grieving fifteen-year-old who had just lost his twin, and he convinced himself that if there was something he could do, then not doing it would be the real betrayal. He wasn't thinking clearly about what a future Livvy might become or what it would mean for her; he was thinking only that death was unbearable and perhaps, somehow, reversible.

His response to Thule Livvy reflects that. He can't accept her argument because, to him, accepting it would also mean accepting that Livvy truly wanted to leave him—and he simply isn't emotionally capable of believing that yet. "My Livvy would want to be alive" is partly something he believes and partly something he needs to believe. Think of Will's response to Tessa telling him she's engaged to Jem. "My Jem?" Just like "my Livvy," it's an expression of how much that other person is a part of you, how much they aren't supposed to be a source of pain and how could that happen? Even though of course neither Livvy nor Jem is at fault, the response is still disbelief. Not my person; that couldn't happen.

I also don't think guilt always produces a predictable response. Sometimes guilt makes people cling harder, because admitting the full extent of the mistake feels like losing the person all over again. In Ty's case, that's even stronger. He doesn't just have to let Livvy go in an ordinary way. He'd have to believe what he did was wrong — even if not morally wrong, the incorrect solution — and that keeping her around is wrong. And it's hard and complex for anyone to believe that kind of thing without believing they are at fault, and the idea of being at fault here is horrific. It might blow apart his entire sense of who he is as a person and a brother and a twin. "I love my sister and so I cannot hurt her" is a very normal human way of thinking. "I love my sister but I hurt her anyway" is much more complicated.

I guess I'm saying that Ty would be sick with guilt and grief if he accepted your premise — that Livvy is stuck in limbo, that maybe she doesn't have a place in a world where almost everyone who ever loved her believes now that she's dead and gone — but he hasn't. He's accepted a Livvy that goes everywhere with him as a ghost, that is cheerful, that seems happy, and he thinks, surely better this than death? And he spends 99% of his time with people who don't know she exists; there isn't someone else to weigh in. That's what changes in TWP, when suddenly there are Kit, Dru and even Ash to observe the situation from the outside, and that's why Ty's journey with Livvy to some extent restarts there so we can follow it to its conclusion. Whatever that may be!

[cassandraclare]

hi cassie!! can you PLEASE give us a kitty snippet i swear it can be a one word snippet!!!!!!!

soup

[cassandraclare]

Hi Cassie! Can we expect Ash to follow down the Morgenstern pipeline of refusing to call Dru by her nickname and referring to her mostly as Drusilla (and also calling other chars by their complete first names like Tiberius or Christopher I guess)? How would she react to this?

You know, he does call her Drusilla, but he calls Kit and Ty mostly Kit and Ty. He calls Kit Christopher once or twice but Kit is like, "Nobody calls me that," so then he doesn't. He isn't terribly dedicated to the concept, it's just the Queen mostly referred to Kit as Christopher.

[cassandraclare]

Hi Cassie!! I was wondering if you would ever, once TWP is done of course, make a book like the flower book that includes characters birthdays and family trees and things like that?

I'm glad that you have picked up on the fact that I am not going to share any more character birthdays until after the whole series is over and kaput. I can't handle the stress. I do think a big world book at the end of everything with family trees and so forth would be fun.

[cassandraclare]

Hi cassie, will Alec continue the tradition of the consul mostly being kept in the dark about most thing the main gang do until it’s too late, he seem to have a lot others in his plate lol 😂

Oh, yeah. Nobody tells him anything.

[cassandraclare]

i had a question about kit - by the end of qoaad it seems like he's less resentful of ty and his choices/doesn't blame him and is more embarrassed about how he felt like he was important to ty and almost blames himself for it too, but as time has passed it seems like that anger has returned? i was wondering if that means his resentment was repressed in qoaad and has grown over time as he's processed the situation more and pinpointed exactly what has hurt him (as much as he can while avoiding it at the same time 😭) or if he's redirecting some of his insecurity and hurt into anger as a way to avoid fully coming to terms with it 🙇‍♀️ unless this is directly dealt with in tlkof!! (very very excited for it omgjskdks)

Keep in mind Kit isn't just mad at Ty — they are mad at each other! That said, I don't think Kit is ever really "over it" at the end of Queen of Air and Darkness. He's just in a different emotional place than he was earlier in the book.

What might look like "being less resentful" is in part resignation. Kit is to some extent resigned at the end of QoAaD; he leaves believing that's probably the end of his and Ty's story. He'll miss Ty, eventually he'll stop missing him so much, and life will move on.

The problem is... it doesn't.

His feelings for Ty don't get smaller. They don't fade into the background the way he imagined they would. So the hurt doesn't disappear either. If anything, there's something especially painful about realizing that time isn't fixing what you thought time would fix, and that doesn't make Kit less angry in the end, it makes him more angry.

So I wouldn't say Kit's anger disappeared and then came back. I'd say the hurt never really went away. As he realizes that Ty still matters to him just as much as he always did, it's only natural that some of those feelings would, as you said, "redirect some of his insecurity and hurt into anger." Love and anger are often much closer together than we'd like to admit, given that they are both intense feelings. If he'd forgiven and forgotten Ty there wouldn't be much coming back from that — he'd just be indifferent to him.

And it's not that he's just mad about being hurt. He's mad because what Ty did put Ty in terrible danger, Kit was warned about that, and he's furious that Ty didn't care about his own life as much as Kit did. I'll give you a little of what Kit thinks himself in TWP:

"That mix of hurt, fear for Ty, and anger that Kit had felt by the lake years ago had never totally faded from memory. Kit had been hurt since. Angry since. Sometimes angry and hurt at the same time, sometimes even with Jem and Tessa. He knew that breaking feeling of believing the people you loved most in the world had let you down, even in small ways, even with misunderstandings. Kit had come to Jem and Tessa a little broken, and even if they had done what they could to help put him back together, some of the sharp edges where the breaks had happened could still be weapons. And sometimes Kit had used them."

[cassandraclare]

What is Ty's favorite thing about Kit? What specific traits or actions make Kit endearing in Ty's eyes?

I think finding out what those things are are actually the backbone of any story about falling in love. So (annoying as that no doubt is) I think it's much more fun to experience Ty's thoughts of Kit on the page rather than be told them out of context — and vice versa as well.)

[luckyladylily]

So the thing is boobs really do be jiggling. If having breasts has taught me anything it is that the ladies frolic. I don't even have that large of boobs but every time I go down some stairs all I can think about is that stupid quote about boobing breastily down the stairs or whatever it is because God Damn.

But anime and video game boob jiggling is like. The most uncanny valley shit I've ever seen nine times out of ten. You would think people this horny about tits would have actually looked at some but I guess not.

What we really need is some pervert to compile the ultimate visual guide to boob bouncing physics that's just like 500 hours of meticulously organized videos of breasts of different size and shape and under different fabrics bouncing around from a wide variety of physical movements so horny game devs can finally get it right and I don't have to be creeped out by women who appear to have surgically implanted softballs in their chest under skin made of rubber bands.

[cassandraclare]

Does Livy have any romance in the last king of faerie

Livvy stays dead for the at least the first two books and does not come back to life. (I guess she could have a ghost romance, but considering ghosts can't touch each other or feel much, it would be very chaste. Also in many ways she is still fifteen.)

I guess we'll see what happens down the line!

[cassandraclare]

Hi Cassie! I was wondering if Anush will have any role in the tlkof? What’s his friendship like with Ty and could there possibly be jealousy on Kit’s end? Maybe I just see Kit as the type of guy who would be jealous lol

Super excited for November!!

We do not see Anush in TKLOF though he gets a mention.

As for Kit being jealous—jealousy isn't inherently a bad emotion. Lots of people feel jealous sometimes. What matters is what you do with it. If jealousy leads you to try to control someone, isolate them from their friends, or punish them for having other relationships, that's unhealthy. But noticing that you're feeling insecure or even feeling "man I hope this person isn't dating anyone" is really normal. (Yearning for someone you can't have because they're in love with someone else, also normal and not evil! I would categorize it as "stuff people have to work through.")

When people aren't sure where they stand with each other, it's natural for those kinds of worries to be stronger. Kit and Ty are figuring out where they stand with each other, and maybe what you're thinking is that uncertainty tends to leave more room for fretting or jealousy than relationships where people feel secure and trust they're not going to lose each other? Because that's certainly true, and sometimes you have to pass through the first before you get to the second.

So yes, Kit does feel insecure sometimes, but I wouldn't say Kit is "the jealous type." I'd say he's someone who's had good reasons to be afraid of abandonment, and that's something very different.

[cassandraclare]

Hi Cassie! I was wondering about Livvy’s role in TWP - as a ghost, does she have her own arc/journey in this story? I feel like I remember you saying that because she’s dead, she can’t grow/develop (I could be completely wrong about this, though!). Is she still mentally 15? Has she matured or grown along with Ty during the last four years?

I'd say she does have her own journey. She doesn't progress past fifteen in the way someone alive would, because she is having none of the experiences living people do. So she is able to learn and to change, but the direction she's going is not one we would recognize as necessarily human. She has watched Ty grow, but has not herself grown comparably, and she knows that.

[cassandraclare]

Hi Cassie!

My question is: Will Kit ever find out what his mother was like? I mean something beyond just descriptions—perhaps a photograph?

I’m also curious about Kit’s opinion of his mother. It feels like, considering all the sacrifices Rosemary made for him, Kit doesn't really know much about her; he doesn't even own anything that belonged to her—nothing to keep her present in his daily life (except for the heron necklace, but Ty has that, not Kit). It's like Rosemary’s presence in Kit’s life has been somewhat sidelined, which I find a bit sad. Will we see him thinking or talking about her in TLKoF?

Thanks for your answer! ♡

Hi! ❤️

As of right now what Kit's relationship to Rosemary's memory will look like in TWP seems a bit spoilery! — but it's an interesting question (though indeed when you are in a fantasy adventure and always running you don't get to introspect as much as you might like.)

Rosemary’s story intersects with Jem’s, and with Tessa’s — they only go looking for Kit when Rosemary dies, and they don’t immediately tell him about her because it would be devastating to find out your mother had been alive without you knowing and then died extremely recently. At that point Kit is not ready to hear it. It becomes clear in TWP though that they've discussed Rosemary with Kit and he is aware of her story.

It's worth keeping in mind that these are Kit's own thoughts regarding his mother, before he really finds out much about Rosemary. "Maybe there was something wrong with him, Kit thought as he followed Alec into the hallway. Maybe he didn’t have the right kind of feelings. He’d never wondered that much about his mother, who she was: Wouldn’t someone who knew how to feel properly wonder that?"

So in some sense the issue is what Kit thinks of his own emotional capabilities. It is clear to us he doesn't have the "right kind of feelings" because that would be too painful. And that becomes more complex for him when he learns the story of his mother. The fact that she sacrificed herself for him would make him more likely to want to hold his feelings at a distance, not more likely to want a photograph or a keepsake. She is also tied up in his mind with him being the Heir which he hates and regards as something that has almost ruined his life.

We do know now that he has blurry memories of her singing to him. But that isn't the same as knowing her. What Kit would be mourning, if he let himself really mourn Rosemary, isn't the loss of someone he remembers. It's the loss of the chance to ever know her at all. For someone in that position, being surrounded by reminders of a life that barely intersected with their own might be comforting, or it might simply emphasize what was lost before it could ever exist.

“It's like Rosemary’s presence in Kit’s life has been somewhat sidelined, which I find a bit sad.”

You’re not wrong; it is sad, and that's okay, because the situation is sad in a way that cannot be undone. Tessa cannot have Will back. Will could not have Jem back. Julian can't have Livvy back. Jocelyn never got her son back. The Merry Thieves don't get Christopher back. And Kit does not get to have a life with Rosemary in it. That is one of the recurring themes throughout the Shadowhunter books when sad things happen and cannot be reversed. The question the books keep asking isn't, "How can this be fixed and made not sad?" It's, "How do we go on after loss and how do we understand that it can be part of our history without becoming our entire present? How can we understand that moving on is not a wrong done to the people we lost but is rather what they would want for us? How do we understand that acceptance is not erasure, and how do we, as Shadowhunters, keep doing what needs to be done instead of being ourselves undone by sadness?”

These are all things that Kit needs to think about and has deliberately not thought about. Rosemary’s presence is minimized in Kit’s life because he never really knew her and he doesn't want to think about her or really about Johnny either. Whether he can keep all that up without cracking is the part that seems spoilery.

I would address one thing about the heron pendant, though, because I think it's interesting that people might look at him giving it to Ty as him sidelining Rosemary. I think about it the opposite way (and this does come up in TWP) — Kit’s mother’s legacy was one of sacrificial and protective love. Kit has given this necklace to Ty as a gesture of protective love. Ty having that pendant is the thing — the first thing in TWP — that Kit thinks of as connecting him to his bio-mom. When he sees Ty with the necklace, he thinks that his mother protected him and in turn he has honored that legacy by giving something that symbolizes her to the person he most wants to protect. He thinks she would be pleased. It's pretty much the only thing he's let himself think about as regards her. So I think of it as connecting him to Rosemary rather than putting her aside.

I don't think Rosemary's place in Kit's story is measured by how many of her belongings he keeps or if he has a photo of her (he's certainly seen one.) He isn't looking for that. It will be measured in what Kit finds out about himself, his own feelings, and his relationship to his past. None of this is to say Kit won't ever know more about his biological mother. It's only to say I don't think that if he did, it would make the situation less sad; it may well make it more sad. It's just that it's okay if it's sad and Kit's ability to engage with it as a real loss, and to work through those feelings, is part of his journey.

[cassandraclare]

Hi Cassie! I hope you're doing good! ❤️

I'm afraid this might be a bit long so I apologize in advance.

Ash has endured years of physical, emotional, and psychological abuse, and it seems clear that prolonged trauma has shaped who he is. You’ve mentioned that he’s the way he is because of “layers of trauma,” and that he’ll bond with Dru over their experiences. I was wondering if you wrote Ash with C-PTSD in mind, or if he’ll display symptoms commonly associated with it, such as flashbacks, anxiety, or dissociation? I don’t mean to suggest how he should be written. I’m just curious about your inspiration.

I understand this is a very heavy topic so I hope it's ok to ask about this.

That is a thoughtful question and it is definitely okay to ask.

Ash has certainly experienced profound and prolonged trauma, and I don't think it's possible to write his story without that trauma shaping who he is. The way he relates to other people, the choices he makes, and the ways he protects himself all grow out of what he's lived through.

That said, I don't think it's for me, as the author, to diagnose a character unless that diagnosis is something I intend to make explicit on the page. While readers are always welcome to see their own experiences reflected in characters and may recognize thoughts and behavior that resonate with them, I don't feel comfortable claiming representation of a specific condition after the fact if it wasn't something I deliberately wrote into the story.

I didn't write Ash with C-PTSD specifically in mind. I wrote him as someone who has survived years of abuse, manipulation, and loss, and I tried to be truthful to the emotional consequences of those experiences. Readers may certainly see aspects of C-PTSD in him, and I understand why, but I wouldn't want to say, "Yes, that's what he has," because I don't think it would be fair to people looking for explicit representation. I also strongly feel that if readers see C-PTSD in him that is a valid interpretation and no one could fairly tell you that you were wrong, including me.

I do think one of the central parts of the journey of anyone with trauma is learning that trauma changes you, but it doesn't make you incapable of love, joy, or healing. So that's something for both Dru and Ash to (hopefully!) learn.

[wikitpowers]

THEY FUCKING WATCH HORROR MOVIES TOGETHER I WILL CRY