Rorochan92 Hey Cassie, I read about people  being concerned that Jesse and Lucie are cousins. Are they cousins? I can’t figure it out. Also, if James and Cordelia get married, and if they have kids, how come Jace doesn’t know he’s related to the Carstairs when he meets Emma? Why don’t they talk about it more?
Ok! Let’s tackle this in two parts.
Jesse and Lucie: I … think that must have been a misunderstanding? They are not in any way related. Jesse’s uncle is Gabriel Lightwood. Gabriel Lightwood is married to Cecily Herondale, who is Lucie’s aunt. The only way they’d be related would be if Cecily and Gabriel were related, which they are not. Jesse and Lucie are distantly connected by marriage, which is not weird, especially in a smaller community like the Shadowhunters who are a tiny fraction of people on the planet. She is likely just as related to Matthew or more so (i.e. not much.)
(And before there is too much pearl-clutching about that, this kind of reminds me of people in my box fretting about whether Kit and Ty would be related if Jesse and Lucie ended up together. They would not be in any meaningful way. Those ancestors are far enough back that they would be considered by any geneticist to be unrelated, and by Shadowhunter terms, they’d be practically total strangers. It’s already a small community, good luck finding someone who doesn’t share some common ancestor with you. (I am Ashkenazi Jewish ( a group which comprises 0.2% of people on the planet): the assumption is that if I meet another Ashkenazi Jew, they’re my tenth cousin. Which is to say, we share some common ancestor way back but are not related. Let me put it this way: whether or not Lucie and Jesse end up together, whether or not the present-day Blackthorns are descended from Jesse’s branch of the Blackthorns at all, Kit and Ty will be the same amount of related, which is: not.)
Another rule of thumb is that “it is 99.9999% likely … that any given person you meet is at least a 16th cousin. And 97.2% likely that they are a 15th cousin” — and that’s the general population, not a smaller community like Shadowhunters, or Ashkenazi. It is not something that concerns me, nor should it you! There is a reason no soap opera plot turns on the discovery that someone is your fifteenth cousin. They are essentially unrelated to you. This is like freaking out that Magnus and Alec have a common ancestor. I guarantee they do. We all do. As the LA Times says, “Everyone is related to everyone else.”Â
Nobody in these books is marrying a first or even second cousin, though I would point out that’s exactly what Elizabeth is meant to be doing in Pride and Prejudice, with Mr. Collins, and exactly what Mr. Darcy is supposed to be doing with Anne de Burgh, and exactly what Edmund and Fanny do in Mansfield Park (they’re first cousins.) This was considered a way to keep wealth in the family, and was most common of course in royal families, which should provide some pearl-clutching historicity fun. :)
As for Jace — I mean, no, I would think of it as very bizarre if the people in the TMI/TDA era made a big deal about having distant common ancestors. Okay, so if Jace is descended from Cordelia, then she is one of sixteen great-great grandparents that he has. She is one of far, far more ancestors: literally hundreds. I think people may be compressing time in their heads and not thinking about the exponential growth of generations. Cordelia is one thirty-second of Jace’s genetic makeup, if they are related at all.
Also, not only does Jace barely know who Stephen and Marcus (his grandfather) are, he has no reason to memorize his family tree. Why on earth would he? I don’t know who any of my great-great grandparents are. I know the name of exactly one great-grandparent. I’ m not sure why Jace, who feels no great connection to the Herondales, would be researching this stuff? And memorizing it? And apparently caring more about someone removed from him by five generations that he cares about, say, his grandmother’s relatives? Why is no one complaining that he isn’t tracking down the Whitelaws or the Montclaires? (He doesn’t care to, but they’re all more closely related to him than the Carstairs.)
The answer to that is: because readers have read the books, and to them the Herondales and Carstairs are significant names, and those names have a connection. But the characters have not read the books. It would be as bizarre for Jace to go lunging at every Carstairs he might meet as it would be for Alec to weep all over the Monteverdes. Jace is not closely enough related to Emma for him to think of her as a relative regardless of whether James and Cordelia end up together or not.
We have to remember: these characters do not know that there have been previous book series in which names like Lightwood and Blackthorn are important. When Jace finds out he’s a Herondale he doesn’t leap on Alec either exclaiming that now they are related or something because a hundred and fifty years ago they had ancestors who got married. They’re not related, and neither of them would likely know about those marriages. To us, these characters are important: to Jace and Clary et al they can’t be without destroying a sense of verisimilitude that these are real people with real people concerns, not book people whose concerns are about other book series.
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