MAJOR chain of thorns spoilers !!!
[[ negative thoughts under the readmore about a particularly topic ]]
i also cannot help but feel as though chain of gold did a better job at handling christopher's potential death when he was poisoned than chain of thorns did with christopher's actual death
like, yeah christopher died right when everyone didn't have time to afford to like properly mourn or grieve and they had to take action but like. still.
and i think part of it, for me at least, is that while we get bits of like, thomas grieving it's from an outside perspective and never iirc in his own point of view??? like, there's when he first finds out of course, and then you get i think cordelia remarking in her pov that thomas lost both his sister and basically brother in a year, and that he was the last of the merry thieves currently and he must be feeling so lonely etc but from what i recall we never get thomas' feelings and thoughts regarding these things when we're in his pov???? and yeah there are 'more important things' to focus on re: the watchers and stuff but it makes christopher's death feel empty and as a result unnecessary. it feels like the same story beats could have been accomplished by christopher being severely poisoned and like comatosed, while the adults are all unaccessible in Idris which worsen his odds or something. he's still taken out of commission and the stakes are still heightened.
maybe i would have taken his death better if he was immediately still or something after he's hit instead of i think lucie hearing him say afterwards,that he was fine, because iirc the actual moment he was hit came off as like significant and i thought he died but then it was like 'oh his shoulder's just hurt! he's just injured! dw we'll just be out of the way bc of his injury' and then it's like 'oh actually he's dead now'. i think that 'false hope' just made his sudden death feel kind of cheap to me, for lack of a better word, and contributed to his death feeling unnecessary. maybe his death would have felt at least a little bit 'better' to me if it wasn't for that, bc otherwise it came off less of a 'this is war and people die' situation and more of a 'he is dead simply for shock value' situation. like i get, in-universe, christopher saying he’s fine when he’s not but the way it played out, as a reader, was unsatisfying to me.
like, the doylist reason for his death is that one of the merry thieves had to die for ""realism"" sake but like. it shouldnt come off as that obviously being the reason when you're reading, you know? and at the very least it should be given the weight and respect it deserves ?? as it is it feels like christopher was killed off for shock value and bc 'well one of them has to die and christopher is the easiest one to get rid of' and everyone's like 'oh no! well we can't dwell on that rn' and then they just never dwell on it, and it just makes his death feel empty and unnecessary and it has me feeling sour ngl
and maybe im an unrealistic idealist who feels like none of the main kids had to die! but if they did i’d imagine their death having more weight and presence in the story after it’s happened !
like, i feel if it was matthew who died, there'd've been more dedicated to it. granted, he's james' parabatai . but still. i feel like if even thomas had died, there still would've been more.
thomas and christopher had such a close bond that we got to see in the other two books and the lack of thomas' feelings from his own perspective just feels wrong. i dont care if theyre shadowhunters and needed to focus on battle and the bigger picture. and i know that thomas especially tries to cope with grief by action. and maybe it's supposed to signify everyone's maturity in this book with their reactions vs back in chain of gold. but it still comes off as significantly unsatisfying. imo.
outside of the scene where thomas finds christopher is dead, and outside the brief moments of anna coming off as reckless/wanting to fight the watchers in anger bc of kit, a lot of the christopher grief came off sort of like ‘telling not showing’ if that makes sense???
not to mention that i like personally really dislike when a character survives something where death was like a legit real possibility to then just die later on, especially when it comes off as just killing someone for shock value and/or to signify that ““things are serious now””. you can claim that their surviving is 'false security' and spin it as subversion or whatever but. i just dont like it. i never like it, whether it's in book series or tv shows, except i guess cases where it's just done well and makes sense and is thematically satisfying. so like, christopher dying after being poisoned and in danger of dying back in chain of gold and surviving also has me feel dissatisfied. especially because his death came off as “well someone had to die” and the aftermath of it was so neglected and it just felt so unnecessary and im just really sour about it.
a lot of this is ramble-y and all over the place and i dont even know if i got out all that i wanted to in regards to my feelings and thoughts about the topic but. yeah.
