#carstairs

[deepspacialrift]

shadowhunter families

this took so long to finish you can see my style changing halfway through lol. it was super fun trying to include subtle family resemblances

artist notes: - ty's eyes are the same color as tessa's - lucie and livvy have the same hair color, while the rest of the brunette blackthorns have tessa’s hair - ash has sebastian’s coloring but clary/jocelyn’s features - alec, anna, and kit have the same blue eyes as will and cecily, but i actually picture kit's eyes to be lighter. i just draw too many blonde haired/blue eyed characters - the blackthorns were the most fun to draw :>

[allthestories]

It’s the Herondale-Carstairs of it all

[rhaenyraqueenred]

I really wish to have Mina Carstairs content without being linked all the time to Kit or Will's Herondale memory. Nobody had though of Lucie and James because they had a link to Jem, because in fact in the 90% of the TSC fandom doesn't really care about Jem.

And they only care about Mina now is because of Kit. If Cassie never brought Kit to the Carstairs family, that 90% of the TSC fandom wouldn't care about her or Jem at all.

They are the same who keep thinking of Will when they read about modern Tessa's life. Even the author keep doing it. To her, and fans, Jem and Mina only matters when is to make it about Will and all the Herondales (Kit, Jace and so on...)

And as a fan of the Carstairs characters since I read The Infernal Devices is so tiring. This thing doesn't happen the other way around. The Herondales are loved by the fandom bc of their own, not because of their relationship with other shadowhunters families. This thing never applied to Jem, Mina, Cordelia and even Emma. They all had to be somehow linked to a Herondale to being "noticed" by readers who didn't care about them in the first place.

Is so tiring. BTW. I love Jem and Mina of their own. I really wish to see them shine on the because and being loved because of their individuality. But that will never happen.

[outerspacess]

I think about this more often than I’d like to admit.

“Whoever you have loved, and however you loved them,” said Jem, “anyone you loved would be lucky.”

[bankofwildflowers]

No but I truly would like to know how Alastair Carstairs lived with himself. Imagine you're this lonely teenager with a sister to protect and a father to be protected from, and you're gay, and imagine your greatest fear is being the cause that your family is ruined. So you get to your school and you're so intensely terrified of being the subject of mockery that you decide to do it to other people before they can dig up things about you, like how it's curious that you flinch at glass breaking or your parents never show up at Academy events. And you...you're GOOD at it. You're skilled at finding out people's secret weaknesses and fears and terrorizing them about it. You see Will Herondale drop off his kid on the first day, and you know he also acted cruel to everyone for his curse, but he never managed to convince the London Institute not to love him because he was just that good of a person to not even manage forced cruelty well. And on the other hand there's you, better at cruelty than Will Herondale, yet no one would ever love you in the capacity he's been loved. So what does that say about you, that you can't even be a good enough person to make cruelty look the obvious falsehood that it is? Are you actually secretly a bad person?

And so you continue on, making everyone despise you, making them dream up a caricature of you so they'll stay ten feet away and never try to get in between the cracks, because the alternative is your family tarnished and cast out forever, your little sister friendless and alone when you know she's capable of being a hero. And you choose her over and over at the cost of so many other children just the same as her. You're all alone and you've built this shell of terribleness around yourself, choosing to be that horrible and being better at it than the poster child for deliberate cruelty, but maybe it's all worth it as long as a little red haired girl grows up happy and faithful and heroic. I'm sick

[greekmythstan]

Obsessed with the idea of Durendal appearing in the twp

[alexisparamour]

idk how to explain this but this album cover is deeply shadowhunters coded

[wonderlandofglitters]

Alastair and Cordelia in CoG

I actually didn't expect how much I'd grow to love Alastair?!!!

Cordelia once mentioned that she envied the sibling bond of James and Lucie in comparison to her own brother. Only we find out later that Alastair kept Cordelia at arms length and they don't seem to be as close because of their father's drinking.

In fact through Alastair, Cordelia had a childhood, a brother, and a father figure 😭 I especially love the bit of Alastair indulging Cordelia in one training session because she was sulking about being left alone.

And in turn, in the present, Cordelia shows him unconditional love after finding out the hardship he's gone through on his own 🥺

Maybe I do have a favorite family and I love the Carstairs much more than the others. From Jem, to Alastair, Cordelia, and Emma 🫶