@unrestrainedlyexcessive replied to your post “So apparently Jace is free of Lilith’s control when he’s awake. Which...”
Like, I can't even remember what crazy reason they gave for lying to him this long.
well, it just keeps fucking shifting.
First he didn’t want to tell Alec because it would make Alec complicit in covering up Clary’s crime?
Then he didn’t want to tell Alec about the dreams because he thought Alec would go blabbing to Jonathan’s spy in the Institute (which, hell, there wasn’t one before, the spy was Jonathan.)
And now he doesn’t want to tell because...idek.
Like, if the constantly-evolving rationale isn’t a tip-off that he’s not thinking rationally, I don’t know what is.
Can I just say that I do not buy the bond between Jace and Alec in the show? Especially in the first season, because for me it came across as horribly one-sided and Jace himself seemed to disregard Alec and his opinions at EVERY opportunity and/or blame him for things which were not Alec's fault. I was wondering about your thoughts on Jace in general and the whole dynamic he had with Alec.
Honestly, my thoughts about Jace pretty much align with yours. He could be an interesting character--not groundbreaking, because he’s still a White Boy With Tragic Past (tm) but interesting, certainly--if the writers played off his struggles for acceptance and his insecurities rather than his douchebagery.
In the show, even more than in the books, Jace is an extremely entitled person who generally disregards any and everyone who isn’t him, and any and everything that isn’t what he wants to do. Sure, it’s framed as 'I want to protect you’ and sprinkled with one or two grand declarations along the lines of ‘Alec is the most important person in my life’ [cue Jace being an ass to Alec]...but at the end of the day, in the show, Jace has
Thrown Clary into the hands of a sexual predator with the power to hypnotise her into submission (and immediately used the guy’s behavior as a pretext to a) start a ight, b) ‘claim’ Clary as his girl before they were in a real relationship and c) put himself in a position where he could have tried to go for the ‘be thankful to me’ route, which thankfully wasn’t done)
Disobeyed Alec’s orders and instructions at every pretty much every turn, even though Alec is supposed to be his bos and AND he’s honestly got the better brain here
Canonically admitted he was pulling Alec along on a leash (literally: when Simon tells him as much, Jace goes ‘takes one to know one’)
And that’s without going into the hypocrisy with which he treats Downworlders, mostly because pretty much all Shadowhunters characters fall prey to that.
In my opinion, Jace is a shitty friend and an even shittier parabatai (though in the character’s defense, the parabatai thing is kind of a cheap-drama-inducing bad joke, both in the book and in the show) and since you can’t exactly re-make him from the ground up now that the show has started, he really needs to get slapped in the face a couple of times, both metaphorically and literally.
(PS: I know this isn’t very detailed, it’s been a while since I got my nose in Shadowhunters as a full entity, and I’m too tired to remember the S2 episodes in detail right now. My opinion still stands, though.)
Hey :) yeah, it's me again. This time I was curious what else pisses you off that Jace does ... besides that outing-thing. Have a nice day! :D
Okay, let me preface this with the fact that his main source of Anoying-ness (so to speak) is how much I’m supposed to like him.If you take a character and spend every couple paragraph trying to cram it down my throat that he’s oh so hot and competent and awesome and did I mention hot? I’m going to dislike him on principle.Especially if you then go on to describe him as vaguely as possible (he’s blond with a tan and yellow eyes. That’s all I know about what he looks like.) and write him as completely incompetent (Take an untrained and weaponless girl into a house full of vampires in the middle of the night? The only reason someone with that kind of reasonning survives to see his seventeenth birthday is because the book said he had to.)
Not to mention he’s terribly self-centered, rarely ever considers other people’s point of view, fetishizes lesbianism, and manages to both put Clary on a completely unhealthy pedestal ("You’re the only good thing about me"? Really? that’s really fucked man, and pretty much obsessive to boot) and regularly dismiss what she wants.(When he gets her to the Institute, when the time comes to get her to the Silent Brothers, he never asks her what she wants out of their relationship, he dumps the responsibility of having sex entirely on her —“If you don’t stop me now you won’t be able to stop me later”, which is basically a rape threat- OH, and there’s also that time in City of Glass where he pretty much gaslighted her.)
JACE IS ONE OF THE UNHEALTHIEST EXAMPLES IN THESE BOOKS OKAY(Luke “I-crossed-an-ocean-and-killed-two-dudes-so-I-could-pine-on-Jocelyne-closet-to-her” Garroway also ranks pretty high on the list tbh)But that’s not even the most worrying part of his character. Because, see, I think there are really interesting elements to him, and on the whole, I don’t mind reading abusive or fucked up characters if they’re recognized as such, which is pretty much never the case.Off the top of my head I can only remember two occasions of him being called out:
When he goes to start a fight (I think in City of Lost Souls?) with Luke’s pack, and Luke goes ‘hey kid, you’re kinda being stupid about how you deal with being frustrated’ to which Jace goes ‘fuck you I like being a shithead’ and Luke replies ‘okay’.
And in City of Glass, after he gaslights Clary and Alec goes ‘dude I’m worried about you bc your gaslighting your girlfriend is making you mopier than usual’.
Now, you can find in-universe explanation for this behavior.You can argue that growing up in a warrior society that pushes you on the field around 13 is bound to fuck you up and normalizes violence and stunted emotional development.
However, my beef isn’t with the in-universe reasons (which rely on the reader doing a large part of the worldbuilding tbh) but with the fact that.
Nowhere in the book does Cassandra Clare make it clear that Jace’s behavior is wrong. Jace’s borderline abusive behavior is constantly romanticized.
It is obvious to me that Cassandra Clare, for the most part, doesn’t even realize what’s wrong with the message she gives to her readers. From what I’ve read, I’m pretty sure she wants to represent healthy relationships, but she fails at it.
Honestly, all I can hope is that she will, someday, realize how fucked up a message her books send because the only characters in her works that don’t have extremely problematic behavior at one point or another are the minor ones, and those usually have a tendency to end up being pretty clichéd :/
(Also, if you want to read about the flaws exhibited in the TMI trilogy, I recommend reading snarktheater's livereads —he's currently at City of Fallen Angels— and/or readingwithavengeance's ones —she's done the whole series. I'm currently doing the Bane Chronicles (picking up at Saving Raphael Santiago because I’d forgotten I did the first part of RotHD on this version of the blog instead of the previous one.) and I’m planning on liveblogging The Infernal Devices once I’m done with the Maze Runner Liveread.)
Archive Repost: Jace, belonging and low expectations
This is a repost of a previous meta post I originally wrote in August (or possibly September) of 2014, which was lost due to the accidental deletion of my former account. Hopefully people who were looking for it will manage to find it :/
I've been wanting to write some meta about Jace for a while, tbh.
It was going to be a very angry post along the lines of “why does fandom buy into the idolatry of an abusive asshole?!”... but while I still think Jace is an abusive asshole and I still dislike him immensely, I also want to try and be fair to his character as much as I can... because to be frank, I wouldn't mind him being an abusive asshole so much if someone, anyone, called him out on that once. Which no one does.
And regardless, I also tend to think it's unfair to him that even the narrative of TMI disregards that aspect of him because it means ignoring why he is who he is, and therefore take away much of his literary depth and potential.
So, without further ado –but with the hope to interest at least one or two people beside myself, here's an attempt at decoding Jace Herondale (/Lightwood/Wayland). At least somewhat.
“Of course.” For a moment a bleak amusement colored his voice. Then it was gone. “When the boy was six years old, his father gave him a falcon to train. Falcons are raptors—killing birds, his father told him, the Shadowhunters of the sky.
“The falcon didn’t like the boy, and the boy didn’t like it, either. Its sharp beak made him nervous, and its bright eyes always seemed to be watching him. It would slash at him with beak and talons when he came near: For weeks his wrists and hands were always bleeding. He didn’t know it, but his father had selected a falcon that had lived in the wild for over a year, and thus was nearly impossible to tame. But the boy tried, because his father had told him to make the falcon obedient, and he wanted to please his father.
“He stayed with the falcon constantly, keeping it awake by talking to it and even playing music to it, because a tired bird was meant to be easier to tame. He learned the equipment: the jesses, the hood, the brail, the leash that bound the bird to his wrist. He was meant to keep the falcon blind, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it—instead he tried to sit where the bird could see him as he touched and stroked its wings, willing it to trust him. He fed it from his hand, and at first it would not eat. Later it ate so savagely that its beak cut the skin of his palm. But the boy was glad, because it was progress, and because he wanted the bird to know him, even if the bird had to consume his blood to make that happen.
“He began to see that the falcon was beautiful, that its slim wings were built for the speed of flight, that it was strong and swift, fierce and gentle. When it dived to the ground, it moved like light. When it learned to circle and come to his wrist, he nearly shouted with delight. Sometimes the bird would hop to his shoulder and put its beak in his hair. He knew his falcon loved him, and when he was certain it was not just tamed but perfectly tamed, he went to his father and showed him what he had done, expecting him to be proud.
“Instead his father took the bird, now tame and trusting, in his hands and broke its neck. ‘I told you to make it obedient,’ his father said, and dropped the falcon’s lifeless body to the ground. ‘Instead, you taught it to love you. Falcons are not meant to be loving pets: They are fierce and wild, savage and cruel. This bird was not tamed; it was broken.’
“Later, when his father left him, the boy cried over his pet, until eventually his father sent a servant to take the body of the bird away and bury it. The boy never cried again, and he never forgot what he’d learned: that to love is to destroy, and that to be loved is to be the one destroyed.”
Clary, who had been lying still, hardly breathing, rolled onto her back and opened her eyes. “That’s an awful story,” she said indignantly.
Jace had his legs pulled up, his chin on his knees. “Is it?” he said ruminatively.
“The boy’s father is horrible. It’s a story about child abuse. I should have known that’s what Shadowhunters think a bedtime story is like. Anything that gives you screaming nightmares—”
“Sometimes the Marks can give you screaming nightmares,” said Jace. “If you get them when you’re too young.” He looked at her thoughtfully. The late afternoon light came in through the curtains and made his face a study in contrasts. Chiaroscuro, she thought. The art of shadows and light. “It’s a good story if you think about it,” he said. “The boy’s father is just trying to make him stronger. Inflexible.”
“But you have to learn to bend a little,” said Clary with a yawn. Despite the story’s content, the rhythm of Jace’s voice had made her sleepy. “Or you’ll break.”
“Not if you’re strong enough,” said Jace firmly. He reached out, and she felt the back of his hand brush her cheek; she realized her eyes were slipping shut. Exhaustion made her bones liquid; she felt as if she might wash away and vanish. As she fell into sleep, she heard the echo of words in her mind. He gave me anything I wanted. Horses, weapons, books, even a hunting falcon.
—City of Bones, ch.11: “Magnus Bane”
What we learn from this story is that Jace was, on the one hand, spoiled rotten, and on the other hand, a victim of severe emotional abuse. (Considering the culture he lives in and the way Valentine treated Jonathan/Sebastian, it's possible that he was also physically abusive, with Jace, if more occasionnally than he was with Jonathan.)
This is later confirmed by Valentine's own words:
And Valentine, his voice hoarse: It wasn’t a son I needed. It was a soldier. I had thought Jonathan might be that soldier, but he had too much of the demon nature in him. He was too savage, too sudden, not subtle enough. I feared even then, when he was barely out of infancy, that he would never have the patience or the compassion to follow me, to lead the Clave in my footsteps. So I tried again with you. And with you I had the opposite trouble. You were too gentle. Too empathic. Understand this, my son—I loved you for those things.
—City of Fallen Angels, as quoted in City of Heavenly Fire, ch. 10: “These violent delights”
So for the first ten years of his life, Jace alternatively received the message that he was above the rest of mankind, and deserved to be rewarded just for existing, but at the same time well below the level of emotional detachment Valentine wanted him to reach, for which he deserved to be punished.
I can only imagine how damaging that has to be for a kid, to be taught he's not good enough for the only social group he's supposed to belong to... in other words, the message Jace gets is that he doesn't deserve to belong anywhere, and this until he's ten.
After he's ten and his father gets “murdered” in front of him –it occurs to me that, as far as I remember, we never got a detailed account of how that happened, which is a shame. But like I said, that's not what I'm going to be talking about, otherwise I'll have to write a novel, and I don't feel like doing that.
Once “Michael Wayland” died, Jace is taken in by the Lightwoods, as we know. Now, this might be talked about in later chapters of City of Heavenly Fire, but up until chapter 9 of that book, it is never made clear what made Robert take Jace in. Did he genuinely care for the boy? Did he do it out of a sense of Shadowhunter duty? In memory of his parabatai bond with Michael? (Was that connection even mentionned in the books prior to COHF? Memory fails me, I'm afraid)... so unless Jace had a heart to heart with either Robert or Maryse at some point, he had no way to know whether or not the Lightwoods truly wanted him around or if they took him in because they had no other choice.
(And given what we know of the Lightwoods, I'll bet anything said heart to heart never happened.)
So Jace goes from a household where he's learned he doesn't belong anywhere, to a household where he's been tossed without proof that he was actually wanted, and where even the “actual” son is treated at best with distance, at worse with disdain. [1] At the same time, he's also being praised for his talent in hunting and his bravery when he takes risks and comes out of a mission successfully.
And see, when you look at Jace this way, he actually starts to make sense as a character.
Because when you're trying to fit into a community (family, social group, etc.) there are several ways to do it: you can do it in an affirmative way, by taking parts in shared activities –in this case things like hunting, sparring, etc.- or in a dissociative way, by pushing out the people you think don't belong in the group –by dismissing them or their hobbies, for example.
Interestingly, you can find both aspects of that in Jace's relationship to Alec as it is written in the books (though I don't know if Clare intended it to appear that way).
Like, on the one hand, Jace asked him to be his Parabatai, which is an unbreakable bond: it ties him to the Lightwoods as a family, makes him as good as Alec's brother and Robert and Maryse's son... in a way, becoming Alec's parabatai is the only chance Jace had at having parents, no matter how good or bad they were at parenting.
And at the same time, Jace often dismisses Alec and his concerns, his desires of interest. Look, for example, at this quote:
Jace leaned forward and banged his hand against the partition separating them from the cab driver. “Turn left! Left! I said to take Broadway you brain-dead moron!”
The taxi driver responded by jerking the wheel so hard to the left that Clary was thrown against Jace. She let out a yelp of resentment. “Why are we taking broadway, anyway?”
“I'm starving,” Jace said. “And there's nothing at home except leftover Chinese.” He took his phone out of his pocket and started dialing. “Alec! Wake up!” he shouted. Clary could hear an irritated buzzing on the other end. “Meet us at Taki's. Breakfast. Yeah, you heard me. Breakfast. What? It's only a few blocks away. Get going.”
—City of Bones, ch.11, “Magnus Bane”
Keep in mind that this happends right after Jace took Clary to the Silent City so she could get her mind looked at, and not only is Jace waking Alec up, he's doing so indecently early, without any form of apology, or consideration for Alec's protests –unless the “buzzing” on the other end of the line is Alec shouting in excitement but given Jace's response, I highly doubt that.
So that's one instance in which Jace gives zero fuck about what Alec thinks or feels, and just expects him to do as he's told (the reasons why Alec actually does as he's told is a topic for another, related but different, meta post.)
There's also the time when Jace almost outs Alec in front of strangers in City of Ashes (which I talked about in more details here, so I'm not going to develop it too much in this meta) and this event:
Alec, who was looking important, ignored this. “Jace, you brought the vampire here, so you’re in charge of him. Don’t let him go outside.”
The vampire, Simon thought. It wasn’t like Alec didn’t know his name. He’d saved Alec’s life once. Now he was “the vampire.” Even for Alec, who was prone to the occasional fit of inexplicable sullenness, this was obnoxious. Maybe it had something to do with being in Idris. Maybe Alec felt a greater need to assert his Shadowhunterness here.
“That’s what you brought me down here to tell me? Don’t let the vampire go outside? I wouldn’t have done that anyway.” Jace slid onto the couch beside Aline, who looked pleased. “You’d better hurry up to the Gard and back. God knows what depravity we might get up to here without your guidance.”
Alec gazed at Jace with calm superiority. “Try to hold it together. I’ll be back in half an hour.” He vanished through an archway that led to a long corridor; somewhere in the distance, a door clicked shut.
“You shouldn’t bait him,” Isabelle said, shooting Jace a severe look. “They did leave him in charge.”
Aline, Simon couldn’t help but notice, was sitting very close to Jace, their shoulders touching, even though there was plenty of room around them on the couch. “Did you ever think that in a past life Alec was an old woman with ninety cats who was always yelling at the neighborhood kids to get off her lawn? Because I do,” Jace said, and Aline giggled. “Just because he’s the only one who can go to the Gard—”
—City of Glass, ch.2, “The demon towers of Alicante”
Now, I agree Alec seems to be puffing himself up, and that probably looks a little ridiculous.
However, this is one of the very, very few times (if not the only one) where we see him being given and asserting any kind of authority –the only time, really, where he's not following Jace's instructions, and Jace's first impulse is to defy his authority and mock him as soon as he's gone.
It's interesting, to me, that Simon remarks on Alec's need to assert his “Shadowhunterness” because when you really look at it, it's Jace who always does that.
Jace is the one who divides the world in terms of Nephilims vs. Mundanes, Nephilims vs. Downworlders, those who have fun (like him) and those who are boring (like Alec). Out of the two, it's not Alec who spends the most time and energy reminding people of what he is, of where he belongs.
I think a part of Jace spends so much time telling people how great he is because he (unconsciously, I believe) thinks that it's the only way they'll keep seeing any kind of worth in him. That if he doesn't remind people that he belongs to the superior class of Shadowhunters (both in the sense that Shadowhunters are superior to all other categories of people –according to Valentine- and in the sense that he's a better Shadowhunter than others, because that's what he's been raised to be) then they'll forget him and he'll end up being treated... well, worse than Alec is.
Another interesting thing, in my opinion, is that Jace does not want to die.
In reading these books, I haven't once gotten a suicidal vibe off him –self-destructive, on occcasion, yes. Very complicated self-image? Yes. Insecurities? Yes. But suicidal? Never. This contrasts with Jace's recklessness and the fact that he regularly ends up in situations where he needs to be rescued, sometimes at high costs, like Alec getting stung by a greater demon, for example.
I say it's interesting because, to me, it's a sign that Jace isn't reckless so he can hopefully die. I think he's so willing to throw himself in dangerous positions for two reasons: one, because he's been taught nothing, in terms of hunting should be impossible for him to undertake. Given that Valentine's idea of a functionning groupe was a cult centered around his personality, I'll bet you everything you want he taught Jace not to rely on others, and that if he couldn't do something on his own, then he'd completely failed.
The second reason why Jace endangers himself so much, I think, is because he wants to be rescued.
If he's about to die and people save him, then that must mean they care about him. That must mean he does belong with them. That must mean he's actually as good and valuable as he's trying to convince them he is –that must mean he's worth being loved with lower conditions than the ones Valentine opposed him.
Maybe even unconditionnally.
In the end, when I try to look at Jace past the layers of assholery and abusive behavior (which, I admit, I don't do too often) what I see is someone whose issues are a lot more similar to Alec's than they seem at first, but who has a very, very different way of dealing with them –in parts because of their different upbringings, and in parts because they have pretty different personalities.
(I'm willing to bet, if you take the self-esteem issues away, Jace would be an extrovert, while Alec is more of an introvert.)
Which, all in all, is pretty sad, because I'm sure if they could just sit down and talk, then they'd get a chance of really developping something close to an actual brotherly relationship instead of just clinging to the fact that they're parabatai to make up for the lack of actual emotional care.
Then again, they're essentially child soldiers, so it's really not a surprise they wouldn't be encouraged to sit down and talk about everything that's gone wrong in their lives –they'd never have time to hunt again.
-----------------------------------------------
Also, after I initially posted this meta, battybirds was kind enough to look up and provide the following elements:
Hi! So, I was pretty sure that Valentine physically abusing Jace was mentioned. After a bit of searching, I found this:
She shook her head. “I don’t see what’s so great about Idris. It’s just a place. The way you and Hodge talk about it-” She broke off.
He closed his hand over the shard again. “I was happy there. It was the only place I ever felt happy like that.”
[…]
"How could you have been happy there? I know what you thought, but Valentine was a terrible father. He killed your pets, lied to you, and I know he hit you- don’t even try to pretend he didn’t."
A flicker of a smile ghosted across Jace’s face. “Only on alternate Thursdays.”
“Then how could-“
“It was the only time I ever felt sure about who I was. Where I belonged. It sounds stupid, but…”
It’s on pages 479 and 480 of my copy of City of Bones.
I think that’s the only time it was discussed. I thought you might like to know. Jace saying he felt like he belonged in Idris seemed relevant too.
