Wait can I ask you to explain about the Gabrily and Gracetopher parallels? I would like to know <3
THANK YOU FOR GIVING ME AN EXCUSE TO RANT! I've been waiting for this opportunity 😈
For me, Grace is Gabriel and Christopher is Cecily, and here's why:
Grace comes from a shitty parental figure (Tatiana), but also has a supportive older brother who is willing to protect her when he can. Gabriel had Benedict as a father and he had Gideon, his older brother, who did everything in his power to protect Gabriel from benedict, much like jesse did with grace
Their older brothers leave for a certain amount of time (gideon to spain, jesse to...partial death?) and Gabriel and Grace have to fend for themselves. In a way, their shitty parental figures have a love-hate relationship with them; tatiana likes grace because of her powers and beauty, but also abuses her and treats her like garbage. Meanwhile Benedict seems to ignore Gabriel until gideon leaves for spain, and then begins giving him attention, but even then it's sort of passive aggressive, from what we see in TID
I've always thought young Cecily and Christopher were super alike, because we can see in CP, Cecily has this sort of hunger to prove to everyone that she can be a hero. Essentially, she wants to bring back her brother and "fix" her family. Kit is similar: from his short story in the penultimate hours, we know that he wants to help people, to be able save shadowhunters.
What I find so interesting about Cecily and Kit is that they both want to help others, even though their sort of disconnected from everyone else. Cecily doesn't fit in with the shadowhunters at the institute initially and is constantly being undermined and sometimes even ignored by everyone else. Like, did anyone other than Gabriel make a valid attempt to get to know her? No. (this is important for later) Then we have Christopher who doesn't fit in with the shadowhunter community either. Thankfully, he has his friends, but they don't really understand him, other than Thomas (though, in his pov, Kit mentioned that Thomas only gets him sometimes)
Cecy and Kit also both have an older sibling that wants to protect them and is always looking out for them (Will and Anna). The difference is that while cecily always hated will's protectiveness, kit didn't seem to notice Anna's (lol I love kit)
Cecily is described as an observer; she's constantly analyzing the room and the people around her. I think the fact that Kit is a prodigy scientist is basically all the evidence we need to describe were the resemblance lies
Now, let's talk about them coming together:
Before meeting, both cecily and christopher have heard bad things from gabriel and grace (both are surrounded by people who hate them, witht he exception of gideon in cecily's case). Despite this, neither of them take this into consideration when they meet them: both cecily and christopher basically say FU to previous knowledge they had about Gabriel and Grace and open themselves to get to know the other.
Here's my favorite parallel: CECILY IS THE ONLY ONE WHO UNDERSTANDS GABRIEL IN TID AND VISE VERSA. AND IN TLH CHRISTOPHER IS THE ONLY ONE WHO UNDERSTAND GRACE AND VISE VERSA (the kit and grace one is even confirmed explicitly in choi)
Cecy gives gabriel advice on how to change, kit encourages grace to keep trying to change for the better
Both Cecily and Kit give Gabriel and Grace the push they need to overcome their past
this one is an intuition of mine, but I love it sm I can't not include it: Cecily is gabriel's ticket into becoming accepted into the tid gang, but we can also see that without Gabriel, Cecily wouldn't have initially stuck around because as I said before, she wasn't able to make significant friendships with the others before meeting Gabriel. In a way, the reason Gabriel and Cecily fit into the tid gang is because they have each other as well and I think that would have been the case for Grace and Christopher as well (we can, however, already see that some tlh characters—Anna and Henry— seem to take grace under their wings, and I don't think it's a coincidence that they were both close with Kit). In a way, Kit is the reason that Grace belongs (Not jesse—in gabriel's case, gideon isn't the reason he fits into the tid gang either)
Their connection/relationship only blossoms in the last book of the series (I say connection because I'm a firm believer in ace-gracetopher)
The fact that both Gabriel and Grace run to the institute after being attacked by their shitty parental figure and find refuge there
They all find comfort with their pair (Gabrily being together during Jem's "death"; gracetopher on christmas)
They initially have one topic in common that leads to their strong bond: Gabriel and Cecily love fighting and training (more specifically distance weaponry) while Grace and Kit bond over their love for science.
There are also parallels between gabriel/kit and grace/cecily, like the fact that gabriel and kit are already familiar with the shadow world and are well immersed into it, while cecily and grace know nothing about the shadow world and have zero training at the beginning of their respective series'
Gabriel teaches cecily everything he knows about training and tutors her because he has faith in her and her natural skills. KIT TEACHES GRACE ABOUT SCIENCE BECAUSE HE SEES HER INNATE TALENT FOR IT!!
Cecily describes gabriel as weirdly attractive upon their first encounter and Grace does the same with christopher
Y'all, there's sooooooo much more, but I'm forgetting everything haha I also need to read like 100 pages for tomorrow so I should probably get to doing that, but if I think of any more, I'll reblog and add them
