Hi Cassie! I hope you're having a great weekend!
I was wondering, since Ash is the only protagonist of twp whom we haven't really properly met yet (unlike kit, Ty and dru whom we got to know pretty well in tea), I was wondering how would you introduce him in order to get people excited about his character? I see a lot of people hating on him which is crazy to me but I can understand those who are mainly indifferent to him since we haven't seen much of ash yet. Maybe you can share something nonspoilery to give us a better feeling about him?
Okay, first, if you want one fun thing about Ash, I'll give you a quote from my Italian translator. "I love how you can never tell where he stands. I love that he loathes lies, and yet must lie all the time. I love that he can be such a TEENAGER (affectionate)." That made me laugh, he's definitely no less teenagery than the other characters, as even when you are immortal and eighteen, you are still eighteen.
Second, I wouldn't worry about people hating Ash. They don't know him. There's nothing to hate but potential, just as there's nothing to love but potential. We've actually spent so little time with him! He's still a mystery.
One thing I've learned over the years is that readers can be enormously protective of the characters they already love in a way that often expresses itself as suspicion of the new. I remember when The Infernal Devices was announced, how much people absolutely hated the idea of Will, Tessa, and Jem. They despised them. Because they wanted more Jace and Clary. Will, Jem and Tessa were the new characters, and to some readers they felt like they were taking the place of characters they were already invested in, even if they didn't exist in the same time period. Will was a Herondale, so he was hated because he might replace Jace; Jem was hated for replacing Alec (a Herondale's parabatai) and Tessa was hated for replacing Clary.
At the time, it really freaked me out, but many years have passed since, and I have seen this happen so many times I am inured to it. I have learned that it is impossible to know how you (my readers and everyone else!) will feel about a character you have not yet met in the same way it is impossible to imagine a new color or a new geometric shape being introduced to your world.
Protective love for the characters you do know often turns into a kind of terror that a new character will take space from them — like the fear Ash will take space from Kit and Ty. He doesn't. If he wasn't in the book, and Dru wasn't in the book, it would just be a shorter book. There wouldn't be more Kit and Ty because without Dru and Ash, there would just be much much less for them to do, much less for them to feel, and much less opportunity for us to know them better.
(It's interesting because some of the people who are scared of Ash taking up space ask whether Kit will spend a lot of his time thinking about his bio-dad, his bio-mom, Jem and Tessa and Mina, Jace and Auraline. Even though Kit spending a lot of time thinking about them would, in fact, technically remove time from pondering Ty. It's just that it would add to our understanding of Kit, which adds weight to who he is and how fully characterized he and Ty are. People know that; they know Kit and Ty are in fact only compelling if they are fully realized characters with other interests besides each other. Ash's existence does the same thing in terms of adding weight, but it is not something people can yet picture, so the idea of Kit thinking about long-dead Auraline is less unimaginable than him thinking about his complex relationship with a potential rival for the Faerie throne he may or may not want, even though the second one is a lot more signifiant to who he is now.)
Looking back at TID, it's almost impossible even for me to imagine people hating Will and Jem as "nothing characters, boring and blah", because we know those characters so well and most people do not find them to be any of those things. Once you've spent hundreds of pages with someone, they stop being "the replacement" who might suck in a variety of imaginary ways, and just become themselves. That's one of the lovely things about fiction: you can't really know whether you'll love or hate a character until you've actually gotten to know them so you can always be surprised. Before that, the character is mostly an idea. The Wicked Powers is really the first time readers will get to spend time with Ash, and I'm excited for people to meet him properly and decide what they think of him, rather than the idea of him.
The unknown is a threat until it is known. That is the much shorter version of this very long post. I have to get back to Dru and Ash clothing-shopping in the mortal world now; potentially Ash would enjoy a fake leopard-skin jacket? Or one of those bowling shirts that has the name "Dave" on it? A t-shirt that says IF YOU MET MY FAMILY YOU'D UNDERSTAND? Probably everyone in the Shadowhunter world should have one of those.
