rose-herondale

[rose-herondale]

Will: The kids haven’t ate their sandwiches

Tessa: Okay, just throw them out

- A while later -

Will *helping their kids pack*: Look I’m just as surprised as you are-

[rose-herondale]

help

[rose-herondale]

Powerful shadowhunter: Have you committed any actions against our law?

Every single likeable character in the tsc universe:

[rose-herondale]

oh i love this one

“For the devil has no power … except in the dark.”

promo for @cassandraclaredaily​

[rose-herondale]

Tessa: So, who’s in charge of the clave?

Will: Usually whoever yells the loudest.

[rose-herondale]

👀👀👀👀👀👀

Some of you have never read The Infernal Devices series and it shows

[rose-herondale]

Izzy: I saw a really hot guy outside today.

Alec: That's weird. Magnus has been here with me all day.

Izzy: Magnus isn't the only hot guy around, Alec.

Alec: Sounds fake but okay.

[rose-herondale]

Jace: If Magnus remarries after you die would you be ok with that?

Alec: What the fuck would I do? Get up?

[rose-herondale]

The children might have lost their way, but whoever they matched wits with, they were able to save each other. HANSEL AND GRETEL #shadowhunters #fairytales #mashup #cassandrajean

[rose-herondale]

ima start crying again :)

silentones said: Hi Cassie, I just wanted to show you this post: sansasnarks(.)tumblr(.)com/post/101813240825/heronstairs-day-2014. We are having Heronstairs Day on November 10th and it would be awesome if you could reblog the post, or write a Heronstairs scene for it, or give us some Heronstairs fanart from CJP, or give us anything Heronstairs really! And if not, I just wanted to let you know anyways :)

Cassandra Jean and I decided to contribute a comic for Heronstairs Day. Text by me, drawings by her. London, Hyde Park, 1877. Will sacks out after a long night of demon-fighting and Jem covers him up with his jacket. :)

[rose-herondale]

someone call 911 i think im having a heart attack

do you think Jem carstairs looks up to the sky sometimes and whispers: “you would have loved this” with a huge smile on his face when he sees new modern things that remind him of Will

[rose-herondale]

**SPOILER

we need to talk about this 

[rose-herondale]

i love this so much.

Cassie, From reading the infernal devices, I think that it is fair to say that us fandom would assume based on Will and Jem’s character that Will would be (lest us admit it people) rough in bed and Jem a more gentle lover. Yet Will asked Tessa how to undo a corset, his gentleness displayed if not in his words but actions. While Jem basically rips off Tessa’s corset…. Why is this so? The only conclusion I can think of it that Will may have had experience in that genre, while Jem had been waiting over a century. O_o — callmetictac

My what a saucy question. I guess I should warn that the below will contain comments about sex? Not that that’s surprising.

1) I guess I would say there are two things happening here. One is a thing that happens a lot, which is an attempt to shove Will and Jem into the boxes of archetypal characters — Will the “bad boy” and Jem the “good one”, etc. And I play around with archetypes a lot, so I get that. But Will is not a bad boy, and Jem is not a good boy. Jem punched Will in the face, not the other way around. The big Jessa scene in Clockwork Prince basically went like “And now we make out like crazy, girl, and I would totally have sex with you except whoops THE FLOOR IS COVERED IN MY DRUGS.”

And there’s Will, who kisses Tessa sweetly and gently removes her glove, and pays for Jem’s drugs without mentioning it, and makes up silly songs. So which one is the wild sex machine in bed? I submit there is no way of knowing, because regardless of these points, you can’t actually tell from things like this anyway. The quietest kindest person can be a rough sex enthusiast and the loudest angriest person can wish to be held and called baby names.

2) The second thing happening here is forgetting that sex involves, usually, another person. In this case, that person is Tessa. When she sleeps with Will in Clockwork Princess, she is a grief-stricken terrified virgin. When she sleeps with Jem in After the Bridge, she is an experienced woman who has lived through all the years of a sexually active happy marriage. Do we not think it is likely the boys would take their cues from her and act accordingly? 

And while Jem and Will are both virgins when they first sleep with Tessa, Will is also a grief-stricken terrified virgin, and Jem is a man who has lived so long he has passed almost out of human experience. Even just one person is capable of having sex in a million different moods and ways, because sex is part of life and is affected by everything else happening in your life at the time you are having it, just as the same piece of music might make you happy or sad depending on the circumstances. 

Context, as they say, is everything.

[rose-herondale]

this is true but it made me cry anyways :)

memento mori

I read the infernal devices 16 times and it is my favourite so thank you so much. It was worth the pain. :) But I have a question. Why didn’t Tessa use her powers to change into Will after he died so that she could have remembered the color of his beautiful eyes or his laughter? Cause i am still not over that epilogue and it makes me cry every time i read it. — livinginbooksworld

If Tessa wanted to see Will’s beautiful face after he died that bad, she could have had him taxidermied and stuffed and put in a corner of her living room. But she wouldn’t do that — none of us would, would we? We would think it was morbid and horrible and unhealthy. And in the same way, I would imagine, Tessa would think turning herself into a facsimile of a man she loved would be morbid and horrible.

I get this question a lot and it puzzles me, because to me it is no different than asking why Tessa didn’t have Will’s dead body stuffed. Yes, it is sad that Tessa begins to one day feel that she may be losing the precise blue of Will’s eyes…the exact sound of his laughter. But it is an incredibly natural and normal part of the grieving process. That forgetting is a gift that is given to us by God or biology or whatever higher power you believe in, because without having the edges of loss softened by time, we would never heal. Without it, our grief would be horrible and new every day without ever becoming something we could accept and live with – which is the gift that time and forgetting bring you.

To me, the idea that Tessa would use her power to turn herself into a fake Will after he died is horror-movie stuff. It’s Norman Bates dressing up like his mother and keeping her stuffed dead body in his office. It is the unhealthy derangement brought on by grief. There is nothing romantic about it except in a very creepy A Rose for Emily kind of way (Faulkner short story: after a very old woman died, the town finds out she’s been sleeping next to the rotted corpse of her dead husband for decades.)

There is a reason “there’s no rune for a broken heart”: magic works in all sorts of ways, largely as metaphor, in fiction, but in the Shadowhunters world it isn’t there to make people no longer have to experience what being human means. Part of what being human means is that you will lose people you love. It also means you will die someday yourself. It means you will grieve and heal. If you grieve and don’t heal, you wind up like Tatiana Blackthorn (or Miss Havisham, on whom she’s based) — twisted beyond any help into a monster of grief and hate.

I can understand why the epilogue of CP often hits people hard. There’s a scene in the Dark Artifices where Arthur Blackthorn tells Julian that in the time of the Roman Empire, when a general won a victory and rode through the streets having flowers thrown at him by a grateful populace, there would be a servant who stood behind him in the chariot and repeated: Respice post te. Hominem te esse memento. Memento mori.

It meant:

Look behind you. Remember that you are human. Remember that you will die.

Part of what the epilogue of Clockwork Princess does is blow up the idea that a story ends at happily ever after: Will is dead, and though he had a great life, the thought of him being dead is upsetting because it means we could all die. We will all die. Tessa finds love again, but someday Jem will die. People we love will die: one day we will die: that is what all art is basically about.

And it is what it means to be human. Tessa doesn’t turn herself into Will because when you love someone, you love them, the spark of life that is them, and no amount of looking like Will (and I guess, staring into the mirror?) would bring that back. Turning into Will would be a horrible reminder of everything she lost that wasn’t important (the precise color of his eyes) and exactly how she will never get back anything that was important (the contents of his mind and heart.)

Respice post te. Hominem te esse memento. Memento mori.

[rose-herondale]

Thank you so much for all the characters from TMI/TID, they have a huge meaning in my life, above all Will and Jem, their story is magic and nothing from this world. So, I don’t know if you already have answered this question, if you did, I’m sorry, but recently I’ve seen some people talking about feeling disgusted about Will/Tessa sex scene in Clockwork Princess because they were “cheating on Jem and being very insensible”. Reading this things really made me so angry, because I can’t stop thinking this people were actually misunderstanding the real relationship between Will/Tessa/Jem. So I decided to come ask you about what is your opinion and how Jem really felt about it. Thanks, xx. — herronstairs

Well, I truly hope they’re not saying “insensible.” Insensible means unconscious, like “Will drank too much gin and fell insensible to the floor.” I have a feeling that isn’t what they mean. ;)

Trigger warnings for the below for discussion of rape and marital rape.

I have answered this, many many times, and I’ve decided this will be the last time. Because of course this is a conversation that has been going on since Clockwork Princess was released. Clockwork Princess is an unconventional book with an unconventional love triangle and an unconventional relationship at its center and a very unconventional resolution to that love triangle. That is always going to bother some people. The whole setup of Clockwork Princess requires you to think about relationships and love in a way romances don’t usually— as being able to exist without jealousy, for a start. As being a situation in which no one wins because no one is competing. People have a hard time letting go of the structures they know: it’s a challenge, and being challenged is uncomfortable. And when you are uncomfortable you try to figure out why, and you say this or that bothers you when it isn’t really that. I can’t count the amount of letters I’ve gotten from people who say it initially bothered them when Tessa slept with Will, or when Tessa and Jem “ended up together” in the epilogue, but then they figured out that was the point of the book and they came to value those things. So mostly I would just say that those people are processing, and let them process. Not everything needs to be an argument.

As for how Jem feels: he asks Tessa not to tell him the details, but he clearly knows and understands. That’s what Jem is like, and I think why so many of his fans are fine with Will and Tessa even if they prefer Jem with Tessa: because Jem is unselfish, and a good person — such a good person in fact, that Tessa could never tell him of Will’s feelings for her: because he would have tried to bow gracefully out of the way, thus sticking Tessa in a position where Will wouldn’t be with her because of Jem and Jem wouldn’t be with her because of Will, and everyone would be unhappy. It was her dilemma at the end of Prince, everyone falling all over each other to spare each other’s feelings and make sure the other person was happy.

Given that, it does seem odd to object to something on Jem’s behalf that Jem himself wouldn’t object to or feel hurt by. People seem to feel that it’s insulting that Will and Tessa slept together thinking Jem was dead, but — and here you can find Holly Black and I writing a long team essay on the intertwining of love and grief and sex — partly they did what they did because Jem was dead, because they were both in despair and nothing mattered and they were heartbroken and reaching for the one other person in the world who would understand how heartbroken they were.

Jem would have understood that, and not judged them.

There also seems this idea that what Jem would object to would be them having sex, not being in love. It weirdly reminded me of Love, Actually, when Emma Thompson’s character realizes her husband is having an affair: “Imagine your husband bought a gold necklace, and come Christmas gave it to somebody else…Would you wait around to find out if it’s just a necklace, or if it’s sex and a necklace, or if, worst of all, it’s a necklace and love?“

Thompson’s character is wise: she realizes that what’s devastating is the person you’re in love with being in love with someone else, not some sex they had. Jem already knows Will and Tessa are in love. And while he might feel a twinge of jealousy about that, it would be nothing compared to the absolute horror he would have felt if Tessa and Will had decided that even though they were in love, a farce of physical restraint at a time when they both needed comforting, and Tessa needed to have a single caring, positive sexual experience before a lifetime of rape, would “honor Jem’s memory”. I mean absolute horror is really the only way I could describe his feelings about that.

Tessa knows Jem extremely well: she knows better than to think Jem would ever, ever grudge her or Will comfort in this time of grief and fear. And indeed, they are right: as they and Jem see each other later and Jem does completely understand and does not hold it against either of them for a moment.

Jem understood, and didn’t judge them.

I think there’s a weird tendency — brought along by the annoying tendencies of classes to teach simplified compare/contrast kinds of readings — to ignore the context something happens in. I’ve seen this scene characterized as “Jem’s dead, let’s fuck” as if they’ve been waiting all this time for Jem to be dead, cleverly anticipating that when they found out, they’d be locked up somewhere with a bed. But that does rather not take into account the fact that they sleep together under very specific circumstances — they’re both grief-stricken, both expect Will to die the next day, neither thinks they’ll see anyone they love again, and Tessa is expecting to be raped shortly — and that they never sleep together in the book again. If they were just waiting on the opportunity, why do  they never have sex again from the time in the cave to the time they get married? If they had merely been taking the chance offered by Jem’s death to have guiltless sex, they would then have had it again once they got back to the Institute. But they never do.

And Jem didn’t judge them.

Because Jem was good at putting himself in other people’s shoes; he was good at wanting the best for people he loved. He loved Tessa. Tessa has just found out the boy she loves is dead. She never got to say goodbye to him, as she says. She never held him or kissed him or told him she loved him before he died. The other boy she loves is by her side, and he is going to die in the morning. She herself hopes to die the next day, but knows perfectly well what will happen if she doesn’t die; Mortmain is going to rape her. Tessa knows that.

This is Tessa’s choice: let herself comfort Will and be comforted, or “save herself” in order that the only experience of "sex” she ever knows is being raped constantly by a man she hates. For the rest of her life. Thus Tessa consenting to sex with Will is also her asserting her control over her own body. She would rather her first sexual experience be with someone that she loves. Jem, the most understanding person in the world and someone who has had terrible things inflicted on his body against his will, would certainly have wanted Tessa to do what she wanted with her own body.

A million times over, Jem would never have judged her for that.

Will and Tessa were in a desperate situation. They did not do what they did out of selfishness, but out of grief and love, a love just as great as Tessa felt for Jem or Jem felt for Will. They kept themselves alive to fight that one more day that mattered. And Jem — I think part of the reason people love Jem is that he is unselfish, that he illuminates what is strong about kindness and generosity and giving. So it does seem odd to me to to to war for him, so to speak, in a manner that would only horrify him and make him sick, over a thing that he would have supported. It doesn’t seem about Jem at all.

In the end — and this is the last time I’ll say this, because I think this conversation will exist as long as the books exist, but after three years I think I’ve said all there is to say — for Will and Tessa, making love was a way of taking back control from Mortmain, of preserving the happiness he tried to destroy, of lighting a candle in a terrible darkness. Will and Tessa hurt nobody, and acted on the belief that if Jem could see their hearts he would understand… which belief was entirely correct. Sex can be holy, a way of making a relationship sacrosanct. I don’t think God would have judged them for what they did. Jem doesn’t judge them for what they did. Do you really want to be someone who does?

[rose-herondale]

London, 2009, so a year after the events of City of Heavenly Fire. There are some clues in here for Dark Artifices and even for Shadowhunter Academy, so if you hate spoilers, avoid!

A lot of people have asked if Will is “really there” or is a ghost. I never thought of Will ever haunting the world after his death. He had a good life and a good death and has no reason to hang around. There’s an implication in the comic that this is Will’s “one trip” from the afterlife, but an equal implication, I think, that he’s not there at all, and is just a figment of the imaginations of those who so badly want to see him.

You can decide what you want to believe. :)

* Art by Cassandra Jean of course!

[rose-herondale]

Hi Cassie! Sorry but I have to tell: I'm a little disappointed about the fact that we're going to meet Tessa and Jem's baby before Wessa's children. Yes I know we red about James in Nothing but Shadows and a little in Cast Long Shadow, but we only know few things about him and Lucie and the release of Chain of Gold has been postponed twice and we still don't know when this book will come out. I love you and your books, but sometimes I feel like you're forgetting about James, Lucie and also Will.

Well, I guess I can answer this as it isn’t a real spoiler!

Baby James featured in The Whitechapel Fiend in 2013. James then featured in The Midnight Heir, and James and Lucie in Nothing but Shadows, Cast Long Shadows, and Every Exquisite Thing. All of these were published before any GOTSM short stories about Jessa or Tessa and Jem being pregnant. There was also an entire Cassandra Jean comic about Tessa finding out she was pregnant and telling Will. So it’s hard to feel honestly like Will and Wessa fans have gotten short shrift here, especially considering that Forever Fallen is one short story and The Last Hours is three full novels about Lucie and James that also have love scenes for Tessa and Will. We know actually quite a few things about Lucie and James, while we don’t even yet know the gender or name of Jessa’s baby!

It’s true the Last Hours was delayed, partly because my publisher wanted to put out Queen first, but I promise that’s not because they’re Jessa fans secretly. :) We also do already know it’s coming in 2019 and as the cover and release date are being announced December 12, I can tell you now you won’t be even waiting a year for Chain of Gold. Not only have I not forgotten about Will, James and Lucie, Chain of Gold is what I’m working on now, so they are literally almost all I think about. Try to remember writer’s schedules aren’t the same as readers’!

I had actually hoped we had put a lot of this behind us – that most people had ceased to think of Jessa/Wessa as a ship war, but as them both as the equal loves of Tessa’s life deserving of equal time and happiness. Telling the story of James and Lucie isn’t as far as I am concerned a point for Wessa, it’s an interesting story in an interesting time period I wanted to tell. Equally, Jem and Tessa and the baby are in Forever Fallen because of Kit, and the story I wanted to tell there, not because it chalks up a point for Jessa fans. Make sense?

Here is how I think of it. Will got everything he wanted in life – except to see Jem as much as he would have wanted, and for Jem to have a chance to have a full and happy life, too. Now Will’s last dream has finally come true. There is no competition here and plenty for Will fans to look forward to; in the meantime, given all that Jem has suffered and how it broke Will’s heart, I would hope Will fans would be happy, for Will’s sake if nothing else, to see Jem happy and having what we know Will already had, at last!