Mortal Instruments & Infernal Devices Lovers! discussion

Here's some questions that fans have asked and some answers by Cassandra Clare about City Of Lost Souls...if anyone has any questions just let us know...

Q - : if Clary had stabbed Sebastian instead, would Jace still have been burned like that through the bond and ended up becoming a human torch? And since Sebastian is not dead and Glorious destroys those who are more evil than good, does that mean there’s still some goodness in him?”

A- I wonder if people have gotten all the TiD hints…? :)
If Clary had stabbed Sebastian with Glorious, Sebastian would have been destroyed by the heavenly fire, because in fact, there is not enough good in him to survive what it does. Jace barely survived and he is basically a quite good person. The fires of Heaven are unforgiving.
Jace would not have been harmed, though, because the whole point of Glorious was that it was a weapon that could hurt one of them and not hurt the other. Thus the whole folderol about retrieving it from the Angel. Sebastian wasn’t harmed or affected at all by Jace being stabbed: he screamed because he felt their bond being cut, but that’s all he felt. 

Well, you already answered mine in other discussions. I'm rereading the series because of you... :'(

Jez wrote: "Well, you already answered mine in other discussions. I'm rereading the series because of you... :'("

Lol really?? Sorry...
I'm re-reading city of lost souls soon. I'm sure I've missed lots of info like tessas necklace I didn't pick up on that till other discussions, I think I read it too fast! You've made me feel bad :)

Don't feel bad, I've been meaning to for a while. You gave me the motivation to do it :)

q - Why is the Mark of Cain was such a curse to Simon? For the most part, it only helped him, because it gave him invulnerability. And it didn’t prevent Isabelle from kissing him—or maybe it did bounce the kiss back sevenfold? Maybe thats why Isabelle likes him so much O.o No, but it really doesnt hinder his daily life—the only time it actually affected him in a bad way is when he had to run away from his mother and the knife. So why is it considered such a curse?

a - Well, because Simon isn’t a terrible person! I think one of the running themes of Mortal Instruments is that no gift comes without a price. For being immortal, there’s a price. For getting Jace back from the dead, there was a price. And for Simon’s invulnerability, there’s a very big price.

Notice how Clary could put the Mark of Cain on pretty much anyone and make them invulnerable if she wanted. Notice how nobody wants it. It’s invulnerability at too great a price to be worth it.

First, the issue of sevenfold: you’re not just invulnerable to people who want to kill you, you’re like a bomb that blows up not just people who come at you with deadly intent, but people who come at you without it. Simon doesn’t want to wander around being the cause of death of random muggers or drunk people who take a swing at him in a bar. The first time someone comes at him with a knife and is ripped apart in front of his eyes, he throws up in the gutter. Fun times!

Secondly, the issue that the invulnerability isn’t the curse. It’s a side effect of the curse. God put the curse on Cain so that he would be forced to wander hated and alone, cut off from his people. Cain pointed that this meant he would be immediately murdered and God put the Mark on him to tell people that if they harmed Cain, they would suffer God’s wrath. The Mark keeps Cain alive so that he can suffer the misery of the curse.

Simon’s mother is not by nature just a lunatic. Her casting Simon out is the beginning of the curse starting to work. Simon is not dumb enough not to know that. If the curse stayed on him he’d lose everyone he loved one by one till he was totally alone. Invulnerability just isn’t worth it.

So I hope at least one can say that you can’t get to the end of City of Lost Souls and not know whether Alec and Magnus broke up or not. Hopefully they got a significant breakup scene and hopefully that little hint about Magnus’ father (and no I cannot say who he is!) did not go unnoticed.

As for “Why?” there are admittedly better answers than “why not?” :) The seeds of this breakup were sown in City of Fallen Angels, and to an extent even earlier than that. Magnus and Alec do love each other, but as Luke says “sometimes love isn’t enough.” When I thought about their two characters, and carrying them forward into the future, there was no way around dealing with the mortal/immortal issue. And it wasn’t something Alec had thought about - he kind of aggressively doesn’t think about it in the first three TMI books, but it’s exactly the sort of thing that, once a relationship starts getting serious, you wouldn’t be able to avoid thinking about any more. And would then start obsessing about. Because it actually does alter the course of your future.

As for Magnus, he’s intensely secretive, throughout all the books. He won’t talk about how old he is or where he’s from or who his father is. At first glance he’s this crazy guy who throws parties for his cat, but he’s actually a lot wiser and sadder and more thoughtful than that, and he keeps his secrets to himself, because they’re a sort of armor. He’s lost a lot of people he’s loved through his life and his choice with Alec is to make Alec immortal (which he does not regard as an ultimate good - his description of it in Clockwork Prince is “We who are immortal, we are chained to this life by a chain of gold, and we dare not sever it for fear of what lies beyond the drop” which hardly sounds positive) or watch Alec die - or die himself. When you’re writing about people who live forever, you have to think about what that would be like — and I think immortality, like Simon’s Mark of Cain, is (to quote Florence and the Machines) “a gift that comes with a price.”

In City of Fallen Angels when Alec and Magnus are arguing you can see the seeds of dissolution — Alec isn’t trusting, but Magnus isn’t giving him a lot of reasons to be trusting. The gap in their ages, their experience, isn’t insurmountable, but a lack of trust is. In freeing Camille at the end of CoFA and lying about it, Alec had already started down a course that had to be played out, one that could only really end with them breaking up.

So I guess the answer to “Why?” is “Without a radical redistribution of trust and honesty, that relationship can’t work.” Could they get back together and, like a broken bone, be stronger in the mended places? Can Alec redeem himself? Can it be fixed? All questions for Heavenly Fire.

I get asked about Tessa and the crew from ID and whether they will ever show up in the Mortal Instruments a lot! I can understand that — their lives are sort of intertwined through the ages so the idea of them meeting has an appeal.

I can’t say whether Tessa or any of the rest of them (besides Magnus and Camille) ever show up in Mortal Instruments. About the only thing I can say is that there will not be any time travel (because writing time travel inevitably screws you with some horrible time paradox, plus it makes your characters so overpowered that you can never figure out why they don’t just use time travel to solve all their problems forever. It’s not like I hate all time travel — Connie Willis FTW! — but there’s already enough dimensional magic in these books without adding time.)

Otherwise, I guess what I would say is that there is a limited extent to which Tessa and company can show up in Mortal Instruments. The two series have to remain readably separate. You have to be able to read ID and never read TMI and still understand it. You have to be able to read TMI and never read ID and understand it. And nothing in either series can spoil anything in the other series. There are obviously small hints in each series as to the content of the other series — Jace reading Will’s copy of Tale of Two Cities, the JG on the wall of the Silent City in City of Fallen Angels, Henry inventing the devices they use in TMI. But if you hadn’t read ID, it would just be a scene where Jace reads Dickens; it doesn’t ruin the scene or make it incomprehensible. So the likelihood of the ID cast appearing in TMI and playing a huge part is very small, because people who had not read ID would not know who they are, or why they were there.

As for the angel in the library in City of Lost Souls: it’s obviously either Tessa’s angel or a reproduction. Which it is and why it’s there only time will tell. But not time travel!

I have been getting a lot of “What are Sebastian’s exact feelings toward Clary?” questions. To me, that questions falls into the category of “Questions the characters ask themselves.” Meaning, I don’t think Sebastian knows what his exact feelings toward his sister are. Sebastian barely knows what feelings are, much less how to delineate the subtle differences between platonic and romantic and familial love. He kind of thinks it might be nice to have someone love him, but has no idea what that would really entail or how you go about getting people to love you, other than kidnapping them and threatening them and performing black magic ceremonies on them so they have to like you.

Is he attracted to Clary? Sufficiently, certainly. Sebastian obviously has sexual feelings — those two girls he brought back to the apartment being an indicator of that — and he doesn’t have brotherly feelings toward Clary: it would be weird if he did, since those are feelings that we develop by growing up in close proximity to someone else, not stuff that’s buried in our DNA. Also, while Clary would morally recoil from the idea of romance with her “brother” (as we well know since she fought basically that feeling for most of the first three books of TMI) Sebastian doesn’t have morals. If it spits in the face of God, he’s for it. So if anything, Clary being his sister would make him more likely to be attracted to her, not less.

Sebastian only has a few feelings he really understands and one of them, as Clary says at the end of the book, is overwhelming loneliness. He knows he’s unique in the world and not in a good way. He wants not just for someone to like him, but also for there to be somebody like him. He thinks Jace might be, because they were raised by the same man, but Jace isn’t. He thinks Clary might be, because they have the same blood, but despite his attempts to convince her that she has a “dark heart”, she really isn’t. Both of them disappoint him. And the more he claws after them to try to keep them close, the more they pull away and hate him. Trying to have sex with Clary is another way of trying to assert power and control over her (and also really the ultimate sign of irredeemability: there is no forgiving attempted rape.)

Sebastian would be a little bit pathetic, if he wasn’t so violent and destructive. Somewhere in some other dimension of infinite possibilities there probably exists an un-demoned version of Sebastian, who is a really great guy, and a good brother, and is happy. This Sebastian never really got a chance to be that guy and that’s the tragedy of him. But too much sympathy for the devil can get your world burned down. ☺