Boy, was I wrong.
This was the first sentence:
The weapons room looked exactly the way something called “the weapons room” sounded like it would look.
I’m 100% sober right now so I can literally only imagine how confused my tipsy!self must have been encountering that sentence. I’m still confused about where this sentence wanted to go and why it sounds like she accidentally mashed two sentences together. I honestly couldn’t even get past that sentence—I think I stared at it for like, 5 minutes. I was taking reaction pictures and I didn’t realise I had my webcam set to take multiple ones at once and this is what my face looked like:
I even had the introduction half written and I just gave up because I couldn’t even deal with it:
Aaaaanyway. I’m going to breeze right past that sentence here and MOVE ON.
Fairy needs to go ask Jace if he’ll accompany her to her own damn house because she’s apparently a captive now, so she follows a fat white cat to the weapons room.
The walls are apparently “brushed metal” which is hilarious to me. Idk, the whole style of this castle seems a lot like the house I wanted to have when I was 13 and heavily into emo music.
She walks in and Jace and Alex are huddled around something:
Jace moved aside so she could see what lay on the table: three long slim wands of a dully glowing silver. They did not look sharp or particularly dangerous. “Sanvi, Sansanvi, and Semangelaf. They’re seraph blades.”
Gesundheit, CC.
This right here? This would be a perfect place for an info dump. Fairy can act as the audience because at this point she knows just as little as we do, and it won't seem contrived to have them explain the three blades on the table so that the readers know what they are. But of course that's not how CC's brain works and instead we get a really weird conversation about the magic system in place.
I’m seriously wondering if I might still be drunk because I’m having a really hard time deciphering what the hell she’s trying to imply with everything:
“No, you don’t, you just think you do. Magic is a dark and elemental force, not just a lot of sparkly wands and crystal balls and talking goldfish.”
“I never said it was a lot of talking goldfish, you—”
Jace waved a hand, cutting her off. “Just because you call an electric eel a rubber
duck doesn’t make it a rubber duck, does it? And God help the poor bastard who decides they want to take a bath with the duckie.”
I... I don’t even know anymore. Where did the goldfish come from? Why are there so many sea creatures in CC’s writing? I thought she was obsessed with grass????
Jace agrees to come with Fairy and see her mom’s things and Alec starts to act all third-wheel like “hey can I come along” and then he literally glares at Fairy when Jace says no:
“No.” Jace didn’t turn around. “That’s all right. Clary and I can handle this on our own.”
The look Alec shot Clary was as sour as poison.
Alec CALM DOWN it’s not like anyone is gonna be interested in the wet sack that is the character of Fairy. Your man is still yours, okay?
Sidenote: sour and poison don't really go together. Just say 'poisonous' or 'venomous' and be done with it.
They leave the 'weapons room' of hardcore emo kids and go to an elevator which is kinda weird I guess? But this scene is great because Fairy finally does what she SHOULD HAVE DONE AGES ago and while I wish she would actually punch him (Fairy, come talk to me later I’ll teach you how to throw a punch), I’m super glad that she at least addressed how fucked up it was that he branded her with a mark that could have killed her. She asks him how he knew she was a Shadowhunter and he's like, 'idk you're the main character of this book and a gigantic fucking Mary-Sue so I guessed':
“You guessed? You must have been pretty sure, considering you could have killed me.”
[ ... ]
“I was ninety percent sure.”
“I see,” Clary said.
[ ... ]
Her hand cracked across his face, a slap that rocked him back on his heels. He put his hand to his cheek, more in surprise than pain. “What the hell was that for?”
“The other ten percent,” she said, and they rode the rest of the way down to the street in silence.
Like, I’m totally okay with praising parts of this book, so I’ll definitely praise that. I was really worried we just weren’t ever going to talk about that again.
HAHAAH JUST KIDDING because the next paragraph is about how mad Jace is and how Fairy feels slightly guilty about slapping him.
They’re on the train and Fairy uses this chance to exercise some good ol’ fashioned internalised misogyny for us!
Farther down the train, two teenage girls sitting on an orange bench seat wereI had no idea what ‘pink jelly mules’ were because I am not the mother of a two-year-old, which I’m assuming is the targeted demographic for that shoe, so I googled it:
giggling together. The sort of girls Clary had never liked at St. Xavier’s, sporting pink jelly mules and fake tans. Clary wondered for a moment if they were laughing at her, before she realized with a start of surprise that they were looking at Jace.
 |
| this was me not being sure if I wanted to google this |
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| and this is me being relieved and also confused. ps the first blog is hilarious and she read TMI too! |
I can safely say that even though I might not have enough money to actually dress in all the trends I love, I know that those haven’t been in style for teen girls in North America. That type of shoe is so specific too, why are they both wearing them? And what the hell about the fake tans? If those girls want skin cancer, so be it! Stop being so goddamn judgy with your ‘porcelain’ skin.
Also, were they naked? Why did you take time to just single out their shoes? EXPLAIN THESE THINGS TO ME.
Anyway, this doesn’t matter, because Fairy only notices them so that we can get a description of Jace:
She remembered the girl in the coffee shop who had been staring at Simon. Girls always got that look on their faces when they thought someone was cute.
 |
| this look? |
She had nearly forgotten that Jace was cute, given everything that had happened. He didn’t have Alec’s delicate cameo looks, but Jace’s face was more interesting. In daylight his eyes were the color of golden syrup and were … looking right at her. He cocked an eyebrow. “Can I help you with something?”
BAM. CALLED IT ABOUT THE FOOD METAPHOR. SOMEONE COME AND HIGH-FIVE ME.
Anyway, this whole “wow I didn’t realise how attractive he was” thing is as annoying as it was in the previous chapter. You can admit someone is subjectively attractive without being attracted to them—it’s the difference between appreciating an aesthetic and falling for someone.
Also, I dunno what she means by ‘cameo’ good looks, but I’m willing to let that pass because I probably just haven’t heard that expression before?
Clary turned instant traitor against her gender.
This should probably have been the tagline for the whole series.
“Haven’t you ever heard that modesty is an attractive trait?”
“Only from ugly people,” Jace confided. “The meek may inherit the earth, but at the moment it belongs to the conceited. Like me.” He winked at the girls, who giggled and hid behind their hair.
I’m going to leave this here as some unintentional hilarity from the both of them because this is totally the kind of sassy response I would’ve written in like 6th grade.
And again with the weird use of verb to denote 'said'-- confided is conspiratorial, it's like he's telling her a secret, but that doesn't fit the tone of what he's saying at all!
They get off the train and head to her apartment and we get a weird little aside:
Jace hummed louder. It was a loud, tuneful sort of hum, somewhere between “Happy Birthday” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
Okay, this is The Battle Hymn of the Republic, and we all know what Happy Birthday sounds like... so... what gives?
Those sound nothing alike, and I’m not American so I didn’t actually know this song and had to look it up—you’d think you’d pick another, more familiar song? I’m guessing both of these songs didn’t have copyrights so she decided to put them together—but that seems so pointless and why not just delete the sentence? It adds nothing to the story other than to make me stop and go “what the hell is that supposed to sound like?”
Fairy then goes on to complete destroy the iota of respect I had for her this chapter:
“I’m sorry I smacked you,” she said.
He stopped humming. “Just be glad you hit me and not Alec. He would have hit you back.”
“He seems to be itching for the chance,” Clary said.
WOW ALEC SOUNDS LIKE A REAL FUCKING CHARMER. I’m sorry, I don’t condone violence but I personally feel like Jace absolutely deserved to be slapped in that instance. Why is Fairy not annoyed about that veiled threat?
Oh, right. Because she has realised he’s got syrup eyes and that other girls find him attractive, so she’s a door mat again.
It turns out Fairy’s apartment building looks totally fine from the outside, and we get to see Jace using his ‘sensor’ which turns out to be so funny:
“It picks up frequencies, like a radio does, but these frequencies are demonic in origin.”
“Demon shortwave?”
“Something like that.” Jace held the Sensor out in front of him as he approached the house. It clicked faintly as they climbed the stairs, then stopped. Jace frowned. “It’s picking up trace activity, but that could just be left over from that night. I’m not getting anything strong enough for there to be demons present now.”
Is this reminding anyone of those things they use on like, Ghost Hunters (which was my jam back in the day) to detect like, EMP frequencies~ or whatever? Did CC seriously jack paranormal activity-esque technology for this series?
They get up to her apartment door and it’s all written okay and then CC does something that I’m so annoyed about that is so small but it’s just ever-present in all of her writing:
Jace touched her arm. “I’ll go in first,” he said. Clary wanted to tell him that she didn’t need to hide behind him, but the words wouldn’t come. She could taste the terror she’d felt when she’d first seen the Ravener. The taste was sharp and coppery on her tongue like old pennies.
That paragraph is nice. It makes sense, it helps me understand that Fairy is scared and experiencing a bit of anxiety without being dramatic. And then the last part is really great up until: “[T]he taste was sharp and coppery on her tongue like old pennies.”
CC does this over and over again—she adds so many qualifiers to things that don’t need them. I know that pennies are coppery, but whatever, that’s fine. What really bothers me is the use of ‘old’ here, because pennies are still largely made of copper (they’re made of bronze usually, which is about 95% copper), and so it doesn’t matter if they’re old or new.
I know I’m nitpicking, but it’s things like this that usually get taken out when you read things over and do a bunch of different drafts, not just hit ‘find + replace’ on anything related to Harry Potter.
They go inside, noting that Madame Dorothea has probably been attacked, casually, as one does when confronted with the fact that your downstairs neighbour has been dragged into your crazy mess, and they enter the apartment.
Her palms were sticky, and not from the heat. In fact, it was cool inside the apartment, almost cold—chilly air seeped from the entryway, stinging her skin. She felt goose bumps rising as she followed Jace down the short hallway and into the living room. It was empty. Startlingly, entirely empty, the way it had been when they’d first moved in—the walls and floor bare, the furniture gone, even the curtains torn down from the windows.
Can someone explain to me what ‘cool, almost cold’ is as a temperature? Is that a Fahrenheit term I’m not familiar with?
It’s weird that it’s empty, but I legit cackled out loud when I read this next bit:
She glanced around one more time. Someone had cleaned up the spilled Tabasco
sauce, she noticed distantly.
I’M NOT EVEN GONNA LIE, I HAD A SARCASTIC JOKE PLANNED ABOUT THIS BUT SHE TOTALLY MENTIONED IT AGAIN.
She demands to go to her room, and it turns out there’s totally a demon hanging out in there, and then everything turns a bit Dragon-Ball-Z-meets-Star-Wars from there:
Looming over him like a giant in a fairy tale was an enormous man, big around as an oak tree, a broad-bladed ax clutched in one gigantic dead-white hand. Tattered filthy rags hung off his grimy skin, and his hair was a single matted tangle, thick with dirt. He stank of poisonous sweat and rotting flesh. Clary was glad she couldn’t see his face—the back of him was bad enough. Jace had the seraph blade in his hand. He raised it, calling out: “Sansanvi!”
 |
| no? just me? moving on. |
A blade shot from the tube. Clary thought of old movies where bayonets were hidden inside walking sticks, released at the flick of a switch. But she’d never seen a blade like this before: clear as glass, with a glowing hilt, wickedly sharp and nearly as long as Jace’s forearm.This is long, but oy vey, is this weird. When you say ‘looming over him like a giant’, that generally implies that he’s tall and big, I don’t need you to follow up that description with another one that means the same thing. "Clear as glass" is also really dumb, too, because... it's redundant pretty much. Also, I don't know how long Jace's forearm is so thanks for that absolutely useless piece of info.
Re: the whole blade calling thing, I don’t know how anyone got through this scene with a straight face but y’all have much more willpower than I do if you did.
So... their wands turn into light-sabres now? Is that what they are? What a terrible system, honestly. She should’ve just stuck with the whole magic thing. It’s not like JKR has wands copyrighted.
There’s a really long and frankly boring fight scene here, and Jace’s arm gets broken.
“Hold still.” Crawling around to his head, Clary slipped her hands under his arms and pulled. He grunted with pain as his legs slipped out from under the creature’s spasming carcass. Clary let go, and he struggled to his feet, his left arm across his chest. She stood up. “Is your arm all right?”
YOU LITERALLY JUST OBSERVED THAT HIS ARM WAS BENT AT AN UNNATURAL ANGLE AND NOT ONLY DID YOU GRAB AT HIS BROKEN ARM, YOU ASKED HIM IF IT WAS ALL RIGHT. Fairy, I don’t think a heroine exists in YA fiction that chooses to be as stupid as you are.
“No. Broken,” he said. “Can you reach into my pocket?”
Heh.
Jace saw her staring and grinned the ghost of a grin.
This is like, when someone writes “they sighed an inaudible sigh”—no. A sigh is a sigh and a grin is a grin, stop trying to turn them into things they aren’t just because you’re too lazy to look for the right way to describe it.
So Jace heals his arm with his ‘stele’—you know what, that’s such a dumb fucking name I’m calling it a wand from here on out—and he kind of weakly explains what their magic system is? You guys were not kidding when you said it’s weak and confusing as hell:
“This,” he said, “is a stele.” He touched it to an inked mark just below his shoulder, a curious shape almost like a star. Two arms of the star jutted out from the rest of the mark, unconnected. “And this,” he said, “is what happens when Shadowhunters are wounded.”
With the tip of the stele, he traced a line connecting the two arms of the star. When he lowered his hand, the mark was shining as if it had been etched with phosphorescent ink. As Clary watched, it sank into his skin, like a weighted object sinking into water. It left behind a ghostly reminder: a pale, thin scar, almost invisible.
[ ... ]
Clearly it was no longer broken.
“That’s amazing,” Clary said. “How did you—?”
“That was an iratze—a healing rune,” Jace said. “Finishing the rune with the stele
activates it.”
I’m so confused right now. I copy-pasted that whole chunk because I literally cannot think of a single way to recap it in a way that makes sense. So... you know, have fun with that. Someone please tell me this gets expounded upon later on?
Also, totally caught where CC slips up and calls the ‘stele’ a wand:
He shoved the slim wand into his belt and shrugged his jacket back on.
GET BETTER EDITORS.
So they’re all “better tell Hodge” and I’m like, yes please, so I can keep using this gif:
Anyway, Madame Dorothea turns out to be like a witch or something? The end of this chapter is kind of like a long wet fart noise—we’ve just watched Jace heal himself with a wand, we just fought a monster, we know that the “Silent Brothers” are notified, and then it’s like:
Hey, here’s this weird old woman. She’s here to fill the quota of things I need to tell you because I’m absolutely incapable of just showing you as a writer.
This chapter was long you guys. THIS WAS A REALLY LONG CHAPTER. Join me next time when Fairy talks about how Jace's skin is like caramel or something!!!!
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