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aka: Mortal Instruments

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  • Alternative Character Interpretation:
    • Jace: Jerkass Woobie, or just plain Jerkass?
    • Clary: Plucky heroine dealing with being thrown into an unfamiliar world, or Jerkass who only defends her best friend when she feels like it?
      • Also, a naive girl struggling to deal with this strange and unfamiliar new situation she’s been thrown into, or as incorrigibly stupid as a box of rocks?
    • Simon: Loyal best friend or Extreme Doormat? Is his Unrequited Love on Clary valid, or creepy and possessive?
  • Captain Obvious Reveal: Many people already figured out that Valentine was Clary's father and that Clary and Jace were Not Blood Siblings before it was revealed due to the heavy foreshadowing.
  • Damsel Scrappy: Clary mostly. Indeed, Simon would be leading a happily mundane life were it not for his determination to protect her even though she just sees him as a friend. Jace could be argued as being a male version of this trope as well, since a great deal of effort on the part of Clary, Alec, Isabelle, Magnus, the Lightwoods, and others centers on saving him from some life-threatening situation that could have been avoided were it not for his nasty independent streak.
  • Die for Our Ship:
    • Poor Aline. She consensually kisses Jace once, while he and Clary are still convinced they're siblings, and promptly decides that he's not her type, is a fairly kind person overall (albeit one with no brain-to-mouth filter), and it's implied that she's trying to figure out if she's a lesbian, or perhaps asexual - yet she is constantly turned into a cruel, backstabbing, relationship-smashing harpy who gets between Clary and Jace, especially in AU fanfics.
      • The release of City of Lost Souls helped the problem a little - it was confirmed that Aline was lesbian, and none of the characters felt any hatred to her.
    • Kaelie gets this treatment too even though she only appeared twice and doesn't show any interest in Jace at all. Usually in AU's she gets the same treatment as Aline, in series we know that Faeries don't care much for humans.
  • Draco in Leather Pants: Sebastian gets this in many fanfics where his actions are at best given a poor Freudian Excuse and he is made a badder bad boy than Jace so they can have a love triangle. He was forced to do it by Valentine and/or was abused crops up a lot as an excuse. Other times writers will have him say he can't control himself or at worse ignore that he killed a child or completely hand-wave it. Some writers go as far as trying to make Jace a Ron the Death Eater by having him be a bigger jerk than usual to make Seb seem nicer (which, given that Jace is based on the Draco in Leather Pants version of Draco Malfoy that appeared in Cassandra Clare's Draco Trilogy fanfiction, is deeply ironic).
  • Faux Symbolism: In City of Heavenly Fire, Sebastian leans over and kisses Jace on the cheek. Later on Jace explains that Judas did the same to Jesus to identify to the Roman solders who Jesus was. However the situation in the book has literally no parallels to the situation with Judas and Jesus.
  • Ho Yay:
    • Jace and Simon have a fair amount of subtext. Especially if these two quotes have anything to say about it:
      Jace: "Do you remember back at the hotel when you promised that if we lived, you'd get dressed up in a nurse's outfit and give me a sponge bath."
      Clary: "It was Simon who promised you the sponge bath."
      Simon: "As soon as I'm back on my feet, handsome."
      Jace: "I knew we should have left you a rat."
    • And...
      "Well, I'm not kissing the mundane," said Jace. "I'd rather stay down here and rot."
      "Forever?" said Simon. "Forever's an awfully long time."
      Jace raised his eyebrows. "I knew it," he said. "You want to kiss me, don't you?"
    • Near the climax of City of Ashes, Jace allows vampire-ified Simon to drink his blood in order to heal. This results in Simon with his arms flung around Jace, clutching him violently, and biting his neck. Furthermore, Jace explicitly relaxes and pulls him closer. Jace later admits that it was rather homoerotic, and that he did in fact like it just a little bit.
    • When she sees Magnus and Alec kissing, Maia asks Isabelle "do we have to do that?"
  • Narm: It can be rather hard for a reader to take a villain named "Valentine" seriously, unless you're a fan of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Steel Ball Run.
  • Portmanteau Couple Name: Quite a few. Most popular is Malec (Magnus/Alec), as well as Clace (Clary/Jace) and Sizzy (Simon/Izzy). And that's just the canon ones.
  • Ship Mates: Fans tend to support the canon Alec/Magnus and Clary/Jace ships, seeing as that takes care of Alec's crush on Jace from early on in the series and leaves Jace wide open for a romance with Clary.
  • They Copied It, So It Sucks!:
    • This is a pretty sensitive issue to a lot of people, so we won't go into too much detail. But there's a not-insignificant number of people who accuse Cassandra Clare of plagiarizing several other works, most notably Harry Potter and Star Wars.
    • There's actually some logical basis in this - Clare copied large amounts of texts from other sources without citing them in The Draco Trilogy: a Harry Potter fan fiction she wrote before City of Bones was published. In fact, the fics were taken down and the trilogy is largely a reworked and renamed version of the fic. Her fans argue that Clare learned her lesson from that, and that the elements Clare is accused of copying weren't invented by the people she 'copied' them from.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The whole Brother–Sister Incest thing could have been tapped for a lot more drama.
  • Unpopular Popular Character: Simon is constantly mocked and belittled by the Shadowhunters for being a "mundane", no matter what he does. Even Clary, his childhood friend and love interest can hardly be bothered to remember him most of the time. A number of fans, especially those not overly fond of the Shadowhunters, love him for his snark, adorkable geeky personality, and willingness to do nice things for Clary. It helps that he's one of few not afraid to call out Jace on being a jerk.
  • The Woobie:
    • Jace Wayland, he was abused as a child and believed for some time that he watched his father die matters only become worse when he finds out that his father did not die but abandoned him and is actually a famous villain in his world, Valentine which means he is siblings with the girl he loves. Because of some mistakes in genealogy, he believed that his mother abandoned him and thought that he was a monster. Later he finds out that he has demon blood in him which would mean he was a monster, though this proves to not be true. Also, he is betrayed by a friend Hodge and handed over to the villain. He was arrested for insulting the Inquisitor, was kicked out of his house and left with no where to go and arrested by the Inquisitor again, who planned to trade him to Valentine for some powerful Shadowhunter relics, and because almost everyone assumed that he had joined the evil side. He is also killed by the man who raised him, though Clary brought him back to life.
    • Alec Lightwood. He's gay and the member of a race of people who... aren't exactly accepting of it. As a result, he's too afraid to come out to his parents. Not only that, he's in love with Jace, who will never love him the same way, and is so hung up on this that he doesn't even notice when a certain warlock does. Luckily, things work out for him in the end.
  • Writer Cop Out: Turns out Jace and Clary never were siblings, so all the drama about incest then magically disappears. To be fair, Clare has stated that she didn't think her book would've been published if they were for real.


Alternative Title(s): Mortal Instruments

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