LOVE TRIANGLES.
This is actually an answer to an ask I got over a week ago from someone who got the book early - I wrote her back but asked her if she’d keep the answer private till more people had read the book. She did, so I just wanted to say: classy reader, thanks for being classy.
That said, this ask and answer is about love triangles, love in general, and The Epilogue.
Yep. I said all those things. But I was not expecting what Cassandra sent me back! Not that I mind. :P
So @CassieClare emailed me asking me to resend her that Will & Jem tarot card so she could post it. But I totally misread what she said and thought dirty thoughts. Which she then encouraged!! It’s all her fault you know!!
She described the scene..! Passionate! Out on night patrol together… things happen! (She said it herself! Totally canon!
Maybe. Probably not. I like to believe so. A gal can dream can’t she?)
“Is there by an chance a Will and Jem card?” — Clacling
There is. It gives even me feels..sneef.
The agape rune (“Agape is selfless, sacrificial, unconditional love”) based on Valerie’s Love Runes, part of Cassandra Jean’s Shadowhunter Tarot.
Me: Hey, there’s Heronstairs on my dash.
Holly: The what?
Sarah (knowledgeably) Will and Jem in flagrante.
Holly: TILT YOUR COMPUTER UP.
ME: *tilts*
Holly: Good morning.
Sarah: The Shadowhunters, it is little known, invented boxer briefs centuries before mundanes caught up.
Me: I know, it’s in the Codex.
ETA: I’ve been told that the artist/original of this piece is here, though I have no idea how it ended up covered in runes or labeled Heronstairs on my dash, if whoever changed it had permission, or what happened.
Im okay with this ending. Plz. No dying .
PLZ.
Hello Ms. Clare! No doubt you get this pretty much 100 times a day, but your books are [isert non-existent word to explain feelings]. They have reached me like no other book, nothing, has ever affected me before. I think I may die of ink poisoning due to all the runes I draw on my arms with markers and pens… Anyway, I’m not certain whether you have addressed this “situation” or not, but I’d very much appreciate some feedback :) What bothers me is that Will and Jem are “more than brothers” to each other, but how did one not know of the affection of the other towards Tessa? This has puzzled me since I first read TID way back when. Will this be answered in CP2? Thank you, you have changed my life…for better or for worse, I do not yet know…— shortxstory
Hello! I Just for reference — you can actually find a huge amount of essays about TID, especially the love triangle, here. But I don’t mind revisiting them!
To break it down to basics: neither Jem or Will knew how the other one felt about Tessa because the other one had never told them.
More complicatedly, they don’t know because the scenes in which their feelings are obvious — Will breaking down in front of Magnus, Jem when he’s alone with Tessa — are never enacted when they other guy is around. We see Will alone with Tessa, telling her he’s wanted to kiss her since the first time he saw her; Jem’s not around for that. He never sees that. Will’s not around for Jem telling Tessa she makes him want to write poetry. He never sees that. He never knows about it. The reader knows all those things, and factors them into their knowledge of the characters. But it’s important to not forget that the characters have not read the book.
(And, also, they are all being chased by giant robots, Jem is dying, Will’s family is being held hostage and he’s under a curse, so while they are close, I never thought that Dude 1’s romantic situation would be the first thing on Dude 2’s mind, no matter how brothery their love.)
So will it be answered in Clockwork Princess? It’s addressed, but not really answered, in the sense that I’ve never thought of it as a mystery. I think there is a belief that with love comes perfect understanding and perfect telepathy, but that’s not how people are. Thats why real relationships involve “working on communication.” Because communication is work, not magic, and while you may love someone enough to be able to tell when they’re upset, that doesn’t mean you can tell why. The other person has to tell you.
However, I did answer the question several times after Clockwork Prince came out, so in honor of Princess coming soon, I thought it might help to revisit those essays, out from under a cut tag now:
1) Why Will doesn’t notice how Jem feels.
SAYS he is in love with Tessa? Oooh…burn. :)
This is a bit more difficult to explain (in my mind) than why Jem didn’t notice Will loved Tessa (though I get asked that more!) — not because there’s a not a valid reasons but because it isn’t as concrete as “Will was hiding it, no?” Jem wasn’t hiding it. And yet, Will genuinely didn’t realize. So, why?
I don’t want to say “Will doesn’t think of Jem as a threat” because that implies all sorts of things — that people don’t see Jem as masculine (not true) or that Jem is some sort of beta or sidekick for Will, which isn’t true either. However, what is true is that for five years Jem has been a source for Will of only good things — in some ways, his only source of good things. Jem has protected him. Jem has loved him. Jem has had faith in him when nobody else did.
In a lot of ways Will isn’t capable of imagining that Jem might be the cause of pain for him (in any other way than Jem himself dying.) In his mind, Jem’s a part of him. It would be like him imagining that his own left hand might suddenly start punching him in the face. That’s why when he finds out that Jem has proposed to Tessa, his first reaction is disbelief: “Jem? *My* Jem?” Jem is his, his parabatai, his other half, his blood brother. Jem is not separate enough from him, in Will’s mind, to take independent action that would be shocking or surprising to Will.
Will is also completely caught up with and distracted by his own circumstances — desperately trying to get the curse off himself, protect his family, protect Tessa (from himself) protect Jem (from running out of drugs.) He is stretched about as thin as you could be. Under normal circumstances, he would probably also have noticed Jessamine was sneaking around, but there’s too much going on: he just doesn’t have the room for it.
This doesn’t make him a bad or selfish person. His circumstances are desperate and extreme. They require his full attention. But he himself thinks it, at the end of the book: “Will had never considered [Jem’s romantic happiness]. He had dwelled on whether Jem was safe, whether he was surviving, but not if he was happy.”
Being too caught up in whether your best friend is going to die to consider whether they’re into the same girl as you doesn’t make you a bad person; in this case, Will’s human frailties are far out of proportion to the level to which he is punished for them. But then, this isn’t a morality tale: it’s the messy story of three good people trying to do right, caught up in an impossible situation. The desire to lay blame on one of them is reasonable, but I think the thing about it that makes it upsetting is precisely that nobody really is to blame.
My .02, anyway!
2) Why Jem doesn’t notice how Will feels.
I think that, when presented with a really painful situation like the one at the end of Clockwork Prince, there is a sort of natural desire to assign blame. It makes it less painful to imagine that what’s going on is someone’s fault — Tessa’s selfish! Will is entitled! Jem is blind! — than to think that these are basically decent people trying hard to be good, and they get screwed anyway. Because one is a moral lesson (always a bit comforting, as it offers the illusion of control) and the other says life is a agonizing lottery of tragedy and chance (not comforting at all.)
Now, to the specifics of the question. First, Jem noticing Will noticing a pretty girl is hardly equivalent to Jem noticing Will being in deathless love. Will notices pretty girls all the time. It’s in fact, part of his persona. Jem noting that Will thinks Tessa is pretty in CA is not about him commenting on Will’s feelings so much as it is him getting confirmation for his own. [Sometimes, my husband offers, when you think a girl is a babe, you want confirmation from your buddy that she is, in fact, as babelicious as you believe.]
Jem is an observant guy. But he is under no illusions that he knows everything about Will, and he is frank about that. From Clockwork Angel, when he tells Tessa he has no idea why Will won’t speak to his family:
““And you’ve never asked him why?”
“If he wanted me to know, he’d tell me,” Jem said. “You asked why I think he tolerates me better than other people. I’d imagine it’s precisely because I’ve never asked him why.”
Nor does Will think Jem knows everything about him.
“I don’t know,” Tessa said. “I’m not sure anyone does understand you, except possibly Jem.”
“Jem doesn’t understand me,” Will said. “He cares for me— like a brother might. It’s not the same thing.”
What Jem offers Will, what makes their relationship unique and workable, is precisely this: unconditional love without demand, perfect trust without perfect understanding. Will’s statement that Jem doesn’t understand him is not a criticism of Jem. He does not want Jem to understand him, because he doesn’t want his curse understood. He deliberately lies and hides things from Jem, and Jem knows it and accepts it because he loves him, but it’s a far stretch from that to “Jem ought to be able to read Will’s mind.”
Only Professor X can read minds.
Certainly Jem is able to tell that Will is in no good mood, but Will is often in no good mood, and much of Will’s upset during Clockwork Prince can be put down to his awful near-encounter with his family and his panic over their well-being. Because a lot of it is about that, and Jem would not be incorrect in assuming so. There seems to be an assumption here that Jem and Tessa ought to be able to see through Will like glass, even though Will says over and over that he isn’t interested in Tessa. If Jem and Will are really all that close, the assumption seems to be, surely Jem would be able to read Will’s mind and see he loves Tessa? But the flip side of that assumption is: since Jem and Will truly know each other, Will also knows exactly how to lie to Jem and make it stick. As for poor Tessa, we’ve been over this: there is no reason to assume a guy who repeatedly says he isn’t interested in you or commitment is not serious. Really, that way lies misery and ending up on Tool Academy with your loser boyfriend.
[Also, if the suggestion is that parabatai ought to be able to read each other’s mind: why is Will so dense as to go off and drug himself up at an opium den and have no idea what that would do to Jem? Why does Will not notice that Jem loves Tessa, given that Will is bending every last atom of his will to concealing his love for Tessa, but Jem isn’t bothering? He’s taking her out on carriage rides and probably oogling at her at the breakfast table. I mean, really, Will.]
And lastly, it’s not like Jem doesn’t have his own stuff going on. He’s dying, and dependent on a drug whose continued availability is limited. He’s in love with a girl, but knows that being a dying man, he doesn’t have a lot to offer. When she unexpectedly accepts his proposal, he’s joyous. Meanwhile, the last time he saw Will, Will was in a terrific mood (as he’d just had the curse lifted.) So Jem’s sitting there, basically overwhelmingly happy for probably the first time in his life since his parents died, and when Will comes in, he’s supposed to flip like a switch and suddenly care about nothing but the possibility that Will might be unhappy despite the fact he hasn’t mentioned it and was just fine an hour ago?
C’mon, let the guy have his moment of happiness. After all, as we know, life is a meaningless lottery of tragedy and chance.
Will as the Nine of Steles from the Shadowhunter Tarot. (Yes, we’re going to do every single card for a complete deck. If you haven’t seen your favorite character yet: you will. There’s room for everyone, and repeats of some of the most important.)
There’s a little Clockwork Princes clue in here too if you look.
| — |
Hey Carina! I love Will. I don’t think I love him the same way readers love him because I think you always feel differently about characters you create and characters you read about. But that applies to all my characters. Certainly he’s a real love interest for Tessa and not just an obstacle. I always think it’s really bad when a character is only in a book (or film or show or play) just as an obstacle, because that means the character’s only function is to keep other characters apart. We all know that character — they’re usually defined by having no real needs or wants or desires or arc of their own. They exist only as a stumbling block to prevent two main characters from getting together; also, usually, they are temporary. Will, I hope, is a character with needs and wants and desires and an arc of his own. If Will were just an obstacle, there would be no need for any real backstory for him; no need for the story of the curse, no need for him to have complicated relationships with characters (Magnus, Jem, Charlotte, Cecily) who are not Tessa. An obstacle character would exist only in relation to Tessa and nothing else. Also, if Will is an obstacle, he isn’t doing a very good job, since Tessa and Jem are engaged. One could say the same about Jem: he is also a real love interest for Tessa, and he has needs and wants and desires and conflicts of his own. He has complicated relationships with people who are not Tessa. In fact, his most complicated relationship is with Will. Tessa’s relationship with Jem is important. Tessa’s relationship with Will is important. Will and Jem’s relationship with each other is just as important as their relationships with Tessa; which is, in fact, the whole structure of the triangle at the heart of the books: that each side of the triangle is as important as the others. Or, at least, that’s the idea: I hope it works. :) Thanks for the kind words, too. <3 |
CP2 SPOILERS.
So the chapter reveal of Clockwork Princess is coming along, but as you probably know due to a glitch earlier a whole bunch - thousands - of tweets didn’t get counted. So right now I’m just going to put up the whole Will/Cecily (er, not Will/Cecily per se, but the scene with them talking) scene from the first chapter, under a read more tag. It’ll be a while before the whole scene is played out on the website, and this is my way of apologizing for how disorganized and unpleasant this whole business has been. I wish I could do something about it, but I can’t. I’ll probably get a lot of flak for doing this. But anyway, here it is (and if it doesn’t match up with what’s eventually on the chapter reveal, that’s because I don’t actually have a copyedited, proofed, final version of the book. I only have a draft.)
