Featured below are two of Cassie's most recent posts in which she answers fan questions. The first includes a spoiler from COLS, and the second, which is hidden from the blog, because it contains a major COHF spoiler. In order to read what Cassie wrote you have to click the READ MORE link found at the bottom of the post.
The Wild Hunt *click the highlighted link to be taken directly to Cassie's post*
"Loved the ending to the series. But just curious, I might have glazed over this in the books, but what exactly is the Wild Hunt? It seemed like they were Faerie but then not. — timbi-sha"
Well, here’s what Jace says about them in City of Lost Souls when they are first foreshadowed:
At last Clary heard it, a long slow rushing noise, like water pouring through a broken dam. The sky darkened and churned as figures rushed across it. She could barely make them out through the clouds and the distance, but they seemed to be men, with long hair like cirrus clouds, riding horses whose hooves gleamed the color of blood. The sound of a hunting horn echoed across the night, and the stars shivered and the night folded in on itself as the men vanished behind the moon. She let her breath out in a slow exhalation.
“What was that?”
“The Wild Hunt,” said Jace. His voice sounded distant and dreamlike. “Gabriel’s Hounds. The Wild Host. They have many names. They are faeries who disdain the earthly Courts. They ride across the sky, pursuing an eternal hunt. On one night a year a mortal can join them—but once you’ve joined the Hunt, you can never leave it.”
So you are correct in a way - they are faeries but not, in the sense that they answer neither to the Seelie nor Unseelie Court.
And now a CoHF spoilery question under a cut, about the Queen.
Is there a reason that the Seelie Queen didn’t show up to the council meeting but sent Kaelie instead? Is she dead?
She’s not dead. But she has a really good reason not to want to be seen by the Clave.
City of Heavenly Fire: Maia and Jordan and sad white men *click the link to be taking directly to Cassie's post*
City of Heavenly Fire has now been out ten days — and scored #1 on both the new York Times and Wall Street Journal lists, so I am super thrilled — and in celebration, I’m going to start answering … spoilery questions.
The answers are under read more tags for now. This one is about Jordan and to some extent, Maia.
This one does admittedly come from someone who hasn’t read the book, but they very much wanted me to answer it. So:
Reading other people’s reviews on COHF, I see many fans really, truly believe Maia has found a love interest in her ex-Bat and has generally failed to give Jordan a proper mourning by the end of the story. Even though Maia planned on breaking up with Jordan, may I please ask what brought on her change of heart after it looked like the two were going strong in COLS?
I’m not sure I know what a ”proper mourning” is, as mourning is very individual, and we all mourn in our own way. Maia grieved for Jordan, held him while he died, felt the sadness and regret that you do when you lose people who are important to you, kept his apartment and saved his things so Jordan’s friends could mourn him once the crisis was past. She was able to go on and fight for her pack, and help her friends, but in my mind that doesn’t mean Maia didn’t mourn Jordan: it means Maia is a hero, and like all heroes is able to put her own emotions aside while important, world-saving actions need to be taken. If she just sat in a corner and moped while the world fell apart around her, that wouldn’t make her a better person, just a much duller protagonist.
Nor does Maia not being romantically in love with Jordan mean that she didn’t mourn him or care about him. I want to write about many kinds of relationships in my books, and wanted to reflect the reality that some relationships just do not work out—that you can give things another try with an ex, with real affection and hope to make it work in both your hearts, and it doesn’t work: that you can both be good people and yet it doesn’t work: that you can genuinely forgive someone for the awful things they did to you, as Maia did, but find it still leaves you in a place where a romantic relationship won’t work in the long term. Maia felt she was more a symbol of forgiveness than a person to Jordan, so it wasn’t healthy for either of them to be together. It was not, to me, a change of heart, rather it was a journey that Maia needed to go on to discover how she truly felt.
It looked like the two were going strong in COLS
Did it? Here is Maia right after she and Jordan sleep together.
She sat up abruptly. She felt as if the world were tilting
and she was clinging on helplessly, trying to keep from tumbling
into a black abyss. She could feel the shadows closing in.
With Jace lost and Sebastian out there, things could only get
darker. There would only be more loss and more death. She
had to admit, the most alive she’d felt in weeks had been those
moments at dawn, kissing Jordan in his car.
and she was clinging on helplessly, trying to keep from tumbling
into a black abyss. She could feel the shadows closing in.
With Jace lost and Sebastian out there, things could only get
darker. There would only be more loss and more death. She
had to admit, the most alive she’d felt in weeks had been those
moments at dawn, kissing Jordan in his car.
This is not the happy way you feel after you make love to someone you have a great relationship with. This is saying that everything in her life is falling apart and she’s grabbing onto Jordan as the only thing that makes her feel. That is not an awesome sign.
"Jordan, stop." He looked at her, his expression dazed and worried. “I’m sorry. Was that not any good? I haven’t kissed anyone but you, not since …” He trailed off.
She shook her head. “No, it’s just— I can’t.”
“All right,” he said. He looked very vulnerable, sitting there, dismay written all over his face. “We don’t have to do anything—”
She groped for words. “It’s just too much.”
“It was only a kiss.”
“You said you loved me.” Her voice shook. “You offered to give me your savings. I can’t take that from you.”
“You said you loved me.” Her voice shook. “You offered to give me your savings. I can’t take that from you.”
“Which?” he said, hurt sparking in his voice. “My money, or the love part?”
“Either.”
Or:
He was leaning in for another kiss when suddenly her hands were on his chest, her palms flat, the gesture unmistakeable: Stop.
“Jordy,” she said. “Wait.”
She almost never called him that, unless it was serious. His
heartbeat, already wild, speeded up further. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s just—if every time we see each other, we fall into bed—
and I know I started it, I’m not blaming you or anything— It’s
just that maybe we should talk.”
He stared at her, at her big dark eyes, the fluttery pulse in
her throat, the flush on her cheeks. With an effort he spoke
evenly. “Okay. What do you want to talk about?”
She just looked at him. After a moment she shook her head
and said, “Nothing.”
She almost never called him that, unless it was serious. His
heartbeat, already wild, speeded up further. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s just—if every time we see each other, we fall into bed—
and I know I started it, I’m not blaming you or anything— It’s
just that maybe we should talk.”
He stared at her, at her big dark eyes, the fluttery pulse in
her throat, the flush on her cheeks. With an effort he spoke
evenly. “Okay. What do you want to talk about?”
She just looked at him. After a moment she shook her head
and said, “Nothing.”
Yep, clearly nothing worrisome brewing there! “We never talk, just fall into bed, mostly because I’m trying to forget my other problems, and also I tell you to stop a lot” — ouch. The fact is,
Maia does blame herself for not telling Jordan how she felt, or didn’t feel, the moment she realized it, but I hope readers will agree with Bat that Jordan dying feeling loved and forgiven was a small mercy for him: that everyone deserves to be held as they die. Jordan’s early death was absolutely a tragedy—but tragedies happen in war, like Max’s tragedy in City of Glass. Like Amatis’s, like Raphael’s, like the many tragedies in the LA Institute: because war has a price, and war is terrible and unfair. It is totally natural to feel angry and sad about Jordan’s tragic death—it matters a lot to me if readers do—but Maia didn’t cause it, and she did all she could for him. If Maia could have saved him, of course she would have. Jordan did something terrible once, but in the end he chose his own path, and achieved his own redemption. I doubt Jordan would have changed anything about his life in the Praetor Lupus or his second chance with Maia, and that’s what we all hope to do—the best we can, in the time we have.
Maia has not got back together with Bat, but who knows what will happen in the future? Bat is obviously kind, smart, brave and cares about her very much: Maia could do worse. Bat partly is in the story to show Maia that she is both lovable and loved, and to show the depths of her own affection and loyalty to her pack and her friends in return: to show that the past was not quite as dark as she remembers sometimes, because Maia… with good reason… is suspicious and cynical about others. But in the time we’ve known Maia, from City of Ashes to City of Heavenly Fire, because of Simon and Isabelle and Clary and Jordan himself, she’s learned to open her heart as she heals from the wounds of her past. Which is a theme for quite a few of the TMI characters.
Maia's journey toward being a hero is completed in City of Heavenly Fire: she learns that she is much more than she ever thought she was, that she is now in a place where she can form more connections with more people (like Lily), that though was not able to save Jordan, she does save Bat. In many ways it is a mirror to the main hero's journey of TMI, which has always been Clary's: Clary, who has saved Jace several times now, who has accepted her own powers, and who now has so many more Christmas presents to buy than she ever has before, for a growing circle of those dear to her. Heroes come through wars not unscathed, not without suffering, but unbroken. For Jordan’s death to break Maia would have done her character a great disservice. “leviosaseeker-190 said:
Hi! So, 75% of me absolutely adored COHF, but the other 25% didn’t like it! I hate how Jordan’s death got dismissed so quickly, especially by Maia (a character that I now passionately dislike.)”
Over the years I’ve been writing, I’ve noticed something that always makes me sad: male characters are judged on their accomplishments. Female characters are judged by their behavior toward male characters, especially sad white men. Jordan was a sad white guy. As I’ve said in earlier posts, I didn’t when I wrote COA intend to bring him back because I didn’t see any way that someone who had done things as awful as what Jordan had done could be brought back and rehabilitated; I certainly didn’t see how he could be a fit boyfriend for Maia, ever.
And then I started to notice something else, which was a pattern in books of men doing terrible things to women and then the story being about how the man makes it up to her and rehabilitates himself through her; how she forgives him, often for her hurting her badly physically. And I thought about how Jordan could be brought back as a way of engaging with that trope: that it would be a way of discussing how you can come back from doing something terrible, that you can be rehabilitated, but your instrument for rehabilitation has to be your own actions, not the person you hurt in the first place.
I think that people are so used to the story of the man who redeems himself through a woman (just like the story of a man who finds meaning in his life through a woman who dies to teach him Important Life Lessons) that there was an assumption this was going to be the same thing, but it was never meant to be — thus the clues in CoLS that Something Was Wrong With This Relationship.
In this book, Maia brokers a peace between vampires and werewolves, saves Bat’s life by physically beating a much larger opponent in combat, thus saving her werewolf pack, destroys Maureen, captures a demon, and in the end is recognized as a hero by the Consul, and appointed not just the werewolf representative to the Council, but the person who will rebuild the Praetor Lupus. And yet I see people saying they are disappointed and now dislikeher because she 1) wanted to break up with her boyfriend and 2) dedicated herself to saving the world rather than being crippled by mourning for said boyfriend after he died.
In other words, once again a lady is judged and disliked for prioritizing her own well-being and the saving of the entire world over one sad white man. Who is dead anyway. (Much as Tessa often gets stick for being able to move on from Will eighty years after he died, as opposed to spending eternity prioritizing a dead white man over everything else in the universe. Only for Maia it’s worse because she’s a lady of color so how dare she think her own agency supersedes a sad white man’s?)
(I have also seen Clary get some stick for not mourning Jordan sufficiently — how dare she respond to Simon’s question about her pajamas shortly after hearing Jordan was dead?! Never mind Simon brought up the pajamas. She should have been inconsolable over the death of her best friend’s roommate, rather than relieved that the people she is actually much closer to – Simon and Maia — are all right, never mind that Jace is in the hospital and she just almost died herself.)
It’s not that I necessarily blame anyone for feeling this way so much as I feel that this kind of reaction comes from absorbing what society is constantly telling us, which is that sad white men and their needs come above everything else and should be focused on to the elimination of all else. The idea that both Maia and Clary literally have to save the world and therefore can’t focus on Jordan’s death is discarded because it is not the job of women to save the world. It’s the job of sad white men. (Batman, Spiderman, all of the Avengers except Black Widow….)
The characters don’t by and large have the chance to mourn Jordan — Simon, as the one closest to him, does the most — Jace notes with bitterness that he’s dead when they are in Edom, which is how Jace mourns (it’s exactly how he reacted regarding Max: sarcastic bitterness) and later Clary feels tears approach as she thinks of Jordan in the epilogue. But these are Shadowhunters. They are used to and expect death. They don’t react to it the way you would expect a normal person to react to it. Thousands of Shadowhunters have died in this war. Jordan is not going to be their focus, however much of a sad white dude he may be.
As for Maia, if you really violently dislike her because many months after the death of the guy she was about to break up with she is able to hold another guy’s hand, well, I guess we have different priorities. Sometimes writers and readers do. Jordan died to make the war personal, for the reader and for Maia. Usually that’s a female character’s job, but in this case I am really okay with the fact that it wasn’t.
*Plus, I thought it was a nice end to the story of Clary and Jace to have Bat become a more important character who readers get to know and like better, since DJ Bat was providing the music for the very first time that they met. You know how important mood music is for romance! I hope that readers feel, as Simon once said, that DJ Bat did a singularly exceptional job.
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