Selene

She is the more rational choice for Darcy vs. the Bennets. She has education, manners, a fortune, and clearly, relatives that he likes. So many fan fiction authors make her vulgar and/or unfashionable, but she isn't! That is why Darcy enjoys hanging out with her in the beginning; he would not have her at his house if she was embarrassing. Even when angry with Elizabeth, Caroline does not dare go further in attacking Elizabeth at Pemberley. She has self control. She understands boundaries, which Jane and Elizabeth mostly do, but the rest of the Bennet family struggles with. This is why she's a foil for them.

As for Darcy, at the beginning, Caroline is a nearly perfect mirror of his opinions and snobby attitude. She is doing this on purpose as a way of flirting, but it's probably pretty close to her real personality anyway. She's right that Darcy looks down on Elizabeth's uncle being a lower class lawyer. She's right that he finds the Bennet family intolerable to marry into. However, as Darcy falls in love with Elizabeth and then reforms, Caroline's mirror distorts. That shows his growth in the novel. She, like Elizabeth, fails to update her priors, though to be fair to Caroline, she didn't build her knowledge of Mr. Darcy on first impressions. It's harder to change her mind because she did once know him very well.

Side note: this is also why people woobyfying Darcy hurts Caroline as a rational character. They start in a very similar place and love mean girl gossiping together, then he changes. When Darcy's flaws are erased, it makes Caroline look super irrational and much crueller.

Whatever you do, don’t imagine Robert breaking down completely.

It’s happening at Luke and Amatis’ house

Michael is bringing the snacks. It’s all just random weird stuff that he found last minute at the gas station and forces everyone to try + rate out of 10 stars

Stephen is bringing alcohol and weed. This is his one and only contribution. 

Amatis picks out the movie. It’s probably something like “10 Things I Hate About You” or “16 Candles”. Hodge gets very invested. The girls are paying attention. So is Michael. Robert and Stephen are throwing popcorn at the screen anytime something slightly romantic happens. Valentine is just giving that “I can’t believe people like this trash” stare to everyone. Luke is reading a book and does not gaf 

They play beanboozled and Robert somehow gets every bad flavor. 

Valentine forces them to play monopoly thinking he’s going to win, but actually Amatis does. This has a catastrophic effect on his ego for the rest of the night. 

Robert and Michael are sleeping SUSPICIOUSLY close together. Celine is curled up like a cat in the armchair. Luke is sleeping on the couch because he let Valentine sleep in his room. Stephen fell asleep on the floor. Maryse, Amatis, and Jocelyn are sharing the bed.

The boys are trying to stay up the latest. They fail miserably and the girls end up gossiping and talking shit until 3 am

Went on at least 4 dates with Michael Wayland during their time at the academy

Fell in love with Michael and later married him

Had a kid with him who they named Jonathan (middle name of Christopher possible but unlikely considering Jace learned his middle name through Valentine’s journals which might’ve been talking about Sebastian)

Was an activist for uniting downworlders, mundanes, and shadowhunters

Wasn’t very popular at the academy due to her activist activities

Was somehow related to Eleanor Blackthorn

Presumedly died sometime around the Uprising

For instance, Robert tells us that Eliza was an activist and apparently her platform was to unite Shadowhunters, Downworlders, and mundanes. But I doubt that he really cared that much about the specifics of what she was doing or what her overall goal was. From the same narrative, we learn that all of the pamphlets she was passing out were specifically targeted towards mundane political issues. It’s unclear how much she actually cared about unity with Downworlders themselves, or if she simply had a more naive “let us all set aside our differences and join hands together” type of mindset that romanticized the idea of world peace more than it actually dug into understanding and solving the systemic issues that prevented it.

An Eliza who is more of an activist in this way might not actually have that much that would diametrically oppose her to dating a Circle member. She may not have liked Valentine Morgenstern himself, and didn’t necessarily agree with his vision of the direction the Clave needed to move in, but as someone advocating for system-wide reconstruction herself, she may have respected it and those who agreed with that ideology.

This would be especially plausible if she didn’t realize the Circle’s true anti-Downworlder motivations- which it seems like most Shadowhunters didn’t. The Circle didn’t platform themselves as a hate group- in fact, they were very adamant that they were only pursuing justice against Downworlders who had broken the Law. The deep racism that was prevalent in most of the Clave prevented proper investigations from taking place to verify these claims, but the Circle had to at least pretend that they were operating within the bounds of Shadowhunter Law.

That said, I think you might be overlooking a few things.

First of all, YESSSS, Robert is far from a reliable narrator (tho no one in the Circle is LMAOO—that's probably why we're never getting one clean story about them). And yes, he says he doesn't understand what Michael sees in Eliza. ((Whether that's genuine confusion or just a full-on gay jealousy crisis is... debatable tho))

BUT I actually think Robert understands Eliza's beliefs better than you're giving him credit for.

In the novella, he gives specific examples of the things she talks about—he even mentions apartheid in South Africa. The only reason he's able to recount those examples is because he explicitly tells us that Michael insists they stay and listen to her whenever she starts talking.

Now, sure, it's possible Robert wasn't really paying attention. But I honestly don't think that's the case, for two reasons:

Michael makes it clear that listening to Eliza matters to him.

If Robert is genuinely trying to figure out what Michael loves about her, it would make sense for him to actually listen to what she's saying in order to understand her.

So I think Robert probably captures her ideas reasonably well.

And if we go with that interpretation, then I don't think Eliza can really be portrayed as some surface-level activist whose politics amount to "peace and love, let's all hold hands." Robert describes her as someone with a genuine understanding of issues that, in his words, "no Shadowhunter seems to understand"—again, he specifically brings up apartheid in South Africa. On top of that, her family is known for maintaining good relationships with Downworlders, including werewolf packs in Europe.

Moreover, I genuinely think that if Eliza's views had been that shallow, Valentine would have tried to recruit her. At the very least, it would've been strategically useful for him to bring under his influence one of the loudest critics of the Clave, allowing the Circle to present itself as the alternative to the Clave rather than just another extremist faction.

ALSOOO Michael is canonically bisexual and canonically in love with Eliza, so I don't really think the "they were each other's beards" theory works here.

As said before tho. I genuinely think your theory is good and interesting I think, for a while at least, the tensions could be contained because Eliza and the Circle shared one common enemy: the Clave. Even if their motivations were completely different, that common ground probably made coexistence possible for some time. On top of that, the Circle's loathing of Downworlders wasn't fully out in the open until later.

But I don't think that explains everything. In fact, Michael and Eliza's relationship (and, more broadly, Michael as a character, his motivations etc) is one of the biggest mysteries surrounding the Circle.

The way I understand your argument is that Michael mainly stays in the Circle because of Robert, because it's where his closest friend is and because it gives him a social circle. But I honestly think the situation is much more complicated than that, or at least that there are major pieces of the puzzle we're still missing.

The biggest issue is that The Evil We Love already shows us a Michael who seems exhausted by the Circle years before the Uprising. The novella takes place in 1984, roughly five years before everything falls apart, yet almost every interaction he has with Valentine is tense, if not openly confrontational. At the same time, he's never portrayed as someone who desperately needs a group to feel accepted. Quite the opposite, actually. Throughout his life, he's consistently described as the guy who's allowed to tag along rather than someone who naturally belongs—both as a child and later within the Circle itself.

That doesn't really fit the idea that he stayed simply because he needed a social circle. What's even stranger is that Michael doesn't seem to fit into any of the Circle's usual categories. Most members either genuinely believed in Valentine's ideology, were personally devoted to him, or both. Michael doesn't really appear to be either. Robert even describes him as having a "bizarre soft spot" for Downworlders, which already sets him apart from the rest of the members.

Another thing worth keeping in mind is that most of what we know about Michael comes through other people's perspectives. In The Evil We Love, but also in Luke's recollections, Michael is a fairly quiet, secondary character who's almost always presented in relation to Robert rather than as an independent actor. So it's also entirely possible that he simply wasn't as deeply involved in the Circle's activities as people often assume, and that he spent those years trying to distance himself as much as he safely could without provoking Valentine—whom everyone knew was dangerous.

I think I didn’t necessarily do the best job of expressing some of my thoughts in my original post, so I wanted to try and expand a little. It was poorly phrased when I said that Robert was an unreliable narrator when it comes to Eliza’s political views- I think what I was trying to express was less that he didn’t understand the content of her activism and more that he didn’t understand Eliza’s philosophical views and how that impacted how she imagined these theoretical concepts would be executed should they be implemented. But this is much less because Robert is an unreliable narrator (although he is) and much more because he just had no way of actually knowing this information in order to be able to share it with the audience.

Now I certainly don’t understand Eliza’s inner world any more than Robert does. It’s just a fact that we have no information on this one way or another, and until we do, it’s all just speculation. And in all honesty, if we ever did get more insight into Eliza’s inner workings, the chances are that she would be presented as approaching Downworlder justice with the same fervor that she approached mundane justice, because TSC is geared towards teens and young adults and has never been that subtle or nuanced when it comes to splitting characters into “backwards and racist” or “enlightened and compassionate.”

But since we don’t have more Circle content and we aren’t really likely to get that much more of it, I always enjoy approaching character analysis from almost an entirely culturally informed lens. This by no means explains all of human behavior even in real life, and seeing as all of this is based on a fictional culture I didn’t create, it is certainly flawed. Nevertheless, it’s still the avenue I go down because I find it the most fun 😂

It’s true that Eliza is informed about real world issues that are affecting mundanes, and that her family has connections with Downworlders which leads to her having a kinder view of them than your average Shadowhunter. But realistically, she still grew up Nephilim, with all the removal from the mundane world that entails. Just a cursory glance over the topics she was giving impassioned lectures about reveals that she was probably getting all her information by getting her hands on Western mundane newspapers, because they are to a T all the topics that were sensationalized in Western media in the 80’s. Nuclear testing, Middle East oil tyrants, apartheid in South Africa, AIDS in America.

This doesn’t mean Eliza was being performative or that she wasn’t genuinely an empathetic person who actually wanted to make positive changes in the world. I think that she was. But I can’t help but wonder:

a) how much her understanding of the topics was shaped by the political angle of whatever news outlet she was getting her information from (not that this is inherently a bad thing- we are all influenced by the angle of the media we choose to consume, but for Eliza, who is pretty far removed from actual mundane life and issues, this could have a more dramatic effect.) A true political movement is born from legitimate concern and dedicated effort towards solving a specific issue… in other words, it makes the news, it isn’t born from the news.

b) what her solution to these issues could have actually entailed, seeing as there is very little way I can see that she could meaningfully engage with some of these issues. I mean, these are things Shadowhunters have not dealt with in their society for a thousand years. They don’t seem to be vulnerable to mundane diseases and homophobia impacts their society in a much different way, so something like the nuances of the AIDS crises would be difficult to grasp. Do Shadowhunters even use oil? They all use witch light to light their homes and the only Shadowhunter I’ve ever heard of that drove a car was Matthew Fairchild. And apartheid? Going back to the 1000’s the Shadowhunters have actually never segregated based on race, and any issues with racism they as a society have look so different from anything happening in the mundane world that I don’t even know where they would begin to approach this from. Eliza’s apparent concern about nuclear testing is actually what really seals the deal for me that most of her thoughts on these issues were regurgitated talking points from whatever she read in the news, because anti-nuclear sentiment in the 1980’s was specifically about reheated Cold War tensions- which isn’t something Eliza could possibly have had the context to take an informed stance on. She could educate herself by reading about these issues and of course she was smart enough to understand what she was reading- but that wasn’t going to give her a true understanding of the deep seated anxiety the threat of nuclear war causes a civilian population, or of the many years of propagandist separation between the two sides that made objective reporting on the issue impossible, or of the fact that some of this fear-mongering over nuclear war was a smokescreen to distract from the true struggle of who was going to be the world’s most dominant colonial power because hard colonialism had gone out of fashion with the general public. Giving a book report on a topic and actually being prepared to engage in meaningful activism that addresses that topic are two different things.

This lack of cultural context matters because if Eliza isn’t approaching this from a naive “let’s all hold hands” type of activism, then I would actually be nervous. The only other clear solution that involves a united front of Nephilim and Downworlders to solve mundane problems is essentially to go into places carrying a big magical stick- a “do what we tell you, or else.” This is also an approach that would probably make a lot of sense to someone raised in a warrior culture whose primary governing body utilizes fear of punishment as their primary strategy for maintaining order- but not only would this be terrible from a “terrorizing people into submission with the threat of violence is generally wrong” perspective, it would also be concerning because how would the Nephilim even decide who to deploy their force in favor of? Just based on how the Western news or local news reported on the matter? Or are they themselves somehow going to be the complete arbiters of justice for peoples they know nothing of? (Probably the latter, as that seems very typical of the Shadowhunter mo, but I digress.)

To be clear, I don’t think this is what Eliza’s platform was (although that would be endlessly fascinating as a concept) but that’s why I do think it wasn’t very well-thought through or action-based as a political strategy either. It smacks of Nephilim-saviorism a bit, and the approach to Downworlders seems to be “Downworlders are equal to us too and the Accords solved everything.” It’s far from the worst rhetoric out there, but it skips over major systemic issues in Shadowhunter society (that actually need to be addressed by Nephilim in order for the change to have any impact at all) in favor of focusing on issues beyond the scope of what the Nephilim could (or even should) reasonably address.

The thing is, that’s fine. Eliza isn’t required to have an actual solution to world problems or be a paragon of effective political action- she was a young kid too, let’s remember. The fact that she cared at all to attempt to raise awareness about issues in the mundane world no matter how unpopular it made her is admirable in its own right and shows us the kind of person she was. But that’s also why I think she would view The Circle as merely a rival political group in their Academy days, especially when their more extreme activities were mostly still under wraps and centered on Downworlders. Eliza may have come from a family that was friendly to Downworlders and believed in Downworlder rights in a broad sense. But the Rosewains having specific positive Downworlder relationships doesn’t equal them being Alec Lightwood. If Eliza had truly been digging into the meat at the heart of the systemic injustices that affected Downworlders, I’m willing to bet her activist focus would’ve looked a lot different. So when the Circle conducts a raid that no one else was present for and says: “it wasn’t because they were Downworlders, it’s because we had evidence that they had conspired to kill a family of mundanes that had done them wrong,” is Eliza really digging into that? Or does she just shrug and trust the Law to protect the “good Downworlders” and punish the “bad ones”?

So when Michael comes along, yes, he’s a Circle member- but he’s cute and funny and listens to what she has to say, and as far as she is aware he isn’t participating in a group whose views are incompatible with what she can tolerate in good conscience. The way I see this is more akin to how US Republicans and Democrats used to view one another 20 or so years ago. There was a lot on which they fundamentally disagreed, but they were still able to have respectful debates and successful mixed political marriages were definitely a thing. Eliza wasn’t about to join the Circle or concede on their points, but she could date a Circle member as long as they didn’t make it their entire personality. This wouldn’t have been the case if she would have actually understood the Circle’s shadow politics, but by the time she knew about that she already knew who Michael was as a person and that he didn’t subscribe to that ideology himself.

As for why Valentine didn’t approach her about joining the Circle, I think that’s fairly obvious- Valentine never approached people with stable senses of self-worth and the backbone to stand their ground when they disagreed with someone. For him, it was less about an individual’s politics and more about control- because let’s be so for real, 0% of the people he got to join his Inner Circle agreed with his most extreme views, but they were just going to ride the Valentine train until the wheels fell off. So if Eliza had been weak-willed and vulnerable to cult abuse? She could’ve actively been the most outspokenly pro-Downworlder individual on the planet and Valentine still might’ve tried to hook her into the Circle. This is also true in reverse- Eliza as she actually was was far too much of an independent thinker for Valentine to ever attempt to approach. She could’ve been Zara Dearborn in her politics and Valentine still isn’t touching that with a 10 foot pole.

I loved what you had to say about Michael though, and I think it changed my mind about some things. I wholeheartedly agree that he was sort of an enigma in the Circle, and that he probably distanced himself more before the end of everything but didn’t completely separate himself because of how dangerous Valentine was. It fits with how I’ve always seen Michael- not someone who is so desperate to belong that he will let himself be peer pressured into doing things he knows are wrong, but not necessarily the person who will loudly or bravely stand up for himself either. I personally think this is why Valentine was fine with him drifting away as well, and is even insinuated to have purposely created the rift between Robert and Michael- because he wanted Robert to be one of his closest people, but he knew Michael wasn’t someone who would ultimately be good to keep around if he wanted to continue to lead the Circle down a more extreme path. Usually Valentine deals with this kind of separation of ideals by killing the person who is drifting away, but in Michael’s case he didn’t seem too worried about him sticking his neck out to blab to the Clave as long as he had plausible deniability by not being too directly involved in any of their shadier activities.

By the end of everything, I think it’s clear that both Michael and Eliza knew how messed up the Circle was. Maybe there’s more canon I’m missing that contradicts this, but I thought it was implied that Eliza may have even died fighting Valentine’s forces at the Battle of the Accords Hall. I’m not coming for them or trying to insinuate that they were anything like Valentine or other Circle members. I just also happen to think that the political views that it makes the most sense for Eliza to have had as a Nephilim in the 80’s wouldn’t be perfectly in line with what we might see as overly progressive.