The Bones Would Break Like Hearts

The Last King of Faerie was an interesting situation because as far as the main characters, that die was cast ten years ago.The Last King of Faerie isn't introducing four protagonists; it's continuing four protagonists whose stories began in The Dark Artifices. Dru, Ty, Kit and even Ash are all set up with future protagonist business. The other characters we know from TDA are not. Ash is Sebastian's son, Kit is the Heir, Ty did something which changed the shape of everyone's future but didn't yet play out to its end, and Dru — well, we will see with Dru. :)

There are definitely books I've written with more protagonists — though having a POV isn't the same as protagonisting. I would still think of Emma and Julian as the protagonists of TDA, but not Diego, even though we get his POV. Their story drives the plot. Ditto Lucie, James and Cordelia probably. But those stories are more diffusely spread out over a cast of supporting characters who themselves have substantial arcs and plot business (and I would never tell anyone that if they think Cristina or Matthew are protagonists, that they were wrong. How you look at them is not my call!) When the plot business is, however, The End of All Things, you go from having nine people who need a resolution to nine hundred. Which requires some different work.

Because of that, I knew I had to be very disciplined about not adding a huge amount of business for other characters. Especially new ones. Every main character needs an emotional arc, relationships to develop, choices to make, and a meaningful resolution. Then there are a massive amount of other characters who people have followed for decades who also need to appear, help, advise, or simply have a moment as the series comes to its conclusion — which was not the case in any other series I've written!

Yes — Dru, unlike the rest of her family, knows Livvy is a ghost. Everyone else has moved on — not like they don't still grieve, but they've accepted. Ty and Dru are stuck in this similar place of not having moved through any stages of grief as we would know them.

A) Gothic Victorian works keep coincidently being really close parallels to Malcolm’s life

Or

Ty doesn't so much have subjects as the Scholomance offers self-directed study, which is great for Ty. We do find out some of the things he's interested in school-wise in LKOF and projects he's been working on with Anush etc. I'm pretty sure however that no theses will get written during TWP. And the Scholomance might have to cancel commencement. Which would be tragic if they had a really good guest speaker. I can see Ragnor complaining that he had to call in so many favors to get Gandalf or whatever.

That's an interesting question because Ash's "parents" aren't exactly people you'd look to as role models.

What I think Ash inherits from them isn't negative or positive traits so much as qualities that are morally neutral. Those qualities can become virtues or vices depending on the choices he makes and the reasons he makes them.

Sebastian, for instance, is/was extraordinarily determined. He achieved some truly lunatic goals. Determination is an admirable quality in the abstract; it's what lets people persevere through impossible circumstances. But determination without empathy becomes selfish ambition, and that can lead to terrible things. Ash has inherited that determination — but we don't yet know where he'll take it.

The Seelie Queen is incredibly intelligent and politically perceptive. She understands power, people's desires, and how to influence them. None of those qualities are inherently evil; in fact, they're often the mark of a gifted leader. But she uses them primarily to control and manipulate others and she does not limit her cruelty. Ash has inherited her instinct for reading people and her strategic way of thinking. The question for him is whether he uses these insights to manipulate people or to understand them.

Janus probably had the greatest influence on the person Ash became. At one point, Janus genuinely cared for him and protected him in the ways he knew how, but Janus also believes that the ends justify almost any means. He wants Clary and he doesn't much care if she wants him back, or what he has to do in order to have her. He is also willing to use Ash in any way to get what he wants. Janus may have taught Ash some things about love, but all Janus' love is twisted up and eventually destructive. Ash needs to understand that love is an important good, but love isn't not caring about the other person's free will and agency.

I've gotten a ton of questions about characters and page time (all of them from people who don't want to take page time away from Dru, Kit, Ash and Ty, but are I think hoping that it would be possible to equally feature the mains and some others and just add more pages, so this kind of addresses that) — but you are the first person to ask about Anush, so what the heck. Also I think this ties in to my previous answers about characters.

Being a main character doesn't mean the author likes you more and not being a main character doesn't mean the author likes you less — often they don't! I think people, including authors, often fall in love with side characters precisely because they have freedoms that protagonists don't. A supporting character can burst into the story with an enormous personality, make spectacularly bad decisions, say outrageous things, disappear for a hundred pages, and still remain delightful. (Not that Anush has actually done this, I think people like him because he had some fun business in TDA and he's Ty's friend but he is largely unknown.) A main character doesn't have that luxury. They're carrying the emotional weight of the novel. Readers live with their decisions, their flaws, and their growth for hundreds of pages, so they're written to sustain that journey while side characters are not. So in a way, wanting to have more of some side characters is not a bug, it's a feature.

Could you rewrite and rebuild the entire structure of a series to feature side characters as just more mains? Not without it becoming an entirely different series. Kit, Ty and Dru and Ash would all just become less significant, and all the stuff already built in for them to do would have to stop being particularly important. Kit is the Heir, but that would matter less; Ty's relationship to Livvy would matter less; Dru being who she is and having the power she does would matter less; Ash being Sebastian's son and the heir to the Seelie crown would matter less. They're all real tradeoffs.

It's also true that side characters can dip out before the consequences of being whatever kind of person they are have to be explored over 500 pages. Characters who were never written to sustain 500 pages of the consequences of their decisions can't, and the book collapses if you try. For side characters you want to see more of (Magnus, Simon) spinoff novels and short story collections are great, because those books allow for them to have protagonist business without winding up with one of those series where at the end you can no longer tell who the main characters are, and the protagonist's hamster gets a resolution the protagonist does not. (I am thinking about a very specific rodent, but I will never tell you what series, never.)

I think there is a sort of fear that since this is the end, the possibility of say, some characters having spinoff novels or short story collections or whatnot no longer exists and everything we ever want to know about them must be mashed into TWP. But that is just a recipe for turning TWP into a series in which no character is developed enough to care about, and and that is a much worse problem than wishing you saw more of some of the supporting characters, which is very normal and honestly a very positive thing. Better to want more than less or none at all, and we never do know what will happen in the future.

I suppose it's just good to remember that at a certain point, every character who isn't a protagonist is taking pages from another character. Characters people have requested page time for include: Clary, Jace, Isabelle, Simon, Alec, Magnus, Jem, Tessa, Emma, Julian, Helen, Aline, Maryse, Cristina, Mark, Kieran, Anush, Lily, Maia, Thais, Diego, Jaime, Luke, Jocelyn, Ragnor, Cameron and Paige Ashdown, Zara, Manuel, Caterina, Adaeon, the Seelie Queen, Max, Other Max, Rafe, Tavvy, and people who are very dead. Alas, they cannot all have significant page time, and that isn't even limited by the number of pages a book can be, it's limited because the ability to emotionally invest in characters is limited. At some point it's not creating a story in which more people matter, it's just creating one where no one matters.

Think of it this way: a book is not a city, it's a house. It cannot expand outward forever. (A fictional world can; a novel can't.) Every room added is a strain on the house's underlying structure, until eventually it stops being a house at all and collapses, tragically crushing all the lawn gnomes underneath.

As for what Anush is up to, he is probably enjoying not being a main character. Terrible things happen to protagonists. Anush can watch from a safe distance with a cocktail.

As we know magnus dru and kit are aware of livvys ghost , do other characters become aware / have a feeling that they are hiding this secret?

Anyways, my question is does Ty “regret” what he did, like does he understand he unbelievably messed up by trying to raise Livvy? Or will we see all this unfold in TLKoF?

In Qoaad, Thule!Livvy encourages Ty to let her go and he says that’s not his Livvy, his Livvy would want to be alive. Not that this should hold him back in a way, but I think I would be sick with guilt and grief if I changed my twin sister’s soul in some Limbo like that and had to face it every single day.

Thank you so much—and seven rereads is amazing!

I don't know if "regret" is the word for Ty in this situation. He absolutely understands that trying to raise Livvy had consequences he could never have predicted or controlled, and that Livvy is now caught in a state neither of them would have chosen. He has to live with the knowledge that his grief and desperation played a part in that. But.

But I don't think he regrets loving Livvy, or wanting with every part of himself for her not to be dead. Those feelings were never wrong. Ty was a grieving fifteen-year-old who had just lost his twin, and he convinced himself that if there was something he could do, then not doing it would be the real betrayal. He wasn't thinking clearly about what a future Livvy might become or what it would mean for her; he was thinking only that death was unbearable and perhaps, somehow, reversible.

His response to Thule Livvy reflects that. He can't accept her argument because, to him, accepting it would also mean accepting that Livvy truly wanted to leave him—and he simply isn't emotionally capable of believing that yet. "My Livvy would want to be alive" is partly something he believes and partly something he needs to believe. Think of Will's response to Tessa telling him she's engaged to Jem. "My Jem?" Just like "my Livvy," it's an expression of how much that other person is a part of you, how much they aren't supposed to be a source of pain and how could that happen? Even though of course neither Livvy nor Jem is at fault, the response is still disbelief. Not my person; that couldn't happen.

I also don't think guilt always produces a predictable response. Sometimes guilt makes people cling harder, because admitting the full extent of the mistake feels like losing the person all over again. In Ty's case, that's even stronger. He doesn't just have to let Livvy go in an ordinary way. He'd have to believe what he did was wrong — even if not morally wrong, the incorrect solution — and that keeping her around is wrong. And it's hard and complex for anyone to believe that kind of thing without believing they are at fault, and the idea of being at fault here is horrific. It might blow apart his entire sense of who he is as a person and a brother and a twin. "I love my sister and so I cannot hurt her" is a very normal human way of thinking. "I love my sister but I hurt her anyway" is much more complicated.