#jacealec

hey, sorry, i know this is 3 days old and i think a second part of this previous ask that i answered. i just have actually watched all of 3x04 now instead of picking up scenes from gifs, so i feel compelled to comment properly on the whole jace/mental illness thing now. (again, i hope i made it clear previously that i’m against morally sanctioning anyone, including you, for their opinions on a dumb show, i’m just offering mine if you’re actually interested, and maybe a little window into hypocrisy if anyone’s willing to look). 

i’m not necessarily trying to equate “i hate jace” (which is fine) with “mentally ill people are the worst” (which is kind of a shitty opinion to have), but it’s just interesting to me. i think it’s maybe a tiny bit reflective of tumblr’s very strange and ever-shifting attitude towards mentally ill people, because we’ve had this unfortunately strong strain of “anti-recovery” people for some time on this site, and there’s been a gratifying reaction against being anti-recovery, but i feel at times like there’s been an overreaction against being anti-recovery. where, in the analysis of characters, jace is not allowed to exhibit any kind of unhealthy coping behaviour re: his mental health, or exert his unhealthy coping behaviour even in minor ways on others, without it being jace’s problem - that he should deal with his trauma in a more acceptable way, that if he inflicts even a little bit of it on someone else i.e. by minorly lashing out at alec, it’s his fault and he/his fans should be more pro-recovery rather than making excuses for his behaviour on the basis of his mental health – rather than any sympathy, empathy, or even understanding being given for the fact that he currently feels like he’s losing touch with reality and in the past has been abused, traumatized, severely manipulated, and has been explicitly suicidal.

now i get, of course, that jace isn’t behaving in a healthy way - that pushing away and, uh, being mean to alec isn’t good, for him or for alec. i get that, and i get that alec is suffering because of it, and my heart goes out to him. but jace is suffering too. jace also is terrified that he’s losing his mind, that he’s going to go the same way as his mother and end up killing himself because of it, he’s terrified that he’s going to kill the girl he loves because of it, he doesn’t understand why it’s happening to him, and he’s afraid that he’s losing touch with reality completely, he’s experiencing severe psychosis (just because it’s demonic and not neurochemical doesn’t make it not psychosis), and i guess i don’t have to keep mentioning the lifetime of abuse, manipulation, torture and trauma, including emotional abuse that specifically punished him severely for being emotional or displaying emotion or having emotional connections, but i’m sure that’s not helping him much either. so he lashed out - that’s not a good or healthy thing for him to have done, but i don’t think it’s unforgivable. i don’t blame him. i don’t think he’s awful for it, i feel sorry for him. if alec’s feelings aren’t his top priority, i don’t blame him. alec is in, comparably, a very emotionally healthy place right now, so it makes some sense why alec is more concerned than vice versa, even if it seems unfair - rather than it being “jace is a complete and irredeemable dick”, why can’t it be “jace is going through Some Shit right now”? alec seems to get that, at least. again, admittedly - well outside the discussion on mental illness, but just in terms of personality - jace has some glaring character flaws, one of which is his compulsion to push people away. i freely admit that he’s not perfect, far from, but i don’t think he’s the devil incarnate either. 

lol………….i think i did see the post that you’re talking about? it was the one where they were like, yeah before jace was better than alec when they were kids but now alec is definitely better than him and only ever just lets him win for [motivation unknown] right? 

like look  i don’t like to just shit on people’s headcanons or analyses just because i personally don’t vibe with them or because to me personally it’s a misreading of the character dynamic because everyone’s opinions and interpretations are valid so you know it is what it is 

but ok fine yeah it did kind of irk me, esp when it comes to jace and alec because it seems like…1.3% of people actually care about understanding their dynamic but everyone then wants to talk out their ass about it lol … the reason i didnt love that interpretation is that, obviously jace and alec are extremely well-matched physically so i don’t think that jace should be significantly more capable than alec, but it also follows that alec shouldn’t be significantly more capable than jace. they’re parabatai, so they should be matched, but any imbalances don’t make a lot of sense imo. and it’s also true that alec likely had to work a lot harder than jace to achieve his level of capability (and i really really (really really) love that about alec my sweet hardworking badger boy), because jace has the angel blood (and uhhh what was it oh right he spent the first half of his life being violently abused and experimented on in order for his ‘father’ to make him the perfect soldier but that’s a different topic for a different day lol)

ok friend see here all due respect you’re already coming in here with a little bias so let’s see if we can work around that i mean i get that you likely don’t ship c/lace and that likely m/alec is your otp, but right off the bat you’re dismissing jace’s emotional life and problems as “high school level drama” without a second thought but validating alec’s as actual emotional problems. i’m not saying you shouldn’t validate alec, but if you really want to look at it from a slightly more objective point of view, you probably shouldn’t be so dismissive of jace’s emotions going to the discussion because that’s where everyone usually is, where alec’s emotions are more valid because you personally are more invested in them, which always, always makes jace come off as the bad guy when he usually isn’t 

and, continuing to talk about bias, we could shade both jace and alec all the livelong day (i know, because depending on who i’m defending on the day, i’ve done both lol) – for example, while jace was languishing in the city of bones potentially awaiting exile in 2x04, alec was ready to skip off to marrakesh for dinner with magnus with hardly a second thought. does alec need to step up his game? (disclaimer: i don’t actually believe this, in fact i defended from such accusations back in the day, don’t @ me) but the point is that it’s easy to build up a case against both of them, people just do it against jace much more often because they like alec (and, usually, m/alec) much more. i mean, has alec asked jace once how he feels knowing who his real parents were and how they actually died? has he asked him how he feels knowing he had a kind of quasi-brother that valentine was raising alongside him  so that he meant literally nothing more to valentine than as one half of an experiment? no, he didn’t, because they can’t always have jace and alec having heart to hearts, because there’s not always  space for that - i wish there was, but the point is, i wish it for both of them, not just one of them

like i’ve said before, jace and alec are in separate spheres of the narrative in 2b for the large part - alec (and izzy! which is why she’s often more ‘aware’ of what’s going on w/ him) is in the politics/downworlder aspect of the valentine problem (with magnus, izzy, luke, etc), whereas jace is in the more personal, sebastian-oriented side of the problem (with clary, seb, and valentine). so narrative structure - because the show services the plot first and foremost - has, in the second half of the second half of the season, kind of kept jace and alec from having long meaningful interactions. again, i wish it were a bit different, but i can’t really complain knowing all the constraints they already have to work with and i love the way the season is unfolding plot-wise, so i’ll accept the sacrifice grudgingly