#lucelyn

I think it’s fascinating to think about how Valentine and Jocelyn’s personalities are incredibly alike, and to consider how it was their different upbringings and divergent moral alignments that significantly impact where each of their stories end up going. It showcases how personality traits don’t define a person, their choices do. It also gives a unique opportunity to further understand characters who are otherwise pretty locked in to their archetypical roles in the Mortal Instruments series- Valentine as “The Villain” and Jocelyn as “The Mother”. By taking Jocelyn’s positive traits and mapping them onto Valentine, it’s easier to understand why he was so beloved in the Circle era. Likewise, by taking Valentine’s toxic tendencies and mapping them onto Jocelyn, she becomes more complex as an individual than the Lily Potter-esque “angelic badass mother who sacrificed everything for her child” character. (Granted, she was more complex than this in TMI, and there are plenty of people out there who don’t like Jocelyn- whereas disliking Lily Potter would be a pretty hot take to say the least. But the basic threads are there- Jocelyn’s main role is as Clary’s beloved mother who did the most to keep her child safe from the bad guy.)

One example of what this kind of trait swapping can do for the story is how it is able to reconcile the seemingly conflicting narratives about how Jocelyn and Valentine’s association with one another began.

For instance, both times he shares his story (first in City of Bones and then again later in Who the Wolf Loves) Luke highlights an initial dislike and tension between the two of them that seemed to spring up almost immediately.

-City of Bones, pg 518

-Better in Black, pg 130

This isn’t solely a Jocelyn problem. Two separate places in WtWL, there are allusions that the dislike was at least somewhat mutual (although I believe the mutual attraction already existed as well, even if both hid it well.)

-Better in Black, pg 130

-Better in Black, pg 136

But all this is contradicted by Jocelyn’s story in City of Glass, where she essentially says she was infatuated with Valentine from the very beginning- when she was “Clary’s age”- which would’ve been when she was 16.

-City of Glass, pg 504

Typically, I’m inclined to trust Jocelyn’s report a bit less simply because of how much this woman rewrites history in her own mind in order to ease her own cognitive dissonance (I mean, this is the Queen of “we aren’t lying to Clary, nothing we’ve told her is technically untrue, it’s just not… the whole truth.” 🙄) However, this feels like a strange thing to reconfigure… in hindsight, wouldn’t she be eager to claim a time when she didn’t like Valentine? It would be easy to point to this and say that she always knew something was off, but out of the kindness of her heart she gave him a chance when he was miserable and grieving and he took advantage of her. But she doesn’t do that at all- in fact, she completely neglects to mention the animosity that Luke was so sure lay between them. So while there is plenty in Jocelyn’s story that raises my eyebrows, I choose to believe that this piece of information is more or less correct.

This is interesting on a couple of levels, but it does raise the question about why these tales are so different. However, if we look at Jocelyn and Valentine as being really similar people at their core, I think it “ma(kes) a terrible sort of sense already.” (Better in Black, pg 138)

It is only Luke who tells about the friction between Jocelyn and Valentine. He was an outside observer and can only report on their actions and whatever else they may have told him. And if WtWL establishes anything, it’s that these three constantly lied to each other (and everyone else) about… a lot of things, actually, but especially about their emotions. Luke lies to Jocelyn about his feelings for her, he tries to lie to Valentine about the same thing (until Valentine pries it out of him), he lies to both of them that their marriage doesn’t bother him. Jocelyn lies to Luke about the depth of her regard for him, she lies to Valentine and pretends animosity towards him rather than admiration… and we don’t even need to start on Valentine’s lies to the two of them. So just because Luke thinks that Jocelyn hated Valentine in the beginning, it doesn’t necessarily make it true- it just means she acted like she did.

Jocelyn self-reports instant attraction to Valentine, but that doesn’t mean she was showing that to anyone. But why would Jocelyn go so far in the other direction with her actions if in reality she already liked Valentine? In her story she highlights three reasons that could have guided her behavior.

1) She admits she didn’t think she had a chance with him.

2) She says that everyone at school loved him.

3) He was close with Luke, who was her closest friend. (She doesn’t explicitly talk about this in her story, but it’s an important factor to consider nonetheless.)

If we examine each of these three points and imagine how Valentine would’ve perceived them if he had been in her shoes, we can see why Jocelyn may have acted like she was uninterested or even disgusted with Valentine while secretly feeling admiration or even attraction towards him.

—She didn’t think she had a chance with him—

If Valentine felt he didn’t have a chance with someone, what would he do? It’s a bit hard to imagine because Valentine had such an outsized ego, but my best guess is that he would belittle the person, put them down, and make it seem like they weren’t worthy of his time or attention. All of this would create an illusion that he held all the power and control. The relationship is only not occurring because he doesn’t want it to occur, not because that person is out of his league. What a ridiculous notion.

This connects to the idea of the psychological need for competency. There is a theory that states that all humans have psychological needs as well as physical ones. These needs have been identified as the need for competency, autonomy, and relatedness- and it can mess people up badly when these needs are thwarted or not met. Threats to these needs are triggered by different things for different people, and every individual is unique in how high or low their needs are in each category, but when we register a threat to one of these needs, our actions change accordingly.

I think both Valentine and Jocelyn had relatively high competency needs- they got very ashamed and frustrated if they felt they failed in an area or were too reliant on someone else. So in this case, where Jocelyn feels there are too many others vying for Valentine’s attention and that he probably wouldn’t choose her anyway, she decides to not even try in the first place. This echoes Luke’s own decision not to pursue Jocelyn out of fear of rejection, although that comes from an entirely different (though no less fucked up) psychological place for him.

For Jocelyn, if she doesn’t try, she can’t fail- but she’s going to come up with reasons and lies to tell herself about why Valentine was never even that great in the first place. “He’s actually annoying, he’s arrogant, he’s this, he’s that…” and if you repeat something to yourself enough, you can start to believe it. Now she doesn’t have to admit that she’s holding back from him because she’s too scared of failure- no, no, no, she’s holding back because she doesn’t even like Valentine, ew, gross.

—Everyone at school loved him—

If Valentine moved into a space where everyone was fawning over somebody else, (even someone whom he thought was admirable and deserved the attention) I doubt he would’ve been content with simply joining the ranks of adoring followers. Valentine feels born to lead, not to follow. He might not be openly antagonistic, and he may even give lip service to respecting such a person- but he would certainly view them as a rival and his pride wouldn’t allow him to mix his group with theirs.

Jocelyn has her pride too, even if it takes a less overt form than Valentine’s blatant self-confidence. Even if she would never admit it to herself, I think Jocelyn reacts similarly to Valentine and his well-established place at the top of the school’s social food chain. The comparisons to both Jocelyn and Valentine being “angelic” and “on a different plane” are frequent- a lot of times from Luke’s POV, but both Valentine and Jocelyn talk about the other this way as well. They obviously drew the eye and instantly had devoted friends/fans. In a way, they seem to occupy the exact same social niche- an apex predator spot that’s only really big enough for one. Jocelyn may not have had specific aims to be the most popular girl in school, but it does read as false modesty to me when she claims to be “nothing special.” Her assertions that she wasn’t even that popular seem almost insulting when read next to Luke’s story about his continual social struggle and isolation. Maybe, like Valentine, she felt that she didn’t have too many people she could genuinely bare her soul to- but WtWL makes it decently clear she wasn’t lacking in people to hang out with, and they just so happened to be people (like Madeline Bellefluer) who weren’t “in” with Valentine’s crowd.

She may not have been a Regina George type of popular in the sense that she wanted people scraping and bowing to her, but she does seem to like the idea of being Barbie popular- she thrived off of being at the center of a network of friends and relationships. In fact, she says that one of her favorite things about the Circle was how she got to be the First Lady in the social center of everyone and everything. So Valentine’s magnetism wasn’t lost on her… in fact, she recognized it in the mirror. Maybe it made her uncomfortable to see this reflection of herself (we often attack others more viciously for having traits we despise or fear in ourselves) or maybe she realized that some of the people she would have liked as friends were in Valentine’s Circle instead (Luke, Maryse, etc) because let’s face it, without him most of them would’ve likely gravitated to her. Either way, it wasn’t primed to earn Valentine a warm response from her, and she decided she would rather hang with the smaller crowd that didn’t mesh with Valentine rather than follow in his wake.

—Valentine was close with Luke—

This is an interesting one, but one I find telling all the same. I do think Jocelyn was jealous of how close Valentine was with Luke. In WtWL Luke talks a lot about how he held back the depth of his romantic feelings for Jocelyn, to the point where she (allegedly) didn’t know they existed, but the way he describes how Jocelyn interacted with him back then seems like he was equally oblivious to how she felt for him. I agree with him that it wasn’t overtly romantic, but her actions seem like she certainly valued him as more than a friend. I will probably make a more focused post about this later, but it was screaming parabatai vibes to me- at least that Jocelyn would’ve wanted to ask Luke to be her parabatai if Valentine hadn’t been a factor. And if that was the case, then how could she fully vibe with Valentine when he is occupying the spot in her best friend’s life that she wishes she had? If Luke had been dating Jocelyn, would Valentine have been chill with it or would he have been passive aggressive and jealous? I think we all know the answer. In fact, Luke wasn’t even dating Jocelyn and we still get to see Valentine’s manipulative attempts to dissuade him from pursuing her further.

-Better in Black, pg 135

Jocelyn did a similar thing in her reaction to the whole Circle when she first met them. Luke first went to her to apologize for their year of distance, and during this meeting she managed to radiate so much disinterest towards his new friendship with Valentine that it was apparently palpable to Luke- I mean, that level of “I don’t care” takes effort to project.

-Better in Black, pg 130

He then took her to lunch, excited to introduce her to his new friends, and he described it thusly:

-Better in Black, pg 130

He interpreted this in hindsight as some moral superiority on Jocelyn’s part- that she was unwilling to stoop to their level and somehow saw them all for the thing they hadn’t even become yet. And I’m sure they did have some mean-spirited humor as a group, but the fact that Luke wasn’t aware of it until facing Jocelyn’s disapproval makes me think it wasn’t an unusual level of gossip or prank based levity for a group of teenagers. I mean, we all love the TMI gang and their humor often follows along this same track. Jocelyn’s condemnation of Luke’s new group of friends seems less about her sensing something actually wrong with them and more about being displeased that he had a group of friends with no obvious place for her (that she would be willing to occupy.) After all, she seemed able to mesh with all these same people easily enough once she started dating Valentine, so maybe that’s enough proof that it was never really about them at all.

But all of this cognitive dissonance about Valentine essentially occupying her spot (both socially and with Luke) melted away after Valentine became Luke’s parabatai and his father died. This finally connects to the beginning of my post claiming that they are the same person but different flavors- because for all their similarities, Valentine and Jocelyn are still unique individuals with some key differences between them.

Once Valentine actually becomes Luke’s parabatai, Jocelyn backs down and sort of accepts that she’s lost. She lets go of some of the tension and switches to an “I’m happy if Luke’s happy” mindset, much like how Luke later insists that he is happy with Valentine and Jocelyn’s marriage, because he doesn’t have much of a choice if he still wants a relationship with them both. This is something Valentine would never have done.

As for Valentine losing his father, he turns to her for solace, citing that she can understand his pain since she recently lost her brother. Many characters talk about Jocelyn’s kindness and compassion, and it shows through here. She wasn’t going to turn Valentine away when he was vulnerable (especially when deep down, she did like him.) Now he’s more human, more down-to-earth, more attainable… and what’s more, he’s showing that he’s interested in her. There’s no risk of her competency need being thwarted anymore- if she wants him, she has him. As the Queen to his King, she is able to sit beside him in the group as an equal, not a follower, and remain close and connected to all the people she wants to be close and connected with. I don’t think it was manipulative or calculated on her part, it was just part of who Jocelyn was as a person- someone who was willing to rewrite the story in her own head when she had a chance to end up in a situation that made her happier. To Luke it may have seemed like the change up of the century, but as he states in WtWL: “it made a terrible sort of sense…” because of course it did.

-Better in Black, pg 138

This was Jocelyn’s fairytale ending in a lot of ways. Sometimes I think people get a little lost in the Lucelyn endgame and forget that. I think Jocelyn herself wants to forget that too, and pretends to herself that she always truly loved Luke over Valentine but was just too young and blind to see it. But at her core, Jocelyn was a person who was always going to fall for Valentine as he was back then- a Valentine she has forced herself to forget, but a Valentine Luke still remembers. A Valentine she doesn’t want to believe ever existed, because that Valentine looks a little too similar to her own reflection for comfort. A Valentine Luke staunchly defends the existence of, since he loves Jocelyn because of those traits, not in spite of them- that’s why he loved Valentine too, and he doesn’t let time erase that.