#tdie

After Clary leaves and Jace finds the note, Jace gets everyone together to make sure Clary is ok. Maryse finds her and takes her home the first night, as she’s mundane and the angels can’t say anything about that. They use a vampire girl her age to encanto her to explain where she is in her current life, after they get her set up at school and with a job and apartment and make sure she’s got identification and money and everything (since the mundane police think clary fray is dead). She goes to school and does her art. The vampire girl and Maryse both keep an eye on her (carefully, so as not to expose her to the shadow world). Jace also keeps an eye on her from afar under a glamour. 

Jace would have just gone after her and told her everything immediately - even would have given up his own nephilim blood to be with her - but Alec talks sense into him and convinces him he has to get the angels to have mercy on Clary, otherwise they may do even worse to her if he goes after her. So while Maryse has an eye on Clary, Jace is pleading to the angels every day to have mercy on her. He does everything he can to contact them. He prays and pleads and cries to them every single day. 

Meanwhile, Alec is busy working on bringing the downworlders and nephilim together. The Clave changes. They bring the downworlders into the fold. It’s a slow process, but it is working. The world is better. It is safer for the mundanes, because everyone is working together to stop the true evil instead of fighting amongst themselves. Seeing the clave change, and seeing the alliance between the nephilim and the downworld, along with Jace’s consistent pleading, makes the angels realize they were wrong to punish Clary for using her rune magic the way she used it. It is Alec’s influence on the Clave that finally makes the angels see how wrong they were, and they decide to have mercy on Clary. 

just kept something important from him but after that moment happens you can see on Magnus that it starts being more of him thinking he needs to put his people first like he believes Alec has been doing (Alec asking for his dna on behalf of the clave, hiding the truth of the soul sword). Like you said, this is something that has been shown throughout the season and not just in regards to Malec (what the Seelie Queen said to Simon about shadowhunters always choosing their own) but it’s (2/5)

something that Magnus has only now openly acknowledged. To me that was the reason Magnus decided to end things. Alec letting go to be with his family made him believe that he had do the same. That he had to do what was best for his people but he couldn’t do that while still being with Alec. And it makes me wonder that if Alec hadn’t let go of his hands to be with his family (and definitely not blaming Alec for that) if Magnus would have still come to that realization and decided to end his (3/5)

things with Alec. Because I think Alec not telling him of the sword was a problem for Magnus but it was not what pushed him to end things. And I don’t think Magnus would have got back together with Alec if he still believed he couldn’t trust Alec. I think in the end Magnus understood that Alec had made a mistake but that ultimately Alec is an honest person, something that Magnus noticed of Alec from the start. So when they start talking at the end of 2x20 I think it’s something Magnus had (4/5)

already forgiven Alec for. Which fits with Magnus saying that it was in the past when Alec apologizes again. And so when they get back together, to me, it’s him acknowledging that Alec will always be a shadowhunter and he will always be a warlock but that doesn’t mean that they can’t be together if they both put an effort. Again, sorry if this was a mess I have a hard time putting my thoughts into words that make sense. (5/5)

Well, if I remember correctly (it’s been a few weeks since the podcast, forgive me, @rutherinahobbit and @michellemisfit if I misremember anything) Ruth and Michelle’s argument was that there just wasn’t enough build-up of the Shadowhunter/Downworlder (as it pertains to Alec and Magnus specifically) divide throughout Magnus’s ruminating in the flashbacks to justify Magnus suddenly claiming that the interracial conflict is the reason he’s breaking up with Alec.

Like, they acknowledged that absolutely, that was what the breakup was about, but they felt that the flashbacks themselves (which should have been where we saw his reasoning for the breakup supported) didn’t support that; they were all about building trust, so Magnus claiming it was about the interracial conflict sort of came out of nowhere.

To which my response is that the flashbacks themselves WERE about the interracial conflict. We (the audience) just sort of totally missed it because we were lost in how beautiful and sweet and romantic it all was.

Which, frankly, is some amazingly subtle writing and I know I give the show a lot of (well-deserved) shit for lazy writing but Jamie Gorenberg knocked this one out of the freakin’ ballpark.

It would have been incredibly easy for them to overplay the whole “star crossed lovers/oh! woe! your people hate mine and my people hate yours oh no whatever will we do? alas we can never be together!” angle…but they didn’t. Gorenberg capitalized on the audience’s tendency to view things from Alec’s perspective to completely throw us for a loop when we realize that Magnus wasn’t looking at things the same way.

(for ease of reference, from here on out, I’ll be referring to the flashbacks as Flashback A, B, and C.)

In Flashback A, the difference in their two perspectives is much clearer. As I said, Alec is panicking over someone finding out he stayed the night with a man, while Magnus is concerned about the fact that he’s getting too cozy with a Shadowhunter (and assuming that Alec is running away–at least in part–because Magnus is a Downworlder.) Because we, as an audience, tend to view everything from Alec’s perspective, we sort of handwaved that and assumed it wasn’t important.

Then Flashback B happens. And because we’re viewing it from Alec’s perspective, we’re thinking, “Oh, Magnus is self-conscious about being a warlock, Alec finds it beautiful and is reassuring him, how sweet, Magnus can trust Alec when he’s vulnerable.” Except…that isn’t all that was going on.

Let’s look at that from Magnus’s perspective. Yes, Alec knows he’s a warlock, he’s seen Magnus do magic, but this is the first time Alec has been truly confronted with Magnus’s…otherness. And Alec is a Shadowhunter. Not only a Shadowhunter, but the scion of a family known for hating (and at one point trying to commit genocide against) Downworlders.

Magnus’s concern wasn’t “is Alexander going to be repulsed by my loss of control?” it’s “Is Alec-Lightwood-the-Shadowhunter going to be able to cope with the reality of me being a warlock now that he’s seeing it up close and personal in this very intimate moment?”

I don’t believe I’m just head-canoning this. This was in there, it was just very subtly dealt with, and it may have been filmed deliberately to lead us to assume the issue is one thing while it was actually another.

In Flashback C, we get a moment where again, you see that Alec knows Magnus is a warlock and accepts that. He asks Magnus what scares him and Magnus gives him an answer that leads Alec–and the audience–to assume that what frightens Magnus is that he’ll lose Alec.

Except that both of the previous flashbacks show Magnus bracing himself for the Shadowhunter/Downworlder conflict to be the issue that makes them not work.

So when Magnus says “you asked me what my greatest fear is. It’s this.” he’s not saying his greatest fear is losing Alec. He’s saying he’s feared all along that he’ll lose Alec because the Shadowhunter/Downworlder conflict pulls them apart.

See, again, the audience tends to see things from Alec’s POV. And Alec has all along naively believed that if they just love each other hard enough, it will be enough to overcome that. Thus, so have we all.

I think we see that in 2x10, when he choses to tell Magnus that he loves him right after hearing from Victor Aldertree how Shadowhunters and Downworlders can never be together. Alec makes a deliberate choice to reject that sort of thinking and simply love harder.

And I think for a while, Magnus wants to believe that’s possible as well. But then 2x12  happens. Magnus had started to believe they could love hard enough to overcome their issues right up until the moment when he said “If you love me, you have to believe me” and Alec…doesn’t. 

That’s when Magnus starts to lose faith in them.

2x13 is salt in that wound, but when Alec apologizes, Magnus accepts it and tries to get his faith back. But then in 2x14 we see a moment when Magnus feels like Alec is rejecting him (or at least his support) because he’s a warlock. He tries to go along with it, he even overcompensates, putting a happy face on and acting as cheerleader for Alec’s Downworld Cabinet plan.

In 2x15 once again, we see Magnus back to fearing Alec is going to reject him for being a warlock. It’s not just that he killed his stepfather, it’s that he killed his stepfather with his magic. Alec is a Shadowhunter; Alec is duty-bound to punish Downworlders who harm mundanes. Alec is once again confronted by the reality of Magnus being a warlock (but even so, he tries to make excuses for it) and ultimately accepts rather than rejects Magnus.

Think about how that must have messed with Magnus’s head. On one hand, you have Alec very adamantly sending him the message over and over that they can overcome the pressures of the Shadowhunter/Downworlder dynamic, they can reconcile their disparate situations and bring their people together, but on the other hand, you have Alec repeatedly blundering in ways that make it harder for Magnus to trust him.

As lovely as the dinner date scene in 2x17 was, there always seemed something stilted about the way Magnus was behaving. We all know why Alec was being shifty, of course, but I know when I saw the sneak peek of that scene, I wasn’t alone in thinking “oh, shit, Magnus already knows about the Soul Sword, he’s laying a trap for Alec to walk into” because the way Magnus spoke about trust and transparency was just so…pointed.

Clearly, I was wrong about Magnus offering Alec enough rope to hang himself, but the weird emphasis with which he assures Alec that he defended Alec to the Seelie Queen stays with me, and in retrospect, I wonder if wasn’t a case of Magnus protesting too much? “Look how I defended you and your initiatives! See? I still have faith in us!”

Except…he doesn’t. He’s trying to, he’s trying the old “fake it ‘til you make it” approach, but he can’t quite pull it off.

There’s been a lot of speculation about what happened between the moment in Magnus’s loft when Luke told him about Cleophas’s fire message and the moment he knocked on Alec’s door, because clearly between those moments, Magnus realized that yes, Alec had lied about the Soul Sword. I think what happened was that Magnus accepted that his faith in them was broken and he couldn’t pretend anymore.

In light of this, I think what sort of comes out of nowhere is Magnus’s decision to reconcile with Alec at the end of 2x20. When and how did he get that faith back? I still don’t know, and I’m hoping what season 3 will show us is that Magnus and Alec are moving forward less on blind faith that it will all work out if they just love hard enough and more on determination that if they acknowledge and deal with those issues, rather than just closing their eyes and pretending it doesn’t matter, then they won’t have to chose between being together and loyalty to their people. I hope.

I cannot be the only one who is absolutely fucking furious at the ending???????????? I've been looking and everyone seems to be happy with this. I am not. I cannot believe the angels would be so harsh to Clary after she’s been a shadowhunter FOR THREE FUCKING MONTHS and there was no one to guide her with this rune power and she used it to end Jonathan. For them to completely take away her angel blood. It’s beyond anything I can believe. If the angels are capable of this, are they really the good guys? And if they aren’t the good guys, what’s the fucking point of any of it? If the angels aren’t the good guys, what is the point of the shadowhunters at all? Why would anyone want to be part of this world then? If Clary’s entire arc was to enter the shadow world, completely fuck everything up for everyone, and then get banished from it, what was the fucking point of the entire show???? Honestly, fuck the angels for this. Maybe Valentine had a point. I’m so fucking angry. 

Everything else about the finale was amazing. I loved literally everything else about it. The boop boop was my favorite thing in the entire episode. But this little plot point of her losing the shadow world because the angels are assholes - I can’t deal with that. They could have done the exact same thing for some other reason and I would have been ok with it. But to turn the entire lore sideways? I’m not here for it. I can’t even be happy about the rest of the stuff because I'm so furious about this. I need to process my thoughts about it and come back to it but I'm in such a foul mood now. 

I have some theories about how malec mortality/immortality will go next ep. I really hope they make Alec immortal somehow and that’s how it will go, but I don’t know. They’ve been hinting at a lot of immortality stuff, but they may not go that route.

I’m worried what will happen is they’ll go to Edom to save Magnus, and Lorenzo will decide to stay and rule in Edom, but Magnus will have to give Lorenzo his magic to keep the rift closed after they leave. So then Magnus will be mortal again. I know this could make sense narratively after what Magnus has been through but I hope they don’t go there. 

My other theory is that they’ll leave it open ended somehow - like Magnus will still have his immortality, and at the end of the episode there will be an option for Magnus to become mortal and an option for Alec to gain immortality but they won’t tell us which one happens. I really hope they don’t do this.