some princes don't become kings.

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.

Hm. I mean there is so much more Ty POV in Last Prince of Hell, it's hard for me to say whether people will find his thoughts in TLKOF surprising — and of course his thoughts are not only about Kit. But part of the reason I stayed out of Ty's POV in TLKOF is precisely because I didn't want readers to fully know how he felt about Kit outside of interpreting the way Ty speaks and responds to Kit, just like Kit has to do. He does think about the reason Kit provided the Herondale pendant to him and I don't know if that matches up with what people would expect?

I was wondering, since Ash is the only protagonist of twp whom we haven't really properly met yet (unlike kit, Ty and dru whom we got to know pretty well in tea), I was wondering how would you introduce him in order to get people excited about his character? I see a lot of people hating on him which is crazy to me but I can understand those who are mainly indifferent to him since we haven't seen much of ash yet. Maybe you can share something nonspoilery to give us a better feeling about him?

Okay, first, if you want one fun thing about Ash, I'll give you a quote from my Italian translator. "I love how you can never tell where he stands. I love that he loathes lies, and yet must lie all the time. I love that he can be such a TEENAGER (affectionate)." That made me laugh, he's definitely no less teenagery than the other characters, as even when you are immortal and eighteen, you are still eighteen.

Second, I wouldn't worry about people hating Ash. They don't know him. There's nothing to hate but potential, just as there's nothing to love but potential. We've actually spent so little time with him! He's still a mystery.

One thing I've learned over the years is that readers can be enormously protective of the characters they already love in a way that often expresses itself as suspicion of the new. I remember when The Infernal Devices was announced, how much people absolutely hated the idea of Will, Tessa, and Jem. They despised them. Because they wanted more Jace and Clary. Will, Jem and Tessa were the new characters, and to some readers they felt like they were taking the place of characters they were already invested in, even if they didn't exist in the same time period. Will was a Herondale, so he was hated because he might replace Jace; Jem was hated for replacing Alec (a Herondale's parabatai) and Tessa was hated for replacing Clary.

At the time, it really freaked me out, but many years have passed since, and I have seen this happen so many times I am inured to it. I have learned that it is impossible to know how you (my readers and everyone else!) will feel about a character you have not yet met in the same way it is impossible to imagine a new color or a new geometric shape being introduced to your world.

Protective love for the characters you do know often turns into a kind of terror that a new character will take space from them — like the fear Ash will take space from Kit and Ty. He doesn't. If he wasn't in the book, and Dru wasn't in the book, it would just be a shorter book. There wouldn't be more Kit and Ty because without Dru and Ash, there would just be much much less for them to do, much less for them to feel, and much less opportunity for us to know them better.

(It's interesting because some of the people who are scared of Ash taking up space ask whether Kit will spend a lot of his time thinking about his bio-dad, his bio-mom, Jem and Tessa and Mina, Jace and Auraline. Even though Kit spending a lot of time thinking about them would, in fact, technically remove time from pondering Ty. It's just that it would add to our understanding of Kit, which adds weight to who he is and how fully characterized he and Ty are. People know that; they know Kit and Ty are in fact only compelling if they are fully realized characters with other interests besides each other. Ash's existence does the same thing in terms of adding weight, but it is not something people can yet picture, so the idea of Kit thinking about long-dead Auraline is less unimaginable than him thinking about his complex relationship with a potential rival for the Faerie throne he may or may not want, even though the second one is a lot more signifiant to who he is now.)

Looking back at TID, it's almost impossible even for me to imagine people hating Will and Jem as "nothing characters, boring and blah", because we know those characters so well and most people do not find them to be any of those things. Once you've spent hundreds of pages with someone, they stop being "the replacement" who might suck in a variety of imaginary ways, and just become themselves. That's one of the lovely things about fiction: you can't really know whether you'll love or hate a character until you've actually gotten to know them so you can always be surprised. Before that, the character is mostly an idea. The Wicked Powers is really the first time readers will get to spend time with Ash, and I'm excited for people to meet him properly and decide what they think of him, rather than the idea of him.

Keep in mind Kit isn't just mad at Ty — they are mad at each other! That said, I don't think Kit is ever really "over it" at the end of Queen of Air and Darkness. He's just in a different emotional place than he was earlier in the book.

What might look like "being less resentful" is in part resignation. Kit is to some extent resigned at the end of QoAaD; he leaves believing that's probably the end of his and Ty's story. He'll miss Ty, eventually he'll stop missing him so much, and life will move on.

The problem is... it doesn't.

His feelings for Ty don't get smaller. They don't fade into the background the way he imagined they would. So the hurt doesn't disappear either. If anything, there's something especially painful about realizing that time isn't fixing what you thought time would fix, and that doesn't make Kit less angry in the end, it makes him more angry.

So I wouldn't say Kit's anger disappeared and then came back. I'd say the hurt never really went away. As he realizes that Ty still matters to him just as much as he always did, it's only natural that some of those feelings would, as you said, "redirect some of his insecurity and hurt into anger." Love and anger are often much closer together than we'd like to admit, given that they are both intense feelings. If he'd forgiven and forgotten Ty there wouldn't be much coming back from that — he'd just be indifferent to him.

And it's not that he's just mad about being hurt. He's mad because what Ty did put Ty in terrible danger, Kit was warned about that, and he's furious that Ty didn't care about his own life as much as Kit did. I'll give you a little of what Kit thinks himself in TWP:

Love your books and I cannot wait to read the last king of faerie!!!

Super excited for November!!

We do not see Anush in TKLOF though he gets a mention.

As for Kit being jealous—jealousy isn't inherently a bad emotion. Lots of people feel jealous sometimes. What matters is what you do with it. If jealousy leads you to try to control someone, isolate them from their friends, or punish them for having other relationships, that's unhealthy. But noticing that you're feeling insecure or even feeling "man I hope this person isn't dating anyone" is really normal. (Yearning for someone you can't have because they're in love with someone else, also normal and not evil! I would categorize it as "stuff people have to work through.")

When people aren't sure where they stand with each other, it's natural for those kinds of worries to be stronger. Kit and Ty are figuring out where they stand with each other, and maybe what you're thinking is that uncertainty tends to leave more room for fretting or jealousy than relationships where people feel secure and trust they're not going to lose each other? Because that's certainly true, and sometimes you have to pass through the first before you get to the second.

My question is: Will Kit ever find out what his mother was like? I mean something beyond just descriptions—perhaps a photograph?

I’m also curious about Kit’s opinion of his mother. It feels like, considering all the sacrifices Rosemary made for him, Kit doesn't really know much about her; he doesn't even own anything that belonged to her—nothing to keep her present in his daily life (except for the heron necklace, but Ty has that, not Kit). It's like Rosemary’s presence in Kit’s life has been somewhat sidelined, which I find a bit sad. Will we see him thinking or talking about her in TLKoF?

Thanks for your answer! ♡

Hi! ❤️

As of right now what Kit's relationship to Rosemary's memory will look like in TWP seems a bit spoilery! — but it's an interesting question (though indeed when you are in a fantasy adventure and always running you don't get to introspect as much as you might like.)

Rosemary’s story intersects with Jem’s, and with Tessa’s — they only go looking for Kit when Rosemary dies, and they don’t immediately tell him about her because it would be devastating to find out your mother had been alive without you knowing and then died extremely recently. At that point Kit is not ready to hear it. It becomes clear in TWP though that they've discussed Rosemary with Kit and he is aware of her story.

It's worth keeping in mind that these are Kit's own thoughts regarding his mother, before he really finds out much about Rosemary. "Maybe there was something wrong with him, Kit thought as he followed Alec into the hallway. Maybe he didn’t have the right kind of feelings. He’d never wondered that much about his mother, who she was: Wouldn’t someone who knew how to feel properly wonder that?"

So in some sense the issue is what Kit thinks of his own emotional capabilities. It is clear to us he doesn't have the "right kind of feelings" because that would be too painful. And that becomes more complex for him when he learns the story of his mother. The fact that she sacrificed herself for him would make him more likely to want to hold his feelings at a distance, not more likely to want a photograph or a keepsake. She is also tied up in his mind with him being the Heir which he hates and regards as something that has almost ruined his life.

We do know now that he has blurry memories of her singing to him. But that isn't the same as knowing her. What Kit would be mourning, if he let himself really mourn Rosemary, isn't the loss of someone he remembers. It's the loss of the chance to ever know her at all. For someone in that position, being surrounded by reminders of a life that barely intersected with their own might be comforting, or it might simply emphasize what was lost before it could ever exist.

“It's like Rosemary’s presence in Kit’s life has been somewhat sidelined, which I find a bit sad.”

You’re not wrong; it is sad, and that's okay, because the situation is sad in a way that cannot be undone. Tessa cannot have Will back. Will could not have Jem back. Julian can't have Livvy back. Jocelyn never got her son back. The Merry Thieves don't get Christopher back. And Kit does not get to have a life with Rosemary in it. That is one of the recurring themes throughout the Shadowhunter books when sad things happen and cannot be reversed. The question the books keep asking isn't, "How can this be fixed and made not sad?" It's, "How do we go on after loss and how do we understand that it can be part of our history without becoming our entire present? How can we understand that moving on is not a wrong done to the people we lost but is rather what they would want for us? How do we understand that acceptance is not erasure, and how do we, as Shadowhunters, keep doing what needs to be done instead of being ourselves undone by sadness?”

These are all things that Kit needs to think about and has deliberately not thought about. Rosemary’s presence is minimized in Kit’s life because he never really knew her and he doesn't want to think about her or really about Johnny either. Whether he can keep all that up without cracking is the part that seems spoilery.

I would address one thing about the heron pendant, though, because I think it's interesting that people might look at him giving it to Ty as him sidelining Rosemary. I think about it the opposite way (and this does come up in TWP) — Kit’s mother’s legacy was one of sacrificial and protective love. Kit has given this necklace to Ty as a gesture of protective love. Ty having that pendant is the thing — the first thing in TWP — that Kit thinks of as connecting him to his bio-mom. When he sees Ty with the necklace, he thinks that his mother protected him and in turn he has honored that legacy by giving something that symbolizes her to the person he most wants to protect. He thinks she would be pleased. It's pretty much the only thing he's let himself think about as regards her. So I think of it as connecting him to Rosemary rather than putting her aside.

What is Kit’s fighting style like in twp? Is it unique due to his upbringing so maybe he adds a little of his own tricks?