Trigger warning: this is the chapter with a rape attempt in it. 

Methodically and carefully Clary was tearing Jace’s room apart.

So, this is a pet peeve of mine.  Technically, “was tearing” is perfectly acceptable.  It’s not passive voice, and it’s grammatically correct.  But…it’s annoying.  What’s wrong with just saying that she “tore” is room apart?  The only time you really need to use past progressive like that is time is a factor.  As in, the action in question gets interrupted, or something else happens at the same time, and therefore it’s necessary to specify that the past action was continuous.  And yet I see past progressive tense all over the place.  In fact, I do it myself.  I’m not quite sure why, it’s just one of those things that slips out and then you look at it going “why did I write that?”

I get the feeling this author has never actually gone through her own writing with an eye to those kinds of edits.

She was still in her tank top, though she’d pulled on a pair of jeans; her hair was scraped behind her head in a messy bun, and her nails were powdered with dust.

It’s vital that we know what Clary looks like in this scene.  Because…reasons.

She was lifting the mattress off the bed, searching the space between it and the box springs, when a knock came on the door.

Now that is a proper use of the past progressive.

Anyway, yeah, Clary’s looking for her ring because she’s a moron and doesn’t realize that Jonathan has it.  Speaking of Jonathan, he shows up and wants her to wear a sexy red dress for some ceremony that’s happening tonight.  I’d probably let this slide if we didn’t have a full description of people’s clothing at least twice a chapter, but as it stands…yeah, get over the clothes already, book.

So after Jonathan goes to get ready, and after she’s already torn up Jace’s room, she finally goes over to his room and finds her stupid ring in the first place she looks.  Oh, sorry, the second place she looks.  First she has to look through all his clothes for some reason and name drop a few brands.

Clary uses the ring to catch Simon up on the plot, but Jonathan comes in and catches her.  Jonathan taunts her by saying that he knew what the ring was the whole time, and also he’s been using it to talk to the Fairy Queen so they could plan being evil together.  Jonathan tells her she should join them for real, because he’s convinced that he’s doing the right thing still.  And then there’s a whole lot of really creepy talk.  He points out that he and Jace are connected to the point where he can feel it every time Jace is with Clary…and he disturbingly likes that.

A soft explosion went off in her head, like a dull firework of rage.

A dull firework, guys.  Isn’t that just so…underwhelming?

Clary realizes that she can’t let Jonathan keep the ring, because the Queen was eavesdropping on the last conversation and learned about Simon’s new sword.  So she steals it and steps on it.  Because…yeah, that’ll totally break a ring?  Step on it in a carpeted room? 

the gold smashing to powder.

???

Well, whatever, seems it works this time and then Clary steals a stele and flees.  She runs to the one wall that can be used as a door and draws a rune on it before Jonathan catches up to her.  They fight in the living room, bantering all the while.  Jonathan says he knew Clary would “betray” him, and I’m just wondering why he ever thought she wouldn’t.  I mean, if he were shown as more desperate for familial attention rather than creepily attached to Clary…I guess it could work.  Not on the timeline we’ve got, but eventually.  And then he accuses her of sleeping with Jace and says that he’d be a better screw than Jace could be, and then there’s a fuckton of incest talk.  There’s a lot of talk about how she “belongs” to him and he plans to show it through fucking her.

There’s a lot of fighting and…if I weren’t drunk right now, it would be disturbing.  It’s clear that this is the author’s pet issue.  Earlier in the book, Clary was fighting like a ninja on speed, and here she’s fighting like a normal person, with lots of scrambling and scratching and shoving and hitting him with random objects.  It’s a really obvious shift from what we saw earlier, which makes it almost seem like it’s from a different book. 

Clary manages to fight him off by stabbing him with a shard of glass, but stops just before actually killing him with it.  He taunts her, dares her to kill him, and then she does stab him but it’s a cliffhanger so we don’t know where.

Okay, so, I’m not going to get into all the ways this author did rape wrong, because that’ll come in the last two chapters with the fall out.  Or lack of a fall out.  For the moment, I want to talk about the meta problems of including a rape attempt like this in the novel.  Now, others before me have already talked about how one shouldn’t need to use rape as a shorthand for “bad guy” and about how it’s just a terrible reason to include something like this, because we hardly need anything at this point to remind us that Jonathan is bad.  He’s trying to summon demons and take over the world, we’re already on the “he’s a bad guy” train.

I would like to take a moment going off on a slightly different train and argue that it’s damaging to paint rapists as evil.  No, really, hear me out.  Part of the problem with rape is that we’ve painted this image of a rapist in our culture.  We imagine him to be cruel, heartless, conniving, evil, and sadistic.  Here’s the problem with that: no one wants to admit to being associated with a monster.  So if someone comes forward and says “your neighbor raped me” or “your best friend raped me,” the automatic reaction is “that can’t be true, because my best neighbor friend isn’t completely soulless and evil.  Why, just last week we passed a puppy, and he didn’t even think about kicking it!”

Nice people can rape you.  Pillars of the community can rape you.  Loving spouses can rape you.  People who volunteer at a soup kitchen can rape you.   I’m not saying this to scare people into thinking that rapists are waiting around every corner.  I’m not trying to make you paranoid.  I’m trying to make the point that rape is a horrifying act, but it’s also a complex issue and we need to keep an open mind about it.  We need to be able to look at rapists and not think of them as irredeemable, because once we do that, we’re more likely to entertain the idea that people we like probably did a very bad thing.

Let me paint this a different way.  Imagine for a moment that you are a teenage girl.  Imagine that you’re going out with a really swell guy, and he wants to have sex but you don’t.  One night, at a party, you’ve had a few too many of your first beers.  He takes you outside for “some fresh air” and starts kissing you.  Then he starts doing more.  You say no, you try and push him off, but you’re too drunk to really put any heat behind it.  He doesn’t force you, but he doesn’t back off either.  He keeps saying stuff like “I love you” and “if you really liked me, you’d do this.”  He’s persistent.  He doesn’t rip your pants off, but he doesn’t let you escape either.  You’re tipsy, you’re confused, you’re feeling sick, and you’re also a little scared of how insistent he is.  You wonder if he’s going to get more forceful if you keep saying no.  Eventually, you give in, and the two of you have sex.  The next day, you’re not sure what to think.  You’re not sure if you should call it rape or not.  After all, you still like this guy, and he did say he loves you, and he didn’t force you, right?

But it still gnaws at you.  You go through the next few days scared, uncertain, and withdrawn.  You can’t process what happened to you, because you have no idea what happened to you.  Part of you wants to call it rape, but another part of you is too scared to do that.  As a distraction, you read this book.  You get to the part where Clary is almost raped, and you think to yourself “Well, my boyfriend isn’t evil.  Only evil people like Jonathan rape girls.  Look, the two words are practically synonymous!  So I must not have been raped.  I was probably just asking for it.”

That is why we shouldn’t paint rapists as evil.  Not because they’re actually “just victims” or “couldn’t help it,” but because it’s such a stark and limiting way to view what is actually an extremely complex issue.  Rapists are people who did bad things.  Very, very bad things.  But they aren’t one-dimensional cartoon villains and we need to get rid of that cultural image and accept that our friends/neighbors/coworkers/SOs/puppy-lovers/etc can do bad things.  Anyone can do bad things.

And “rape” should never be used as a shorthand for “evil.”  Save that shit for the demon-summoning story line.

—

The angel summoning team are driving back to New York when Simon gets a call from Clary over the rings.  Apparently Clary has decided that the Lilith-summoning ceremony is going to happen tonight, despite only being told that there’s some sort of ceremony going on.  Of course she’s right, because no one in these books are allowed to be wrong, but it still annoys me.  She gives him as much info as she can on the location and they hope Magnus can figure it out.

How convenient that she found her ring just two hours before the ceremony is due to happen.  Now we can have a big dramatic race to get there in time, rather than having this sort of shit happen earlier where it might have gotten in the way of teenaged makeouts.

Then they get cut off, because back in the other plot, Jonathan found Clary.  They all pull over to the side of the road so that Simon can tell the others what happened.  Oh, wait, no, Magnus decides that they need to speed over to the shoulder and slam to a stop before they talk, because…reasons?

Simon catches them up on what’s going on, and Magnus knows about the seventh sacred site (where the ceremony is).

“Everything has an alliance, Simon. The alliance of the Nephilim is seraphic, but if it were demonic, they’d still be as strong, as powerful as they are now. But they would be dedicated to the eradication of mankind instead of its salvation.”

First, City of Glass made it pretty clear that they’ve got shitty powers that don’t amount to anything.  Second, are you telling me that shadowhunters only currently protect humans because of some alliance bullshit, whatever that is?  They don’t really have free will, they didn’t decide to adopt that as a cultural value, they didn’t come to any personal decisions about having great power and great responsibility and deciding to take that on?  Basically the only thing making the good guys good is mind control?

And what about Valentine?  He didn’t have any demon blood in him; he was just as much “seraphic” as anyone in this story, but he sure as shit fucked stuff up.  So are these alliances…optional once they apply to humans?  Can someone be turned into a “dark” shadowhunter and then decide “LOLNOPE, I don’t actually want to kill all humans, I’m going to go hunt demons instead”?

Book, did you put any thought at all into this?

(And when has any shadowhunter in this book ever given two shits about the “salvation” of mankind?)

Apparently everyone wants to go to Ireland except Magnus, because he doesn’t know what kind of odds they’ll be up against.  Magnus, do you have an alternate suggestion that doesn’t involve sitting around and whining?  …no, you’re just going to sit around and say “it’s too hard”?  Come on, the answer is obvious.  Portal to Idris/Maryse, tell them what’s going on, portal to Ireland with all the rest of the hunters in hand, and save the world.  No one said it has to just be you four.  Hell, if the Clave is too fractious to get it done by the deadline, just go talk to Luke and get him to lend you a few werewolves.  Apparently they’re the only group that ever gets shit done in this world anyway.

Oh, look, after several pages of just straight-up whining about how hard things will be, they finally decide to go get some fucking help.  They all split up to talk to different people and agree to meet back together in an hour.