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everything bitch don’t act stupid

hey cassie, instead of getting a spoiler or snippet, can you maybe post 3 words or 3 emojis to describe thomas/alastair’s relationship at the end of coi? i love them so much and can’t wait to read more about their development/relationship!

are you already working on chain of thorns? do you have outlines of an outcome you want for tlh yet? i am so excited for chain of iron and fairstairs already!!

My my, Fairstairs. I sense a fight brewing. *hides in bunker* I do know how TLH ends, and I have an outline for Chain of Thorns even though currently I’m working on Sword Catcher. I tend to always outline trilogies before they’re started — I like to know where I’m headed!

Hi Cassie !! I absolutely loved chain of gold and can I tell you the book destroyed me ! Desperately waiting for chain of iron !! Could you tell us if we get a james scene where he is jealous of Matthew and cordelia's closeness or could you give us a snippet of jordelia please . I'm utter trash for them !♥️

I can’t answer the jealousy bit or not — too spoilery! — but have a bit of Jordelia. It’s been a day. ;)

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James closed his eyes. Against the back of his eyelids, he could see the city take shape—the minarets flung darkly against a blue sky, the silver river. Cordelia’s voice, low and familiar, rose above the clamor of his nightmare. He followed it out of the darkness, like Theseus following the length of thread out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth.

And it was not the first time. Her voice had lifted him out of fever, once, had been his light in shadows. . . .

A sharp pain spiked through his temples. He blinked his eyes open: he was firmly back in the present, his friends all looking at him worriedly. Cordelia had already moved away from him, leaving behind the lingering scent of jasmine. He could still feel where her fingers had rested against his shoulder.

Hey Cassie! Will we have sexy times in COI? As in like more than just a kiss, if you know what I mean 😏 XD

There’s a lot of kissing between various couples. There’s definitely some hotter action, and I would say the most wild sexy business is had by Anna and Ariadne. 

Hey Cassie! I love Cordelia and her connection to her Persian Middle Eastern roots. I was wondering if we would ever see something similar and have a Muslim character? Thank you for all the representation you put in you books it’s really nice to see yourself represented in a character. ❤️

I’m glad you like Cordelia! A great deal of love and research went into her and Alastair. :) 

I recognize it may be frustrating for some readers to encounter a Persian/Iranian character who isn’t Muslim. I’ve written about this before here. Unfortunately, Cordelia and her family can’t be Muslim, just as Cristina couldn’t be Catholic, Will can’t be Church of England, Jem can’t be Buddhist, etc. Shadowhunters have their own religion. It’s part of what binds them together, and it’s also necessary — both to the characters, and to the concept of Shadowhunters at all. They believe all the stories are true, because I realized early on in the creation of this world that they couldn’t participate in mundane/human religions. There was no way to have the Shadowhunters be of a religion that actually exists in our world; that shut too many people out of being Shadowhunters, and made the books essentially an embrace of one religion over others. Nor could they all follow different real-life religions, without a constant ugly argument over the source of their magic — i.e. what kind of angel is Raziel? What religion does he represent? What religion does all this power they have come from? What is heaven, what are angels, what’s after death — for the Shadowhunters to function as a demon-fighting group, they need to share core beliefs about what demons and angels are. I gave them a religion that didn’t correspond to a real-life religion because I wanted to forstall that kind of infighting, both on the page and off it.

Cordelia and Alastair do come from a Muslim-majority country. But they are not Muslim. They are Shadowhunters. Cristina comes from a majority-Catholic country, but is not Catholic. She is a Shadowhunter. (There are also, of course, many non-Muslim Iranians; I knew many growing up, as my parents retained a lot of the friends they had made in Iran. Some were Jewish, some Zoroastrian, some Baháʼí. Part of what I love about Iran is that it is a tapestry of incredible history and different cultures; it’s definitely not a monolith!) This is a fundamental part of the Shadowhunter books’ world-building that has existed since the first book.

Fundamentally, Shadowhunters hold beliefs that contradict those held by every real-world religion I’m aware of. They can’t be meshed in with existing religions without compromising the tenets of those religions and I believe it is more offensive to present a warped or halfway version of a real religion than simply to say that the characters you’re writing do not practice that religion at all. This is in part why I am writing Sword Catcher, because its magic system is based on Jewish mythology — something I can’t do in the Shadowhunter books, though Judaism is my own religion. 

Cordelia is a woman of color, she is biracial, she is Middle Eastern in her heritage. But she is not Muslim. I understand that Cordelia and Alastair not being Muslim means some readers will have trouble relating to them; but this was a world-building decision made long before Cordelia and Alastair were invented. I needed to present all religions, all mythology as equal, without any religion being the “only” one Shadowhunters can practice. If that means you don’t want to read about the Carstairs, I understand, and can recommend some wonderful books based on Islam-inflected fantasy instead, like Saladin Ahmed’s Throne of the Crescent Moon. However, this is not a new piece of information about Shadowhunters, or the way their world works. 

I believe Islam to be a beautiful, deeply felt and peaceful religion, and while I cannot write Muslim (or Jewish or Christian or Hindu) Shadowhunters, there certainly is nothing that says there cannot be Muslim Downworlders, sighted mundanes, etc. (I have written other Muslim characters, like the Reyjavis in Magisterium, who are observant.) 

I will say only one other thing, which is that I’ve received some pretty anti-Semitic asks about this specific issue of religion. I’m answering this ask because I won’t reply to asks that contain anti-Jewish content (and I will block the sender). Or asks that just say “you suck” or “Cordelia and Alastair are bad” because yeah. I mean, why bother. As a member of a minority religion myself, I can say I’ve grappled with how to respect and uplift my rarely-depicted-in-fantasy religion in these books while also making clear that all other religions are regarded equally as “all true.” (Simon, for instance, is Jewish while he is a mundane, and after he becomes a Shadowhunter, must struggle with how to reconcile his Judaism with his new beliefs which run contrary to the religion he was raised in. That is however unique to someone in Simon’s situation, and I wouldn’t feel qualified to write a character who must decide whether to discard their Muslim or Catholic heritage in order to be a Shadowhunter.)

I do not believe the people writing/and or sending me anti-Semitic comments represent my sincere Muslim readers. There are, however, kinds of anti-Semitism that are coded into certain language (especially discussing “greed”, “control of media”, “clannishness”, using the word “Zionist” instead of “Jewish”, and suggesting I must disrespect Islam or Christianity specifically because I am Jewish) that people may not always recognize for what it is. It is of course always fine to critique representation and how it’s done. (There is no such thing as perfect rep; it’s generally always going to be flawed, even if it’s something as small as a spelling error.) I would only urge not attacking the religion or ethnicity of a writer in doing so. 

Hi Cassie, I had a question that a few people were wondering about the Carstairs siblings: do Cordelia and Alastair have Persian names or is that something that wouldn't really be possible in Edwardian times etc? Love your writing so much!

They do both have Persian names that function as their middle names; we find those out in Chain of Iron.

Hi Cassie!! I absolutely love Lucie’s and Cordelia’s relationship. Are the able to officially become parabatai in chain of iron?

That seems like a pretty big spoiler — all I can say is that they continue to work toward being parabatai, including of course training together, but they are both keeping secrets and the pressure of that does affect their relationship.