Prep Process - The Immortal Cup: Clary Fray (#2)
So I’ve been thinking further on Clary’s origins, her ancestry and how she felt about it.
I’ve decided to make her mixed race with Jocelyn being black and Valentine white purely because, as I mentioned in my previous Clary post, I really feel way to iffy about writing a black dude with a blood supremacy-like mindset, no matter how many twists I’ll put in that story (and there will be). I believe this story can be written, but really I don’t think I’m the author who should do it…so mixed race Clary (and Jace) it is.
Now the thing is, I’ve headcanonned the Fairchild family as being one of the oldest lines in Idris pretty much from the beginning, and I don’t feel like changing that, but combined with having Clary as a young black american who lives in a time where #BlackOut only just happened (I settled on the summer of 2015 for the start of TIC fairly early on in the re-planning draft) it does bring some interesting questions.
I’ve always thought of Jocelyn as someone who thinks of herself as a Shadowhunter first and foremost, and who built her identity around that and her identity as a Fairchild. To me, it was always very clear that the first Fairchild ancestor was a French man who had fairy blood from way back and that, if pressed to give an identity related to the human world, Jocelyn would say she was French and leave it at that…which means that, when explaining her ancestry to Clary, Jo would go ‘I’m French, your father is/was German’ and possibly not think about it all that much.
For Clary however, the topic of where she comes from has always been a sore point-she doesn’t know anyone in Jo or Luke’s family (not even through pictures), has little to no idea about their lives pre-New York other than that they were involved in a gang* then ran away, and has ben raised with the idea that the three of them might need to leave everything behind one day, which isn’t conductive to digging your roots deep into any kind of life.
And the thing is, as a biracial girl, that sense of missing would be multiplicated first by the numerous miccroaggressive questions of the “were are you from” variety, but also in some ways by her participation in black american culture. By which I mean that (and this is where black american readers are absolutely welcome to jump in if something seems off sensitivity-wise) I think part of her would possibly feel some distance between herself and the parts of the culture that are about reclaiming african heritage, because Clary doesn’t have that-or rather, it’s been so long since her family at large left Africa** that the heritage has been lost almost entirely).
And I think a part of her (I have yet to determine how large a part of her) would be frustrated with her mother’s insistance that she’s “a black american girl with French and German roots” because she’d se her friends and other members of the black community reclaiming african heritages/getting informed on the history of slavery through their identity as black USians and she’d be unable to fully identify with that because it’s not really her story.
I’m not sure yet how I’ll handle this exactly, but this is something I think about because the topic of identity and self-identification is something that plays a big role in Clary’s overaching arc and in Jace’s*** and I think this is the sort of things that would come up between them if only in touches, you know? Even if it’s ‘just’ a couple of short exchanges.
If any black follower would like to chime in on this, I’d be happy to listen to what you have to say because these questions are kind of central to Clary’s potential development and the rewrite so. Of course, feedback from black folks from the US is particularly appreciated but honestly, I think any black person who doesn’t live in a country with a (recognized) black majority can have valuable feedback so. Yeah. Feel free to chime in any time :)
*It’s a bit of an unfortunate development of making Clary biracial but that’s just about the only thing I can come up with for Jo to prepare Clary to a possible reunion with the Shadow World while still not talking directly about said world.
**I’m thinking Ethiopian, not that it’s likely to have much influence on the story at all but I figure it doesn’t hurt to know that.
***I’ll need to do a post about him, aren’t I? He’s one of the characters I’m changing the most after all.