These Books Are My Ride Or Die ❤️‍🔥

"I don't care what Nora says, Andrew heals!!!" Ok but where did she say he doesn't??? I see people complaining about "Andrew not healing" all the time. Please point me to where she says that because there are several times she talks about him getting better.

(If anybody says it's because Andrew and Neil don't say I love you, get married, or have kids I'm going to scream. Which I know is probably the reason but can we please use our brains and think beyond the stereotypical story of healing)

There’s only so many times someone can get burned before they just wanna give up. After a while it’s easier to just stop feeling or try to stop feeling (by suppressing) then to once again open yourself up to people only to be destroyed all over again

HERE'S MY HOT TAKE - Andrew Joseph Minyard does in fact care!

People who say Andrew honestly doesn't care about being included or wanted or appreciated or whatever in my opinion are misunderstanding Andrew.

What "doesn't care" really means for Andrew and people who adopt the same defense mechanism, is that he's actively choosing to take all his cares and wants and shoving them in a box labeled "Warning: Hazardous Emotions - Do Not Engage" and ignoring them with masterful levels of denial and obfuscation. But that doesn't mean the feelings go away. It just means he's suppressing them. Repressing them, even.

And yeah, even if he does start to get accepted and wanted and included by the other Foxes of whomever else (especially for being good at Exy), that doesn't mean Andrew will open the fucking box. He's no fool, he knows what happens when the rug gets pulled out from under you. How devastating that is. How earth shattering. Sure, they include him now. But that shits conditional, and he's never been good fitting into those.

Andrew does care, you guys. Just very very very deep down, and he's still trying to dig that shit deeper (on the off chance there's an endless chasm in there some where for those wantings to shrivel up and die. Alas, emotions don't work that way, but it wont stop him from trying)

It's not genuine lack of caring. It is the active repression of care. Not the same, your honor.

And sure, that level of commitment to Not Wanting and thus Not Caring does translate to steadfast dismissal and rejection of inclusion and whatnot, but that shit stems from not being willing to take a chance. Fool me once, twice, thrice - Never Again. Reject you first and you can't reject me later, checkmate bitches.

Andrew opened that box for Neil, but not wholly intentionally. Word of God (Nora) says that shit was an accident, and he resigned himself to the open box of his Feelings after Baltimore. Word of God also says if Neil had died then That Was It. Tea candle in a dark room blown out, total darkness type shit.

Andrew does care, he just tries really fucking hard not to think about it, and even harder not to act on it, in every case except one.

But the best part? He still fucking fails. Aaron, Nicky, Kevin, Renee, Bee, Wymack? Fuck, even Sir Fat Cat McCatterson and King Fluffkins. Very hard to keep the Box Closed, turns out. Shit keeps leaking. People keep sticking their goddamn fingers in. Turns out he can't fucking read his own signs. Fuck.

Andrew does care. He just does so silently, and with great reluctance, lots of teeth pulling, and deeply rooted denial.

But it's okay. He has a therapist.

*snaps in enthusiastic agreement*

i think one reason why so many people fail to understand andrew and neil's relationship is because people don't know what it is to be aspec. and obviously the aspec umbrella is wide and varied and no one size fits all, but at the heart of their relationship, neil is demisexual. and i fully believe andrew is some form of aromantic. and obviously their shared history of trauma (of all kinds) colors their relationship and their sexualities and actions. but aspec people (and the people in relationships with those aspec people) develop such different relationships than allo people. they care differently, and it's often the care that becomes most important, rather than (just) the attraction. like yes, i choose you because i see you because i am interested in you because i don't quite understand you but i want to, i need to, and i am committed to sticking around regardless of whether we are a legal partnership or not.

people argue all the time that andreil would grow to say i love you some day, that they'd eventually heal enough to get married, but that isn't healing. that's ignoring a vital part of each of them. not only are they both still learning what love is, but love is not what their relationship is built around. they did not ~FaLl In LoVE~ they built a partnership around taking care of the other person. sure they were attracted to each other in their own ways, but andrew doesn't look at neil like he's his happily ever after romance. neil is the person who wants andrew to live, who wants andrew to be happy, who wants andrew to know that he has value even when he's not a good person. and andrew is the person who wants neil to be safe, who wants neil to be happy, who wants neil to know that he has value even when he isn't playing exy. their "romance" comes from holding each other up, from calling each other on their shit, from being a safe space when the world has proven it is anything but. neil is the one who almost starts to imagine some kind of long-term partnership in such conventional terms and andrew is so unconcerned with what that partnership looks like...he just knows the two of them will continue holding each other up as long as they can. and sure they'll have sex and sleep in the same bed and get cats together and all that "romantic" shit, but it's more than romance. it's a life. it's security. it's a chance to rewrite the trauma of their pasts.

and yeah to an outsider all that is romantic, sure. but i don't think andrew and neil see it like that. their relationships is all facts and truths. they feel safest in these absolutes, in the trust they are building together, in the shared language they are crafting between tentative touches and long stares. but to label it something as banal as ~romance~ undersells just what's happening to them. they don't need to say i love you because they know that all of these pieces that make up their shared life together say that for them, and they wouldn't know what to do with those words anyway. their "love" is not the same as other people's anyway. they don't need to get married because anniversaries and dates and marriages minimize just how long forever is, and they are already joined together by the understanding they share.

if the two of them got married or started "dating" it would send the wrong message to people who will never understand. neil isn't andrew's ~boyfriend~ he's the man who convinced him that life can interesting enough to stick around for. andrew isn't neil's ~lover~ he's the man who refused to let him run away from the life he always wanted. it's not romantic, it's survival. it's selflessness. it's learning how to care for yourself by caring for someone else and letting them care for you.

I still get excited when my friends refer to me as their friend

"My friend said" "this is my friend" "they're my friend"

Im freaking out inside every time

I’m not okay bro UGHHHH

i love parallels

it’s so poetic that Clary’s first rune was made by Jace (her love interest) and Kit’s was made by Ty (also his love interest). the saga started like that and will end like that.

I’ve been in burn out since the beginning of march, but it doesn’t matter because I have to finish the semester, so I’m crashing out in small increments 🫠🫠🫠

That’s all I want in life, to see them reunited and speaking again

*throws like a hot potato and hides*

They really do…just two traumatized guys struggling through life and unintentionally falling into found families.

Also I love that my newest hyperfixation series and my longest obsession series are COLLIDING!!

Kit Herondale and Neil Josten have the same energy and you can't convince me otherwise

actually so upset we didn't get to see andrew's reaction to neil going "oh he's gay? so i guess him and kevin..." like andrew who has been ruthlessly attracted to neil the whole time and trying to ignore it only to find out neil immediately thought he was with kevin...the crash out would've been memorable...

As someone else with autism, I can concur that change is extremely overwhelming and I have definitely equated dealing with change in my life to being in hell.

ty blackthorn and the resurrection arc

Let’s start by the fact that Ty’s childhood was very complicated. He, like Julian and all his siblings, were only kids when his parents died. Not to ignore the fact that he had to watch Julian kill his own father. Ty’s autistic. He doesn’t perceive life as all we do. Ty was different, and not many people (read this like NO ONE outside his family) wanted to understand him. He didn’t have friends (before Kit but that’s something I won't talk about because I don’t want to cry) because no one wanted to be his friend. That had an impact on him and made him rely more on Livia, his twin. They were always together, they knew each other better than anyone else. 

I would dare to say that Livia was the most important person in Ty's life. And sometimes I wonder how people can not comprehend the reasons why he kept going on with the resurrection spell. How many people are ready to judge him only because he is different and they don’t even mind trying to understand how complex his character is.

Autism plays a big role in a person's life. I’m not autistic, I won't pretend that I understand everything perfectly only because I try to teach myself about it. But I'll try to develop my perception about it, and, please, don’t hesitate in correcting me if there’s something that I’ve misunderstood. Based on some experiences I’ve read about, I understand that our minds work differently. For autistics, change feels different. They don’t like change. And their way of expressing emotions and thoughts can vary to non autistic people. Us, neurotypical folk, we really have not a real understanding of how their minds are. How they think, how they feel. We can try to understand and empathise but it's not the same. So, there’s more of Ty Blackthorn than we know and we understand. 

With the resurrection arc. That’s something very complex that many have misunderstood or overlooked only because we are talking about Ty. It’s not the first time we had a resurrection. We had Jace’s and, after Livvy’s, we had Jesse’s. It’s still not logical in my mind how people reacted so badly to Tys resurrection arc when they praised Lucys and Clary’s. Don’t get me wrong. I know the details and context behind each one of them. Each one of them had consequences and the fact that these people decided to do them doesn’t mean it’s correct. What I don’t understand is why people were so fast to crucify Ty when they were very open minded about Clary and Lucy. 

However, I didn’t bring on Clary only to talk about peoples opinion. I brought her because her resurrection arc had an impact on Tys. After the conversation with Magnus, it was evident to me that in Tys mind it was FINE to resurrect people because that was something that had happened before and had no consequences (in front of The Clave). Ty knew that Clary resurrected Jace, and perhaps he ignored deliberately that it was a different situation or saw no difference. The thing is that I don’t think that someone took the time to explain to the younger shadowhunters that resurrection spells were not right. That there were consequences linked to them. You might think that that is something obvious, but, as I mentioned before, we don’t perceive the world in the same way (that’ll be boring anyway) and maybe there’s some kids that didn’t fully understand what happened. Let’s not forget that even Clary and Jace were very young when this happened. If people dying young is something normal, why wouldn't it be, for some of them, resurrecting people seen as something normal as well? 

Ty didn’t see the consequences. He only saw the opportunity to bring back the person that always had been to his side. It is true, as Kit said, that Ty had his family and him. But losing someone is never easy. It was not the first time that Ty had lost a relative but I think this time was more hurtful for him. And I understand with those who get mad about Livia because she did deserve rest. Don’t do all of them deserve it? But something that we some understand is that losing someone really close is not easy. Ty needed his family to be more aware of him after Livia passed away. But the one who was with him was Kit, who, afraid of losing Ty, couldn’t face Ty and talk with the truth before everything escalated so quickly. Lets not forget that they were 15 as well and that barely had adults around to watch their actions. And I can’t blame Julian either because he’s always been so careful of his family and has sacrificed his whole life for them. He also had his own problems and the spell that Magnus did on him to not to have his feelings for Emma didn’t help. Honestly, I think that this situation (as many others) was a product of all the older shadowhunters being neglected. 

This analysis is not to say that I think that Ty’s actions were correct. Because actually I don’t, but I understand the reasons behind them and I empathise with him. Ty, like many shadowhunters, lost more than is acceptable for a person.