Reflections: Emma and Julian really went through it, huh
No cus the reason The Dark Artifices works isn’t because it’s about forbidden love in the Shadowhunter world. That’s not why. The trope of forbidden love and star-crossed lovers isn’t inherently new or interesting.
TDA works cus Emma and Julian lived in a goddamn psychologically MESSED UP family situation where they had to play house, where they had to play Mommy and Daddy to survive. They literally didn’t do just their physical duties as the “older siblings” to protect the younger ones but literally went into a parental headspace on top of it. Emotionally, psychologically, sexually, physically, Emma and Julian became adults prematurely, in a way in which kids and teens in the modern world are typically not expected to under such circumstances.
The way the LA Institute is set up mirrors a pseudo-nuclear family structure: physical house, “husband and wife” figures, children to care for. Throw in the captured faerie brother, the exiled big sister, the PTSD of the Dark War, Julian being the faux Institute Head, and that is a big pathological web of complexes I have no idea how to sift through (if it were real life). Like all of the Shadowhunter couples had to deal with a shit ton of shit but the way TDA plays on family structures and the psychological repurcussions of them crumbling (in a subliminal way) is wild.
I always wondered, why the hell are Jules and Emma the first ones to suffer this bad from the parabatai curse? Surely the index of parabatai curses must be disproportionately higher, right? But like, it makes sense why Emma and Julian signed up to be parabatai then screwed themselves over so badly and fell in love, fell in eros, to be exact. I’m pretty sure no pairing who suspected they were in romantic love would even do the parabatai ritual but I think what happened is that during their formative years with them playing parents, they did in fact develop a level of codependency on each other that made them tap into that forbidden love domain after a while. Furthermore, I think it’s not them being in love that made the curse catalyze but it’s the sexual dynamic between them. I’d go out on a limb to say that Emma and Julian really fell into the parent’s headspace by the time LM hit, and the ramifications of that became burrowed into their overall dynamic in an undoable way. The Shadowhunter community had two CHILDREN raising a family after losing all of their elders to death or the law like this an episode of SVU I swear.
I just think what’s so interesting is that Emma and Julian aren’t a unique ship because of the curse, but they’re a unique ship because of the why the curse even came into play. Pretty sure the index of “Shadowhunter parabatai who had to raise a family and run an Institution and witness their whole family either killed or taken away from them leading to them falling into headspaces that literal adults have regarding child-rearing and relationships and homemaking, thereby causing them to fall into love and develop a sexual dynamic” is much lower than “parabatai who developed feelings then were able to get over it due to the absence of these wack external factors”.
Emma and Julian literally couldn’t get over each other when their pathology in their mid-teens made them the north to each other’s compass in every way possible. And that’s why the parabatai curse hit *them* so hard. She really subverted my expectations with this trope by giving it so much layers.
