Shadowhunters and Downworlders

As he tells his best friend, Clary Fray, in City of Ashes, “The Shadowhunter thing—they’re like a cult.” Clary denies it, of course, because who wants to admit they’ve been suckered into a cult? But Simon’s got evidence: “Sure they are. Shadowhunting is their whole lives. And they look down on everyone else…They’re not friends with ordinary people, they don’t go to the same places, they don’t know the same jokes, they think they’re above us.” Simon may have a somewhat bizarre definition of cults—he could be describing a particularly snobbish bunch of cheerleaders—but you’ve got to admit he has a point. Like any good cultists, Shadowhunters forswear allegiance to anything that could interfere with their loyalty to the institution. (Remember Alec explaining in City of Bones why he wishes Clary would disappear: “[She’s] making Jace act like—like he isn’t one of us. Making him break his oath to the Clave, making him break the Law.”) They share an eccentric but ironclad belief system and hew to a code of behavior that allows for no deviation. And let’s not forget their utter ignorance of basic pop culture that could only result from spending a life in cultural isolation, willfully ignoring the outside world.

Admittedly, these days the word “cult” has a mushy definition and is easily pinned on any group with a suitably wacky set of vaguely religious-seeming habits and beliefs. But the Shadowhunters’ odd fashion sense and demonology studies (a belief that doesn’t seem so wacky once demons start popping up everywhere to eat people alive) isn’t what raises Simon’s hackles. It is (or should be) the isolationist and absolutist nature of the Shadowhunters that strikes Simon as threateningly cult-like. He’s using the term as a loose standin for any group that dictates every major element of its members’ lives, that conflates obedience with morality, that replaces independent decision making with knee-jerk obeisance to a “higher” law, running itself like a miniature absolutist state. Call them a cult, call them a mini-dictatorship, call them a really, really intense fraternity, but there’s no question that the Shadowhunters are extremists, distrustful of outsiders, obsessed with obedience, and worshipful of the laws that govern every aspect of their behavior.

And the supposedly rebellious Clary—along with her fellow teen Shadowhunters—welcomes this life and its mandates with open arms. (Yes, she seems to have little choice in the matter, given the whole life-in-danger, chased-by-demons, need-to-save-the-world situations she keeps ending up in, but as will be discussed later, there’s always a choice. She chooses to join up.) Not that the implications occur to her, or any of the other young Shadowhunters. In fact, Clary’s repulsed by the thought of anyone voluntarily signing up for that kind of draconian existence—at least in the abstract. Upon hearing the loyalty oath of Valentine’s Circle: “I hereby render unconditional obedience to the Circle and its principles” (City of Bones), she’s totally freaked out. “It sounds creepy,” she complains. “Like a fascist organization or something.” Somehow Clary fails to connect the dots to the Clave and the obedience it demands, an obedience no less unconditional than that required by Valentine. After all: The Law is hard, but it is the Law.

Questioning the Law is not only forbidden: It’s considered a threat. Which is a strange situation for teenagers—for whom you’d expect questioning authority to be a prime directive—to find themselves in, much less willingly accept. And indeed, things don’t go well for those who can’t toe the line: It’s easy to imagine Valentine as that querulous child who asked the questions no one was supposed to ask. Why not just make more Shadowhunters? he asked his teachers innocently—an idea seen as “sacrilege.”

Why do we do what we do? Because it is the Law.

You might as well say: Because we said so.

Maybe it’s not so surprising that Valentine stopped asking questions of his elders and started asking them of his peers—then, quickly, started supplying the answers himself. Nor is it surprising that he substituted one extreme for another. Young Shadowhunters may be great with a stele and deadly with a blade, but they don’t get a lot of lessons in moderation and moral flexibility.

When it comes to rebellion, Valentine is the exception: For Shadowhunters, obedience (whether to the Clave or, for that brief period of rebellion, to the Circle) is the rule. Why would generations of teens, given more power and responsibility (not to mention more weapons) than any of their mundane peers, go along so readily with the dictates handed down by their elders? Why would the outspoken, stubborn, courageous young Shadowhunters of the Mortal Instruments series—and the readers who’d happily switch places with them—so unquestioningly buy into the Clave’s brand of absolute authority and the omnipotence of its Law?

Speaking as a former teenager, I’d like to believe there’s more to it than a hormonal attraction to fascism.





Don’t Trust the Man (Trust the Institution)


“Betrayal is never pretty, but to betray a child—that’s a double betrayal, don’t you think?”

—Valentine Morgenstern, City of Bones