Shadowhunters and Downworlders

There are benefits to being a vampire in the Shadowhunters’ world. Immortality. Beauty. Strength. Community.

But Simon rejects that community. He rejects vampire ideals by not relishing his vampire status. He consumes blood to stay alive—but only animal blood. He tries to hide the truth from his mother—because he is ashamed and in denial about what he has become. And perhaps most tellingly, Simon resists interacting with other vampires. He doesn’t live with them. He doesn’t feed with them. He doesn’t befriend them. He behaves more like vampirism is a disease he has, rather than something that defines who and what he is. He does not see himself as being one of them.

But if he chose to, he could be.

When Simon finally acknowledges and proves to his mother that he is a vampire in City of Fallen Angels, she calls him a monster and casts him out of his own home. That devastates him, to the point that he actually asks Raphael if he can stay at the Hotel Dumont—with those who initially turned him into the thing that he hates. It’s a request of last resort—Simon literally feels like he has nowhere else to go, having been kicked out of his mundane home and being unable to enter the Institute with his friends. But as Raphael says, “In every way you do not accept what you really are, and as long as that is true, you are not welcome at the Dumont.” Camille Belcourt, another vampire, says to Simon, “You befriend Shadowhunters, but you can never be of them. You will always be other and outside.”

The primary authority figures in Simon’s new, adoptive culture—vampire culture—express disdain at his refusal to assimilate, to acculturate to their ways. Raphael takes the position that Simon is in denial about his true nature—that his humanity (his positive inclination, his Yetzer HaTov, of which Jewish identity is a significant part) is gone. Camille attempts a subtler, more subversive pressure; she doesn’t deny Simon’s humanity—she appeals to it. To his yearning to belong and to his feeling of loneliness with infinity stretching out before him. But even Camille then mocks his inability to speak the name of God, saying that if he were to simply abandon his beliefs, the name of God would lack meaning and he could speak it without a problem.

Simon ultimately rejects her and Raphael both. He is unwilling to abandon his Jewish identity, his humanity, his Yetzer HaTov, even though it means forgoing community. Even though it means remaining separate and Other from Downworlders and Shadowhunters still. In his staunch refusal to assimilate into vampire culture—despite the benefits it affords, despite how harmonious it would doubtless feel to not have to constantly struggle with his Yetzer Hara, or vampirism, if he were to truly identify and live as one of them—Simon embodies the commitment of the Jewish people to adhere to the core beliefs and traditions that have made us separate, distinct, and Other from every other culture for centuries and for millennia.

It is a fundamentally Jewish act.

Simon is a denizen of two worlds—the Downworlders’ and the mundane world. But while he can’t be a part of the mundane world anymore, he chooses not to belong in the Downworlders’. He is a wanderer not because of the Mark of Cain, not because he is “cursed.” He is in exile because he chooses to be. Simon would rather belong nowhere than belong with other vampires; he would rather be nothing than be the creature ruled by his Yetzer Hara, the animalistic instinct we glimpsed in that Jewish cemetery.

In City of Glass, Valentine says to Simon:

“I’ve seen you choke on the name of God, vampire…As for why you can stand in the sunlight—” he broke off and grinned. “You’re an anomaly, perhaps. A freak. But still a monster.”

Simon is a freak among freaks, Valentine says. A monster among monsters, who can’t even speak the name of God. But here is a character who was transformed into a predator that has to harm others to survive, and still he wrestles with his “evil inclination,” his instinct to kill and drink blood. The Jewish concept that sin rests always at the door is truer for no one than it is for Simon. But despite how he suffers in City of Fallen Angels—despite the fact that he is tested and fails (with Maureen), missing his target spectacularly—Simon refuses to accept that being a vampire is what he is. He doesn’t let his Downworlder blood define him and embraces belief instead, even though doing so cuts him off from those who most closely resemble what he has become.

Perhaps it’s the Jewish will to survive and endure, to persist unchanging in our beliefs despite the most horrific circumstances, that lends Simon the strength to survive and endure and hold onto his Jewish identity and humanity, to embrace his moral aims even as a new, dark, intruding part of him urges him to let go. But whatever the source, in fighting to retain that humanity, Simon proves that despite being a vampire, he isn’t a monster at all.

He proves that he’s a hero.





The Other as the Hero