Shadowhunters and Downworlders

Exhibit A: Like Duckie, Simon tries to make the girl he loves jealous.

In City of Bones, Simon notices the attraction between Clary and Jace almost immediately and employs a slightly more sophisticated strategy to make Clary jealous. Simon focuses all his attention on the beautiful Isabelle, often staring at her “rapt and openmouthed.” And he is actually more successful than Duckie. Simon does make Clary jealous, most notably at Magnus Bane’s party, when she watches as Isabelle dances around Simon, “looking at him as if she were planning to drag him off into a corner to have sex.” In American literature and film, consciously choosing a guy with whom they have an instant attraction is one of the ways young women signal their independence. Their sexual identities are closely tied to breaking free from their parents and the expectations others have for them—expectations that sometimes include a sweet best friend.

This might explain why making Clary jealous doesn’t actually work in the long run. Jace is the one Clary is instantly attracted to and ultimately the one she wants—the aloof enigmatic boy who kisses her in the hallway outside her bedroom. Even when Simon interrupts the kiss and admits his feelings for Clary, professing “I’ve been in love with you for ten years,” he still doesn’t get the girl. Like Andie, Clary feels guilty and torn. But in the end, she can’t fight the way she feels, and Jace wins out.





Case Study 2: Sixteen Candles (John Hughes, 1984)


Sixteen Candles is another example of the Duckie effect at work. In the film, Samantha is turning sixteen the same weekend her older sister is getting married. Relatives descend on the house, along with a foreign exchange student, and Sam loses her room and her family’s attention. School is a welcome distraction, especially since her secret crush, Jake Ryan, is there.

Sam’s “Duckie” is more of an accidental friend than a lifelong best friend. Farmer Ted, as Sam calls him, is king of the geeks, and he bets his friends that he can “make it” with Sam at the school dance. The same night, Sam’s family forgets her sixteenth birthday. She shares a moment with Jake before his nightmare diva of a girlfriend drags him off to a party. Sam retreats to the school auto shop, where she spills her guts to best friend stand-in Farmer Ted and he tries to kiss her. Farmer Ted never gets a kiss (though Sam does give him her underwear so he can save face with his friends), and she ends up with Jake.

Farmer Ted and Simon have less in common than Duckie and Simon, since Farmer Ted isn’t technically Sam’s best friend. He does give Sam a shoulder to cry on and throws her an emotional life preserver when she needs one. But anyone who has ever harbored a monster crush knows a shoulder to cry on is no match for hundreds of class periods spent combining your name and your crush’s (especially if you added his last name to your first name just to “see how it would look”). This is particularly true of young women in literature and film, who suffer extreme cases of the grass always being greener on the other side. They seem to be more interested in the unattainable than in the boy who’s busy adding his last name to theirs.

Exhibit B: Simon is the grass on this side—the known quantity.

Simon is the boy Clary confesses her hopes and fears to in the auto shop, not the boy whose name she writes over and over in class—or, in the case of Shadowhunters, the boy upon whose skin she draws runes.

Clary isn’t the only one who needs an emotional life preserver. In City of Bones, Simon admits (though Clary denies it), “I’ve always been the one who needed you more than you needed me.”

This brings up another important distinction between Duckies and guys who get the girls: The guy who gets the girl avoids showing both physical and emotional vulnerability, except to the one girl he cares about.

Exhibit C: Jace bleeds and battles demons and still has enough energy to make a smartass comment afterward, while Simon just bleeds.

Unlike Simon, Jace doesn’t seem to lean on anyone. He suffers silently, hiding the pain of losing his parents, his insecurities, even his feelings for Clary at first. As the series continues, we learn Jace’s secrets along with Clary, and discover that he is more vulnerable than we could’ve imagined, which only makes him even more wounded and irresistible. To their detriment, Duckies are never wounded and irresistible (physically wounded maybe, but that’s not quite as sexy).





Case Study 3: St. Elmo’s Fire (Joel Schumacher and Carl Kurlander, 1985)