Shadowhunters and Downworlders

The person who always seems to get you, the one you can call at any time day or night for reassurance or bail money, the one you talk to for hours sharing your darkest secrets without ever worrying they’ll tell, the one who always, always has your back no matter what idiot thing you just did. The one you have inside jokes with, and ice cream binges, and bad movie marathons. The one whose betrayal would break your heart and smash your soul into teeny-tiny pieces with the pure shock of it.

Who doesn’t remember this yearning? And if you think I’m talking about love, well, you’d be wrong—at least in part. Sure, we all want to meet a gorgeous being who longs to make out with us and whom we long to make out with in return. But when I think back to my teen years, to the people I dated, it’s usually with half-affectionate, half-mortified laughter. We were so young, so inept and ill-suited for each other. We were actively bad at making out. The dissection of everything that happened on a date afterward with friends was usually way more fun than the date itself.

So, no, the relationship nostalgia I’m talking about is a different kind entirely, and I’d bet I’m not alone. And this need sticks with you into adulthood, perhaps evolving, but still there (and if you’re lucky, met). It’s something that can be just as important as romantic love but is rarely treated that way in stories: friendship.

But the Mortal Instruments series is an exception. The phenomenon of undervaluing friendships—or at the very least taking them for granted—can sometimes be a side effect of the understandable focus many readers have on the series’ great epic loves—Clary and Jace, Alec and Magnus, Isabelle and Simon (a girl can hope). But Cassandra Clare never forgets how important friendships are in her characters’ lives. The novels never give short shrift to the other epic love stories being told too, the ones that involve old friends, new friends, and, most important of all, best friends.





Beyond the One True Pairing


The lack of attention given to just-friendship when love is also in the air has been noted before. No less than C. S. Lewis—himself one half of a famous literary bromance with J.R.R. Tolkien—wrote in Four Loves, “To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world, in comparison, ignores it.” Of course, a few paragraphs later, he also nails one of the reasons why that’s so, pointing out that there’s “nothing throaty about it, nothing that quickens the pulse or turns you red and pale.” Romantic love is more dramatic, more edge of the seat. Hearts pound, palms sweat, cheeks burn, breath quickens. Friendship has different, subtler effects. It brings other rewards, and other costs.

I’m not disputing the importance of connections centered on romantic love, because that would be insane. Clary + Jace = forever. What I’m suggesting is that the connections of friendship in the series are just as real, strong, and important as the smooch-inclined ones. But it’s also not as if those types of relationships and friendship are mutually exclusive, so some further definition is in order to make clear where friendship fits into the mix.

Acknowledging areas of overlap is important partially because the overarching story of the series, in which Team Good battles Team Evil (or, at times, Team Less Good) to protect the world, is played out primarily through relationships. The Mortal Instruments is all about the ever-evolving connections between people, whether they’re human or supernatural beings. Clare explores a wide variety of relationships over the course of the series, all with their own specific depth and complexity: fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, Shadowhunters in a parabatai bond, siblings (including those who turn out not to be siblings after all, whew), to tick off just a few examples. Throw the bad history between Downworlders and Shadowhunters or the natural dislike between vampires and werewolves into the mix and things get even more interesting. But since we’re talking here about one specific variety of relationship—friendship—what is it that makes a friend a friend?