Shadowhunters and Downworlders

KELLY: If there wasn’t anything to complain about, then there wouldn’t be any story. Stasis is the enemy of plot.

When Raphael (vampire) says that to Simon (now a vampire too), Simon thinks: “It sounded good, but did anyone really want to be sixteen forever? It would have been one thing to be frozen forever at twenty-five, but sixteen? To always be this gangly, to never really grow into himself, his face or his body? Not to mention that, looking like this, he’d never be able to go into a bar and order a drink. Ever. For eternity.”

HOLLY: Can he even drink? Like, booze? Caaaaaaassie!

CASSIE: It’s never come up before. He says at one point in the books that he could drink a little bit of coffee. Eating would make him sick.

KELLY: So no booze. No barbecue, Chicken McNuggets, or cotton candy. It’s a bit like keeping kosher only much, much worse. And of course, yes, blood isn’t kosher.

HOLLY: But blood is legendarily delicious in literature. I mean, Simon seems super into it when he’s drinking from a living person.

KELLY: I’ve never tried blood myself. Although I have had black pudding.

HOLLY: I am willing to concede that Simon might have concerns about immortality, but he’s largely speculating about how it will go, since he’s only a few weeks into his new life. He hasn’t yet watched his family age and die. He hasn’t yet lost lovers.

KELLY: It does affect his relationship with his family, though. Becoming a vampire—being an immortal—is taboo, even in contemporary American life. His mother locks him out. That’s the first real time we get that being a vampire (being out as a vampire), for Simon, has a price.

HOLLY: The person we know best in the books who has experienced both the boon and burden of immortality is Magnus. And because the Infernal Devices is set more than a hundred years earlier than the Mortal Instruments, we get to see how Magnus has changed over time. Immortality isn’t a burden just for him, it’s a burden on the people close to him. As his relationship with Alec grows, Alec has to figure out what it means to be with someone who has lived so much before him and will live so long after he’s gone.

KELLY: For the writer, an immortal character offers a chance to tell a lot of different stories, to rework the character in interesting ways. Magnus’ arc as an immortal is interesting to me for two reasons. One, his love life follows a pretty classic vampire character arc: He’s loved and lost and loved and lost again. But because of his apparent physical age, he’s attractive to—and attracted by—young adults like Alec. Sound familiar?

Second, he’s bisexual. (Oh, and he’s Asian. That’s a lot of intersectionality going on!) In terms of audience reaction, his sexual preferences seem much more notable than the fact that he’s immortal. That’s pretty new. There aren’t a lot of bisexual immortals in popular fiction.

HOLLY: Would you consider Anne Rice’s Lestat bisexual? He didn’t really have sex with anyone, just engaged in a lot of biting.

KELLY: Well, yes, but he’s not bisexually active in the books, at least not on the page, not explicitly. There’s a very good reason why it’s appropriate that he was played by Tom Cruise.

HOLLY: The thing that fascinates me about Magnus is that he appears to be the most human seeming of the Downworlders we meet, because he’s so friendly and up on popular culture. He buys scarves at the Gap! Raphael and Camille are more menacing and seem more inhuman.

But when Magnus thinks about humanity, even as someone with a human parent and who once had a human life, he sees himself as outside of it. For example, “Magnus had always found humans more beautiful than any other creatures alive on the earth, and had often wondered why. Only a few years before dissolution, Camille had said. But it was mortality that made them what they were: the flame that blazed brighter for its flickering. Death is the mother of beauty, as the poet said. He wondered if the Angel had ever considered making his human servants, the Nephilim, immortal. But no, for all their strength, they fell as humans had always fallen in battle through all the ages of the world.” These are the thoughts of a being who might look human, who might try to act human, but who is essentially other.

KELLY: We all want what we can’t have. Magnus immerses himself in humanity to keep himself human. Talking about this helps me understand better why, in books, immortals—especially vampires—like to hang around with young adults. If your baseline condition is one of stasis, you might need regular jolts of chaos, change, extremes. Teenagers are to the immortal as cups of coffee are to the writer, except that the problem for writers is that they have deadlines and the problem for immortals is that they don’t.

HOLLY: So teenagers are reinvigorating?

KELLY:…

HOLLY: Well, reinvigorating to drink anyway.