Shadowhunters and Downworlders

HOLLY: We really see that with Magnus and Camille. She says to Magnus in Clockwork Prince, “You expect me to have the morals of some mundane when I am not human, and neither are you.” She believes that love between immortals should be fundamentally different—that rules about fidelity, for example, shouldn’t apply. On the other hand, I have always thought that there was something about Camille that seemed more essentially human than Magnus. She’s petty in a way that he isn’t—jealous of his having Alec in exactly the way she criticized him for being jealous a hundred years earlier—and she has a way of showing off that seems to be about impressing just the sort of people she claims not to care about.

KELLY: Apparently immortality is no cure for hypocrisy or insecurity. Or humanity. So maybe that’s how Camille manages her immortality. Magnus manages his immortality by flooding himself with new experiences and interests, by creating makeshift, mixed human and supernatural familial groups for himself in each new place and time. And yet he also seems to stay above it all. Camille, on the other hand, keeps herself occupied by manipulating power dynamics and personal status. How other people see her tells her what she is.

HOLLY: Yeah, sometimes I feel as though Magnus wants to be human, when he can’t help seeing humanity from a great distance, and Camille wants to be inhuman, but she doesn’t have his perspective. She’s down in the mess of life with the rest of us.

KELLY: Cassie, do you think of Magnus as a kind of author’s stand-in in the books? For saying what you want to say to your characters, about love and immortality?

CASSIE: Yes. Usually. Everything he says about burning a lot more brightly if you’re mortal, I think that’s true. He gives good advice.

KELLY: Do you think of him as the linchpin for the series? I mean, he’s there in all of the books.

CASSIE: Not the linchpin, no. I think he could die. Like Dumbledore.

KELLY: I guess that’s why the series is called the Mortal Instruments and not the Immortal Instruments.

HOLLY: One of the things that we sometimes forget about immortality is that it’s not invulnerability. Death can come to all the immortals in the world of the Mortal Instruments.

KELLY: Well, there’s an argument to be made that all forms of magic—including immortality—stand in as metaphors for money. Magic, in fantasy, often works the way that money does. Magic buys you things: long life, cool stuff, access to the kinds of worlds that people without magic can’t get into. But the one thing neither money nor magic can buy is freedom from death.

HOLLY: This is making me think, as a highly practical matter, how once you become immortal, you’d be well served to spend a couple of years doing nothing but working and amassing cash so that you could live off the interest forever. Because your retirement problems are really different from most people’s. Those charts that tell you how much to put away per year are not going to work for you.

KELLY: Readers of this essay, take note: If you plan to live forever, make good investments. It’s like being a time traveler, where you want to make sure you’ve done your research, memorized some lottery numbers and the names of really spectacular stocks when you go back.

HOLLY: I do wonder where Camille’s money comes from. I mean, Magnus works. He’s the High Warlock of Brooklyn. As long as Downworlders and Shadowhunters have magical problems, he’s got a job. Cassie, where did Camille get her money from?

CASSIE: I’ve decided that she had a string of lovers who bestowed many jewels on her because she is so beeyoo-tiful.

HOLLY: Really?

CASSIE: No. I figure many vampires have money from being around so long and whatnot. Remember there’s that part in Clockwork Prince where they talk about vampires leaving their money to themselves, masquerading as their own heirs? And they have big investments that pay out over time.

KELLY: And traditionally, vampires are good at getting more than blood from their prey. They can hypnotize their victims into signing over their estates, etc.

HOLLY: Like a sweetheart scam, but with blood.

KELLY: We haven’t talked about the Seelie Queen yet. Cassie, when you wrote the Seelie Queen, what sources were you drawing on? Which Faerie Queens were inspirations?

CASSIE [points to Holly Black]: Hers.

HOLLY: Ha! The thing I find interesting about faeries in general is that they were never human and that they are essentially other. The shorthand for that in Celtic folk-tales is “they laugh at funerals and cry at weddings,” but it alludes to the whole separate moral system faeries operate under. And in the Mortal Instruments, the Seelie Queen is not just untouched by her immortality but untroubled by it. For her, mortality seems skeevy. It grosses her out, the way you’d be grossed out by a rotting peach on your desk.

KELLY: I can see why you’re Cassie’s source. That’s good stuff. And of course, the Seelie Queen and her court, in the Mortal Instruments, are weirdly sideways to the rest of the Downworlders.