Shadowhunters and Downworlders

HOLLY: Awww, that’s nice of you to say. And I agree about the faeries being sideways. They’ve never been human. They’re separate from the realm of demons and angels. They may have originated there, but now they are a people apart, self-contained and (change-lings aside) self-reproducing. All other Downworlders continue to have to truck with humanity to survive. Vampires make more vampires by turning humans. Werewolves probably can breed more werewolves but mostly seem to make more through infection. And as far as we know, warlocks can’t reproduce at all.

KELLY: Humans and faeries, in fact, appear to be somewhat allergic to each other. Like you said, when the Seelie Queen looks at Jace and the other Shadowhunters, she sees not young men in their prime but their decay and their deaths. She doesn’t get it. She says, “You are mortal; you age; you die…If that is not hell, pray tell me, what is?”

HOLLY: Well, forever for her isn’t something to hope for or dread or dream about. It’s a given.

KELLY: I’m guessing that complicates her love life as well. In some way that we mortals probably can’t quite comprehend. Whatever it is, I’m guessing it works for her. (I keep coming back to how immortality and love intersect.) Cassie, what do you think?

CASSIE: I think there is a difference in the books between the characters who are born immortal and the ones who are born human and who become immortal. The ones who have it thrust upon them think, “I don’t know how I feel about this. Everyone I love will die.” Whereas the Fairie Queen has always been immortal. Everyone she loves is immortaI.

KELLY: I guess the thing I want to bring up about love and immortality is that in the Mortal Instruments, they function in similar ways. The characters we care about don’t choose immortality any more than they choose who to fall in love with. Love and immortality are both things that happen to you, at least if you start out human. And that’s straight out of the classic young adult and children’s fiction tradition. Think of Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt. Jesse and his family don’t choose immortality, and at the point where Winnie is old enough to make a decision for herself, the opportunity for choice is gone. Or a story like Ray Bradbury’s “The Homecoming,” in which our viewpoint character is a mortal boy born to a family of immortals. He can’t choose either. I can think of a few characters in young adult fiction who pursue immortality, like Bella in the Twilight series, but even Bella, in that final moment, doesn’t actively choose immortality. Edward, out of necessity, chooses it for her. Young adult fiction is all about agency: the protagonists coming into the world and taking on active roles. And yet when it comes to immortality, it’s extremely rare to see protagonists take it for themselves. It’s usually either forced on them, or else it turns out to have been their birthright all along.

HOLLY: I wonder if immortality is often thrust upon characters (or found to be their birthright) because there is nothing particularly surprising about choosing to live forever. That’s something we’d all be mightily tempted by, and I would guess it would be the rare individual who wouldn’t give in to that temptation.

KELLY: I have one more thought. Isn’t it every author’s dream to have characters (and books) that live forever?

HOLLY: Well, authors are notoriously of the devil’s party, whether they know it or not. Wasn’t that what what’s his-face said about Milton? That printmaker dude. Blake!

KELLY: If the devil was an agent, everybody would want to sign up with him.

HOLLY: Relatedly, I do think that we as readers are often in sympathy with Downworlders and maybe feel more kin to them than the Shadowhunters. Downworlders seem to have lives lived less to extremes. They don’t have a great and holy purpose in the way that Shadowhunters do. They seem to have big parties and stay up late and watch television. Well, possibly that’s mostly Magnus.

KELLY: That does sound like most teenagers and also most writers that I know. Or maybe just most people. Maybe it’s rarer to find someone who, like a Shadowhunter, has a sense that their life may be short but knows what they want (and need) to do with it.

HOLLY: That’s a kind of certainty that it seems to me that many of us envy. But immortality makes certainty of purpose impossible. Immortals live so many lives that no one purpose will stretch to fit all of them. And though we’ve discussed some of the drawbacks of immortality, those of us left with but a single lifetime stretching before us must admit that no disadvantage could discourage us from wanting to live forever. And since we can’t have that, at least we can comfort ourselves knowing that of all the things Shadowhunters fight, they are no more able to defeat death than Gilgamesh…or us.

Thus ended our conversation, as we all sat silent in contemplation of exactly which investments would be our best bet for long-term financial security if Holly was wrong and we all became vampires.



Kelly Link is the award-winning author of three collections, most recently Pretty Monsters (Viking). With Gavin J. Grant, she coedited the anthology Steampunk! (Candlewick) as well as the forthcoming Monstrous Affections. Together they run Small Beer Press and put out the zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. Her website is www.kellylink.net.