SHADOWHUNTERS AND DOWNWORLDERS

The Tyranny of Choice


“My oath to the Covenant binds me.”

—Jace Wayland, City of Bones

There’s nothing I can do. It’s a constant Shadowhunter refrain.

It’s also a comforting lie, and the biggest reason of all why someone might be tempted to cling to a system of Laws and absolutes—a system that narrows your choices down to one.

In The Paradox of Choice, a book about why the proliferation of choice has made modern Americans increasingly unhappy, psychologist Barry Schwartz argues that the more choices we have, the more opportunity there is for confusion, paralysis, and regret: “As the number of choices keep growing, negative aspects of having a multitude of options begin to appear. As the number of choices grows further, the negatives escalate until we become overloaded. At this point, choice no longer liberates, but debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize.”

In other words: Choosing for yourself is hard, especially when none of the choices is particularly appealing. Submitting to something like the Clave, an institution that makes your decisions for you, means abdicating the responsibility of choice and so escaping its consequences.

In City of Bones, Clary wants to know: Does Jace really believe it’s right to kill someone in revenge? Jace replies by citing the Law—“A Shadowhunter who kills another of his brothers is worse than a demon and should be put down like one”—and offers this reply “sounding as if he were reciting the words from a textbook.” Faced with a thorny moral predicament, he doesn’t even have to think; the Clave does his thinking for him.

It’s not just the consequences of action that the Law saves you from—it’s the consequence of being yourself. It’s no surprise that of all the characters, Alec is the one with the most knee-jerk fealty to Shadowhunter Law and tradition—even though he is the one with the most to lose. Alec clings to the Law as a shield to hide behind. He can’t be himself, he can’t accept his true feelings, he can’t pursue the one he loves, not because he’s afraid (or so he tells himself), but because the Law forbids it. (Funny, then, that when he’s inscribed with the Fearless rune, he’s suddenly ready to shout the truth to the world.) Clary, hewing for once to a higher law, complains that she can’t be held responsible for her feelings or her actions because all that is inconsequential in the face of love: “When you love someone, you don’t have a choice…Love takes your choices away” (City of Ashes).

They may be using the concept of law for opposite purposes, but Clary and Alec are both taking refuge in the same fantasy of compulsion. They can’t be held responsible for themselves; they have no choice. For Clary, it’s love that decides for her, so she can’t be held accountable for her feelings; for Alec, it’s the Law that forces him to deny his feelings. But in both cases, they’re driven by the same fear: What might happen if they decided for themselves?

“[T]his is how the Clave works,” Alec reminds Jace in City of Glass, when the new Inquisitor lays claim to Simon, supposedly for the purpose of getting him safely back home. “We don’t get to control everything that happens. But you have to trust them, because otherwise everything turns into chaos.” Things in Idris have gotten scary, they’ve gotten real, and there are real lives at stake—including Simon’s. Yes, over the course of two books, Alec and the others have proven their courage and their willingness to take the initiative in a crisis and save the day. But they’ve done so through necessity, stepping up in case of emergency because there was no one else. Now, Alec implies, they can go back to what they were supposed to be doing: playing the obedient, pliable children, letting the grown-ups take over and fix things. Letting the grown-ups make the hard decisions (and then take the blame if and when everything goes to hell).

Alec says we don’t get to control everything that happens—but he means we don’t have to control everything that happens.

It’s a child’s strategy; it’s a coward’s excuse. And so it takes a coward to point out that it’s time to grow up. In the face of Clary’s despair over the probable loss of everything that matters to her, Amatis Herondale tells her exactly what she’s doing wrong and sets the stage for the first trilogy’s triumphant climax: “Oh, Clary. Don’t you see? There’s always something you can do. It’s just people like me who always tell themselves otherwise” (City of Glass). It’s a pivotal moment for the book, and for Clary. She’s been inching toward this realization herself—all those minor rebellions and impertinent questions and treasonous authorities and “inevitable” injustices surely adding up to something—but it’s Amatis who pushes her over the brink. It’s Amatis who aims a spotlight at the terrifying truth Clary hasn’t wanted to see. It’s terrifying because fatalism is easy. Surrender is easy. Taking charge of your own life and your choices, no matter how ugly things get? That can be hard enough to seem impossible.

By the end of City of Glass, Clary is ready for the impossible. With Amatis’ charge ringing in her ears, with the Clave ready to throw up its hands and give in to Valentine, with all hope apparently lost, Clary is done letting other people tell her what she can and cannot do. And after hundreds of pages of excuses, of there’s nothing I can do and the Law is the Law, finally, someone stands up to say there’s something I can do.

There’s a choice after all.

There’s always a choice.

This is the lesson our heroes need to embrace before they can grow up…and before they can triumph. To win, they need to do more than just question the rules. They need to change them. The runes of the past aren’t enough to win a battle against Valentine’s demon army, but if Clary and co. break the rules? If they write a new rune, and write it across the skin of every Shadowhunter, if they incite an entire society to buck the established order, if only for a single day, they just might prevail. It’s the key to defeating Valentine, but it’s also the key to their coming of age—to Alec embracing his identity, to Jace choosing his true family, to Clary discovering her inner warrior. Before any of that can happen, they need to reject the comfort they’ve found in following the rules and letting someone else call the shots. They need to understand their lives aren’t prescribed and predetermined, that things don’t need to work the way they always have, that the future is unwritten and belongs to them. No matter how terrifying, they need to decide that the only rules that matter are the ones they write themselves.



Robin Wasserman is the author of several books for children and young adults, including the Cold Awakening Trilogy, Hacking Harvard, and, most recently, The Book of Blood and Shadow. She lives and writes (and occasionally procrastinates) in Brooklyn. You can find more information about her and her books at www.robinwasserman.com.