SHADOWHUNTERS AND DOWNWORLDERS

The Life and Crimes of Valentine Morgenstern


It’s probably no surprise by this point that there’s a special place for Valentine Morgenstern in my heart, a place I reserve for the most deliciously evil characters. Right from the start, Valentine’s role is clear. It’s in his name (or at least his last name). Morgenstern means “morning star,” a reference to Lucifer, who fell from heaven for his sins against God.

Valentine, raised in Idris, was an exceptional child who excelled at his Shadowhunter training and seemed poised for great things. Unfortunately for the rest of the world, these great things skewed toward the darker end of the spectrum. He is extremely attractive, intelligent, and possessed the kind of charisma that would have served him well as a politician, if not a king. Instead, Valentine became the leader of a splinter group of disaffected young Shadowhunters who believed they were superior to the Downworlders and that the Accords that kept a peace between the two was an offense. After his father’s death at the hands of a werewolf, Valentine’s negative views on Downworlders became even more extreme, and the Circle became a rebellion in truth. Valentine no longer simply wanted to discuss the superiority of Shadowhunters; he set his sights higher than that. He wanted to break the Accords.

Valentine interests me so much because he’s a man of extremes. He is an idealist who wants to see evil purged from the world, but he became a revolutionary willing to do anything—evil included—to keep the Accords from being renewed. He is a zealot who wants all Downworlders destroyed, but he is also an opportunist who has no qualms against using those very same Downworlders to achieve his goals. He is a father who loves his adopted son enough to forgive him his rebellions and repeatedly extend an olive branch to him (in his own way), but he is also a monster who experimented on three children still in the womb without their mothers’ knowledge or consent and without caring about the consequences.

For a man who despises all that Downworlders are, Valentine’s deeds rival any of their greatest crimes with ease. He has started wars, drafted armies of demons to torture and kill fellow Shadowhunters—the same people he was claiming to try to save—and even gone up against the angels themselves, thinking that he knows better than they. Even the worst of the Downworlders tend to kill their victims quickly. They don’t keep them chained up in their basements for sixteen years, torturing them for their secrets. And through all of this, Valentine still considers himself the hero of his own story.

In an attempt to bolster his army in the early days of his campaign to acquire the Mortal Instruments, Valentine created a number of Forsaken by using runes on mundanes. He knows that the mundane body cannot handle the runes, that it becomes misshapen and twisted and that the end result is a sort of mindless monster. He knows too that once a person becomes Forsaken, there is no turning him or her back. And Valentine still condemns his army to insanity and eventual death.

Vampires drink blood in order to survive. It may not be the most noble action, but they do it to survive. When Valentine murders Downworlder children, it is with much darker motive: to quench the Mortal Sword in their blood, in order to swing its alignment from angelic to demonic. He kills to strengthen his control over the demon hordes he needs to strike out at the Clave.

All of the things he does are in service of a single endgame: to cleanse and purify the Shadowhunter race and return it to its former glory. Once Valentine summons Raziel, he plans to ask the Angel to remove the angel blood from any Shadowhunters who do not drink from Valentine’s altered cup—which means that the newly human Nephilim, still covered in Marks, would instantly become Forsaken. Such was Valentine’s plan for pruning what he saw as a corrupt government and population: mass murder.





Humanity: The Root of All Evil?


What makes Valentine’s actions even more disturbing is the fact that Valentine is human. He’s not necessarily predisposed to acts of evil the same way demons are. While I say that Valentine is human, that’s not entirely true. He, like all Nephilim (and Clary and Jace more than the rest), has the blood of an angel running through his veins. If anything, that should bolster his humanity. But Valentine’s humanity isn’t, like Simon’s, a counterweight to his darker impulses. It’s the source of them.

What does it mean to be human? The word “humanity” refers to the human race as a collective whole but also to treating people with sympathy and compassion. One of the synonyms for “human”? Humane. All three words have the same root, suggesting that treating others with compassion, in a way that is humane, is a fundamental part of what it means to be human. That because we’re human, we are predisposed to acts of kindness, in the same way that the Mortal Instruments series suggests that a demonic heritage can, and sometimes does, predispose one toward more brutal behaviors.

But being human has a dark side too. When we talk about human nature, it’s almost always cast in a negative light. It’s an admission of our failings. “I’m only human” is what we say when we make a mistake or when we strive for something only to fail. “What can you do? It’s human nature” is what we say when we, or others, don’t live up to our ideals of benevolence. In short, to be human is to wrestle with two related but contrasting ideas: that our nature is inherently compassionate but that we will act without compassion often, and we must accept not only that it has happened before but also that it will happen again.

Fundamentally, then, to be human is to know what is good, to be tempted by what is evil, and to choose to strive, over and over again, for the former over the latter. If this sounds like the same struggle Simon experiences in becoming a vampire, that’s not an accident. After all, Downworlders are human too; it’s what makes them different from demons. They are not mindless creatures driven only to destroy. They too can choose. (And who’s to say that the root of Downworlders’ darkness isn’t human in origin, just amplified by demon blood beyond what a normal person experiences?)

Valentine is exceptional only in that, though he like all men is born with a choice between acts of humanity and acts of destruction, he chooses destruction almost every time. He isn’t an animalistic devourer trapped between worlds, hungry only for something it can shatter apart and rend between its jaws. He’s a man, a cultured man. And even though he knows the pain of loss and the dangers of war, he sees violence as having more value than kindness.

What makes Valentine such a great villain, however, is not that he is a cautionary tale about following one’s darker impulses. It’s that he’s familiar.Shades of Valentine echo in every history class, every time we learn about a despot’s rise to power or a cult leader who sacrifices his followers rather than be swayed from his plans, because Valentine’s not trying to destroy the world, bring about the end of days, increase his personal abilities, or take on the powers of a god. He’s trying to change the world.

Valentine reignites a race war. He starts an actual war. But his motivation is a high-minded one: He’s trying to change things for what he believes is the better. He’s trying to preserve—and then improve upon—tradition. Shadowhunters were originally given their powers by the Angel in order to protect humanity from the demons and the Downworlders. Valentine just wants to make them purer. Stronger. He wants to make them better. And in that, Valentine’s evil is the most human one of all: evil done in the service of the same ideals that are supposed to inspire us to strive for good.

This is part of why I love Valentine so much as a villain. Take away the supernatural elements, the behavioral disorders, and his “unique” views on parenting, and he’s the kind of villain we see every day. He’s the smooth-talking politician filling up news networks. He’s the charismatic leader of an oppressive regime who has the undying loyalty of his followers. He’s the parent who just can’t accept that his children are not carbon copies of himself and cannot accept that they may hold different beliefs. His behavior is chilling not because we can’t imagine it but because we all too easily can.