SHADOWHUNTERS AND DOWNWORLDERS

SARAH CROSS

I love Sarah’s essay because it cuts to the heart of the nature of a true warrior: the ability to work with what you have, and the ability to adapt. I don’t just mean what you have materially, but what you have inside you: your background, the skills you possess, your ability to think on your feet. While everything else in Clary’s life is turned upside down when she discovers she’s a Shadowhunter, Clary’s weapon of choice remains unchanged: art.

Beyond runes, which have remained the same for centuries, there is no precedent for Shadowhunters using art as a weapon. Luckily, Clary’s pretty good at setting her own precedents. This essay is a great articulation of how she goes about it.


THE ART OF WAR

NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE GIRL WITH THE SKETCHBOOK

Everyone loves a kick-ass girl. (Well—maybe not her enemies, but you know what I mean.) Whether her strength and fighting prowess come from years of training, supernatural powers, or a combination of both, she’s a force to be reckoned with—and admired. We envy her seemingly effortless domination of her enemies, her killer instinct, and how cool she is under pressure. She has the strength and endurance of an Olympic athlete and the knockout punch of an action hero. Who wouldn’t want to be like that?

But most of us, unless we’re lucky enough to be born into a clan of ninjas, will never be that kind of kick-ass. I know I’m not. I could hit someone with a baseball bat if I had to, but I’d probably just hurt myself if I borrowed Luke’s kindjal.

When I was sixteen, I dreamed of being a kick-ass girl—but my reality was the complete opposite. I was totally inept at weapons, fighting, and anything sports related. I could barely walk in high heels, let alone deliver a roundhouse kick while wearing them. And unlike the amazingly fierce Isabelle Lightwood, I didn’t spend my teen years learning the fine points of demon slaying.

No, like a lot of fantasy-loving kids, I spent my teen years reading and drawing on any piece of paper you put in front of me. I read comics full of women with superpowers and fantasy novels with sword-wielding heroines on the cover. I might have felt like I was a hero at heart, but I wasn’t anything like the characters I read about. Psylocke and Storm would have laughed me right out of the Danger Room, and no self-respecting party of heroes would have let me join their quest.

Which is why I love Clary. Clary is every bookish, fantasy-loving girl who grows up wielding a pencil and a sketchbook instead of mutant powers or a sword. She’s completely unprepared when she’s thrust into the world of Shadowhunters, Downworlders, and demons. She doesn’t know their rules, she’s never heard of runes, and while she can use a knife as well as any panicked person backed into a corner, that’s not much help against a demon horde.

But Clary is also determined, super stubborn, and courageous. Just try to tell her she can’t do something. When she finds out that Simon (currently in the form of a helpless rat) has been taken to a hotel full of vampires, she doesn’t hesitate; she decides to save him, and she would go alone if she had to. Because Clary never abandons her friends. Even when she doesn’t know how she’s going to help, she’s willing to put herself at risk to try, because, in her mind, that’s what friends do.

Clary isn’t particularly fast or strong. She’s not skilled with weaponry, and she doesn’t have magic, fangs, or claws in her arsenal. But Clary’s a hero at heart—and that means she’ll find a way to be the hero she needs to be, to look beyond the skills she doesn’t have and draw on the skills she does have to ultimately save the day.

Draw, by the way, is the key word here.





The Girl with the Sketchbook


“But you—you’re dead weight, a mundane.” [Alec] spit the word out as if it were an obscenity.

“No,” Clary said. “I’m not. I’m Nephilim—just like you.”

His lip curled up at the corner. “Maybe,” he said. “But with no training, no nothing, you’re still not much use, are you?”

—City of Bones

Clary lacks special training—and to some people (like our friend Alec here), that means she’s useless. She’s not a warrior, so she can’t get the job done. And Alec isn’t the only one who feels that way. There are plenty of people who think that if a heroine isn’t physically dominating her opponent, she’s not a fighter, and she’s less heroic than a girl who’s kick-ass or tough. But not every girl can be Isabelle Lightwood or Katniss Everdeen. I think the true measure of a hero is what a person does with what they have, how hard they’re willing to fight, and how far they’re willing to go to set things right.

When we first meet Clary, her extraordinarily mundane talents include art, being a great best friend, and vetoing Simon’s crappy band names. (Sea Vegetable Conspiracy? No.) She’s the kind of person who doesn’t hesitate to help someone in trouble—like when she decides to come to a club kid’s rescue when she spots two armed Shadowhunters following him into a storage room at Pandemonium—but I doubt she thinks of herself as a hero.

And yet, when her normal life is ripped away from her, and her reality expands to include demons, Shadowhunters, and Downworlders, she doesn’t hide from it. There’s no doubt that she would be safer if she stayed holed up in the Institute (well, providing she stayed far away from traitorous Hodge and I’ll-claw-your-face-off Hugin). No one would fault her if she wanted to sit back and wait for the Clave to deal with Valentine and rescue her mother. Just the fact that demons exist is a lot to take in—no one expects Clary to bounce back from that revelation and fight. If anything, they expect her to be a liability.

Because, as a girl with Shadowhunter lineage but no training, what can she do that they can’t do better?

But Clary is not a hole-up-and-hide kind of girl. She’s passionate and loyal and brave, and the fact that she’s not a warrior doesn’t mean she’s useless. It just means she has a different set of skills to bring to the table—skills most people probably wouldn’t associate with winning a war. But you know what? Those are the skills Clary has to work with. So she does.

She might not have been raised to be a hero, but she’s so determined, and has so much heart, that she finds a way to be a hero anyway, using a talent she’s had all along:

Art.