SHADOWHUNTERS AND DOWNWORLDERS

DIANA PETERFREUND

Any warrior worth his salt isn’t too keen on having the secrets of his weapons revealed, but I find this essay by Diana to be an illuminating analysis of what makes Jace the Jace we know, love, and occasionally want to strangle.





SHARPER THAN A SERAPH BLADE


The Shadowhunters of Cassandra Clare’s Mortal Instruments series have a variety of weapons at their disposal, and most possess particular favorites. Isabelle Lightwood is fond of her golden electrum whip, Luke Garroway (when not wolfy) is very attached to the kindjal blade Valentine gave him to off himself with, and Clary Fray probably gets the most mileage out of her Angel-given gift of rune making—that is, when she can manage to hang on to her stele. (Honestly, she drops that thing more often than Stephanie Plum forgets her gun.)

But Jace Wayland Morgenstern Herondale Lightwood—who, thanks to his angel blood, is one of the most powerful of all Shadowhunters, and who has more names for seraph blades than can be found in your average baby-naming book—has one weapon that trumps them all.

Humor.

Seraph blades and daggers and steles are all well and good (and for Jace, they’re very good indeed), but the weapon he turns to time and time again throughout the Mortal Instruments series is his wit. When things look particularly dire, that’s when his jokes get particularly harsh. Late in City of Fallen Angels, Simon even points it out explicitly:

This was Jace being brave, Simon thought, brave and snarky because he thought Lilith was going to kill him, and that was the way he wanted to go, unafraid and on his feet. Like a warrior. The way Shadowhunters did. His death song would always be this—jokes and snideness and pretend arrogance, and that look in his eyes that said, I’m better than you. Simon just hadn’t realized it before.

Poor Simon. Given the many times the mundie vampire Daylighter has been the brunt of Jace’s masculine swagger, it’s little wonder it took him four books to realize the truth behind Jace’s weapon of choice. Luckily, Jace knows exactly what his biting wit, mocking laugh, and arrogant amusement can accomplish, even from the very beginning of the series.

In City of Bones, when Clary and Jace first return to her apartment, they are confronted by a Forsaken minion of Valentine’s—a big one, with an even bigger axe. When the formerly human creature attacks, narrowly missing Jace’s head with his aforementioned axe, what does Jace do? Does he sigh in relief ? Does he attack the dude from a distance? No; he laughs.

“The laugh seemed to enrage the creature,” who then proceeds to drop his weapon—you know, as you do if you’re a possessed evil minion who is being made fun of by a teenager—and raises his fists to the heavily armed Jace, who immediately dispatches him with a quick slice of his seraph blade.

You know, as you do if you’re a badass Shadowhunting teenager who knows that laughing at your exceptionally large, exceptionally enraged opponent is the best way to get him to do something dumb.

And the fun for Jace is just starting. Later, in the battle in Dorothea’s apartment, he taunts the Greater Demon Abbadon in a similar way. As the demon soberly intones about his particular prowess over other demons and hellish domain, Jace feigns disdain. “I’m not so sure about this wind and howling darkness business…smells more like landfill to me. You sure you’re not from Staten Island?”

Jace apparently knows that one of the best ways to attack the bad guys is to wound their pride. Abbadon does not appreciate his precious Abyss being compared to an outer borough, and leaps at Jace, who stands at the ready (are you noticing a pattern here?) with a couple of seraph blades.

Time and again, Jace returns to his signature move: Make fun of the villains, keep them off balance, provoke them into a blind rage during which he can coolly get the upper hand. He deploys his razor-sharp wit against angry demons, hapless rivals (Simon, when still vying for Clary’s affections, was a common target), and even, on occasion, against Clary herself.

Even in Raphael’s vampire lair, as Jace, Clary, and the beratted Simon are being set upon by a whole flock of blood-suckers, Jace takes time out of his busy seraph-swinging schedule to ridicule Clary’s Hollywood grasp of fighting (she thinks they should stand back to back) and mockingly call Raphael “inconsiderate” for daring to move while Jace was trying to stab him in the heart. His commitment to joking, even in a time of crisis, tends to infuriate his enemies. And, naturally, his list of opponents occasionally includes Clary, as his strong attraction to the little mundie deeply disturbs him (even before he finds out she might be his sister).

See, Jace never learned how to flirt properly, because he was raised by a murderous sociopath.

As it turns out, however, humans are a great deal smarter than Valentine taught Jace to give them credit for, and as the series progresses, he finds he can’t as easily disarm and enrage the villains when they aren’t simpleminded minions or demons (or, like Clary, deeply sensitive to his barbs). In Renwick’s at the climax of City of Bones, his attempts to utilize humor against his father get him nowhere, since Valentine is way too smart to fall for Jace’s tricks. Valentine is utterly without a sense of humor (so it must be nature, not nurture, that gives Jace his wit), and Luke and Jace’s attempts to mock him are answered with dull, dead-serious regurgitations of Valentine’s purity platform.

However, the attempt does provide the reader with a clue into Jace’s internal state of mind. The more Jace distances himself from his father in that scene, the more his natural humor comes back to him. When Clary first finds him, he is under the sway of his father, and all of the teasing, all of the joking, all of the Jace has gone out of him. He’s Jonathan Wayland: serious, earnest, in thrall to Valentine. But as he begins to doubt his father, the humor and sarcasm comes back, as much an offensive move (as useless as it is) as a defensive armor to protect him from the pain of realizing that his long-lost father is, well, not as great a guy as Jace had thought.

And the hits just keep on coming for Jace as the trilogy continues. Though he may have a way with wounding demons and minions through a few well-placed verbal barbs, when it comes to those with a little more brainpower and battle training—people like adoptive mothers, Clave Inquisitors, and his erstwhile papa—his attempts at using humor as an offensive technique don’t have the same panache. Throughout most of City of Ashes, Jace doesn’t triumph due to his sharp tongue; he actually suffers.

“Usually he could get his way with Maryse by making her laugh,” Jace thinks when his adoptive mother begins to interrogate him about Valentine. “He was one of the only people in the world who could make her laugh.” And yet relying on jokes and sarcasm backfires this time, and his relationship with the only mother he’s ever known teeters on the brink.

Later, he tries to match wits with the Queen of the Fair Folk, who is admittedly amused by his comparatively pathetic efforts (and, you know, by the fact that Jace is way hot, and faeries like that kind of thing), but she makes sure he knows precisely who is the spider and who is the fly in her world. Though Jace mocks her with his now-that-you’ve-had-your-fun glares of doom—as Clary sees them—the immortal Faerie Queen can give much, much better than she gets from some teenager, even if he is a Nephilim warrior. Jace escapes from that little encounter only after being forced to make out with his “sister” in front of her boyfriend, his family, and the entire faerie court.

And he fares worst of all when he gets snarky with the Inquisitor, who calls his attempts at humor “revolting” and socks him in a magical cage, believing he’s taunting her as one of Valentine’s men.

The more subdued humor in this second installment of the series can be attributed to Jace’s growing insecurity. He deploys his trademark wit mainly as a defensive move; he’s trying to hide just how much Maryse hurts him when she doesn’t trust him or just how scared he is of the Inquisitor’s threats. He’s no longer sure of his place in the world. In City of Bones, Jace is a Shadowhunter, the beloved (if orphaned) son of the late, great Michael Wayland (great in Jace’s mind, at least; Clary thinks the guy’s kind of a jerk), living happily among the close-knit Lightwood clan, dealing with his attraction to a cute redhead who, appearances aside, is so not really a mundie. By City of Ashes, the Clave is interrogating and imprisoning him, Maryse Lightwood has thrown him out of the house, people everywhere are calling him Jonathan Morgenstern, his dad’s a psychopath, and—oh yeah, the cute redhead is his sister.

There are a few things that even sarcasm can’t protect you from.

But when Clary carves the Fearless rune on him at the end of the novel, his sense of humor returns. Is fear of demons the most useful thing she excises from Jace at that moment? Maybe. But what if it’s fear of everything else that’s been messing with his head? With the Fearless rune on, he is able to kiss Clary, to joke with Luke, and to face a phalanx of demons with a swagger in his step. With the Fearless rune on, he mocks his father and acts like the Shadowhunter people have been telling him he isn’t worthy to call himself for the entire book. Jace and the Shadowhunters, along with Luke and his werewolves, face impossible odds thanks to Valentine’s mass demon summoning, but Jace is back in prime form, yukking it up even as the ichor flies. At last, the complications of Clave politics and family drama and incestuous relationships are out of the way and he’s back on familiar ground. Jace = badass Shadowhunter and demons = dead meat.

In the end, the fear demon Agramon manages to burn that rune off Jace’s back. However, it does so not through physical superiority but rather by hinting at all the mental baggage the rune has been helping keep at bay. Agramon appears as Valentine himself, reminding Jace of their family connection, and even more, of how many characteristics they share: courage, leadership, and the arrogance that in Jace, at least, forms the core of his sarcastic armor.

And though Jace kills Agramon on Valentine’s ship, the demon does a fair amount of damage to Jace first. Fear and insecurity have him in a humorless grip throughout most of City of Glass, as Jace begins to doubt not only his identity, but also his very humanity (or nephilimity, as it were). Clary notes his depression, thinking, “Despair, anger, hate. These are demon qualities. He’s acting the way he thinks he should act.” After all, like Valentine, demons don’t seem to have much of a sense of humor. If Jace is Valentine’s son, infused with the blood of demons (as Clary saw in the angel’s visions), then a sense of humor isn’t exactly his birthright.

Jace can pretend to be demon-tainted as much as he wants, can protect himself with anger and indifference instead of sarcasm and arrogance, but when the chips are down, he returns to form. When Jace is imprisoned by Sebastian later in City of Glass, bound, injured, and with no hope of rescue, he doesn’t despair. He mocks his captor: “Waiting for a special occasion to kill me? Christmas is coming.”

Sebastian replies: “You have a smart mouth. You didn’t learn that from Valentine.” You can say that again, demon boy. Sebastian, like his father (or perhaps his demon blood donors), didn’t get a humor gene. He’s also pretty smart, so he isn’t particularly susceptible to Jace’s attempts to anger him with his usual displays of mocking arrogance. “Nothing, not a flicker of emotion, passed across Sebastian’s pale face,” as Jace tries every trick in his arsenal, to no avail. Sebastian is weak, Sebastian is crazy, Sebastian is on the wrong side of history…nothing moves his “brother” until Jace stumbles on the deepest wound of all, the one that even he can’t joke about, because he feels its bite so strongly himself. If Sebastian kills Jace unarmed and tied up, Valentine will be disappointed.

In the first few books, whenever Jace is given the chance to kill Valentine, he can’t pull it off because he can’t divorce himself from his long-indoctrinated need to impress the man he knew as Michael Wayland, the man he thought of as his father. His hand trembles in Renwick’s in book one, and when he kills Agramon on the ship in book two, his first, terrible fear is that it really was Valentine all along. Valentine is Jace’s enemy; he abused Jace, “beat Jace bloody for the first ten years of his life” (as Sebastian says in City of Lost Souls), but he’s also the only father Jace ever knew. If there’s one quality that Valentine has in spades, it’s charisma. It’s how he was able to get all the members of the Circle to do such awful things for him to begin with. Jace guesses right that Sebastian, despite his sociopathy and demon blood, worships Valentine in the same way everyone else did. And what’s more, Jace understands that humor and sarcasm is not the way to convince Sebastian that he knows what he’s talking about.

In the first book, Jace’s momentary alliance with Valentine at Renwick’s is humorless; in the second, his pretended defection when Valentine shows Jace his terrible plan is similarly earnest. Valentine’s hold on Jace lives beyond his sense of humor, so deeply embedded in his psyche that he knows that the humorless, psychopathic Sebastian feels it too. So when Jace convinces Sebastian to fight him fair and square, the way Valentine would want (the argument is debatable, but hey, it works), there’s no joking required, or even warranted. His connection to Valentine is one area of his life where jokes do not suffice.

In City of Fallen Angels, Jace is resurrected and reassured of his place in the world—or, at least, that’s what he wants everyone to think. His cocky swagger and amused arrogance are on full display, but those close to him are no longer fooled. Clary, when confronted with Jace’s continued vulnerability, thinks: “Alec and Isabelle knew, from living with him and loving him, that underneath the protective armor of humor and pretended arrogance, the ragged shards of memory and childhood still tore at him. But she was the only one he said the words out loud to.”

No matter how hard he might be working to exorcise Valentine’s twisted teachings, to Jace, emotions and connection are still a weakness, and humor is the way he tries to keep his distance from the things out there—demon or otherwise—that might hurt him.

An argument with Simon and his new roommate, the werewolf Kyle/Jordan, has Jace back in fighting form: “So basically you’re threatening to turn me into something you can sprinkle on popcorn if I don’t do what you say?” Exasperated, Kyle asks Simon if Jace “always talk[s] like this.” The answer, to Simon’s chagrin, is yes.

Later, as the demon Lilith’s possession takes hold, Jace loses even this facade of sarcasm. Clary thinks “it was hard to see him like this, all his usual burning energy gone, like witchlight suffocating under a covering of ash.” You can always tell when things are going poorly for Jace, when he’s in the thrall of a master manipulator like Valentine or, more literally, when he’s the pawn of enchantments like those cast by Lilith or Sebastian. When that happens, he’s just not funny anymore.

In City of Bones, he has to lose faith in his father before he can join in on Luke’s mocking appraisal of Valentine’s plans. In City of Fallen Angels, it isn’t until Clary breaks Lilith’s hold on him by cutting apart his rune that Jace starts making jokes again, turning the full force of his humor weapon on Lilith herself: “You and your name-dropping,” he mocks. “It’s like I’m with the Band with biblical figures.” (“This is Jace being brave,” Simon thinks when he witnesses it.)

Lilith, however, is not amused. Seriously (pun intended), what is it with these demons? None of them has a sense of humor—that is, until Sebastian and Jace are bound. In City of Lost Souls, Sebastian and Jace go on a wild crime spree through Europe’s most fashionable cities, living it up like a pair of hot yet evil frat boys on the spring break from Hell. Sebastian is no longer Valentine’s humorless, sociopathic son. Whether it’s their magical bond or just by way of spending time with a wit like Jace, Sebastian has somehow developed quite the knack for cracking jokes. The two of them even banter in front of Clary in order to put her at ease when she first shows up in their interdimensional penthouse apartment.

Clary is baffled by the Jace she meets. This time, his possession is of a different nature. He’s not the despondent, heavily controlled automaton she cut into on Lilith’s rooftop. In fact, it’s hard for her to keep in mind that he’s really possessed at all. Thanks to Lilith’s enchantments, he is bound physically to Sebastian, his former enemy, and is also mentally subservient to Sebastian’s will…but he’s happy about it. He loves his new life as the sidekick of a psychopath, and, unlike the other time he was possessed, it’s difficult to determine if he’s faking it, because the central tenets of his character—arrogance, humor, and a passion for Clary Fray—are completely intact. “How could he be Jace and not-Jace all at once?” Clary wonders.

Every time Jace makes a sexy joke or brags about his physical prowess in that arrogant tone she’s grown to love, Clary’s confidence in her mission to rescue him from Sebastian is shaken. Maybe this is the Jace he was always meant to be: happy, funny, madly in love, pure in thought and purpose. After all, she’s spent four books learning that Jace is least himself when he’s not funny, that the jokes stop when Jace is under the thumb of a villain. But the Jace wandering about the streets of Europe and taking her to enchanted nightclubs is a real hoot.

Then, at last, comes that marvelous Silver Chair–esque moment, when the enchantment is temporarily broken and Jace urges Clary to believe that this, this is the real him and the other Jace is a mirage, no matter how “happy” (and jokey) he seems. But Clary remains uncertain. After all, she remembers the last time he was possessed, back in Fallen Angels. “You didn’t smile or laugh or joke,” she says, because she knows that’s what Jace does. He smiles. He laughs. He jokes. And so does Enchanted Jace 2.0. But the Jace who comes to her with the pugio wound marring the red Possession rune on his chest, this supposedly sane, free-thinking Jace…well, he’s deadly serious. What’s a girl supposed to think?

Unfortunately, things get totally out of hand when deadly serious Jace starts talking about, well, death, and confused Clary decides the best person to help her out with the situation is her evil brother. Oops. Lesson learned, folks: Sometimes your hilarious boyfriend would rather be unhappy and unpossessed than otherwise. (In fact, when she goes to apologize to him at the end of the book, I initially figured it would be for squealing to Sebastian, not because she later, completely justifiably, stabbed him with a sword soaked in heavenly fire. Because, let’s be honest here, which part of that deserves an apology? Obviously the part where Clary is a total tattletale.)

But while demonic bondings apparently can bestow a sense of humor on the likes of Jonathan “Sebastian” Morgenstern, we’re all quite lucky that heavenly fire doesn’t burn it out of the likes of Jace Wayland Morgenstern Herondale Lightwood. In fact, when Jace first wakes up, after all the burning and such, he almost immediately reverts to form, asking to see Clary (“‘It really is you,’ Isabelle said, her voice amused”), and, of course, cracking jokes about his dream life as a topless underwear model.

“God,” says Clary, when he tries the same schtick on her, “I forgot how annoying the unpossessed you is.”

Except she doesn’t really mean it. Because in truth, she loved the sarcastic, arrogant, annoyingly funny Jace—loved him so much she almost let him stay bound to Sebastian rather than risk having him revert to the humorless drone she’d had the misfortune of dating when he was under Lilith’s possession in City of Fallen Angels. The most insidious thing about the Sebastian-controlled Jace was how much like Jace he remained. Enough like Jace that he was afraid Alec and Isabelle wouldn’t believe he was cured when they came to visit him in the hospital. Enough like Jace that even Clary had her doubts about what was best for the man she loved.

Which means it’s probably good for the Shadowhunters that Sebastian wanted to keep Enchanted!Jace as his own personal pet-slash-BFF. Had Jace not run off with Sebastian to make Mortal Cups and party with vampires, had he stayed in the care of the Lightwoods like some kind of rune-stricken sleeper agent, it’s possible that Sebastian’s terrible plan ultimately would have been effective. No one would suspect a happy-go-lucky, Clary-loving, joke-slinging, adorably arrogant Jace Lightwood of being a minion of evil.

Now there’s a scary thought. After all, Jace did warn Clary that, under Sebastian’s influence, he might “burn down the world…and laugh while he’s doing it.”

How very Jace, to make even the end of the world into a joke.



Diana Peterfreund is the author of eight books for adults and teens, including the Secret Society Girl series, the “killer unicorn” novels Rampant and Ascendant, and For Darkness Shows the Stars, a post-apocalyptic reimagining of Jane Austen’s Persuasion. She once spent a week in a haunted Irish castle with Cassie, so she knows exactly where Jace got his dangerous wit. You can find out more about Diana at www.dianapeterfreund.com.