SHADOWHUNTERS AND DOWNWORLDERS

ROBIN WASSERMAN

Ah, the Clave. Nothing like an intimidating, inflexible institution of adults who expect nothing less than unwavering, unquestioning loyalty to brighten your day. This authority is problematic in the extreme, yet so many Nephilim adhere to it! What gives?

One of the aspects I’ve tried to preserve in the series is the moral ambiguity of the Clave. They’re supposedly the good guys, but they sure don’t act like it. In many ways, the Clave begat the Circle, just by being who they were, as Robin points out below.

But ultimately, this essay is about growing up. It’s about questioning authority, thinking critically, and coming into one’s own ability (and willingness!) to make choices and take responsibility for them—an important stage of development for our Shadowhunter heroes and for us mere mundanes alike.


WHEN LAWS ARE MADE TO BE BROKEN

“We Shadowhunters live by a code, and that code isn’t flexible.”

—Jace Wayland, City of Bones

Imagine that your best friend came to you one day, brimming with excitement because she’d met these super-awesome new friends who suggested she come live with them, follow a bunch of arcane and unquestionable laws, and cut ties with all her old friends because they’re incapable of understanding her new super-awesome life.

If you’re a child of the ’80s like me, reared on a steady diet of Jonestown horror stories and trashy novels about brainwashed teens, you would immediately recognize the situation for what it was: Your best friend has joined a cult.

If you’re not a child of the ’80s but not completely oblivious, you’d still clue in pretty quick: definitely a cult.

Simon Lewis is far from oblivious.

As he tells his best friend, Clary Fray, in City of Ashes, “The Shadowhunter thing—they’re like a cult.” Clary denies it, of course, because who wants to admit they’ve been suckered into a cult? But Simon’s got evidence: “Sure they are. Shadowhunting is their whole lives. And they look down on everyone else…They’re not friends with ordinary people, they don’t go to the same places, they don’t know the same jokes, they think they’re above us.” Simon may have a somewhat bizarre definition of cults—he could be describing a particularly snobbish bunch of cheerleaders—but you’ve got to admit he has a point. Like any good cultists, Shadowhunters forswear allegiance to anything that could interfere with their loyalty to the institution. (Remember Alec explaining in City of Bones why he wishes Clary would disappear: “[She’s] making Jace act like—like he isn’t one of us. Making him break his oath to the Clave, making him break the Law.”) They share an eccentric but ironclad belief system and hew to a code of behavior that allows for no deviation. And let’s not forget their utter ignorance of basic pop culture that could only result from spending a life in cultural isolation, willfully ignoring the outside world.

Admittedly, these days the word “cult” has a mushy definition and is easily pinned on any group with a suitably wacky set of vaguely religious-seeming habits and beliefs. But the Shadowhunters’ odd fashion sense and demonology studies (a belief that doesn’t seem so wacky once demons start popping up everywhere to eat people alive) isn’t what raises Simon’s hackles. It is (or should be) the isolationist and absolutist nature of the Shadowhunters that strikes Simon as threateningly cult-like. He’s using the term as a loose standin for any group that dictates every major element of its members’ lives, that conflates obedience with morality, that replaces independent decision making with knee-jerk obeisance to a “higher” law, running itself like a miniature absolutist state. Call them a cult, call them a mini-dictatorship, call them a really, really intense fraternity, but there’s no question that the Shadowhunters are extremists, distrustful of outsiders, obsessed with obedience, and worshipful of the laws that govern every aspect of their behavior.

And the supposedly rebellious Clary—along with her fellow teen Shadowhunters—welcomes this life and its mandates with open arms. (Yes, she seems to have little choice in the matter, given the whole life-in-danger, chased-by-demons, need-to-save-the-world situations she keeps ending up in, but as will be discussed later, there’s always a choice. She chooses to join up.) Not that the implications occur to her, or any of the other young Shadowhunters. In fact, Clary’s repulsed by the thought of anyone voluntarily signing up for that kind of draconian existence—at least in the abstract. Upon hearing the loyalty oath of Valentine’s Circle: “I hereby render unconditional obedience to the Circle and its principles” (City of Bones), she’s totally freaked out. “It sounds creepy,” she complains. “Like a fascist organization or something.” Somehow Clary fails to connect the dots to the Clave and the obedience it demands, an obedience no less unconditional than that required by Valentine. After all: The Law is hard, but it is the Law.

Questioning the Law is not only forbidden: It’s considered a threat. Which is a strange situation for teenagers—for whom you’d expect questioning authority to be a prime directive—to find themselves in, much less willingly accept. And indeed, things don’t go well for those who can’t toe the line: It’s easy to imagine Valentine as that querulous child who asked the questions no one was supposed to ask. Why not just make more Shadowhunters? he asked his teachers innocently—an idea seen as “sacrilege.”

Why do we do what we do? Because it is the Law.

You might as well say: Because we said so.

Maybe it’s not so surprising that Valentine stopped asking questions of his elders and started asking them of his peers—then, quickly, started supplying the answers himself. Nor is it surprising that he substituted one extreme for another. Young Shadowhunters may be great with a stele and deadly with a blade, but they don’t get a lot of lessons in moderation and moral flexibility.

When it comes to rebellion, Valentine is the exception: For Shadowhunters, obedience (whether to the Clave or, for that brief period of rebellion, to the Circle) is the rule. Why would generations of teens, given more power and responsibility (not to mention more weapons) than any of their mundane peers, go along so readily with the dictates handed down by their elders? Why would the outspoken, stubborn, courageous young Shadowhunters of the Mortal Instruments series—and the readers who’d happily switch places with them—so unquestioningly buy into the Clave’s brand of absolute authority and the omnipotence of its Law?

Speaking as a former teenager, I’d like to believe there’s more to it than a hormonal attraction to fascism.





Don’t Trust the Man (Trust the Institution)


“Betrayal is never pretty, but to betray a child—that’s a double betrayal, don’t you think?”

—Valentine Morgenstern, City of Bones

One of the great tragedies of growing up is the discovery that your parents—and your teachers, and your sports heroes, and your favorite actors, singers, YouTube sensations—are fallible. Adults don’t know all, and what they do know, they often won’t tell you—because they’ve got their own agendas, or because they want to shield you from the hard truths “for your own good.” Adults lie, they betray, they screw up in every way possible, and the adult Shadowhunters are no different from their mundane counterparts—except that a Shadowhunter’s lies are more likely to get you eaten by a demon.

The Mortal Instruments books are rife with adults lying to their impressionable charges, often in ways that nearly destroy the teens’ lives. In some cases, this is simply because the liars are evil: Valentine lies to Jace about everything because that’s what bad guys do. The more lies, the better to enact his evil plan. Hodge lies because that’s also what cowards do, and when you’re in sway to the big bad guy, you do whatever he tells you, especially if what he tells you to do is pretend you’re not such a coward. It’s more unsettling—and far more destabilizing—when the people lying are the ones who are supposed to tell the truth: the good guys, the ones you’re supposed to trust with your faith and your life. The ones who tell you what to do and expect you to nod and go along. They claim they tell lies only to protect you, withhold information only “for your own good.”

But it’s not for Clary’s own good that her mother lied to her for her entire life, stole her memories, allowed her to be taken unaware by a demonic ambush, and, certainly not least, let her believe she’d fallen in love with her own brother. As it’s not for Jace’s own good that Maryse allows him to believe she’s exiled him from his family, when in fact she just wants to get him away from the Inquisitor. Luke lies to Clary about who he really is—and who she really is; the Lightwoods lie to their children about what they once were. Over and over again, these supposedly trustworthy adults abuse the faith of their children—and that isn’t to mention all the times that adults in the highest positions of authority in the Clave abuse their power for their own misguided purposes. The first Inquisitor following her own agenda with Jace, the next Inquisitor following his twisted agenda with Simon, the shunning of Luke, the casual prejudice against and occasional abuse of Downworlders…it’s no wonder that Clary, Jace, Isabelle, and Alec spend a fair amount of time defying orders. And maybe it’s no wonder that, robbed of the ability to trust in individual authorities, they put so much faith in the authority of an institution. Everyone has to believe in something, and the Clave offers a ready solution to anyone disappointed by human fallibility. People may make mistakes, people may lie to you and fail you, but the Law is incorruptible.

Clary and the others think nothing of defying their parents and only a little more than nothing about defying the Clave administrators, the fallible humans in charge. But it never occurs to any of them to defy the Law itself, to question, say, the rules about parabatai relations, about minors having no vote in Clave operations, about revealing things to mundanes, about reporting people to the authorities. They may question the adults who bend and break those rules, but they never question the assumption that the rules exist for a good reason. And, as usual, it’s Valentine who goes the extra mile, who makes the uncomfortable claim that it’s possible to question a law while remaining loyal to the institution it governs. (Uncomfortable, because who wants to agree with Valentine?) He refuses to let anyone call him a traitor, because “[a] man doesn’t have to agree with his government to be a patriot” (City of Ashes).

Why are our bold, curious, stubborn heroes so slow to catch onto this concept and so reluctant to start asking the hard questions and making their own rules?

Maybe because when the rules of life, and the punishment for violating them, aren’t spelled out in detail, figuring them out can be torture. This is especially true of adolescence, when your social fortunes can be decided by the most trivial of wrong choices: wearing the wrong outfit, saying the wrong thing, kissing the wrong guy. Most high schools are as inflexible and judgmental as any fundamentalist society—ostracism and exile for the most minor of infractions is the norm. Following these unspoken rules is hard enough…but what about when you can’t even figure out what they are?

Clary spends much of City of Ashes playing at this, trying to figure out how she’s “supposed” to act—as a girlfriend to Simon, as a sister to Jace—as if life were a role-playing game in which you have to work out the rules as you go along. (A game that poor Clary’s pretty much guaranteed to lose, given how ungirlfriendy she feels to one and how very unsisterly she feels to the other.) It’s only when it comes to playing her role as a Shadowhunter that she doesn’t have to guess at what she’s supposed to do, because people are only too willing to tell her. If you’re forced to play the game of life, who wouldn’t want a cheat sheet?