Shadowhunters and Downworlders: A Mortal Instruments Reader(11)

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.