Shadowhunters and Downworlders: A Mortal Instruments Reader(16)

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?





Power to the Powerless


“What?” Jace sounded furious. “Why not? The Clave requires you—”

Magnus looked at him coldly. “I don’t like being told what to do, little Shadowhunter.”

—City of Bones

Just one problem: You’re not forced to play the game. You can ignore the rules; you can make up your own. Magnus Bane is a living example, the closest thing the Mortal Instruments has to an anarchist, and certainly he’s in no mood to be told what to do. His resistance to obey is no surprise here. The surprise is that a seventeen-year-old with no magical powers would think he could issue commands to the most powerful warlock on the eastern seaboard. But Jace can and does, without a second thought, because he’s not just speaking for himself: He’s speaking for the Clave, with the full power of the Law.

The trilogy is packed with the (relatively) powerless using rules and laws to control the powerful—warlocks controlling demons and magical forces, Valentine controlling his demon army with the Mortal Cup, controlling Clary herself with binding runes—in all these cases, power imbalances don’t matter. No matter who’s stronger, the one with the rules on his side wins. And the Shadowhunters in particular seem to conflate the laws of magic with laws about magic (i.e., the Law), assuming that both are immutable.