Shadowhunters and Downworlders: A Mortal Instruments Reader(34)

The other odd couple with memorable scenes in City of Fallen Angels (and elsewhere in the series) is Izzy and Clary. Knowing she can’t call Jace to come to her and check out the mysterious address of the Church of Talto, Clary texts Isabelle. Just as with Jace and Simon, neither of these two will quite admit that they trust the other. Neither wants to admit they really are friends at this point, beneath their bickering. Izzy informs Clary that their “girl talk” is normal and seems strange to her only because Simon’s been her only friend. Still, I have always thought that Izzy is the one among the group who most needs a friend. Family is so important to her, but unlike Simon and Clary or Jace and Alec, she doesn’t have a best friend to call her own.

Surely part of what draws her to Simon is that so much of their relationship ends up being built on the roles friends usually play for each other. He makes her laugh. They talk. She’s confused by her growing feelings for him but also by the way his presence comforts her. And though Isabelle’s jealousy of Clary’s close relationship with Simon persists, I’d be willing to wager its days are numbered. If Simon and Isabelle work out, maybe she will finally understand—in the same way Jace does—what Simon and Clary are to each other and that their bond is not a rival to her own relationship with Simon.

This spiderweb of connections is woven into new patterns in each volume of the series. The more horrors our heroes go through together, the more resilient the web becomes. Not being friends with someone whose life you’ve saved—more than once—is hard. Just as it’s hard not to be friends with someone who’s a good person at heart, once you know them in the way that’s possible only after you’ve seen them vulnerable. Just as it’s possible to engage in mutual trust only once your friendship is established enough to chance showing that vulnerability.





All Together Now


But it’s not just the warm fuzzy feeling of good friends combating evil and cracking jokes together that elevates the role of friendship in the Mortal Instruments series. There is a resonance to these connections that speaks to the deepest underpinnings of what the series has to say about love and relying on the family you make. Simon says it best in City of Glass, talking to his best friend, Clary. He maintains that no one is born good or bad. He says, “[I]t’s the way you live your life that matters. And the people you know.” It’s your friends.

The arc of the central and auxiliary friendships, and the resulting lines they draw between the major characters, echoes this theme. The Mortal Instruments is a story about what love can do but also, more broadly, about what our connections to other people can enable us to overcome. When these characters get in too deep for their own good, the reason is almost always because they’re isolated from those with real feeling for them, as when Simon is turned. Or else it’s because they’re being controlled—as with Jace’s dealings with Lilith and Sebastian—which is a twisted perversion of love, its inverse. The message seems to be that you can survive anything as long as you don’t have to survive it alone.

If Clary can create a rune that binds Shadowhunters and Downworlders to draw on each other’s strength, is it any wonder that the same universe allows Jace and Simon to be friends? Relationships are power in the Mortal Instruments, and friendship has a place of pride, treated as carefully and with the same respect as familial bonds and true love. This is a series about a family chosen, not just born.

And we all recognize the longing for that. For the ones who’ll travel beneath the earth to the realm of scary, treacherous faeries with us, who’ll make sure we’re interred in the right kind of cemetery if we die, who won’t care if we become a vampire or turn out to be a Shadowhunter, who could give a damn if we’re straight or gay as long as we’re happy. The ones who’d risk their lives for us and whom we’d gladly risk ours for in turn, again and again—even if we’d rather just watch an anime marathon and gossip.

The truth is, we love the Mortal Instruments in no small part because these characters feel like our friends now. Old, new, true friends. We can never wait to find out what they’ve been up to, and we miss them when they’re gone.



Gwenda Bond writes young adult fantasy. Her debut novel, Blackwood, was released in 2012, and will be followed by The Woken Gods in 2013. She is also a contributing writer for Publishers Weekly, and her nonfiction work has appeared in the Washington Post, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among others. She has an MFA in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She lives in a hundred-year-old house in Lexington, Kentucky, with her husband, author Christopher Rowe, and their menagerie. Find her online at www.gwendabond.com.





RACHEL CAINE

One of the most distinctive things about Shadowhunters are their Marks. Rachel Caine takes us on a tour of the power invested in tattoos over the course of history, and it’s a fascinating trek. (Also, I will forever have an image of child-Rachel in a biker bar, which is awesome.)


(NOT) FOR ILLUSTRATION PURPOSES ONLY

When I was a kid, the thing I most wanted, the coolest thing ever, was a tattoo.

This is mostly because my dad had one, probably courtesy of a drunken evening on leave in the army, but hey. My dad had a tattoo, so I wanted a tattoo, and damn those societal expectations, anyway. So what if I was a girl? In the 1970s? I also craved a floor-length leather fringe vest. My mom was not a fan of daring fashion choices, so I lived in disappointment on that score, but the tattoo? Right out.