Shadowhunters and Downworlders: A Mortal Instruments Reader(43)

Any of these character types on their own would make a compelling villain. Downworlders are the offspring (whether literally or symbolically) of demons, most of which are mindless monsters driven to hurt and destroy. As a result, many Downworlders succumb to impulses much darker than the ones their more human counterparts even possess. In fact, a case could be made that the evil that Downworlders do is tied directly to their demonic heritage. Either their inclination to do harm is innate (as with faeries, who are born with a cold, capricious nature), or when they transition into their new life, new instincts develop that push them to do harm (as with humans turned into vampires, who must struggle against the new desires burning under their skin).

But in the Mortal Instruments series, Downworlders aren’t villains, not really. Not as a group. Just because someone is turned into a vampire doesn’t mean they have to be evil. Simon struggles with the change, still wanting to be the boy he was before he was bitten, and while he stumbles on his path, he still strives to be better. Luke sought to master his werewolf side in order to keep his loved ones safe, and seems to have succeeded. Magnus may possess a physical manifestation of demonic heritage (his cat eyes), long life, and the ability to do magic, but otherwise he seems as human as anyone else.

Of all the different creatures we meet during the course of the Mortal Instruments series, there’s only one who proves himself to be utterly unredeemable, fantastically evil, and gloriously unhinged. And he’s not a Downworlder at all; he’s human.





The Life and Crimes of Valentine Morgenstern


It’s probably no surprise by this point that there’s a special place for Valentine Morgenstern in my heart, a place I reserve for the most deliciously evil characters. Right from the start, Valentine’s role is clear. It’s in his name (or at least his last name). Morgenstern means “morning star,” a reference to Lucifer, who fell from heaven for his sins against God.

Valentine, raised in Idris, was an exceptional child who excelled at his Shadowhunter training and seemed poised for great things. Unfortunately for the rest of the world, these great things skewed toward the darker end of the spectrum. He is extremely attractive, intelligent, and possessed the kind of charisma that would have served him well as a politician, if not a king. Instead, Valentine became the leader of a splinter group of disaffected young Shadowhunters who believed they were superior to the Downworlders and that the Accords that kept a peace between the two was an offense. After his father’s death at the hands of a werewolf, Valentine’s negative views on Downworlders became even more extreme, and the Circle became a rebellion in truth. Valentine no longer simply wanted to discuss the superiority of Shadowhunters; he set his sights higher than that. He wanted to break the Accords.

Valentine interests me so much because he’s a man of extremes. He is an idealist who wants to see evil purged from the world, but he became a revolutionary willing to do anything—evil included—to keep the Accords from being renewed. He is a zealot who wants all Downworlders destroyed, but he is also an opportunist who has no qualms against using those very same Downworlders to achieve his goals. He is a father who loves his adopted son enough to forgive him his rebellions and repeatedly extend an olive branch to him (in his own way), but he is also a monster who experimented on three children still in the womb without their mothers’ knowledge or consent and without caring about the consequences.

For a man who despises all that Downworlders are, Valentine’s deeds rival any of their greatest crimes with ease. He has started wars, drafted armies of demons to torture and kill fellow Shadowhunters—the same people he was claiming to try to save—and even gone up against the angels themselves, thinking that he knows better than they. Even the worst of the Downworlders tend to kill their victims quickly. They don’t keep them chained up in their basements for sixteen years, torturing them for their secrets. And through all of this, Valentine still considers himself the hero of his own story.

In an attempt to bolster his army in the early days of his campaign to acquire the Mortal Instruments, Valentine created a number of Forsaken by using runes on mundanes. He knows that the mundane body cannot handle the runes, that it becomes misshapen and twisted and that the end result is a sort of mindless monster. He knows too that once a person becomes Forsaken, there is no turning him or her back. And Valentine still condemns his army to insanity and eventual death.

Vampires drink blood in order to survive. It may not be the most noble action, but they do it to survive. When Valentine murders Downworlder children, it is with much darker motive: to quench the Mortal Sword in their blood, in order to swing its alignment from angelic to demonic. He kills to strengthen his control over the demon hordes he needs to strike out at the Clave.

All of the things he does are in service of a single endgame: to cleanse and purify the Shadowhunter race and return it to its former glory. Once Valentine summons Raziel, he plans to ask the Angel to remove the angel blood from any Shadowhunters who do not drink from Valentine’s altered cup—which means that the newly human Nephilim, still covered in Marks, would instantly become Forsaken. Such was Valentine’s plan for pruning what he saw as a corrupt government and population: mass murder.





Humanity: The Root of All Evil?


What makes Valentine’s actions even more disturbing is the fact that Valentine is human. He’s not necessarily predisposed to acts of evil the same way demons are. While I say that Valentine is human, that’s not entirely true. He, like all Nephilim (and Clary and Jace more than the rest), has the blood of an angel running through his veins. If anything, that should bolster his humanity. But Valentine’s humanity isn’t, like Simon’s, a counterweight to his darker impulses. It’s the source of them.