Shadowhunters and Downworlders (20 page)

What makes Valentine such a great villain, however, is not that he is a cautionary tale about following one's darker impulses. It's that he's
familiar.
Shades of Valentine echo in every history class, every time we learn about a despot's rise to power or a cult leader who sacrifices his followers rather than be swayed from his plans, because Valentine's not trying to destroy the world, bring about the end of days, increase his personal abilities, or take on the powers of a god. He's trying to change the world.

Valentine reignites a race war. He starts an
actual
war. But his motivation is a high-minded one: He's trying to change things for what he believes is the better. He's trying to preserve—and then improve upon—tradition. Shadow-hunters were originally given their powers by the Angel in order to protect humanity from the demons and the Down-worlders. Valentine just wants to make them purer. Stronger. He wants to make them better. And in that, Valentine's evil is the most human one of all: evil done in the service of the same ideals that are supposed to inspire us to strive for good.

This is part of why I love Valentine so much as a villain. Take away the supernatural elements, the behavioral disorders, and his “unique” views on parenting, and he's the kind of villain we see every day. He's the smooth-talking politician filling up news networks. He's the charismatic leader of an oppressive regime who has the undying loyalty of his followers. He's the parent who just can't accept that his children are not carbon copies of himself and cannot accept that they may hold different beliefs. His behavior is chilling not because we can't imagine it but because we all too easily can.

Valentine's ultimate fate is particularly poignant because of
how
his plan is unraveled. When Clary creates the Alliance rune at the end of
City of Glass
, she turns what Valentine holds up as the flaw in the Angel's plan—that Downworlders have gifts that the Nephilim don't—into an asset. And she does it from a place of compassion and heart. From humanity. Valentine is literally brought down by the antithesis of all he holds dear: Shadowhunters working with Downworlders, as equals, both bringing something unique and important to the table.

It's not just how Valentine is defeated that is important, it's
who
defeats him: his children, who are strong enough to do so only because of what he has made them. They have every reason to become like him—Clary through blood, Jace through upbringing—but they reject him instead. (Even the name Clary gives her new rune, Alliance, shows how far she is from her father.)

It's the humanity in Valentine that makes him so fascinating. And in the end, it is his own humanity—his need to leave a legacy, through his children—that leads to his demise.

Scott Tracey
was born and raised near Cleveland, Ohio. His debut novel,
Witch Eyes,
is a 2012 ALA Popular Paperback pick and one of the top ten LGBT Kindle books of 2011 at
Amazon.com
. His lifelong love of villains (and a serious aversion to apples) started with the Evil Queen in Snow White. You can find him on Twitter at @scott_tracey, and on his website at
http://www.Scott-Tracey.com
.

KELLY LINK AND HOLLY BLACK

In Kelly Link and Holly Black's charming essay-slash-dialogue, they deconstruct the idea of immortality in the Mortal Instruments books (the series does have the word “mortal” in the title, after all). Is it a blessing or a curse to live forever? And how are various characters changed not just by living forever, but by knowing someone who will? There are occasional interjections by me, but on the whole I tried to stay out of it and let the discussion unfold!

IMMORTALITY AND ITS
DISCONTENTS

IN WHICH HOLLY BLACK AND KELLY LINK DISCUSS CASSANDRA CLARE'S MORTAL INSTRUMENTS

HOLLY:
When we sat down to talk about this essay, it happened to be in a room where Cassandra Clare was hard at work on her next book. We thought we would just have the conversation in front of her and see if she wanted to pitch in.

KELLY:
It seemed appropriate, since this is often the way that the three of us work: Everyone doing their own writing, and stopping when necessary to discuss a plot point or read what someone else is working on and make suggestions.

So. Why do young adults (and for young adults, let's go ahead and make it
all
readers) like books, like Cassandra Clare's, about immortal beings like vampires and faeries?

HOLLY:
Well, I remember as a teenager being constantly told that I was going to
change
. That every time I dyed my hair blue or declared my love for a particular band or book or thing, someone (usually my mother) would say that I would regret it once I was older. And I remember thinking that it seemed to me that the way people talked about getting older, it seemed a lot like getting possessed. Immortality is stasis, but stasis doesn't always seem like a bad thing, especially if the alternative is losing some essential part of one's identity.

KELLY:
So immortality is change, and it's also stasis. The best of both worlds! I guess it offers the chance to continue to be yourself, even as the world around you changes. And that seems exciting—as if you're the thing that the world revolves around. And of course, as everyone will say, young adult fiction offers the opportunity, without risk, to explore different kinds of lives and adulthood and choices. Like science fiction, it's a literature of
what-if
. And the biggest what-if of all is,
What if we didn't have to die?
One of the very first
stories is the story of Gilgamesh, which is all about trying to defeat death. Every culture's first stories are about their gods, who live forever.

HOLLY:
Well, living forever seems pretty sweet. As Raphael says to Simon in
City of Glass
, “You will never get sick, never die, and be strong and young forever. You will never age. What have you got to complain about?” Is there anything to complain about?

KELLY:
If there wasn't anything to complain about, then there wouldn't be any story. Stasis is the enemy of plot.

When Raphael (vampire) says that to Simon (now a vampire too), Simon thinks: “It sounded good, but did anyone really want to be sixteen forever? It would have been one thing to be frozen forever at twenty-five, but sixteen? To always be this gangly, to never really grow into himself, his face or his body? Not to mention that, looking like this, he'd never be able to go into a bar and order a drink. Ever. For eternity.”

HOLLY:
Can he even drink? Like, booze? Caaaaaaassie!

CASSIE:
It's never come up before. He says at one point in the books that he could drink a little bit of coffee. Eating would make him sick.

KELLY:
So no booze. No barbecue, Chicken McNuggets, or cotton candy. It's a bit like keeping kosher only much, much worse. And of course, yes, blood isn't kosher.

HOLLY:
But blood is legendarily delicious in literature. I mean, Simon seems super into it when he's drinking from a living person.

KELLY:
I've never tried blood myself. Although I have had black pudding.

HOLLY:
I am willing to concede that Simon might have concerns about immortality, but he's largely speculating about how it will go, since he's only a few weeks into his new life. He hasn't yet watched his family age and die. He hasn't yet lost lovers.

KELLY:
It does affect his relationship with his family, though. Becoming a vampire—being an immortal—is taboo, even in contemporary American life. His mother locks him out. That's the first real time we get that being a vampire (being
out
as a vampire), for Simon, has a price.

HOLLY:
The person we know best in the books who has experienced both the boon and burden of immortality is Magnus. And because the Infernal Devices is set more than a hundred years earlier than the Mortal Instruments, we get to see how Magnus has changed over time. Immortality isn't a burden just for him, it's a burden on the people close to him. As his relationship with Alec grows, Alec has to figure out what it means to be with someone who has lived so much before him and will live so long after he's gone.

KELLY:
For the writer, an immortal character offers a chance to tell a lot of different stories, to rework the character in interesting ways. Magnus' arc as an immortal is interesting to me for two reasons. One, his love life follows a pretty classic vampire character arc: He's loved and lost and loved and lost again. But because of his apparent physical age, he's attractive to—and attracted by—young adults like Alec. Sound familiar?

Second, he's bisexual. (Oh, and he's Asian. That's a lot of intersectionality going on!) In terms of audience reaction, his sexual preferences seem much more notable than the fact that he's immortal. That's pretty new. There aren't a lot of bisexual immortals in popular fiction.

HOLLY:
Would you consider Anne Rice's Lestat bisexual? He didn't really have sex with anyone, just engaged in a lot of biting.

KELLY:
Well, yes, but he's not bisexually active in the books, at least not on the page, not explicitly. There's a very good reason why it's appropriate that he was played by Tom Cruise.

HOLLY:
The thing that fascinates me about Magnus is that he appears to be the most human seeming of the Downworlders we meet, because he's so friendly and up on popular culture. He buys scarves at the Gap! Raphael and Camille are more menacing and seem more inhuman.

But when Magnus thinks about humanity, even as someone with a human parent and who once had a human life, he sees himself as outside of it. For example, “Magnus had always found humans more beautiful than any other creatures alive on the earth, and had often wondered why. Only a few years before dissolution, Camille had said. But it was mortality that made them what they were: the flame that blazed brighter for its flickering. Death is the mother of beauty, as the poet said. He wondered if the Angel had ever considered making his human servants, the Nephilim, immortal. But no, for all their strength, they fell as humans had always fallen in battle through all the ages of the world.” These are the thoughts of a being who might look human, who might try to act human, but who is essentially other.

KELLY:
We all want what we can't have. Magnus immerses himself in humanity to keep himself human. Talking about this helps me understand better why, in books, immortals—especially vampires—like to hang around with young adults. If your baseline condition is one of stasis, you might need regular jolts of chaos, change, extremes. Teenagers are to the immortal as cups of coffee are to the writer, except that the problem for writers is that they have deadlines and the problem for immortals is that they don't.

HOLLY:
So teenagers are reinvigorating?

KELLY:
…

HOLLY:
Well, reinvigorating to drink anyway.

KELLY:
I always wanted to ask Cassie if Magnus was inspired, at all, by Diana Wynne Jones' wizards Howl and Chrestomanci. Cassie?

CASSIE:
By Howl, yes. Not so much by Chrestomanci. I always loved that scene in
Howl's Moving Castle
where Howl dyes his hair blue. I wanted to write wizards that weren't old and gray like Dumbledore. Everybody pictures wise, ancient, beardy wizards. I wanted to write a wizard who was young, a New York raver, a party boy.

HOLLY:
It's interesting that an immortal person who appears very young is much more eerie and alien seeming than an aged character like Gandalf living forever.

KELLY:
Most cultures have myths about figures like Magnus, though. Fairies, gods who appear as youths to court mortals, and of course lots of scary children who aren't what they seem. The child—or the young adult—in fiction represents potentiality, for good or evil. And that's a big part of all of Cassie's books—young adults, like Clary, who discover that they are much more powerful than they thought they were and that the world is much stranger. Or else young adults who, like Simon, get changed into something they never expected to become—maybe never even knew it was possible to be. Of course, that's a big part of young adult literature, period. It's a literature of discovery
and change. You, the protagonist, have to discover the world. And at the same time you have to discover what you are that you didn't know was possible. You are changed. You change the world. The literature of the fantastic enlarges all of these possibilities.

You know what I find really interesting? Not that there are immortals in Cassie's books, but that, given the possibility of immortality, her Shadowhunters are so very, very mortal. The blood of the angel Raziel gifts Shadowhunters with many things but not immortality. In fact, as Will Herondale says in
Clockwork Angel
, “It's not a long life, killing demons. One tends to die young, and then they burn your body.”

HOLLY:
So that the risk of dying young, being a Shadowhunter, being mortal, gets associated with divinity, with the way that things should be. And on the other hand, immortality is linked to the infernal. Only Downworlders get that gift—warlocks, faeries, and vampires—so it must be a by-product of their demon blood. Werewolves are the only Downworlders to miss out on the immortality boat. So doesn't that imply that immortality is tainted in some way, more burden than boon?

KELLY:
Well, it's always seemed to me that werewolves are the most like us: the most human of monsters. They're inside us; you're always a vampire, whereas you become a werewolf once a month. And they're messy in a way that humans are messy: creatures of appetite, who suffer and die like us.

But yes, immortality comes with several pages of fine print. You stay the same, and everything else changes. Maybe it changes so much that there's no place for you any longer, no place that you recognize or that recognizes you. Or, more important, no
one
. We haven't really talked about how immortality works in Cassie's romances, that tension between the immortal and his or her mortal lover.