Shadowhunters and Downworlders (21 page)

HOLLY:
Love is, traditionally, forever and ever. That's what we say to one another, what we promise—
forever
. It's a romantic ideal, but love would be way different if forever really meant forever. Can two people stand each other for that long? Can one person really have a single love that means more than any other over the stretch of decades and centuries? Is that a crazy way to think about love?

KELLY:
Cassie's books are, in large part, about people who find real love. True love. But every love story is a tragedy, even when you add immortals. Either you're immortal and your lover isn't. (Woe.) Or you're both immortals, and after the first forty or fifty or five hundred years, the bloom is off the immortal rose. (More woe.) The immortals in Cassie's books don't fare well together.

HOLLY:
We really see that with Magnus and Camille. She says to Magnus in
Clockwork Prince
, “You expect me to have the morals of some mundane when I am not human, and neither are you.” She believes that love between immortals should be fundamentally different—
that rules about fidelity, for example, shouldn't apply. On the other hand, I have always thought that there was something about Camille that seemed more essentially human than Magnus. She's petty in a way that he isn't—jealous of his having Alec in exactly the way she criticized him for being jealous a hundred years earlier—and she has a way of showing off that seems to be about impressing just the sort of people she claims not to care about.

KELLY:
Apparently immortality is no cure for hypocrisy or insecurity. Or humanity. So maybe that's how Camille manages her immortality. Magnus manages his immortality by flooding himself with new experiences and interests, by creating makeshift, mixed human and supernatural familial groups for himself in each new place and time. And yet he also seems to stay above it all. Camille, on the other hand, keeps herself occupied by manipulating power dynamics and personal status. How other people see her tells her what she is.

HOLLY:
Yeah, sometimes I feel as though Magnus wants to be human, when he can't help seeing humanity from a great distance, and Camille wants to be inhuman, but she doesn't have his perspective. She's down in the mess of life with the rest of us.

KELLY:
Cassie, do you think of Magnus as a kind of author's stand-in in the books? For saying what you want to say to your characters, about love and immortality?

CASSIE:
Yes. Usually. Everything he says about burning a lot more brightly if you're mortal, I think that's true. He gives good advice.

KELLY:
Do you think of him as the linchpin for the series? I mean, he's there in all of the books.

CASSIE:
Not the linchpin, no. I think he could die. Like Dumbledore.

KELLY:
I guess that's why the series is called the
Mortal
Instruments and not the Immortal Instruments.

HOLLY:
One of the things that we sometimes forget about immortality is that it's not invulnerability. Death can come to all the immortals in the world of the Mortal Instruments.

KELLY:
Well, there's an argument to be made that all forms of magic—including immortality—stand in as metaphors for money. Magic, in fantasy, often works the way that money does. Magic buys you things: long life, cool stuff, access to the kinds of worlds that people without magic can't get into. But the one thing neither money nor magic can buy is freedom from death.

HOLLY:
This is making me think, as a highly practical matter, how once you become immortal, you'd be well served to spend a couple of years doing nothing but working and amassing cash so that you could live off
the interest forever. Because your retirement problems are really different from most people's. Those charts that tell you how much to put away per year are not going to work for you.

KELLY:
Readers of this essay, take note: If you plan to live forever, make good investments. It's like being a time traveler, where you want to make sure you've done your research, memorized some lottery numbers and the names of really spectacular stocks when you go back.

HOLLY:
I do wonder where Camille's money comes from. I mean, Magnus works. He's the High Warlock of Brooklyn. As long as Downworlders and Shadow-hunters have magical problems, he's got a job. Cassie, where did Camille get her money from?

CASSIE:
I've decided that she had a string of lovers who bestowed many jewels on her because she is so beeyoo-tiful.

HOLLY:
Really?

CASSIE:
No. I figure many vampires have money from being around so long and whatnot. Remember there's that part in
Clockwork Prince
where they talk about vampires leaving their money to themselves, masquerading as their own heirs? And they have big investments that pay out over time.

KELLY:
And traditionally, vampires are good at getting more than blood from their prey. They can hypnotize their victims into signing over their estates, etc.

HOLLY:
Like a sweetheart scam, but with blood.

KELLY:
We haven't talked about the Seelie Queen yet. Cassie, when you wrote the Seelie Queen, what sources were you drawing on? Which Faerie Queens were inspirations?

CASSIE
[points to Holly Black]: Hers.

HOLLY:
Ha! The thing I find interesting about faeries in general is that they were never human and that they are essentially other. The shorthand for that in Celtic folk-tales is “they laugh at funerals and cry at weddings,” but it alludes to the whole separate moral system faeries operate under. And in the Mortal Instruments, the Seelie Queen is not just untouched by her immortality but untroubled by it. For her, mortality seems skeevy. It grosses her out, the way you'd be grossed out by a rotting peach on your desk.

KELLY:
I can see why you're Cassie's source. That's good stuff. And of course, the Seelie Queen and her court, in the Mortal Instruments, are weirdly sideways to the rest of the Downworlders.

HOLLY:
Awww, that's nice of you to say. And I agree about the faeries being sideways. They've never been human. They're separate from the realm of demons and angels. They may have originated there, but now they are a people apart, self-contained and (change-lings aside) self-reproducing. All other Downworlders continue to have to truck with humanity to survive. Vampires make more vampires by turning humans. Werewolves probably can breed more werewolves but mostly seem to make more through infection. And as far as we know, warlocks can't reproduce at all.

KELLY:
Humans and faeries, in fact, appear to be somewhat allergic to each other. Like you said, when the Seelie Queen looks at Jace and the other Shadowhunters, she sees not young men in their prime but their decay and their deaths. She doesn't get it. She says, “You are mortal; you age; you die…If that is not hell, pray tell me, what is?”

HOLLY:
Well, forever for her isn't something to hope for or dread or dream about. It's a given.

KELLY:
I'm guessing that complicates her love life as well. In some way that we mortals probably can't quite comprehend. Whatever it is, I'm guessing it works for her. (I keep coming back to how immortality and love intersect.) Cassie, what do you think?

CASSIE:
I think there is a difference in the books between the characters who are born immortal and the ones
who are born human and who become immortal. The ones who have it thrust upon them think, “I don't know how I feel about this. Everyone I love will die.” Whereas the Fairie Queen has always been immortal. Everyone she loves is immortaI.

KELLY:
I guess the thing I want to bring up about love and immortality is that in the Mortal Instruments, they function in similar ways. The characters we care about don't choose immortality any more than they choose who to fall in love with. Love and immortality are both things that
happen
to you, at least if you start out human. And that's straight out of the classic young adult and children's fiction tradition. Think of
Tuck Everlasting
by Natalie Babbitt. Jesse and his family don't choose immortality, and at the point where Winnie is old enough to make a decision for herself, the opportunity for choice is gone. Or a story like Ray Bradbury's “The Homecoming,” in which our viewpoint character is a mortal boy born to a family of immortals. He can't choose either. I can think of a few characters in young adult fiction who pursue immortality, like Bella in the Twilight series, but even Bella, in that final moment, doesn't actively choose immortality. Edward, out of necessity, chooses it for her. Young adult fiction is all about agency: the protagonists coming into the world and taking on active roles. And yet when it comes to immortality, it's extremely rare to see protagonists take it for themselves. It's usually either forced on them, or else it turns out to have been their birthright all along.

HOLLY:
I wonder if immortality is often thrust upon characters (or found to be their birthright) because there is nothing particularly surprising about choosing to live forever. That's something we'd all be mightily tempted by, and I would guess it would be the rare individual who wouldn't give in to that temptation.

KELLY:
I have one more thought. Isn't it every author's dream to have characters (and books) that live forever?

HOLLY:
Well, authors are notoriously of the devil's party, whether they know it or not. Wasn't that what what's his-face said about Milton? That printmaker dude. Blake!

KELLY:
If the devil was an agent, everybody would want to sign up with him.

HOLLY:
Relatedly, I do think that we as readers are often in sympathy with Downworlders and maybe feel more kin to them than the Shadowhunters. Down-worlders seem to have lives lived less to extremes. They don't have a great and holy purpose in the way that Shadowhunters do. They seem to have big parties and stay up late and watch television. Well, possibly that's mostly Magnus.

KELLY:
That does sound like most teenagers and also most writers that I know. Or maybe just most people. Maybe it's rarer to find someone who, like a Shadowhunter,
has a sense that their life may be short but knows what they want (and need) to do with it.

HOLLY:
That's a kind of certainty that it seems to me that many of us envy. But immortality makes certainty of purpose impossible. Immortals live so many lives that no one purpose will stretch to fit all of them. And though we've discussed some of the drawbacks of immortality, those of us left with but a single lifetime stretching before us must admit that no disadvantage could discourage us from wanting to live forever. And since we can't have that, at least we can comfort ourselves knowing that of all the things Shadowhunters fight, they are no more able to defeat death than Gilgamesh…or us.

Thus ended our conversation, as we all sat silent in contemplation of exactly which investments would be our best bet for long-term financial security if Holly was wrong and we all became vampires.

Kelly Link
is the award-winning author of three collections, most recently
Pretty Monsters
(Viking). With Gavin J. Grant, she coedited the anthology
Steampunk!
(Candlewick) as well as the forthcoming
Monstrous Affections
. Together they run Small Beer Press and put out the zine
Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet
. Her website is
www.kellylink.net
.

Holly Black
is the author of bestselling contemporary fantasy books for kids and teens. Some of her titles include the Spiderwick Chronicles (with Tony DiTerlizzi), the Modern Faerie Tale series, the Good Neighbors graphic novel trilogy (with Ted Naifeh), the Curse Workers series, and her new vampire novel,
The Coldest Girl in Coldtown
. She has been a finalist for the Mythopoeic Award, a finalist for an Eisner Award, and the recipient of the Andre Norton Award. She currently lives in New England with her husband, Theo, in a house with a secret door.

SARAH REES BRENNAN

As you will see below, Sarah Rees Brennan has a very active imagination, which happens to writers sometimes. She also has some very, er, unique opinions on what's going on in my books. But her heart is absolutely in the right place.

WHAT DOES THAT
DEVIANT WENCH
THINK SHE'S DOING?
OR, SHADOWHUNTERS
GONE WILD

THE DIRTY SIDE OF DEMON HUNTING

 

“So, technically, even though Jace isn't actually related to you, you have kissed your brother.”

—Simon Lewis in
City of Glass
, telling it like it is

I
hope, with this saucy title, that everyone has flipped right from the table of contents to this essay. Hi, guys! Almost every other essay will be more coherent and intelligent than this one, but if you want dirty jokes, you have come to the right place. Welcome to Sarah's School of Deviant Literary Analysis, where everyone gets to canoodle, including Magnus Bane's magnificent self.

And since I invoked Magnus Bane's name because I was shamelessly cribbing off a phrase he used in
City of Bones
(nobody canoodles in his bedroom but his magnificent self), let's begin my list of shameless debauchees (otherwise known as Cassandra Clare's cast of characters) with a look at Magnus: warlock, Downworlder, fashion icon. Though the angel Raziel says that Downworlders have souls, warlocks are looked down on by the Shadowhunters. They would probably be looked down on by most people: It's a shady enough thing to have a parent from Hell and to know that you are born via a nonconsensual demonic arrangement. Magnus' mother was violated, and his birth had far-reaching tragic consequences, resulting in the deaths of most of his human family; no wonder Magnus does not want to talk about his father. In lesser books, Magnus might be a villain: doomed and damned by descent, by his sexual preferences, by who he is.