The series’ other set of best friends—Alec and Jace— aren’t as openly demonstrative as Clary and Simon (read: no making out) but face a similar obstacle. Alec believes he’s in love with Jace, despite the prohibition against falling for your parabatai, and he has the added worry over coming out. But Jace knows Alec so well that he picks up on his friend’s budding relationship with Magnus when no one else does. And, in a pure Jace fashion, he outs this fact casually in City of Ashes, reminding Magnus he’s the only warlock they know who happens to be dating one of their friends. When Alec protests, Jace’s reaction is confusion. He wants Alec to be comfortable coming clean with him about this and goes so far as to assure him it doesn’t matter.
That their friendship survives Jace not getting what a big deal this admission is to Alec—in fact, questioning why it is a big deal, directly and cluelessly—is a testament to its strength. Unlike Clary, Jace either hasn’t realized Alec’s feelings for him yet or isn’t comfortable speaking to them. Jace only knows an essential fact about his friend Alec that, of course, doesn’t change how he feels about Alec. Painful or not, the revelation that Alec didn’t ask for is the first open reassurance Alec receives that maybe he won’t lose everything if he’s honest with himself and the people around him. Maybe he won’t lose Jace. Maybe he’ll gain Magnus. By the time Alec and Jace talk about Alec’s feelings openly in City of Glass, the fact that these two will remain friends is clear. Jace rudely attempts to push Alec away, in a pure Jace-like fashion. He dismisses Alec’s crush as existing only because Jace is safe, in that he’s not a viable romantic partner. But we know this won’t ultimately push Alec away— not in the sense that matters most. Sure, it takes Alec time to announce his feelings for Magnus, but the real relationship he has with Jace, not the aspirational one, is his first reassurance that the people who love him will accept him as he is. His friendship with Jace is transformational: It helps him admit who he loves.
Once these key relationships are settled—and stronger— for being confirmed as best friends (only) for life, all-new connections are formed as a result among the other people in their lives. What happens when you’re the best friend who doesn’t exactly get along with the other people in your favorite Shadowhunter’s life? Well, it seems you make friends with them, sometimes by accident.
Familiarity Breeds Odd Couples
The unique thing about the Mortal Instruments is not just that the story honors these friendships but that the characters do too. In a sea of books where characters are often friendless until they lock eyes with someone hot across a crowded room or have a token friend who disappears once the action gets going and is never thought of again, it’s a refreshing change. How else to explain Jace’s unflinching decision to feed Simon his blood to bring him back to life during the climactic battle of City of Ashes? He saves Simon even though there’s no love lost between the two of them because he doesn’t want Clary to experience the pain of losing her friend. And if there’s one thing Jace and Simon both seem to understand about each other from the word go, it’s how the other feels about Clary. Though Simon at least briefly considers them romantic rivals, in every instance that truly matters, there’s a grudging acknowledgment by both that the other guy doesn’t want to hurt Clary, will protect her at all costs, and has a fierce loyalty to her. Each is aware that Clary needs both of them. She needs Jace, but she needs Simon too. When Jace is missing in City of Lost Souls, Simon’s presence allows her to sleep at night (much to Izzy’s dismay—more on that in a moment).
Just as it made for the unlikely scenario of Jace saving Simon, again, Simon’s friendship with Clary leads to something even more unlikely in City of Fallen Angels. Not long after Simon thinks to himself that the two aren’t even friends, this odd couple is out shopping for tomato soup together. Over time the boys’ shared care for Clary turns into a strange friendship of its own. Simon can’t not take care of Jace when he sees the other boy hurting. Perhaps that is partly because he knows what Clary feels for Jace and what Jace feels for her in turn, but I have to believe it’s also about what he and Jace have been through by this point. They might never admit it, but Simon and Jace have chosen—perhaps grudgingly—to become friends.
And it’s not so odd when you think about it. They’ve been through battles—plural—together. And Simon’s vampirism serves as an equalizer of sorts. Jace may be the gorgeous untouchable Shadowhunter, but as Simon continues becoming the hero he’s meant to be, he becomes perfectly capable of retaliating against Jace’s insults. That’s right: Simon starts quipping back. Male friends teasing each other is a tradition as old as time (or at least middle school) itself. And if Simon and Jace can be friends, anyone can. I dream of a world where Downworlders and Shadowhunters snark side by side, and it looks a lot like this.
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.
“Only sailors and—and girls with red shoes get tattoos!” she sputtered, when I mentioned it. (I was not absolutely sure where the red shoes fit into all this. After that, I began looking out for red shoes hoping to spot some kind of trend. Turns out she was under the mistaken impression that hookers wore red shoes. I don’t know. Don’t ask me.)
In any case, when you’re twelve and a girl and you live in the ’70s, it’s unlikely that you’re going to be able to follow your budding, possibly inaccurate, sense of cool and score that sweet tat (and leather vest) you think you really, really need to be yourself. So I found other ways to express my coolness. One of them was elaborate self-administered drawings in marker on my forearms, sometimes illustrating horses or spaceships. DON’T JUDGE ME, MAN. I was creative, okay? And I always washed them off before I went home, because I was really not all that rebellious. Outwardly.
I say all this so you can understand how deeply completed I felt when I discovered Cassandra Clare’s Mortal Instruments series, because it sparked a renewed fascination for tattoos and what they meant—or could mean, beyond needing to be matched with a pair of sweet red stiletto pumps. (Technically, her tattoos are really scarification—the art of incising a design in the skin instead of just inking it on—but that’s a practice similar to tattooing. We’re not going to split hairs here.)
And the fact that the Shadowhunters’ Marks not only were cool but also stored power just blew my mind.
The idea that tattoos have very real magical force goes back not just to Ray Bradbury’s incredible, groundbreaking work The Illustrated Man (if you haven’t read it, please do, it’s riveting and fantastic) but to real life too. The history of tattooing—from marks to adorn, to those to heal, protect, advertise, or punish—goes back to the earliest days of humankind.
So let’s start with the therapeutic use of tattoos.
The first solid example of any kind of tattooing—at least to date—goes back about 5,200 years, to a frozen Copper Age corpse found decorated with some simple marks likely made with cuts and powdered charcoal. The tattoos, primitive as they were, were located just where this man would have felt pain from the advanced bone degeneration that was evident when his corpse was examined. So these were healing runes, placed to take away the pain of arthritis—and it wasn’t just done once. Our iceman had over fifty-seven separate tattoos, which meant that some doctor/ tattoo artist—or several of them—had applied these healing marks over time as the patient needed help.
You can just imagine the conversation during flu season. Doctor! I need a skull and snake tattoo over here, stat—he’s sneezing! Okay, so Copper Age medical care might not have been quite as efficacious as a trip to the local doc in a box today, but it definitely would have been more decorative. Plus: You get to carry your medical records around with you on your skin!
Take that, modern medical science! IN ON YOUR FACE!
Very definitely, of course, all this healing stuff correlates to the use of the runes by our favorite Shadowhunters…although theirs generally work. (Note: If anybody can work me up a tattoo for curing migraines, I will pay you good money. Clary? I’m talking to you, girlfriend, since your special gift is creating new ones. I’m sure this is on your list to develop, right after the “deliver me my own personal Jace” rune that so many other readers have already been requesting.)