The Mortal Instruments, part 1: City of Bones
let's go on a journey to the distant past (2007)
I love watching 3-hour-long video essays on YouTube explaining the plot of a show or movie, so inspired by this trend, I have decided to do my own version of a long video essay: a way too long Substack post about The Shadowhunter Chronicles by Cassandra Clare. As of June 2024, this franchise is made up of 17 novels and several short stories, five graphic novels, a terrible movie adaptation, and a TV show, amongst other things. For the purpose of this Substack, I will only be covering the main books, starting with City of Bones (2007), the first book by pubishing order. There's a lot to talk about, so I will be doing one post per book. Let’s begin.
City of Bones: Abridged.
PART 1: Dark Descent
The book opens with our main character, Clary Fray, a normal 15-year-old girl from Brooklyn, going to a goth club called Pandemonium with her best friend Simon Lewis.
Simon hates the club, but Clary doesn’t particularly care about what he thinks, a sign of a very healthy friendship. In the club, she sees a guy with blue hair (and pronouns?) getting jumped by three mysterious teens, two boys and a girl. Clary tries to stop them from killing the blue-haired guy, but they insist that he’s actually a demon and that they have to kill him. Despite a lot of hints pointing towards something supernatural going on, Clary is convinced that she walked into some sort of gang conflict. Suddenly, the would-be victim transforms into a monster and attacks the teenagers, who promptly dispose of him, but not before the demon can say something about a man named Valentine, who will be important later. One of the teens, a blonde boy named Jace, tries to explain things to Clary despite the warnings from the other two. They get interrupted by Clary’s friend Simon arriving with security; Simon can’t see the murderous trio, so Clary decides to act like nothing happened and get out of there.
The day after, Clary gets told by her mom, Jocelyn, that they are going to the countryside for the rest of the summer. Two important details about Clary and her mom is that they are both artists, and that Clary is a little jealous of how beautiful her mom is.
Jocelyn’s best friend Luke is also there, and he seems to be mad about Jocelyn’s decision. He says Jocelyn should tell Clary the truth and leaves. Clary is not happy with her mom trashing all her plans for the summer, so she storms out of the apartment. Before she leaves, she makes a point of describing her downstairs neighbor, an old “witch” named Madame Dorothea, who never leaves her place.
Clary meets Simon at a café. He tries to confess to Clary, at which point someone laughs behind them and she turns around to find Jace, the blond guy from the club. Clary ditches Simon to follow Jace to an alley, where he proceeds to drop some useful exposition. He’s a Shadowhunter, he hunts demons and works as a sort of magical cop. The tattoos on his body are actually runes, magical drawings that have a variety of effects like making him stronger, heal his injuries, make him invisible, etc. He calls normal people “mundanes” or “mundies”, which happens to have the same amount of letters as muggles. HINT #1 That this is a Harry Potter fanfic turned into a novel.
Jace tells Clary that she has to go with him to the Institute, where Shadowhunters live, to be questioned by his tutor, Hodge, because normal people shouldn’t be able to see Shadowhunters. A very standard “call to adventure”.
In the middle of their conversation, Clary gets an urgent call from her mom, telling her that she loves her and that she can’t go back home. Proving that she’s physically unable to follow orders, Clary immediately rushes back to their apartment, leaving Jace behind.
The apartment is completely destroyed and her mom is nowhere to be found. She gets attacked by a demon, but manages to kill it. Jace arrives at the apartment right as it dies and takes her away to the institute, but before that, he has to draw a healing rune on her arm because she got bit by the demon. The rune works, proving that she has Shadowhunter blood—if she had been just a normal human, she would have died or become a monster.
After three days of being comatose, Clary wakes up in the infirmary of the Institute. Isabelle, the girl from the club, is there when she wakes up, and Clary immediately hates her for no other reason than the fact she’s hot. Clary is not just not like other girls, she vehemently hates other girls and pretends that they hate her. Isabelle makes a passing comment to Clary about Jace being attractive (in case you forgot), and Clary is confused because she assumed that Isabelle and Jace were related. This may be foreshadowing. Isabelle quickly explains that they are not; Jace was simply taken in by her parents when he was 10, after his dad died. The other guy from the club, Alec, is Isabelle’s brother, and their parents are currently not in the Institute for plot-convenience reasons along with their younger brother.
Clary leaves the infirmary to look for Hogde, the only adult around, and in her way she finds Jace playing the piano. Of course he can play the piano. He takes her to the library to meet Hodge: a kindly old man who goes around with a big raven on his shoulder and who’s cursed to never be able to set foot outside the building. Alec is also at the library, and just like Clary hates Isabelle on sight, he hates Clary for no apparent reason. Clary explains what happened at her house and asks for help finding her mother; and then we get a lot of exposition about the politics of the Shadowhunter world. Shadowhunters can’t leave their job, and they can’t mingle with humans, so Clary’s mom was probably some sort of criminal on the run. Her father is conveniently out of the picture, because according to Clary, he was a soldier who died before her birth. She calls Luke, her mom’s friend who’s like a father to her, but he promptly tells her that he doesn’t care about what happens to Clary and her mom. This is perhaps the best-written scene in the book; Clary is genuinely devastated, and the way she begs Luke to help her really makes her look like the lost teenager she is.
After that, she tries again to convince the Shadowhunters to help her. She reveals that the demon at her house mentioned Valentine, which prompts another exposition dump from Hodge. Basically, 15 years ago, Valentine was the leader of a hate group called the Circle that targeted “Downworlders” (vampires, werewolves, warlocks, the fae, etc.).
Downworlders are the result of mixing with demons. Vampires and werewolves are essentialy humans that got infected by a demonic disease, warlocks are the children of demons and humans, and the fae are the children of angels and demons.
Valentine’s goal was to steal the Mortal Cup, one of the Mortal Instruments1, and use the Cup to make more Shadowhunters and get rid of the Downworlders. Valentine supposedly died during the uprising, but the Mortal Cup was lost in the battle. Since Jocelyn’s disappearance seems to have something to do with Valentine, the Institute has no choice but to help Clary find her mom.
HINT #2 That this is a Harry Potter fanfic, the Circle is just a revamped version of the Death Eaters.
Clary asks to go back to her house to pick up some things. She goes with Jace, and there they are attacked by a Forsaken, a normal human turned into a monster after being marked with Shadowhunter runes. Jace kills it, and then the witch that lives under Clary’s apartment, Madame Dorothea, tells them to come inside her place. It turns out she’s a Control, someone who owns a magical portal and lets Downworlders use her place as a safe haven and escape route. Jace, who as a Shadowhunter has to uphold the law amongst magical citizens, is not very pleased with this information. This is also why Clary’s mom decided to live there, so she could run away if anything happened, which supports the theory that Jocelyn was a criminal.
Dorothea then reads the tarot to Clary and Jace, dropping some obvious foreshadowing for their eventual romance, and she also mentions that her tarot deck was painted by Jocelyn. The deck includes a beautifully drawn golden cup, which may or may not be important. Suddenly, Clary decides that she wants to go through the portal, even though she doesn’t know how it works. She jumps through the portal, followed by Jace, and they are sent to Luke’s house because he was the last person to use it.
At Luke’s house, they find Simon, Clary’s normal best friend whom she completely forgot about. He’s been spying on Luke because he’s worried about Clary (reminder: Clary did not think about Simon once). Jace puts Simon up to speed, and he accepts all the magical stuff pretty easily. They enter Luke’s house and see him talk with two men who say they work for Valentine and are looking for the Cup. They are called Pagborn and Blackwell, and they threaten to harm Jocelyn, who turns out to be in their custody, but Luke repeats that he doesn’t care about what happens to Jocelyn or Clary. This pretty much tells us that Luke was also part of the racist Valentine cult. Luke and the men leave, and then Jace drops the bomb that Pagborn and Blackwell are the ones that killed his father. He’s shaken, but also excited about the prospect of revenge.
Jace and Clary decide to bring Simon back with them to the Institute. This turns out to be a terrible idea because he starts flirting with Isabelle, and Clary, who hates women and also hates when Simon shows interest in anyone other than her, is extremely mad about this. There’s a short comedic (?) scene about how Isabelle is a terrible cook, and Jace talks about how Isabelle’s mom probably didn’t teach her how to cook so she wouldn’t “stay in the kitchen” because Shadowhunter women have only recently been allowed to fight alongside the men. Clary asks if Isabelle is a better fighter than her brother, to which Jace says that she is, and also mentions that Alec has never killed a demon because he’s always protecting Isabelle and Jace. Instead of thinking Isabelle is a badass, Clary continues to be a hater because God forbid Simon talks to another girl.
PART 2: Easy is the Descent.
Clary and Jace go report to Hodge, who decides it’s time to elaborate on Valentine’s fascist hate group, revealing he was part of the Circle along with Isabelle and Alec’s parents and that Clary’s mother was actually Valentine’s wife.
The reason he hadn’t noticed before was because Jocelyn changed her last name from Fairchild to Fray, which is a really obvious change and realistically he should have realized way sooner.
Clary, of course, is horrified at the fact that her mom would ever be part of a fantasy version of the KKK, and also at the implication that her mom was married to someone else before she married Clary’s dad (yes, she still believes the story about her dad being a dead soldier; she hasn’t connected the dots). Hodge adds that obviously Jocelyn wasn’t racist, she just married the “wrong guy.” He may or may not have connected the dots at this point, but he doesn’t say anything about Clary’s parentage. Also, Jace’s father, Michael Wayland, was also part of the magical KKK, but that doesn’t seem to faze Jace that much for some reason.
After that they all have dinner together and discuss how to proceed now that they know Valentine is back and that he’s looking for the Cup. They can’t get help from other Shadowhunters because they are all busy with some diplomatic affairs back at their home country, Idris2. They realize that Valentine must have kidnapped Jocelyn because she probably knows where the Cup is, and Clary may know something too. The problem is that Clary’s memories have been tampered with, so it’s decided that the next day she will visit the Silent Brothers, a special brand of Shadowhunters that live in the City of Bones (title drop!), working as archivists, researchers and healers.
They go to sleep, and Clary has a weird dream with lots of foreshadowing. Jace wakes her up to meet Jeremiah, a Silent Brother who has come to check on her. The Silent Brothers have no eyes, their mouths are sewn shut, and they speak telepathically. Jeremiah confirms that there’s a magical block in Clary’s brain, so she has to be taken to the City of Bones to be examined by a council of Silent Brothers. Clary and Jace get on a carriage to get there, and he drops some more world building exposition about how demons are basically aliens from other dimensions that enter the Earth through interdimensional holes that the Shadowhunters are unable to close. He also talks a little about his father and how he wants to get revenge-slash-justice for his death. They finally arrive at the City, a giant underground mausoleum for Shadowhunters. The Silent Brothers try to undo the block in Clary’s mind, which brings forth some vague childhood memories and the name Magnus Bane. Since they are unable to break the spell on Clary’s mind, the Silent Brothers tell her to go find whoever put it in there.
Jace takes Clary to get breakfast at a magical café, along with Simon, Isabelle and Alec. Clary is still mad at Simon and Isabelle for daring to flirt in her presence, and then Jace flirts with some pixie girl at the café, making her even more mad. As an aside, this is the scene where Clary realizes that Alec is in love with Jace. They get food and discuss what to do, and Isabelle conveniently remembers that she got an invitation to a party thrown by the Warlock of Brooklyn, who, of course, is named Magnus Bane. Clary makes a random hateful remark about how Isabelle wears vanilla perfume, and Clary thinks girls who wear vanilla perfume are idiots. In case you forgot, she hates women.
The group gets back to the Institute. Hodge gives Clary a picture of all the members of the Circle when they were younger, which includes Michael Wayland, Jace’s father. Hodge tells Clary not to show the picture to Jace, which will make more sense later. Clary goes back to her room to take a nap, and there she finds Jace, who sees nothing wrong with invading her privacy and going through her sketchbook. The next scene is really weird. Jace offers to tell Clary a bedtime story and then goes on and on about how his father killed his pet falcon and how love makes you weak, and Clary tries to make him understand that his father was actually abusive, but she falls asleep so the topic is dropped.
She is woken up by Isabelle so they can get ready for the party. Isabelle helps her get properly dressed up and does Clary’s makeup for her, and instead of being grateful, she goes on a mental tirade about how Isabelle dresses like a slut and how much she hates putting on makeup because, remember, she’s not like other girls. Clary reveals that she knows Alec is gay, and Isabelle gets very protective of her brother. She asks her to keep it secret, which Clary thinks is dumb because being gay shouldn’t matter (she’s super Woke when it isn’t about women), but she agrees not to say anything. They finally go to the party, which is filled with Downworlders. They meet Magnus, an immortal warlock that looks like a hot 20-something; he is vaguely Asian and not so vaguely gay. Magnus agrees to speak with them, so Clary, Alec and Jace go to his room while Simon and Isabelle go enjoy the party.
Magnus admits that he has been putting a spell on Clary every couple years to keep her unaware of the supernatural world, at the request of her mother. He can’t undo the spell, but it will eventually disappear on its own, and Clary will start remembering all the things that her mom made her forget over the years. Magnus flirts a little with Alec, who, let me remind you, is a minor, and then tells them to get out of his house.
As they are leaving, Isabelle screams because Simon drank a magical potion (AFTER being warned not to do so by her), and he turned into a rat. Clary, for some Godforsaken reason, blames Isabelle for this, slaps her and calls her a bitch. She will never apologize for this. Rat!Simon gets accidentally kidnapped by some vampires, so Clary and Jace go to rescue him by themselves.They get to the vampires’ lair and meet a Latino boy3 who is obviously a vampire and he tricks them into an ambush. Nobody cares about this, it’s such a stupid side quest. There’s a big fight, they are saved by a pack of werewolves turning up out of nowhere, they get Simon back and they leave, Simon turns back into a human, the end.
Back at the Institute, Alec tells Clary to leave Jace alone because she makes him act reckless (kinda true; there was no reason for them to go rescue Simon withou Isabelle and Alec), and Clary lies about Jace calling Alec a selfish coward. He’s heartbroken, and she feels a little bad about lying, but as always, she makes it about herself.
Clary goes to her room, and then Simon comes by and they spend some time talking until he falls asleep on her bed. She gets up and Jace surprises her as she’s leaving the room; it happens to be her birthday, which she forgot about, so he takes Clary on a date at the Institute’s greenhouse.
The date is really cute; they talk about things they got for their birthdays, he gives her a glowing stone, and they kiss. A little tidbit here is that Clary shows Jace a mark on her shoulder that looks like a star; it’s not important, but it made me think of the Joestar birthmark.
Anyway, they are all giddy and happy until they get back to her room, where Simon is waiting for Clary. Jace gets mad, Simon gets mad—it's total chaos. Jace storms off, trying to act like he’s not jealous, and Simon finally confesses that he’s in love with Clary and that he was using Isabelle to make her jealous (nobody addresses the fact that it was messed up to use Isabelle like this). Clary rejects him, so he acts like an entitled incel about it and leaves the Institute.
Clary is upset about this whole situation, so she starts drawing to relax, and suddenly she finds out she has the ability to take her drawings out of the page and put things inside it. This will be explained later on but for now you just have to accept this is a thing she can do because she’s just built different. She has a eureka moment, so she rushes to find Jace. For some reason, Cassandra Clare then switches the PoV to Jace for about a page, and this doesn’t give us any new insight into his character, so I’m genuinely confused as to why she did this only for this chapter. Whatever. Jace is still mad at her, but they go speak with Hodge, Isabelle and Alec. Clary then explains what she can do and says that she knows where the Cup is. Remember the golden cup on the tarot deck that I said was important? Well, that’s the Mortal Cup, disguised as a drawing by Clary’s mother, and Clary thinks she can take it out of the drawing.
They need to get back to Madame Dorothea, so they call the only person with a driving license they know—Simon. He’s still pissed off at Clary, because he’s an incel, but he agrees to take them there. He stays in the car while the rest go into Madame Dorothea’s apartment to get the tarot deck, but she’s acting weird. She’s been possessed by the Greater Demon Abbaddon. The demon attacks them, and Alec, still upset because Clary called him a coward, tries to save the day and gets terribly injured in the attempt. Alec left a bow and arrow in the car, which Simon used to rescue them by shooting a window on the roof and letting sunlight come in. Demons are weak to the sun, so Abbaddon dies. Everyone is badly injured, but the worst is Alec, and Clary feels bad because she knows it’s her fault, so she tells him that he was the one to kill the demon. Also, they got the tarot deck so the mission was a success.
They get back to the Institute, desperate to heal Alec. Nothing seems to be working, and things only get worse. Clary and Jace go to the library and give the Cup to Hodge, who makes his raven attack Jace. Jace is out of commission, Clary gets trapped behind a magical wall, and then Hodge reveals that he’s been working with Valentine. The Big Bad himself arrives using a portal; he lifts the curse that made Hodge unable to leave the Institute, takes the Mortal Cup and Jace and dips out. Before leaving, he says something ominous about reuniting Jace with his dad, so Clary understandably thinks Valentine will kill him.
Hodge lifts the spell on Clary and sends someone a message before getting the hell out of the Institute. Clary runs after him into the streets and corners him in an alleyway, so Hodge attacks her, when suddenly a giant wolf appears to save the day.
Clary has suffered a fair amount of injuries, so she passes out as the wolf appears and later wakes up in a prison cell, greeted by Luke. He reveals that he’s a werewolf and the leader of the New York pack. HINT #3 That this is Harry Potter fanfic, Luke is a clear stand-in for Remus Lupin. They are in an abandoned police building, where most of the pack stays. Clary is exhausted, confused and angry at Luke for seemingly abandoning her to fend for herself, so she immediately starts being racist toward him for being a werewolf. She’s a great person, isn’t she? Anyway, Luke lets the fantasy racism slide and decides it’s time to explain things to her, and so ends Part 2.
Part 3: The Descent Beckons.
TW: There will be discussion of incest from here to the end of the post.
This part begins with the second PoV shift of the book, with a whole chapter told in 1st person by Luke as he tells Clary his backstory. Luke was a Shadowhunter, and he grew up with Clary’s mom back in Idris. At the Shadowhunter Academy, they became extremely close with Valentine—Jocelyn fell in love with him, and Luke became his parabatai. The parabatai concept is not super fleshed out at this point in the series, but parabatai couples are two Shadowhunters that are magically linked to each other until death; the bond makes them stronger, amongst other things. This isn’t explained that well in this book and doesn’t really impact the plot, but it’s worth noting that Jace and Alec are also parabatai. Back to Luke’s story, he tells Clary about how Valentine got radicalized and his group of friends started to become a racist cult looking to overthrow the government. Luke and Jocelyn are good people, so they obviously were not onboard with this, but they were too intertwined with Valentine to leave the group. At this point, Jocelyn already had a child with Valentine, a boy named Jonathan Christopher (say the initials out loud). One day, Luke got bitten by a werewolf, and Valentine told him he should do the honorable thing and kill himself now that he was a Downworlder. Instead, Luke ran away and became the leader of a werewolf pack near Idris. After some time, Valentine and his cult decided to stage a coup during the Accords (a diplomatic meeting between Shadowhunters and Downworlders). A big battle breaks out, and Luke arrives to fight Valentine and his little fantasy KKK. Valentine’s group gets beaten up by the other Shadowhunters joining forces with the Downworlders, so Valentine runs away and burns down his house, making it seem like he died along with his baby son. Jocelyn disappears after that, and Luke finishes his story, explaining how he got to New York, how he found Jocelyn and Clary and telling Clary that the story Jocelyn told her about her dad being a dead soldier was a lie. Clary finally connects the dots about being Valentine’s daughter, and she’s very upset about that and about having a dead brother. We will get back to that soon.
They figure out where Valentine’s evil lair is (no time to explain how), so Clary and Luke’s werewolf pack go there to take back Jace, Jocelyn and the Mortal Cup. Oh, I forgot to mention that the wolves that saved Clary and Jace from the vampires were sent by Luke. Anyway, they get to Valentine’s lair, and Valentine has a little army of Forsaken zombies so some of the wolves die in the battle and nobody cares. Clary and Luke find the room where Valentine is keeping Jocelyn, who’s comatose, and Luke gets busy fighting Valentine’s cronies, so Clary has to go find Jace on her own.
She finds Jace, and he’s looking quite well; it doesn’t seem like Valentine hurt him at all, which should have made Clary suspicious, but she’s not very smart, so she doesn’t notice that. Jace doesn’t want to leave; he says something about his dad and how Valentine is just misunderstood; Clary is getting desperate; nothing is making sense to her; and then Valentine pops up.
Valentine sits down and looks at Jace and Clary being clearly in love with each other. He locks eyes with Clary. Clary is begging that she’s wrong. And then he drops the bomb that he’s Jace’s father.
Valentine is a great villain just for this scene, incest be damned. This is why Hodge didn’t want Jace to look at the picture of Valentine’s magical KKK, because Jace would have realized that his dad wasn’t Michael Wayland. Also, Jace has a dumb ring with a W in it, and Valentine turns it upside down to turn into an M because Valentine’s surname is Morgenstern; it’s so goofy, and I love it.
Clary is in shambles, and Jace is confused about why she cares so much about who his dad is, until Valentine drops the second bomb about how he’s also Clary’s father. So, remember how Valentine faked his own death along with his son after his failed coup by burning down his house? Well, he actually burned down the body of Michael Wayland, who died in the battle, along with Wayland’s son. Wayland’s wife was conveniently dead, so it all worked out. He took Jonathan Christopher (Jace), and they lived together for 10 years as the Waylands until Valentine faked his death again. It’s convoluted and doesn’t make a lot of sense (how come nobody checked on Michael Wayland, a member of a terrorist group, for a full decade?), but the point is that Jace is, supposedly, Clary’s lost brother.
OOF, it’s dire out here, and Valentine is living for the drama. Jace and Clary are panicking about their suddenly taboo relationship, and Jace doesn’t know who to trust—should he side with his abusive dad who happens to be the leader of a racist cult, or should he side with his new sister that he made out with a couple of days ago? It's too much for him; he’s a mess. I think it’s weird that Clary didn’t think to remind Jace about his best friend Alec who is still very much dying back at the Institute, but whatever, maybe she didn’t want to add to his fragile mental state. Luke arrives after killing Valentine’s minions; there’s a big fight, Jace realizes that his dad sucks and helps Clary and Luke fight him off, so Valentine runs away with the Mortal Cup using a portal.
There’s a time jump, and we see Clary going to visit her mom at the hospital. Jocelyn is still in a magical coma, and they don’t know where Valentine is, but at least Alec survived thanks to the help of Magnus Bane. That was the person that Hodge sent a message to before running away, meaning that Hodge didn’t leave Alec to die. There’s the implication that something romantic may be going on between Alec and the warlock, but it’s nothing serious yet.
Clary and Jace are barely speaking to each other due to the whole “we might be related” thing (spoilers: they are not, but the author will milk this conflict for two more books). This is all well and good for Simon, who may have a chance now that Clary can’t date her brother. Clary has a ridiculous scene with Isabelle where Isabelle APOLOGIZES? TO CLARY? FOR BEING A BITCH? Even though Isabelle has been nothing but nice to Clary the entire book and Clary hated her for no reason, slapped her and called her a bitch? After that idiotic scene, Clary has a conversation with Alec, and she apologizes for calling him a coward; it’s actually kinda nice. Then Clary goes find Jace and asks him to go with her to visit Jocelyn, because maybe that will make her wake up. Jace is not eager to meet his mom, but he agrees.
The End.
Relationships.
Clace (Clary/Jace) is in hiatus. They love is mutual, but they just found out that they are siblings so they're currently trying to navigate their new relationship status, and it’s really awkward.
Things are looking up for Clarimon (Clary/Simon). He’s still into Clary, and now that she can’t be with Jace she doesn’t have a lot of options. This is absolutely not unhealthy and not going to horribly backfire.
Sizzy (Simon/Isabelle, and yes, that is their ship name) is not looking good. Simon only used Isabelle to make Clary jealous, and Isabelle doesn’t seem too upset about this so she probably didn’t like him that much. I sure hope she doesn’t give him a second chance later on.
Malec (Magnus and Alec) is starting to flourish, which is fine if you ignore the fact that Magnus is an adult flirting with a minor who is still figuring out his sexuality and has never had a relationship. This is totally not a case of grooming.
Positives.
I can see why I liked this as a teenager and why it was so big when it came out, even if it doesn’t hold up very well. The Mortal Instruments was released during a very interesting period for YA literature when everyone wanted to fill the void left by Harry Potter, and Twilight had just come out, paving the way for the supernatural romance trend that would dominate until the teenage dystopia boom. I will talk about the relationship between this book and Harry Potter in a bit, but I think Clare does a really good job at taking elements from that series and Twilight to create something new and, at times, better.
The world building specifically stands out to me; compared to the wishy-washy lore of the Harry Potter franchise, Clare seems to have the rules of her world figured out from the start, and she finds a way to make all the separate fantasy elements fit into her narrative about angels and demons. She also doesn’t neglect to flesh out the political situation in her world. Unlike in Harry Potter, the prejudice from the privileged magical citizens towards the “magical minorities” is not left unaddressed, and the characters acknowledge that the current peace between them is delicate and that the grievances these minorities have are justified. While Clare undermines her anti-racism message in a couple scenes, I think she does a good job, or at least a better job than Rowling, at presenting this theme to a younger audience. The conflict between Shadowhunters and Downworlders is not just a background issue but the core of the entire series.
The characters are not great but my favorite part of this re-read was realizing how cool Isabelle is. She’s a strong, confident young girl, she’s supportive of her gay brother despite living in a very homophobic society and wants him to be happy, she’s friendly and funny and she has a badass whip. I love her, she deserves better than being trapped in this series.
While I hated Clary, I do have to admit she’s a very active protagonist, and Clare gives her and Jace a lot of chemistry. Jace is a little flat, but at least his flaws are recognized as such, like his lack of concern for danger, and he has an actual arc about realizing his childhood was abusive and letting go of his idealized version of his father. Nothing incredible, but it’s done well.
Cassandra Clare is good at foreshadowing, and the couple action scenes are decent. The comedy is alright, with some bits here and there that made genuinely laugh out loud. If you can overlook the negatives this is a fun book, so let’s talk about those.
Negatives.
There are two things that most people know about this series:
The main couple are siblings, and
The series is based on Harry Potter fanfiction.
Both are sort of true. The big twist of the first book is that Clary and Jace are related, and even though it’s eventually revealed they are not siblings, this is still the biggest thing that people associate with the series. It somehow only gets worse despite them not being related, but we will get to that later.
The second bit is also true, although it is a little more complex than people think. This series is, as far as I can tell without reading the actual fic, based on Cassandra Clare’s Draco Trilogy, which was published before the original Harry Potter books were finished. The Draco Trilogy doesn’t contain incest4, instead the main couples in that fic series are Ginny Weasley + Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter + Hermione Granger. Clary is Ginny’s stand-in, while Jace is based on Draco, and while the side characters are harder to place, I would say that Simon is likely based on Harry. Nothing weird here. HOWEVER, Cassandra Clare did also write another fic featuring a relationship between Ginny and her brother Ron, called Mortal Instruments. She published that fic when she was 31, by the way. I haven’t read that, and I won’t ever read it, but the plot is completely different from Shadowhunters, so it’s safe to say the only thing Clare took from that one is the incest and the title. From all that I could gather about Mortal Instruments, it’s debatable whether Clare wrote it in earnest or if she was trolling, and there’s an argument that could be made about her writing that fic out of hatred for both Ginny and Ron. Still, writing incest ironically does not make it okay, and it does make the inclusion of incest in the Shadowhunters series worth scrutinizing. I will talk more about this in the next books, once we really get into the meat of the issue.
There are other things to criticize Clare for. There’s a lot of internalized misogyny in the way Clary thinks about other women and herself; she’s the textbook example of a "not like other girls" character. The narrative constantly belittles Isabelle for being conventionally attractive and for flirting with boys; there’s an undercurrent of slut-shaming in every interaction Clary and Isabelle have. Simon is another terrible character, acting entitled to Clary’s love and using women for his own benefit. Not only does he use Isabelle to make Clary jealous, but it’s also stated that his past girlfriends were also just practice for him. I genuinely can’t see any redeeming qualities in him, and he’s arguably the third main character. There are some other issues, like the pacing and the prose, but those aren’t that important.
Final Thoughts.
While L. M. James is the face of the fanfic-to-novel pipeline, I don’t think she holds as much responsibility for that as Clare, not just because City of Bones came out before 50 Shades, but also because Clare is a pretty consistent and prolific writer—the last Shadowhunter book came out just last year, and they still sell. I will talk more about this once I finish the Mortal Instruments, but keep that in mind. Despite how much fun I'm having re-reading and info-dumping about this series, I do NOT advise reading it, especially if incest is triggering for you. I’m just doing this because sometimes it’s fun to talk about bad things, and there’s a lot of crazy stuff in this series that people don’t know about. If you want to know what’s up with this series but don’t want to read it, stay tuned to read the abridged version. I will be covering the next book, City of Ashes, in a couple of weeks.
They are 3: the Cup, the Sword and the Mirror. Drinking from the Mortal Cup turns normal humans into Shadowhunters. We will learn more about the other two later.
Idris is located somewhere in the middle of Europe, it was explained in one of the hundred exposition dump scenes. Hodge was cursed to never go back to Idris or leave the Institute because of the “being a member of a fascist hate group” thing. Meanwhile, Alec and Isabelle’s parents were also part of that group, but they are high class so their punishment for “trying to take over the country and commit genocide” was that they have to live in New York and can only visit Idris in important occasions. They also get to lead the New York Institute. Pretty realistic.
Raphael is the worst example of USAmerican people writting latine characters. No, Cassandra, that is not how bilingual people speak, stop with the random Spanish words.
But there is a funny case of accidental incest. Because the fic was published before the original HP books ended, Clare had no way to know that Sirius Black and Narcissa Malfoy, which she turned into a couple, would eventually turn out to be cousins. She just can’t escape the allegations.