Let's Reread The Mortal Instruments

Obvious spoilers for TMI but warnings are before any spoilers for other Cassie series

I first picked up City of Bones by Cassandra Clare at the beach the summer before 7^th grade. I’d only recently made friends I actually liked at school and I hadn’t even had my first period. But my middle school self found comfort in the shadow world, a name that aptly described her level of self-proclaimed angst. She lost herself in Clary and Jace and Simon and Izzy and Alec and Magnus in a way she hadn’t since the days of reading Harry Potter and Percy Jackson for the first time.

I just graduated high school, so that was over six years ago.

Cassandra Clare’s books have meant a lot to me in all the years since, but I rarely found myself turning to The Mortal Instruments, the series that started it all. Reading The Dark Artifices as they came out filled my school breaks with laughter and tears, while rereading The Infernal Devices helped me get through periods of tears in my own life, but I haven’t returned to the OG since I first read them in the seventh grade. As I throw my cap in the air and cross from one stage of my life to the next, I realized I didn’t want to leave these books behind. I figured it was time to revisit some old friends.

Since I’ve never reread these books and the last time I picked one up was the release of City of Heavenly Fire in 2014, they evoke a certain nostalgia Cassie’s other books don’t since I’ve reread them more than once. There’s so much about these characters and this story that I had forgotten when I dismissed TMI as my least favorite Shadowhunters series. I also have knowledge about future books and wisdom about the craft of writing that make me appreciate Cassie’s unique genius in a way I couldn’t have done when I read them for the first time.

One thing I didn’t know to respect when I read these books for the first time is the level of representation Cassie was including in her books from day one. Plenty of authors have made their books more inclusive as society becomes more and more open minded, and many other authors now have the courage to tell the stories they’ve always wanted to tell. What I love about Cassandra Clare is that she was doing this back in 2008, when LGBTQ+ PoC stories were few and far between and certainly weren’t mainstream. City of Bones was a huge hit in the YA community, and as it shot up the charts of readers’ consciences, so did Alec and Magnus. The resistance to their relationship they met from the shadowhunter community mirrored the resistance Cassandra Clare met in publishing such an overt commentary on homophobia, because let’s be real, the shadowhunters are bigots and that is not an accident. I recognized this when reading The Dark Artifices in wake of the 2016 election, but using shadowhunter politics as an allegory for what’s going on in our world is not a new concept for Cassie. The tension between shadowhunters and downworlders that’s present throughout the series is applicable to so many conflicts in our own society and the idea that change is possible though it is not linear and will certainly not be easy is such an important one.

Let’s talk about the villains. Valentine is fascinating; I’ve always said he is one of my favorite villains of all time even though TMI was never my favorite series. He’s so damn charming and persuasive that even the reader feels the pull. Cassie’s short stories about the Circle in Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy and Ghosts of the Shadow Market exemplify this. The scene in City of Bones where Clary and Luke face Valentine at Renwick’s tore me to pieces because I now recognize how difficult that must have been for Jace. In that moment, he’s just a child and the father he thought he’d lost is standing right there and he just doesn’t understand why everyone wants to kill him so badly. The character of Valentine thrives on these bonds of loyalty that he secured in the past to entrench him so definitively in every other character’s story. No other character can completely erase the stain of Valentine, whether it be actions they committed under his command or blood ties they didn’t know they had, even when he’s gone.

Sebastian on the other hand, I’d always thought of as kind of bland villain. I remembered him as this basic villain whose main motive was revenge like every other white guy in a long line of YA “evil for the sake of being evil” villains. They even call him “Team Evil” in City of Lost Souls (and you know how I feel about teams in YA). However, in my reread I have acquired a more nuanced appreciation for Sebastian. The Sebastian I remembered is the one we see glimpses of in The Dark Artifices: predatory, hedonistic, malicious, and while he is still all of these things in the original books, he’s also so weirdly normal. Unlike Valentine, Sebastian isn’t an authority figure in any way. He’s on a level playing field age and maturity-wise with the rest of our squad. He talks like them, he jokes with Jace, he whines when he doesn’t get his way. For all intents and purposes, he’s a teenager just like the rest of them. Such humanizing qualities serve to foil him against his own monstrous nature, which is significantly more interesting than I initially gave his character credit for.

Another thing I did not give Cassie enough credit for when I read these books the first time is the J.K. Rowling-level planning for future series she included in them. Part of my ignorance the first time around is that I didn’t read her books in publication order, so I missed out on some pre-City of Heavenly Fire references, but plenty of the references are Easter eggs even super fans wouldn’t have caught at the time! The biggest one is obviously SPOILER ALERT FOR CLOCKWORK PRINCESS the reveal in City of Heavenly Fire that Brother Zachariah is Jem. Clockwork Princess had not yet come out yet when readers were reading City of Fallen Angels and Lost Souls, so Brother Zachariah really be out here talking about his debt to the Herondale family and how he had a parabatai once and WE DON’T EVEN KNOW. Beyond that, there’s obvious set up in COHF for The Dark Artifices; I mean Emma and Julian get their own plot line, but you can actually catch a glimpse of Julian with Helen and Aline as early as the beginning of City of Lost Souls! It was really awesome to read these books (especially books 4 and 5) for the first time with the knowledge of Cassie’s other series.

Some favorite moments I remembered and were still great:

Some favorite moments I had forgotten about:

·      Magnus being disappointed when Jace shows back up at his apartment after the party instead of “the pretty blue-eyed one” (City of Bones) ·      Alec kissing Magnus in front of the entire Clave in the Accords Hall (City of Glass) ·      Simon telling Robert Lightwood “wrong religion” and plucking a crucifix out of his hand (City of Heavenly Fire) ·      Reasons why Alec did not make a pie. Enough said (City of Heavenly Fire) ·      “Straight people! Why can’t they control themselves?” (City of Heavenly Fire) ·      After Helen gets banished, Julian says “I’m only 12 and I’m going to have four kids!” Just as heart wrenching as I remember (City of Heavenly Fire). ·      “Where’s Church? Did Brother Zachariah steal our cat?!” (City of Heavenly Fire)

·      Alec breaking Jace out of jail by goading him into jumping 30 feet straight up in the air (City of Ashes) ·      Alec nearly coming out to his parents with Clary’s fearless rune (City of Ashes) ·      “She’s just jealous I have an 18-year-old boyfriend with a stamina rune and she doesn’t” –Magnus about Camille (City of Fallen Angels) ·      “The only way you could raise enough money to hire Magnus by selling lemonade is if you put meth in it” –Alec (City of Lost Souls) ·      Simon willing to sacrifice himself to raise the angel Raziel to save Jace (City of Lost Souls) ·      Jace to Alec: “The best thing Valentine ever did for me was send me to you.” (City of Heavenly Fire) ·      Jocelyn picked Fray as Clary’s last name in honor of Tessa (City of Heavenly Fire)

You can tell from this favorites list that I particularly love City of Heavenly Fire. Most of the moments from this series that have stuck with me all these years are from that book, so obviously it made an impression. This is because damn it does Cassandra Clare know how to write an epic finale! Cassie is the queen of acknowledging there are certain pitfalls that YA series often fall into and making them her bitch (unlike Alec). Cassandra Clare wrote The Infernal Devices SPOILERS and said “I see your classic love triangle where girl must choose between two obnoxious but equally gorgeous boys and I’ll raise you one where everyone loves and respects one another, the girl gets with both of them, and it’s somehow MORE DEVASTATING.” The other thing Cassandra Clare has mastered that the likes of Suzanne Collins and Veronica Roth could never manage is incredibly epic yet still satisfying finales to trilogies. Trilogies seemed to be the default series length in YA for a long time, which is so counterintuitive considering how hard they are to get right. The fact that they are so formulaic just makes it difficult for them to stand out or feel satisfactorily wrapped up at the end when the last two books have been nothing but build up. The Mortal Instruments is essentially made up of two trilogies which means it has TWO INCREDIBLE FINALES; City of Glass and City of Heavenly Fire are by far my favorites of the whole series. In both, Cassie delivers final battles of epic proportions, wraps up the main plot and brings in any plots that have been brewing in the sidelines, and still purposely leaves a few loose ends to set up for future series (something even Rick Riordan couldn’t quite manage in Blood of Olympus and it takes a lot for me to admit that). However, my favorite thing about Cassie’s finales is that she takes the time to pay respects to each character’s arc, some of which have been building for six books, while still leaving them with room to grow. After six books of poor Jace struggling to find a last name that suits him, he decides he’s ready to reclaim the name Herondale and honor a family that has done a lot for the Shadow world, but Tessa says he isn’t ready to meet her and learn about the rest of his ancestors quite yet. He’s still figuring out who he is and his place in the world by the end of the last book. A story like that is far from dissatisfying; it makes the characters live on off the page because, realistically, no one’s story is over at eighteen.

I’ll admit, I didn’t start this reread as some sort of “I open at the close” metaphor. I didn’t read TMI for the first time at a pivotal moment; it wasn’t the beginning or end of anything in my life. There were plenty of other books I could’ve chosen if I had wanted that. It was actually thanks to the release of The Red Scrolls of Magic, the first book in Cassie’s new series all about Alec and Magnus. As I read and loved this adorable story where Magnus and Alec get to be the sole heroes and the girl next to me on the plane leaned over and asked “Not that I’m judging or anything but are you reading Malec fanfiction?”, I was hit with this wave of missing these characters. When I finished Red Scrolls, I couldn’t help but feel like I wasn’t ready to be done, that I had more to say to these characters, that I didn’t want to leave them just yet, that I wanted to remain in their world just a little bit longer. I realize now that the metaphor is probably in there somewhere if I really want to look for it.