#awaytothink

No bother at all.  I sometimes feel like I spend half my blog space whining about how every other book on the planet is inferior to Animorphs, which isn’t actually the kind of vibe I’m going for.  I SWEAR I LOVE YA SF.  Just… Not Mortal Instruments.  I’ve tried.  I tried so hard to like that series.  It is objectively well-written and creative.  I just… I can’t with Cassandra Clare’s work.  I can’t.

First of all: a confession.  I’ve only ever read City of Bones, City of Ashes, and about half of City of Glass, and then several different issues (the glorification of violence, the glorification of “slender” or “skinny” bodies, the way Jace’s Freudian Excuse gets used to let him get away with all kinds of bad behavior, the borderline-pathological worship of True Love in City of Ashes) conspired to drive me away from the series as a whole.  So I don’t actually know if Clare improves in the last 80% of the series.  Thus everything I say has that big honking grain of salt. 

However, I do take issue with the way that, from what I’ve seen, the Mortal Instruments series portrays violence.  Individuals are portrayed as all good or all bad (literally, they’re on the side of the angels or else they support demons) and—from what I’ve seen—there are literally no good demons, nor are there angels worse than “morally grey.” This Manichaeisan worldview (which I think is no accident given the overtly Christian overtones of the series) basically justifies pretty much any acts of violence on the grounds of “they are bad and we are good and therefore pretty much anything we do to them is good, regardless of the means we use to get to that end.”  One extension of this principle which pops up again and again and again with regards to the Shadowhunters is that Might Makes Right.  Clary is the best at coming up with new runes to kill demons, which is a sign she is the best good; Izzy is the best at stabbing demons very dead, which is a sign that she is good too.  Morality comes about by way of violence in that series.

It’s troubling because it glorifies war as “we are the good guys wiping out the bad guys” and utterly dehumanizes the bad guys in the process.  Given that we live in a world where pretty much any group can be potentially cast as “the bad guys,” and that we as humans have an implicit bias toward casting ourselves as “the good guys” no matter what group we belong to… It can reinforce bad behavior.  To say the least.  

Case in point, the first scene in the series is one of Clary witnessing a major fight between (apparently) several children her own age, who are using deadly weapons to launch all-out attacks against each other and (again, apparently) succeed in killing at least two individuals at the end.  The narration doesn’t focus on her shock or horror or utter terror; it spends a long time dwelling on how cute Izzy’s dress is and how nice Jace’s cheekbones are and how cool they all look swirling around with their magical weapons.  (And slender bodies. Can’t ever, ever forget to mention that every single one of them has a slender body.  I confess that’s the #1 pet peeve in the writing that drove me away from the series.)  I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that Clare has probably never witnessed a real fight, or even a video of a real fight, because this is not only unrealistic (real fights are short, chaotic, hard to interpret, and incredibly disturbing—kind of like how they’re described in Animorphs) but it also suggests that violence is cool. 

Meanwhile, I don’t want to suggest that Clare is by any means the only author with this problem.  There was a great article (which I have since lost—I’ll have to send a link if I find it) which pointed out that American Clinton supporters and American Trump supporters and American independent voters all cast themselves as the Rebel Alliance in Star Wars and cast their political nemeses as the Galactic Empire.  Because it’s easy to do: the narrative of Star Wars dehumanizes the stormtrooper enemy (although I could have cried with happiness when Finn took his helmet off in the latest film) while glorifying the individuated, special, blessed-with-magic heroes.  It literally says that there is “light” and “dark,” and that the light is justified in (for instance) blowing up a space station with dozens of prisoners of war and possibly hundreds of innocent sanitation workers on board, just as long as doing so advances the cause of the Light.  Avengers, Doctor Who, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Supernatural, and a simple majority of sci-fi/fantasy suffers from this problem. 

I also specifically said that Clare doesn’t so much glorify violence and other troubling content as much as she fetishizes violence, which I do view as a problem specific to Mortal Instruments.  It leads to this attitude of “people did bad things to me, therefore I can do bad things to [totally unrelated individuals].” Clary nearly forces Alec to out himself to his parents (which, I admit, hit all of my own personal “NOPE” buttons when I was reading the series as a closeted queer kid) because she idly experiments on him without fully informing him of what he’s getting into, but she’s special and this is how they discover she has the best angel powers of them all and that means that it gets brushed over.  Jace and Clary are jealous and possessive jerks toward each other while also pushing each other away throughout City of Ashes and City of Glass, but this is portrayed as excused because They’re Doing It For (unhealthy, selfish, possessive) True Love.

The one that drives me furthest up the wall is the scene where Jace stalks into a bar, orders a Scotch (because Scotch is a Man’s Drink, never mind that the Man in question is a bratty 16-year-old), throws the Scotch at the wall because he’s Overcome By Emotion, shouts at the people in the bar, and then demands a replacement from the bartender.  This whole sequence gets portrayed as “look how much Jace is suffering” but I couldn’t get away from thinking about how much the bartender, the random patrons, and everyone else who has to deal with his temper tantrum must be suffering.  Seriously, that’s the kind of behavior that I would punish in a six-year-old, because I’d expect a six-year-old to know better, whether or not the six-year-old thinks that he’s in love with his sister and that their father is an evil demagogue (Luke Skywalker called and he wants his plot back, by the way) and whether or not the six-year-old has a Sad Hawk Backstory™. 

Anywhoo, I find Clare’s work… frustrating.  Obviously.  I have ambivalent feelings about most of the other sci-fi/fantasy for which Animorphs has ruined me forever, but Clare’s work is high on my personal “nah” list.

Quick inevitable aside to How Animorphs Did It Better: the kids view avoiding violence as the ultimate end for which they are fighting this war.  Any time the protagonists have to choose between a violent means and a nonviolent one, they struggle to find a nonviolent one.  There are good yeerks (Aftran, Illim, Niss), bad andalites (Estrid, Alloran, Samilin), and even bad Animorphs (mostly David, but to a lesser extent Marco and Rachel).  Even then, the good-bad dichotomy gets complicated and continuously questioned, such that the “good” guys do a lot of things that everyone can agree are “bad” and get condemned for it.  Marco acts like a jerk toward Tobias early on in the series, and the fact that he’s doing it partially because he’s (reasonably) terrified of dying thanks to what Visser One did to both his parents and partially because he’s whistling in the dark very clearly doesn’t excuse his behavior.  Visser One spends AN ENTIRE BOOK trying to argue that her bad behavior is the product of her having had a rough life, and at the end of it Applegate succeeds in getting us to hate her more, not less.  Predominantly “good” characters do “bad” things (Ax killing Hessian soldiers, Cassie letting Tom’s yeerk have the morphing cube, Jake flushing the yeerk pool), just as predominantly “bad” characters do “good” things (Visser Three helping defeat the nartec and helmacrons, Visser One protecting Darwin and Madra, Chapman’s yeerk agreeing to help Melissa), and the series doesn’t offer a moral dichotomy any more absolute than “try not to harm people, I guess.  Oh, and do your best to prevent other people from getting harmed, if they can’t protect themselves.”  The series shows that Tobias’s sad human backstory doesn’t make it okay for him to annihilate the mercora or even to snap at Rachel when he’s hangry.

Oooh that’s cute! Uhm, five things, that’s kinda hard:

i’m loyal

call me whenever, i’m awake

there’s also my ability to sleep everywhere

i’m good at solving puzzles and stuff

i can be interested in nearly everything as long as you’re passionate about it