One of my best friends in high school, Hannah, insisted I read The Mortal Instruments series. I put it on my reading list and eventually I read the first book, City of Bones. This was years ago already. City of Ashes, the second book, is only becoming one of the top books on my list now.
The timing is perfect. I finished the first book significantly before the first movie, The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, was released. I saw it when home on break one year, it happened to be on TV. It was OK. I thought it was a pretty faithful adaption, but nothing about it really jumped out at me. I figure that if the second book was turned into a movie, I'd probably watch it on TV or get it from a Redbox. It didn't matter enough to me to see it in theaters or to make sure I read the book first.
Recently, I joined Instagram. I thought I was going to need it for #busmm, so I decided to get familiar with the platform over winter break. Aside from people I know in real life, some of the first people I followed were YouTube personalities I follow. One of these was Christine Riccio aka PolandBanana20. She had barely been posting on her main channel for the last year or so because she made a second channel, PolandBananaBOOKS, where she put a ton of videos, becoming a staple of the BookTube community. I didn't follow this channel, surprisingly enough. I have mixed feelings about BookTube, but that is a story for another post.
Anyway, a ton of her Instagram posts were about this show, Shadowhunters. She was posting reviews on PolandBananaBOOKS, she was meeting the cast, she was dressing like a Shadowhunter. Simultaneously, I started getting an influx of gifsets from the show on Tumblr, mostly of people shipping the main character, Clary, with Isabelle, one of her friends. A few weeks back, I had a free night and started catching up online just to see why everyone was so excited.
This adaption is less faithful. It mixes up the timeline. For example, Clary's best friend Simon becomes a vampire towards the end of the book. In the show, he becomes a vampire much earlier, around episode 7, about 1/3 of the way through the length of a normal season. It allows him to develop as a character post-vampiring, like his story almost parallels Clary's own. Having a parallel structure always helps with pacing of shows because then you don't watch the same 3 people the entire time. It takes liberties that actually enhance the storyline and relationships.
What I really like is that the show isn't whitewashed like most mainstream media I see. In fact, it uses race to make a statement about power structures. The elite, powerful Shadowhunters are all white, with the exception of Isabelle and Alec, who are half white half Hispanic, but mostly white-passing. The twist? Their parents were reformed traitors. So they're not in as good of graces with the Clave as they thought. The Downworlders are all people of color. Luke, a werewolf, is black. Raphael, a vampire, is Puerto Rican and Jewish. Magnus, a warlock, is Chinese. Meliorn, a fey, is Lebanese.
This is no accident. It's a commentary on the way our society is structured. White people are disproportionately powerful. Oh, those people can't have any say in our society. They have inferior blood. Downworlder blood. Even the fey, who have half downworlder blood and half angel blood (Shadowhunters are half angel half human) are excluded. Systems like this feed into themselves and are cyclical. This is how the rich and powerful get richer more powerful, but the poor and powerless get poorer and are silenced.
Overall, I'm liking this show. I got behind during spring break and caught back up last night. Just be happy this post wasn't me fangirling over #Malec. I will definitely keep watching- and now I want to read the second book before the second season comes out.
No comments:
Post a Comment