seriousfic

The first thing you should know about City of Bones is that although the book is long, there isn’t much meat on dem bones. There’s a very high ratio of exposition to shit-going down. There’s also very little resolution and an excess of world-building. As in, who cares how leprechauns work in your canon, get on with the story! They conspire to rob the book of its readability. There’s a perfectly fine light, even quotable work in there, but it’s buried pretty deep.

The bigger problem would be Jace, he of both “My parents are deeeead’ and ‘my dad was meeean’ pain. He’s very much your standard snarky badass, but there’s nothing else there. It's just Draco Malfoy reguritated, chapter and verse. The story even goes through some pretty major convolutions just to get him a confrontation with his "Lucius Malfoy."

Moreover, the trope isn’t so much played straight or subverted so much as it’s missed. Think of the real champion snarkers. Han Solo, Hudson, Hawkeye, Wolverine. They’re always sidekicks. Because if your claim to fame is pointing out flaws in the plan, you can’t be the one making the plan. The archetype works best when it’s played against a leader who’s idealistic, conservative, or just plain crazy… that way, the snarker voices the audience’s more uncharitable thoughts.

Make him the big damn hero and it’s just overpowering. That’s because the best humor pits the underdog against authority. Even black jokes go against the authority of political correctness and politeness. So if you have the big damn hero making cutting remarks, he’s not taking the piss out of the hoity-toity, he’s picking on people weaker than he is. Not only that, but Clare doesn’t give the character any flaws (someone literally says that his rudeness makes him sexy). He makes mocking comments, he’s the best at his athletic pastime, all the women and some of the boys want him… holy shit, he’s a jock!

Archetypes are like animals. If you take them out of their natural habitat, they have to adapt if they’re going to survive. I bet part of the appeal of Draco Malfoy is that he’s a Doylist underdog: he’s not one of the gang, he and Slytherin are picked on. So why is it that the target audience is meant to laugh when Simon is turned into a rat but cry foul when Draco becomes a ferret? Really, all the Shadowhunters (they're demon hunters… why don’t they just call themselves Demon Hunters? Is there some confusion there?) seem to disdain anyone who doesn’t kill monsters for a living. It makes you wonder why they go around saving people who irritate them so much.

Oh, and Simon is a geeky ‘mundane’ (NOT Muggle, mundane, they're spelled differently, see?) introduced to serve as a butt monkey for the cool kids. Even our heroine, his best friend, tosses him aside for her shiny magic friends. But he’s plucky, loyal, and reacts to the existence of monsters with ‘wow, cool’. Holy shit, he’s a Doctor Who companion. Then the nice guy turns out to be a Nice Guy. He’s ever so much in love with heroine Clary, you see, but he dated other girls as “practice.” Honey, no. That’s the kind of thing the Phantom of the Opera would do if he had a face. But it's okay, he turns into a werewolf in the second book.

Now, admittedly, all of this could make for some interesting story elements… wouldn’t it suck to work for someone who derided you because he thought it was funny?... but it never breaks out of the unexamined Buffy/Supernatural/Harry Potter mold. Most damning is that although it’s not technically plagiarizing, the tropes that make up the story have been assembled with as much care and poise as randomly inserting Blackadder lines into an unrelated narrative. I get the feeling that the demon hunters and unreliable mentors and fascist villains aren’t there because the author has anything to say, but just because those are things that you find in the genre. They’re what’s come before, therefore, they should be reiterated now. None of these tropes are particularly subverted or inspired or even well-written, they’re just reassembled in a slightly different configuration then we’ve seen before. Now, if you like the genre, that’s okay (there’s a reason horror fans can’t get enough of silent, slow-moving killers gorily murdering nubile teenagers). But it’s pretty damning for a first work.