The foundation of every genre – from Shakespeare to YA – is built on tropes or commonly used devices in storytelling. For its part, Shadowhunters is fairly quintessentially “YA fantasy,” containing many of the well-loved and well-trodden conventions of the genre. However, some of the most interesting and gripping aspects of Shadowhunters tend to arise when the show dares to color outside the lines of convention. While tropes are a key part of any genre, especially one as structured as YA fantasy, departure from the expected devices can make for the most affecting and grounded storytelling.
A significant example of Shadowhunters subverting convention is regarding Jace Herondale. At first glance, Jace is the picture of the brooding male, teenage heartthrob-antihero that YA genres seem to mass-produce: attractive, arrogant, superior in talent, sarcastic, burdened with a tragic past – the list goes on. While Jace certainly embodies elements of this stock YA fantasy antihero, which leads many to misread his character, there are many significant ways in which he defies this prototype that give him hidden depths that the audience doesn’t expect or always realize. By giving us a male protagonist with dimension and nuance, Shadowhunters reaches above the expectations of its genre and creates both a character and a narrative that is more unique and poignant.
Writing and storytelling is key in defining any character. But before we expand on that, credit should be given where credit is due: Jace is brought to life by the talented Dominic Sherwood, who brings a softness, sensitivity, and nuance to the role of the seemingly cocky male lead, without which these complexities of Jace’s character would be lost to implication in the writing alone. That being said, let’s talk about the many ways in which Jace Herondale defies convention and takes the “anti” out of “antihero.”
Not a Teenager = No Teen Angst
A small but significant point is courtesy of Shadowhunters’ decision to age up the main characters compared to their counterparts in The Mortal Instruments novels. Jace, while originally a sixteen-year-old in the source material, is now in his early twenties.
Especially with an audience older than sixteen, there tends to be a dismissive attitude towards brooding teenagers in fiction – it’s viewed as simply stereotypical teen angst, and the depth of the issues themselves are seldom viewed by the audience as significant. This isn’t to say, of course, that the emotional issues of teenagers are always trivial, but rather that they are more likely to be unfairly interpreted as such.
Without having the excuse of Jace acting out simply because that’s just what boys his age do, the audience is then forced to confront the realities of the character and his circumstance. It allows the deep roots of Jace’s myriad issues to be brought to the forefront rather than hiding behind a curtain of sarcastic quips and teen angst, as it usually ends up happening for our typical Brooding YA Male Protagonist. Compared to his teenage counterpart in the novels, this Jace is less guarded by sardonic humor and immaturity (as befits his older age), which allows more moments for viewers to see deeper into his character.
To that end, the problems that Jace faces, such as his struggle with identity and family, are given more weight considering the older audience, allowing Jace’s emotional narrative to unfold with both gravity and complexity.
His Tragic Past Is Actually Really Tragic
Another hallmark of the prototypical Brooding YA Male Protagonist that Jace initially seems to share is the “I had a rough childhood” sob story to excuse the character’s questionable behavior and make him appear sympathetic. It’s a trope that has been seen so often, it’s very easy to become desensitized to it, especially when truly despicable behavior is excused on the usually flimsy basis of sort-of bad childhoods.
However, when it comes to Jace, the generally weak “tragic past” excuse holds a lot more weight than expected. A lot of Jace’s childhood traumas were revealed gradually throughout Season 2, and they are truly horrific. Jace’s suffering runs the gruesome gamut from severe emotional manipulation all the way to violent physical abuse, both in his harrowing childhood, before he was taken in by the Lightwoods at the tender age of ten, and in the present day as well. Throughout Season 2, he was put through the wringer, from being tortured by his “father,” to being homeless, to being manipulated into causing a massacre, to literally being stabbed to death by the man he considered his father, and the list goes on.
Despite all of this tragedy, many might still stubbornly insist that Jace’s traumatic history is analogous to that of the stereotypical Brooding YA Male Protagonist: that is, blown out of proportion to make him seem more sympathetic than his questionable behaviors should otherwise allow him to be. But in fact, this is one of the ways in which the character of Jace has allowed the Shadowhunters writers to work against convention in the YA fantasy genre.
By highlighting the horrific traumas of Jace’s past in no uncertain terms rather than just alluding to vague past unhappiness for the sake of eliciting sympathy, the narrative allows the ramifications of such abuse to be explored in present-day Jace with more complexity and nuance than the tired tropes the genre usually allows. Moreover, Sherwood’s performance masterfully evokes the delicate balance between Jace’s guarded exterior and the sensitivity of his trauma welling below the surface, allowing Jace to be brought to life as a complex and three-dimensional character.
Coping Mechanisms, Not Character Traits
It’s almost too easy to misread Jace’s character as following – rather than subverting – the tropes of the YA male lead, because Jace’s actions and behaviors can easily be taken at face value rather than understood with the appropriate context of his character – a context which is explored frequently in flashback form or in reference rather than being immediate in the narrative. This can make him appear to be the prototypical Brooding YA Male Protagonist where he is anything but.
Especially in Season 2, Jace showed some tell-tale behaviors of the Brooding YA Male Protagonist; however, placed in context, it’s clear that none of these behaviors were meant to reflect Jace as a person, but rather to reflect the extent of the trauma that Jace has been trying to cope with. In episodes like 2×07 “How Are Thou Fallen,” when Jace is acting out, it’s placed deliberately after Jace has been kicked out of his adoptive home and essentially shunned by his own society. In that very episode, Jace alludes to Alec that his behavior is a response to the events of the previous episode (and, likely, the entire season at that point, including the torture and abuse at the hands of Valentine and unfair trial at the hands of Aldertree).
In this way, most of Jace’s more rakish “traits” that are seemingly in line with the mass-produced antihero of YA genres are subverted to give a surprisingly complex and affecting perspective on how trauma and suffering can affect a character in Jace’s position. At some point, which Jace is well past, it stops being the conventional Melodramatic Brooding™ and becomes an actual realistic reaction to abuse and tragedy.
More significantly, traits like chauvinism and the casual misogyny typical of the stock antihero character are notably absent: Jace is shown to be nothing but respectful of the women that he cares about, and even when having casual sex, doesn’t treat Kaelie or Maia with any sexist disrespect. And while Jace does exhibit the very prototypical marriage of “sarcastic humor” and “repressed emotions,” it’s important to remember that, growing up, Jace was punished for showing emotion – which clearly influences his emotional mindset in adulthood. While he occasionally uses arrogance as a façade, his actual self-worth is in tatters thanks to years of emotional manipulation.
In this way, the narrative around Jace creates deliberate cause-and-effect connections that pointedly indicate that these supposed features of the Brooding YA Male Protagonist are not character traits, but rather coping mechanisms for a struggling young man. Shadowhunters thus turns some of the uglier tropes of the antihero prototype into deeper points of reflection on the character of Jace.
Who Performs the Emotional Labour
Another of the less attractive conventions of the typical YA fantasy antihero is the burden placed on others – usually the female protagonist/love interest – to perform undue emotional labor necessary to “fix” the brooding, angst-ridden brokenness of the male lead. To that end, one of Shadowhunters’ best decisions, for myriad reasons, was to largely keep Clary and Jace apart for the majority of Season 2A. Significantly, giving Clary and Jace separate storylines while Jace was suffering the most allowed the budding Clace relationship to avoid this unfortunately common pitfall.
Throughout Jace’s struggles, the narrative never forced Clary into the most basic and awful YA romance trope: having to exclusively put in the emotional labor to get under Jace’s emotional guardedness to try and make him a good person with the strength of her love and her endless well of patience for his unsavory behavior. Rather, Jace has always treated Clary with respect and equality, and their relationship has generally included strong communication with each other. Jace even acknowledges, in the last episodes of Season 1, that he can’t, and shouldn’t, shut her out.
Even outside of his relationship with Clary, Jace has never placed the burden of his own emotional wellbeing on any of his loved ones. Instead, he usually opens up to them when he needs to (such as the rooftop scene with Alec in 2×11 “Mea Maxima Culpa”) and, in fact, is usually there for them when they need him as well (such as the other rooftop scene with Alec in 2×05 “Dust and Shadows”). Although he has been guarded at times, he has never forced anyone to perform undue emotional labor to “fix him” while he behaves like an ass because of his hidden angst. Instead, we see him grow and develop organically through his character’s personal journey. It’s a welcome departure from the overused and harmful trope for this particular narrative.
He’s Actually a Nice Guy
Ultimately, while generally portrayed as a desirable heartthrob antihero, the Brooding YA Male Protagonist is not usually a particularly nice guy. He’s sexy and brooding, and ultimately redeemed by True Love™, sure, but he’s usually just kind of an a-hole. It’s easy to read Jace in a similar way because of his often sarcastic humor and his understandable emotional repression; but overall, such an interpretation does a disservice to the truth of the character.
To be fair, Jace isn’t as angelic as his blood by any stretch of the imagination: his rivalry with Simon attests to this, as do some of his more heated exchanges with Alec in Season 1. But Jace defies genre convention in his compassion for Clary and her plight from the start (treating her like an equal in a way that a YA male protagonist almost never does from the outset), his unwavering love and loyalty for the people he cares about, and the fact that his actions – even when questionable – are driven largely by the desire to do the right thing. In romance, he’s respectful and gentle; in friendships, he reciprocates and apologizes; he is sensitive, but not (always) self-centered. By no metric is Jace a perfect character in any of these regards, but – significantly – Shadowhunters never glorifies nor exalts his flaws in these respects as desirable characteristics for the male protagonist to have. He is not set up to be an antihero, and his flaws are obstacles to overcome.
Too often in YA genres, we see a harmful trope of male characters who treat other people like garbage and are excused for it because of tragic pasts or personal circumstances. In Jace, we have a male protagonist who is three-dimensional and definitely flawed, but who tries his best to do right by the other characters in the narrative and to persevere towards a greater good.
From minute details like lifting away branches to help Clary navigate through Brocelind Forest, to massive gestures like sacrificing himself for the sake of his friends, Jace is that rare thing for a male protagonist in any work of fiction, YA fantasy or otherwise: while he’s rebellious and maybe a little cocky, he’s a good guy. Not an antihero, but an actual hero, or at least trying to become one.
At the end of the day, whether you’re talking about Jace or another character, the big takeaway is that Shadowhunters is a show that often subverts the typical tropes of its genre conventions in many different ways, which serves to make the show all the more complex and entertaining. Instead of a male lead with toxic traits, we get a nuanced, three-dimensional hero.
Rather than relying on done-to-death storytelling devices, Shadowhunters, in this way, is a catalyst for a slight but significant paradigm shift in often rigidly-structured young adult genres: it uses its many characters and relationships to expand the boundaries of what YA fantasy can be and, ultimately, the impact it can have.
Shadowhunters is available for streaming via Freeform for U.S. residents and internationally on Netflix. Shadowhunters returns with Season 3 in early 2018.
