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freaked out. “It sounds creepy,” she complains. “Like a fascist organization or something.” Somehow Clary fails to connect the dots to the Clave and the obedience
it
demands, an obedience no less unconditional than that required by Valentine. After all: The Law is hard, but it
is
the Law.
    Questioning the Law is not only forbidden: It’s considered a threat. Which is a strange situation for teenagers—for whom you’d expect questioning authority to be a prime directive—to find themselves in, much less willingly accept. And indeed, things don’t go well for those who can’t toe the line: It’s easy to imagine Valentine as that querulous child who asked the questions no one was supposed to ask.
Why not just make more Shadowhunters?
he asked his teachers innocently—an idea seen as “sacrilege.”
    Why do we do what we do? Because it is the Law.
    You might as well say: Because we said so.
    Maybe it’s not so surprising that Valentine stopped asking questions of his elders and started asking them of his peers—then, quickly, started supplying the answers himself. Nor is it surprising that he substituted one extreme for another. Young Shadowhunters may be great with a stele and deadly with a blade, but they don’t get a lot of lessons in moderation and moral flexibility.
    When it comes to rebellion, Valentine is the exception: For Shadowhunters, obedience (whether to the Clave or, for that brief period of rebellion, to the Circle) is the rule. Why would generations of teens, given more power and responsibility (not to mention more weapons) than any of their mundane peers, go along so readily with the dictates handed down by their elders? Why would the outspoken, stubborn, courageous young Shadowhuntersof the Mortal Instruments series—and the readers who’d happily switch places with them—so unquestioningly buy into the Clave’s brand of absolute authority and the omnipotence of its Law?
    Speaking as a former teenager, I’d like to believe there’s more to it than a hormonal attraction to fascism.
Don’t Trust the Man (Trust the Institution)
    â€œBetrayal is never pretty, but to betray a child—that’s a double betrayal, don’t you think?”
    â€”Valentine Morgenstern,
City of Bones
    One of the great tragedies of growing up is the discovery that your parents—and your teachers, and your sports heroes, and your favorite actors, singers, YouTube sensations—are fallible. Adults don’t know all, and what they do know, they often won’t tell you—because they’ve got their own agendas, or because they want to shield you from the hard truths “for your own good.” Adults lie, they betray, they screw up in every way possible, and the adult Shadow-hunters are no different from their mundane counterparts—except that a Shadowhunter’s lies are more likely to get you eaten by a demon.
    The Mortal Instruments books are rife with adults lying to their impressionable charges, often in ways that nearly destroy the teens’ lives. In some cases, this is simply because the liars are evil: Valentine lies to Jace about everything because that’s what bad guys do. The more lies, the better to enact his evil plan. Hodge lies because that’s also what cowards do, and when you’re in sway to the bigbad guy, you do whatever he tells you, especially if what he tells you to do is pretend you’re not such a coward. It’s more unsettling—and far more destabilizing—when the people lying are the ones who are supposed to tell the truth: the good guys, the ones you’re supposed to trust with your faith and your life. The ones who tell you what to do and expect you to nod and go along. They claim they tell lies only to protect you, withhold information only “for your own good.”
    But it’s not for Clary’s own good that her mother lied to her for her