As I mentioned last week, I have been a long time fan of Cassandra Clare's The Mortal Instruments series/ what is known as The Shadowhunter Chronicles universe. I first started reading City of Bones late in middle school or early in high school, and was hooked. I loved the urban fantasy adventures of Clary Fairchild and the rest of her Shadowhunter friends as they fought demons and protected the Downworlders(vampires, werewolves, etc.) from the group of extremists led by Valentine Morgenstern. I only wished they wouldn't stop every chapter or so to kiss or talk about relationships. (In retrospect, I probably did not understand the point of teen paranormal romance.) I read most of the books as they came out, including the Victorian England spinoff series The Infernal Devices. Honestly, I lost interest in the series, putting the final book in the main series down after only the prologue. I guess the amount of plot action versus romantic scenes had gotten too high for me. Even though, I feel what I have read of the series is a major inspiration for my current work-in-progress.

So, I was happy to follow the adaptation TV series, Shadowhunters, which has been running since winter 2016, along with my mother; while also being a fan of the books, it is much easier for her to find time to watch TV than to read, for better or for worse. While I find the TV series enjoyable(although it could use a higher special effects budget/stunt budget), the various adaptations to the story for television are quite interesting. (Warning: spoilers for the first trilogy of books and Season 1 and 2A of the show.)

The base premise starting the series is the same. Clary Fairchild is an artsy teenager(bumped up to 18 from 16 in the books) living in New York City. One day, she discovers her apartment ransacked, her mother missing, and and an unearthly creature lurking about which attacks her. She wakes up in the Institute, where she discovers that she and her mother are Shadowhunters, humans gifted with the blood of angels to fight the demons secretly threatening the world. Together with Alec and Isabelle Lightwood, whose parents run the Institute, and the mysterious Jace Wayland, Clary searches both for her mother and the Mortal Cup, an ancient angelic artifact which Valentine Morgenstern, the leader of the Circle, wishes to use to destroy all Downworlders(all the magical beings with demon blood, such as vampires, werewolves and warlocks). One of the first major changes I noticed is the scale of the Institute itself; while in the books the Institute housed (usually) a family group or two of Shadowhunters, the TV version upsizes the operation to one on the scale of something akin to, say, SHIELD from Agents of SHIELD. It also is noticeably more high-tech(or magic-tech?) seeming than the Gothic cathedral it appeared to be inside and outside in the books. They even have a magic generator that Alec and Victor Aldertree(a show-only character) access by hacking a magic panel with magic. Honestly, that's kinda stupid.

Most of the changes to the story come from having to break up the story into arcs that can be resolved within the span of an episode. Each book is adapted into about 13 episodes, which must build to a climax that is then resolved. One way the showwriters create this effect is adding material from elsewhere in the books. For instance, the arc involving Clary's best friend Simon becoming a vampire is accelerated, having Simon being turned halfway through the season compared to halfway through the second book. In the second season, one of Isabelle's story arcs involves her getting addicted to yin fen, a magic drug akin to morphine or oxycontin that in the The Infernal Devices trilogy was slowly killing one of the romantic leads. Granted, it came from an entirely different source, and eventually led to Isabelle getting involved in an abusive relationship with Raphael, the leader of the local vampire gang(who was definitely underage in the books).

Honestly, my biggest issue with the series are the things it invents whole-cloth. For instance, in order to find Valentine, Clary travels into a universe where she has a "normal life"; her dad is a loving man, she can be with Jace, there's no magic...the conflict is "Will she get trapped in this life she can never have, or will she fulfill her plot-advancing mission?" While in this case it serves as some character development, most of the time this leads to drama for the sake of drama. "Oh no, Alec went into a coma trying to use his Parabatai(magic blood brother) bond to find Jace(which isn't how it works in the book)! Can Jace get to him before it's too late?" Honestly, this effect just surrounds all the show-original characters. Lydia Branwell, although her surname serves as a callback to The Infernal Devices, only exists to be arranged-married to Alec so that Magnus Bane, his warlock lover, can crash the wedding and Alec can come out in front of the entire Institute. (Honestly, I never really picked up on the fact that Magnus and Alec were a thing in the first trilogy. I blame the autism-induced obliviousness that made me skim the sexy parts.) The aforementioned Victor Aldertree undermines the protagonists so much( persecuting and blackmailing Jace for being Valentine's son, giving Isabelle the yin fen and later using it as leverage for spying on Clary) I swore he was a mole for Valentine. Well, at least until the mid-season finale, where it turns out he's just a well-intentioned extremist.

The most egregious case of adaptational changes for the sake of drama is killing off Jocelyn, Clary's mother. Halfway through the first half of the second season, a demon slips into the Institute, possesses Alec and through him rips her heart out. Nothing like this ever happens in the books; Jocelyn survives both trilogies in the main series. This only sets up an entire episode where Clary tries to bring her back from the dead, which later leads to Clary almost dying from a blood curse(which I really wish I could see properly spread up her arm), and an arc where Alec feels guilty to the point of almost committing suicide(granted, an enemy warlock was deliberately sowing drama that day). While, in hindsight, a major part of this sub-season, this change is the first radical divergence from the book canon that I've noticed, and there's probably nothing stopping the writers from diverging further.

Despite these major changes, the show is still following the outline of the books, although at its own speed; while this season has Simon drinking Jace's blood to save his own life and developing the ability to go outside in the day, the revelations that Valentine used angel and demon blood on his own children, the fact that it was angel blood in both Jace and Clary, and the fact that Jace isn't really Clary's brother have been moved up from book three. That is going to make the rest of the season, airing weekly as of now and seemingly covering the third book, very interesting. I'll just have to wait and see how things play out.