The beautiful tormented angelic warrior who rocked 2010s fandom spaces is finally on Netflix

If you were growing up in fandom spaces in the golden, cringe age of the late 2000s and early 2010s, chances are you’re pretty familiar with The Shadowhunter Chronicles.

Your level of involvement with Cassandra Clare’s humungous body of work about tattooed angelic warriors hunting demons around several cities and time periods might have varied, but you couldn’t be on Tumblr or Twitter during that era without catching sight of a rune here and there.

While the book saga, which includes a whopping six different series for a grand total of twenty-one major novels with four companion works, has been incredibly fortunate and is still actually pretty far from being officially finished, the same can’t be said for its live-action adaptations, of which there are two. And yet, even among their frankly impressive series of faults, they both have their moments.

And now that Netflix is officially streaming the first of these two adaptations, the 2013 movie The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, I think it’s finally time we all recognize what was undoubtedly its best feature—Jamie Campbell Bower as none other than Jonathan Christopher Wayland Lightwood Morgenstern Herondale, better known as Jace and one of the first entries in a long, long line of YA book boyfriends.

Whether you love him, hate him, or see him as either an off-brand Draco Malfoy—since Shadowhunters did allegedly start as a Harry Potter fanfiction—or a 1.0 version of his much-beloved ancestor Will Herondale—one of the main characters of The Infernal Devices trilogy—it’s undeniable that Jace is a pretty pivotal character when it comes to the YA genre. He helped set a standard that arguably continues on to this day—with love interests being angelically beautiful, snarky, and with a dark and twisted tragic backstory.

And Jamie Campbell Bower perfectly embodies everything that makes Jace Jace. Some of his one-liners in the movie are genuinely funny and perfectly delivered, like the deadpan “Of course they’re staring at me, I’m stunningly attractive” and the “For the record, my hair is naturally blonde,” which are incidentally both aimed at Robert Sheehan’s Simon. He also has that kind of otherworldly beauty and perfectly sculpted face you would expect someone who is literally part-angel would have. 

Bower and Lily Collins as the story’s protagonist, Clarissa “Clary” Fairchild—rune inventor via her incredibly special powers, daughter of the evil megalomaniac du jour and the one Jace will dive down the very first instance of Clare’s obsession with incest plots with—are the best part of that otherwise pretty unremarkable film. (Even though it did star Lena Headey, Aidan Turner, and Jared Harris in the usual supporting roles of the adults that are around the story’s teenage protagonists.)

That’s not to say that Dominic Sherwood, who stars as Jace throughout the three seasons of Netflix’s adaptation of Shadowhunters, was terrible in the role. But he doesn’t have that certain je ne sais quoi that Bower has. Then again, we all know that the highlight of that particular version of the story was Alec Lightwood and Magnus Bane, played by Matthew Daddario and Harry Shum Jr respectively—the power of Malec was too strong for Netflix to ignore, and honestly, we can’t really blame them.