These Guys Again

What if "Harry Potter" and "Twilight" made a baby? Well, previously I'd have had to say that Harry Potter would play more like early-period Chris Claremont "X-Men" than it already does... but now I guess the more apt answer would simply be "The Mortal Instruments."

I'd managed to be largely unaware of this most-recent YA Fiction phenomenon until just now, outside of the fact that it existed and that it was considered vaugely controversial for reasons I never bothered to look up, but it's yet another success story for a onetime fan-fiction author making the jump from re-writing existing material to writing something really, really similar to existing material. In this case, the pitch seems to have been "American teenage female Harry Potter," which isn't all that bad a place to start really...



Our seemignly-normal-hero-secretly-hidden-from-heroic-destiny-for-their-own-protection for this go-around is a Brooklyn high-schooler, the Secret World Just Under Our Noses is a shadow-war involving tattoo-powered magic users battling the usual urban-fantasy monsters plus The Nephilim, who somehow went from being a Biblical obscurity only theology geeks cared about to the most overused cliche in genre-fiction within the last decade. and

I'm informed that part of the "hook" is that the main characters jump on the "lets imperil our Save The World Mission by letting our hormones override every other instinct" romance-go-round pretty much right off the bat and with less... "binary" approach to who's-pining-for-who re: sexuality, so there's that. In particular, the first one is supposed to end with a "twist" (which apparently becomes THE central character-conflict of the series) that I frankly have no idea how they plan to translate to the screen without creating a minor freak-out among mainstream audiences; though maybe that's what they're counting on?