The Infernal Devices & Divergent

Who’s this Will Herondale?

WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS!

✦MY OWN SAY ON HIM

Will is hard to understand. I have no clear idea on why at one point he shows his admiration for Tessa and the next he drives her away from him. Maybe Cassandra Clare could explain more about him and his problems.

Will is also brave and gorgeous. (Yes, the most common description for a male protagonist.) He has black hair and blue eyes. (Perfect, right?)

He’s very sarcastic &  readers would find his clever responses funny. (I do.) Even if there’s something dark about him, I still find myself liking him instead of the perfect gentleman: Jem Carstairs. (Will’s bestfriend, another male protagonist.)

Will is very interesting because of the secrets he’s keeping. (Which I hope will be unlocked at the second installment of the trilogy: Clockwork Prince.)

✦SUMMARY OF WHO WILL IS (Source)

Seventeen-year-old Will is the sort of young man nice Victorian girls were warned against. He drinks, gambles, and enjoys the company of ladies of questionable virtue—at least, as much as he enjoys anything. Will hates everyone and everything, with the possible exception of Jem, and even that’s in some doubt. Charlotte despairs of keeping him alive past the age of nineteen. When he finds himself oddly drawn to Tessa, his friends begin to hope that the Downworlder girl will prove Will’s unlikely salvation—but as Tessa grows closer to the bleak secret that makes his life a prison, danger threatens to destroy them both if she ever finds out the truth.

✦READ FULL BIOGRAPHY (Source)

Will Herondale is a Welsh Shadowhunter in nineteenth-century London. His parabatai and best friend is Jem Carstairs. He has a number of apparent vices, including alcohol, cursing, gambling, and women of poor morals. He is well aware of his own charms. He allows people to believe his is an orphan, but he is not. His father was a Shadowhunter but fell in love with a mundane and ran away to Wales in an attempt to live a normal life. However, Will decided to leave them as a boy and made his way to the London Institute and joined the Clave.

While hunting a shax demon, Will and Jem discover the body of Emma Bayliss, which eventually leads Will to The Dark Sisters. While in their house, he rescues Theresa Gray. They begin to work together to find her brother, a task taken on by the Institute. Eventually they are led to Alexei de Quincey, a vampire, who is reportedly executing humans at his dinner parties, which breaks the Law.

While infiltrating the party with Tessa in the form of Lady Camille Belcourt, they discover that de Quincey has Nate Grey in his custody. He intends to kill him via draining his blood, as a show for his vampire clan. After the ensuing battle, Nate is brought back to the Institute. During the fight, Will recklessly bites de Quincey’s arm and inadvertently ingests some of the vampire’s blood. That night, back at the Institute, he drank holy water in order to cleanse the blood from his system and prevent him from becoming a darkling. When he refuses to take the water from Sophie, Tessa brings it to him and they kiss, but Will pushes her away and makes her leave.

He is again drawn by emotion to Tessa when he believes she has killed herself to escape the grasp of the Magister, but once she explains to him that it was trick and she was fine, he withdraws again. When Tessa tells him that she has been asked to stay at the Institute, thinking he will be happy, he is rude and cruel to her.

In the epilogue of Clockwork Angel, he is visiting Magnus Bane to ask for help, saying there is no one else he can talk to. It likely has something to do with his running away from home after opening a box in his parents’ library. It may have been a Pxyis, but as a rune is supposedly necessary to open one, that seems unlikely. However, since Axel Mortmain is convinced that there is another way, perhaps Will already knows there is.

Through Clockwork Angel, Will is particularly antagonized by Gabriel Lightwood, who hates him as well. Will enjoys taunting Gabriel that his father, Benedict, has a taste for Downworlders and demons in his bed. It is possible that this conflict leads Will’s presumed relative, Inquisitor Imogen Herondale, to have little respect for the Lightwood family in The Mortal Instruments novels. This would also relate him to Imogen’s son - Stephen Herondale, Jace Wayland’s father in the same series.