To the showrunners/creators, producers, Freeform, and everyone else involved with the promotion of the television series, Shadowhunters:

First of all, thank you for giving us this wonderful TV show adaptation of the Mortal Instruments books, and more specifically, for the way you have handled the Malec relationship. We absolutely love what you have done with Malec - in some ways it’s even groundbreaking, especially for LGBTQ+ couples on TV. There aren’t that many same sex couples on TV which are being presented in such a positive and healthy way. Thank you for everything you have shown us about their love story so far. We’re all gladly along for the ride.

However, we feel that currently, Malec is being over-promoted online through social media and other channels. So far, in season 2, there is not a scene between Magnus and Alec that hasn’t been seen in some way before the episode itself; either as sneak peaks, BTS videos, promotional photos (usually weeks in advance), news articles, or teaser tweets.

In regards to episodes 204 and 205, the only Malec scenes in these respective episodes, were fully released as a sneak peek online. For 207, we felt it was heavily implied that this would be a very Malec-centric episode, yet it wasn’t.

For many of us, promotion tactics like these take away part of our enjoyment when watching an episode for the first time. By over-promoting their scenes as a couple, it also creates an expectation that there are additional unseen interactions to come in an episode, and every time this doesn’t happen, we actually feel let down - when we should be ecstatic with the amazing scenes that we did receive.

Don’t get us wrong, we absolutely love what you’re doing with the show and we fully understand why you want to promote everything about Malec -- you’re probably just as excited as we are -- but we would really appreciate it if that didn’t mean that you literally promote every single scene beforehand, or hype them up too much, and thus unintentionally create false expectations of Malec featuring more prominently in each episode than they actually are.

We would kindly like to ask you to balance things more between reasonable promotion and keeping an element of surprise and suspense. Malec is a special part of the show, this is true, but it is not the main focus of the show, unlike what the constant promotional actions tend to imply. There are so many compelling stories, great characters, and other fantastic relationships who deserve a better balanced treatment than the one the marketing team has given us so far.

This is why we’d like to present you with this petition and we hope that you’ll take our collective plea into consideration, that sometimes, less is more.

Thank you.

For questions, contact us via info@magnusandalec.com