Why Hester Shaw is Deeply Scarred in the Mortal Engines Novel

A little while ago I found a website called 'tall tales & short stories' and it featured an interview with Mortal Engines author Philip Reeve.

The article was six years old and the site is now defunct but I did copy Reeve's thoughts on Hester Shaw and her scar with the view to using it somehow one day.

So here we go...

Breaking the Mold of the Pretty Heroine

The interview reveals quite the insight into why Reeve did the role reversal that many books and film shy from. That role reversal being making the female lead quite genuinely ugly.

Let me repeat that for you. Ugly, disfigured and NOT PRETTY.

Name a famous movie or book in the last 10 years where the main character is truly hideously ugly.

I will wait.

If you found one, good on ya. Maybe Aileen Wuornos in Monster?

One example. Yippe Kay Aye.

In a modern media landscape entirely obsessed with flawless aesthetics, a protagonist whose face is a literal map of her trauma is revolutionary. Her disfigurement is not a quirky character trait or a minor blemish. It is a daily, agonizing reality that shapes every single interaction she has. When Thaddeus Valentine murdered her mother Pandora for a piece of Old Tech, he didn't just casually scratch seven-year-old Hester. His sword strike severed her nose, destroyed one of her eyes, and left her mouth permanently wrenched open in a terrifying sneer. It is a level of physical trauma that completely isolates her from normal human society.

Regardless, Hester Shaw is the clear fan favourite when it comes to the Mortal Engines series. While part of her might want to live a happy, healthy life, the Hyde to her Jackal is that she is a murderous wee thing with a hair trigger for some good old fashioned ultraviolence.

Being raised by Shrike, a resurrected cyborg assassin with blades for hands, meant she learned to hunt and survive in the harsh Out-Country rather than how to process her emotions. Imagine being a traumatized child whose only parental figure is a towering, undead machine incapable of shedding a tear. Shrike did not teach Hester how to heal. He taught her how to hunt, how to scavenge, and how to weaponize her hatred. This brutal environment forged a young woman who viewed her own survival as the absolute only metric of success. She doesn't hesitate to kill to protect the few things she cares about.

When she finally encounters Tom Natsworthy, a sheltered London historian, their dynamic is entirely dictated by her physical and emotional walls. The red scarf she wears is not merely a fashion statement or a dust filter. It is a profound psychological shield. When Tom eventually buys her a replacement scarf, it represents one of the most poignant moments of acceptance in modern fantasy literature. He sees the monster she believes she is, and he actively chooses to stay.

And she's a bad mother...

As we see later in the series with her teenage daughter Wren, Hester's deep-seated self-loathing and raging paranoia make it nearly impossible for her to show normal maternal affection. She is constantly terrified of losing Tom, which twists her priorities into very dark, obsessive places. She will sacrifice the world to save him, even if it means alienating her own child.

She has also bad typing skills.

There, I said it. For those who know the lore from Infernal Devices, Hester literally bludgeons a man to death using a heavy Old Tech typewriter to protect her family. She is a woman of sheer, brutal willpower.

Philip Reeve on Hester's Disfigurement

For decades, the dedicated Mortal Engines community has produced incredible fan art that honors Reeve's original, brutal description. These artists understand that smoothing over her jagged edges does a massive disservice to the fierce, unyielding survivor she was written to be.

So with that in mind, here is what Reeve said of Hester's scar after this interview question:

The main female character, Hester, in the Mortal Engines series is facially disfigured which I find an interesting, but welcome, choice for a female lead. Was this a conscious decision made at the outset of writing the first book or did it evolve along the way? And what prompted this decision?

Reeve's answer:

Women warriors are a bit of a cliche in Science Fiction and Fantasy, and they tend to be very glamorous or at least good looking.

But it struck me that people who live by their wits in wastelands tend not to be that glamorous or good-looking, and who cares about beautiful people anyway?

An artist's impression of Hester

So I decided right from the start to make Hester ugly, and I liked the idea that the hero would slowly fall in love with her anyway, which is far more interesting than having two gorgeous people seeing each other across a crowded room and falling in love.

Then it seemed to make sense to give Hester a scar, which she's received at the hands of the villain, so there's her initial motivation, revenge, right there on her face; she's like Captain Ahab with his missing leg!

But I didn't want it to be a little cosmetic scar. The Hollywood way of dealing with facial disfigurement is always to have somebody who's a bit messed up seen from one angle but is still gorgeous from most others.

So Hester's scar is really grotesque; I didn't want her to be pretty from any angle!

I think in the first book my idea was that actually, under this hideous exterior, she's lovely and sweet, but when I went back to write the sequel I thought that someone who had been through what she has, and looks as she does, probably wouldn't be sweet and well-adjusted, so she goes further and further off the rails as the series progresses, though I hope she remains sympathetic, and even attractive in a Ripley-ish way (Tom Ripley, that is, not Ellen*).

The Hollywood Compromise

When the first trailer came out, we raised concerns that the trailer shows Hester with two eyes. We now know that Reeve's honorable vision of a key female character has been trumped by Hollywood's needs for beauty and marketability. It's actually stirred quite a few people up!

*As in Ellen Ripley from the Alien films.