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#scholomance
hatepotion · 1 year
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so i read a deadly education
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elizabysmal · 8 months
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I’m about a third of the way though the third book in the scholomance series and I’ve been rotating these two at 350 degrees in my brain for two weeks
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nepttunnee · 4 months
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i just finished a deadly education and let me just say i adore el and orion. i love how they fall for each other but for the exact opposite reason of the way other ppl see them. el looks at loved for being a knightin shining armor who can do no wrong orion lake and goes. hes actually cringe and fail. i like that in a man. and orion lake looks at weapon of mass destruction knows multiple languages to roast you galadriel and goes shes actually kind of nice. she shares her food with me. i want to marry her i think. thinking abt them
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emily-e-draws · 4 months
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wip of the faves... at any given moment I am thinking about the scholomance trilogy
(preview from the latest batch of sketches going up on my patreon!)
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tanoraqui · 7 months
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I’ve started reading the Scholomance books—okay, I’m 2/3 of the way through the first one—and my favorites parts so far are
How utterly completely fucking bizarre El and Orion’s relationship and every single interaction in it looks to every single outsider
Aadhya’s “fuck it, we ball” attitude toward El
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hmslusitania · 5 months
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JUST REALISED the conclusion of the last graduate is very intensely “alright gang to save this school we’re gonna have to put on the best talent show the Scholomance has ever seen”
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ace-and-ranty · 22 days
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MORE SCHOLOMANCE. MORE SCHOLOMANCE!
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ATTENTION EVERYONE, MORE SCHOLOMANCE!!!
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kaetor · 1 year
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You're already dead. But stay anyway
cried while reading the end of the golden enclaves so obviously I immediately got to drawing. everyone go read the scholomance series by naomi novik
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whetstonefires · 1 year
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Do you have any opinions on Scholomance?
I do! I like it a lot. I really enjoyed all three books, blitzed through them easily and was much more excited to see how the plots unfolded than I'm used to these days, as a jaded adult, and I also really appreciated them as works of craft.
Especially the first one, I spent the whole time being all 'wow!' at how simple it was. So easy to read, but no waste. You really need to know what you're doing, to get that kind of pared-down elegance of form to work and still fit so much content in.
Like these are dense, there's a fantastic stylistic minimalism that allows El's character all the space it needs to breathe by making absolutely every other thing and person in the whole novel also do character work for her, which is exactly where the first person voice shines.
Also great use of character perspective to make the pacing feel really natural, so the fact that the first book takes three weeks, the second book takes one year, and the third book is like. Five or so incredibly stressful days spread out over the course of a few weeks? Doesn't feel imbalanced.
I actually got distracted from the story a few times by noticing the strength of Novik's technique. 😂 This is a me problem, in itself it's the opposite of distracting. Very low-profile.
I think the Scholomance is a great example of how far you can go in specfic when you aren't cringing from the label 'derivative,' because the Scholomance books feel very fresh ad clean specifically because nothing in them is concerned with standing out as 'original,' whatever that's supposed to mean, only with being well-executed and suitable to its task.
Hm, maybe that's where Liesel was born, the intersection of the efficient narrative style and the vast proportion of the story that concerns the maximization of utility and the instrumentalization of persons by themselves and others, and the forces that incentivize these behaviors. Or maybe she's just the narrative counterweight to Orion 'Head Empty' Lake lmao. How's that for a principle of balance, Galadriel?
I really did enjoy how beautifully it was laid out, over and over, in dozens of shades of humanity, how no matter where you go in an exploitative system almost everyone is being driven by the same survival instincts.
Because I don't think I've ever seen made so cleanly clear why you just can't expect any person or small group of people, no matter their level of goodwill or status, to unmake one of these systems from the inside; how it's not a matter of people being bad but of every single person being very...small.
And then not retreating into the idea of a person who is Big coming and breaking the cruel system from the outside as some kind of panacea, because 1) that is terrible, even if it's necessary and done in the best way possible and 2) that's not a sustainable answer to anything. Getting a balance between the protagonist being able to effect change and not subscribing to the great man theory of history can be really tricky!
Also did I mention, I love El, and I love most of the cast, even the dreadful ones. How am I going around with this many feelings about Li Shanfeng who doesn't appear until the actual climax?
The romance murdered me a bit, but it took up no more space than it absolutely needed to do its job, and I respect that. Also I appreciated Orion as a love interest; Novik has a slight record at this point of a version of that style of male love interest who's like a caricature of Mr. Darcy but old, which was shaping up to be my least favorite thing about her body of work.
...Orion is kind of like if you took the human king from Spinning Silver and gave him an alignment flip come to think of it, so he's not coming out of nowhere. Lmao.
Which reminds me (re: romance character typing) I've heard Novik didn't want it to be known she was astolat, which this series has renewed my sympathies if so. Because if I were a published novelist I wouldn't want people going 'you know, that resolution was really emotionally satisfying! reminds me of that fic she wrote where optimus prime and megatron get stuck in a hole underground and hatefuck about it.'
I don't even like Transformers. That fic almost made me cry. Actually I suspect it reads better if you don't like Transformers because I'm sure it does not give a shit about canon.
Anyway, whoever pointed out that one of the things El has going on is she's Enoby (and we're going to sit down and explore what the true reason to put your middle finger up at preps is, and what are some constructive ways to channel that socioeconomic wrath, and what it means that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism) was right and I'm not entirely over that either.
Fucking love El's mom as a character. Spectacular level of parent relevance and usefulness. A+.
Aadhya and Liu are also characters who fucking delivered.
Re: minimalism though, I laughed at the start of The Golden Enclaves when I realized that none of the enclaver characters who'd gotten development in the the first two books were from London, the enclave El was theoretically shooting for when we met her.
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feyarcher · 9 months
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Muderbot El Higgins
🤝
Doing the morally good thing but being mad as hell about it
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voyaging-too · 5 months
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The ending of Scholomance is such a trip, because it's super duper happy and hopeful and yay, but also very dark. Our heroine saves the day and saves all her friends and brings her boyfriend back to life and reconciles with her family and finds her place in the world and saves the world and stops a war and unites everybody for a common goal and also stops the magical equivalent of global warming and is well on the path to dismantling the magical equivalent of capitalism, but in order to accomplish all that, she has to team up with the magical equivalents of Jeff Bezos and Xi Jinping respectively.
El gets to confront people who exploit and mistreat others, she gets to confront people who casually commit human sacricifice, she technically has the opportunity to kill some of them, she could at least try, but she won't, because she has to work with those people. Redemption and forgiveness is not even raised as an option, she's not try to make those people better, she's not trying to have a personal relationship with them, she just accepts that for the time being, they are unfortunately on the same side. The main villains in the trilogy see no retribution OR redemption, they continue to run the world El has saved and will have to save over and over again, and that's a really weird and dark writing choice.
(We find out what Ophelia did! There are no consequences! Orion still loves her! This is a horrifying note on which to end a series! I love it!)
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Scholomance as a musical.
Im imagining a maw mouth song. Some good-dreary introduction song full of different maleficaria. Orion and El have themes that strongly hint to certain spoilers if you pay close enough attention. Something peppy and annoying for the enclavers. Mals having their own hints and themes so you can *hear* them creeping along in the background.
What does horror high school *sound* like?
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optionalcausality · 6 months
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The Scholomance series is going to have just so many re-read bonuses. Isn't it.
There's some spell, I think in book two? Where the origin story can be summed up as "a bunch of deeply ethical wizards formed a promising community, saved up to buy the enclave-building spell, and promptly fell apart; some of the more notable survivors went off to become hermits and even swore off magic use for the remainder of their days" and. Yeah. Understandable.
The books must be peppered with things like that.
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woahwanda · 1 year
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Liu from Scholomance 
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emily-e-draws · 1 year
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postgrad studies at the london enclave 🌱✨
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aridotdash · 1 year
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I think too often we forget that besides being incredible powerful magically, El has to be fucking JACKED. Like, her primary form of mana building was exercising and she's had to do more crochet because exercise is too damn easy. Like, she's doing literally hundreds of push-ups just to get ANYTHING mana wise.
In conclusion, El can, should, and does bench-press Orion on a regular basis and you can't convince me otherwise.
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