Thoughts about the Scholomance
Oct. 11th, 2022 10:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conulyLiterally about the school in the series.
So, let's lay out my thoughts in order. I'm not sure they add up at all, but let's do it!
1. Novik has a knack for writing characters who don't seem to understand other people and their thoughts/feelings/motivations nearly as well as they think they do. I'm sometimes unsure as to whether or not this is intended, however
1a. in this case, El's stated opinions on other people's thoughts/feelings/motivations change so much between books that I'm pretty sure that it is. I'm also pretty sure that El is not a reliable narrator of her own thoughts/feelings/motivations, which fits because
1b. as we all noticed, she's not a reliable narrator period. Long after she's established herself as being able to do really impossible things in the context of the universe she's still earnestly trying to convince herself via the narration that she's only normally extraordinary, not off-the-charts extraordinary. In fact, I have a whole secondary set of thoughts about things I'm pretty sure we're supposed to think she thinks everybody can do (everybody that has magic, anyway) but that I'm reasonably sure the text shows everybody cannot, in fact, do. For example, I'm pretty sure that practically nobody can actually detect the Reek of Wrongness that indicates a hard-core use of malia. That's an El-specific thing - even with prompting, her friends couldn't feel it very strongly in New York Enclave, and they couldn't tell that massively evil Ophelia Lake was a maleficer until they saw El's face and got clued in.
2. El has variously believed the following about the pre-epilogue Scholomance, the one infested by the mawmouth that was created to power it: it actively dislikes the students, it actively dislikes her in particular, it's rather resentfully playing a numbers game to save the bare minimum of students, it definitely doesn't prefer some students over others, except maybe maleficers, it either doesn't understand or doesn't care about the imbalance that makes survival very much based on your incoming advantages. She continues to believe some or all of those even after the reveal that the school would like to save MANY MORE KIDS, even at the cost of its own existence.
3. El has also more or less explicitly drawn a comparison between the Scholomance and two other characters: herself and Ophelia Lake, Orion's mother. She refers to both herself and the Scholomance as the "lesser of two evils", and Ophelia's whole raison d'etre is basically that argument made immensely grotesque. She also explicitly states that Ophelia and the Scholomance have been playing the same numbers game, just from slightly different angles - namely, acting according to the principle that it's okay to kill lots of kids if that means some of them have a better chance of survival, the ends will always justify the means.
4. This ought to go without saying, but for most of three books and the whole childhood before the books start, El has been more or less chock-full of self-loathing. It's not a good thing if she sees herself in other entities.
5. While Ophelia Lake is inarguably a monster, and a bad parent, I don't think the Scholomance is, and I think El has got it all wrong. I see no evidence that it actually doesn't care about the students, other than that, as El spells out for us in the first book, it's built into the oh-so-persuadeable void and all those magically powerful students who hate the school and think it's out to get them probably aren't making the situation better with their dismal (but wholly understandable) viewpoints.
6. The school was there when she and Orion became - well, the two of them. The Scholomance was there when Ophelia Lake murdered several hundred graduating seniors just to give herself a boost of power to do something inhumane to her gestating child, and ultimately increase her own personal power "for the greater good". And it was also there when El's parents made their open-ended request for a book from the library/void (not sure how this works), and accidentally ended up with an amazingly powerful child instead. And also a book. We're now about to drift off from what can definitely be supported in the text to what can't but whatever.
7. In a very real sense, neither Orion nor El would exist, certainly not as the monstrously powerful entities they are (El) / remain (Orion) without the Scholomance being there, no more than, apparently, either of them could have existed without the other as a counterbalance. Which means
7a. it's sorta like their shared third parent, their literal alma mater, by which I mean
7b. I believe the school, despite El's fervent belief otherwise, loves her. And also Orion, who goes around and kills all the mals and saves all the kids. Sure, the school only manages tough love, but honestly
7c. it's doing the best it can. It was invented by a lot of people who really believed in tough love, and also it was created through the death of a child, that's gotta do messed-up things to its inner self.
7d. I mean, look at El's shitty senior schedule. For all her whining about her "seminar in freshman saving", the school was trying to fulfill its other purpose and teach her something - first, to get over herself and ask for help, but also something a bit more practical: Mandarin! Wasn't she just saying she wanted to learn it? And isn't it going to be phenomenally useful in her destined career? I just don't see how she can fix the world without it, not when a lot of the people she's saving chose Mandarin over English.
So, let's lay out my thoughts in order. I'm not sure they add up at all, but let's do it!
1. Novik has a knack for writing characters who don't seem to understand other people and their thoughts/feelings/motivations nearly as well as they think they do. I'm sometimes unsure as to whether or not this is intended, however
1a. in this case, El's stated opinions on other people's thoughts/feelings/motivations change so much between books that I'm pretty sure that it is. I'm also pretty sure that El is not a reliable narrator of her own thoughts/feelings/motivations, which fits because
1b. as we all noticed, she's not a reliable narrator period. Long after she's established herself as being able to do really impossible things in the context of the universe she's still earnestly trying to convince herself via the narration that she's only normally extraordinary, not off-the-charts extraordinary. In fact, I have a whole secondary set of thoughts about things I'm pretty sure we're supposed to think she thinks everybody can do (everybody that has magic, anyway) but that I'm reasonably sure the text shows everybody cannot, in fact, do. For example, I'm pretty sure that practically nobody can actually detect the Reek of Wrongness that indicates a hard-core use of malia. That's an El-specific thing - even with prompting, her friends couldn't feel it very strongly in New York Enclave, and they couldn't tell that massively evil Ophelia Lake was a maleficer until they saw El's face and got clued in.
2. El has variously believed the following about the pre-epilogue Scholomance, the one infested by the mawmouth that was created to power it: it actively dislikes the students, it actively dislikes her in particular, it's rather resentfully playing a numbers game to save the bare minimum of students, it definitely doesn't prefer some students over others, except maybe maleficers, it either doesn't understand or doesn't care about the imbalance that makes survival very much based on your incoming advantages. She continues to believe some or all of those even after the reveal that the school would like to save MANY MORE KIDS, even at the cost of its own existence.
3. El has also more or less explicitly drawn a comparison between the Scholomance and two other characters: herself and Ophelia Lake, Orion's mother. She refers to both herself and the Scholomance as the "lesser of two evils", and Ophelia's whole raison d'etre is basically that argument made immensely grotesque. She also explicitly states that Ophelia and the Scholomance have been playing the same numbers game, just from slightly different angles - namely, acting according to the principle that it's okay to kill lots of kids if that means some of them have a better chance of survival, the ends will always justify the means.
4. This ought to go without saying, but for most of three books and the whole childhood before the books start, El has been more or less chock-full of self-loathing. It's not a good thing if she sees herself in other entities.
5. While Ophelia Lake is inarguably a monster, and a bad parent, I don't think the Scholomance is, and I think El has got it all wrong. I see no evidence that it actually doesn't care about the students, other than that, as El spells out for us in the first book, it's built into the oh-so-persuadeable void and all those magically powerful students who hate the school and think it's out to get them probably aren't making the situation better with their dismal (but wholly understandable) viewpoints.
6. The school was there when she and Orion became - well, the two of them. The Scholomance was there when Ophelia Lake murdered several hundred graduating seniors just to give herself a boost of power to do something inhumane to her gestating child, and ultimately increase her own personal power "for the greater good". And it was also there when El's parents made their open-ended request for a book from the library/void (not sure how this works), and accidentally ended up with an amazingly powerful child instead. And also a book. We're now about to drift off from what can definitely be supported in the text to what can't but whatever.
7. In a very real sense, neither Orion nor El would exist, certainly not as the monstrously powerful entities they are (El) / remain (Orion) without the Scholomance being there, no more than, apparently, either of them could have existed without the other as a counterbalance. Which means
7a. it's sorta like their shared third parent, their literal alma mater, by which I mean
7b. I believe the school, despite El's fervent belief otherwise, loves her. And also Orion, who goes around and kills all the mals and saves all the kids. Sure, the school only manages tough love, but honestly
7c. it's doing the best it can. It was invented by a lot of people who really believed in tough love, and also it was created through the death of a child, that's gotta do messed-up things to its inner self.
7d. I mean, look at El's shitty senior schedule. For all her whining about her "seminar in freshman saving", the school was trying to fulfill its other purpose and teach her something - first, to get over herself and ask for help, but also something a bit more practical: Mandarin! Wasn't she just saying she wanted to learn it? And isn't it going to be phenomenally useful in her destined career? I just don't see how she can fix the world without it, not when a lot of the people she's saving chose Mandarin over English.
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Date: 2022-10-11 05:22 pm (UTC)That said, I liked the books themselves largely because I liked El's super sarcastic voice, and the main reason other people don't like it is because they don't and also they feel the setting, especially in the first book, is excessively grimdark.