#Golden Enclave spoilers

[ldyliberty]

Spoilers for all of ‘The Golden Enclaves’. I’m rambling about everything I loved about this book.

The scene where El is confronting the mawmouth in the London Enclave, and she terrified and psyching her self up to face it, and then it runs away and she immediately starts chasing it. Like a cat, oh it’s running? I’m going to chase it.

I know I saw some people complaining about the Leisel/El scenes, but they worked for me. Sex doesn’t always have to be a committed romantic relationship, sometimes it’s just a way to connect with someone and have a good time. I thought it fit both of their characters.

Speaking of Leisel, I loved her character arc of ‘Great, we escaped the school and improved the world, now I’m well set up to start my getting my revenge - Nope, have to deal with a mawmouth first. OK, now I need to make sure El stays alive and sane. Oh, we didn’t fix things as much as I thought. Wait, THAT’S how Enclaves are made?! Ugh, fine, I guess fixing things is more important than revenge.’

The scene after El pulls down the wall in Beijing and figures out exactly how mawmouths are made. It such a great moment of ‘I never saw that coming.’ & ‘Yep, makes perfect sense.’ Then the realizing El hadn’t made the link to ‘When I destroy mawmouths, that’s when destroying Enclaves.’ The whole sequence of El impulsively taking off for Mumbai, and traveling the way her Mum would, and finding the mawmouth, and finding out the truth about the prophecy. I stayed up way to late reading because of that.

The Enclave war at the end, and all of El’s classmates being ready to help her without knowing the whole story because she’s the only one they’ve seen try to help everyone, not just the people who would be useful. Her conversation with Li Shanfeng, him wanting to make sure she had the information that he got too late. Him telling her that what had happened was not her fault, but theirs. Orion looking for her in the crowd. ‘You’re already dead. You’re already dead, but stay anyway.’

The fact that nothing was ‘magically’ fixed - people went right on making the same stupid, selfish choices, and El and her friends were going to have to do a lot of hard work to make thing better for the future.

[cucurbitapuella]

I think I loved El Higgins so much bc she really digs deep into a core character trait I find so powerful and fascinating and that's selfishness as fuel for selflessness. The ones who look around and tell the world, don't you dare touch that one, They're Mine, and pour all of that and all of themselves into protecting what's Theirs, and also btw fuck off that one is Also Theirs, in fact, Everyone Is.

(See also: Tiffany Aching, Beka Cooper).

The Last Graduate is most obviously about this (El has her alliance who are Hers and then despite her best efforts she has her pack of freshmen who are, ugh, Hers, and eventually must grudgingly open up to realizing that now absolutely everyone is Hers and she's getting all of them out there, fuck you very much), but then. Then! The Golden Enclaves shows the struggle of that kind of selfishness, of saying these ones are mine and fuck the cost, I will pay it (off of the backs of those ones). Because the modern enclaves ARE paying it, because their children are Theirs and what wouldn't you do? (A lot, actually, it turns out, if you had to do it with your own hands, eyes open and ears unblocked)

The way that most of the contributors to an Enclave need the wool pulled over their eyes (literally!!) so they cannot even register that the gift horse HAS teeth, because then they might see what horrible gore is stuck in them. They just want to save their children, and the cost is so high - but it's so removed, so, is it really even real? And El's the cosmic foil to that, the one who looks at it and goes "no, that's real. You have to pay it yourselves you can't defer the cost." Even before she works out that the price is higher than the first sacrifice (which is. Horrifying enough on its own), she's desperately trying to get to one of Hers and she can't pay the cost to save Liu on her own, she needs them all to buy in, and she taps into everyone's collective selfishnes and gives them an out and they have to work for it but they take it and they do the work! They pay up front! They try to make some fucked up reparations!

And that selfishness, of El's audacity to even dare question the system, but also most people's basic selfishness (wanting to keep yourself and your children safe and to do it without all the blood on your hands) - that's what's going to see them all through, together.

[dawn-the-rithmatist]

Rereading the scholomance (yes again, shush) and I’m a bit obsessed with the differences between Ophelia Lake and Gwen Higgins. Strict malia vs strict mana. Lives in a luxury enclave apartment vs lives in a yurt in the middle of nowhere. The way that they raised their kids.

Mostly though it’s their worldview that hits me, because they’re DEAD OPPOSITES. We spend three books being told that Gwen gives as freely as a person can, even when logic says she could stand to take more in return, and when she’s in need she just kind of blindly trusts in the goodness of humanity and the universe at large. Even when summoning the sutras, it’s the same pattern! She didn’t name a price, trusting that the world would be kind enough when asking her to pay!

On the other hand, Ophelia is a full maleficer. She takes even when she absolutely doesn’t need to- she has New York’s mana supply at her fingertips and STILL drains the people in her lab every day. And when confronted with the horror of mals being made when people use malia, she defends it by saying that everyone uses malia anyway- she builds her life on the assumption that the world will be selfish in the end, the exact opposite of the way Gwen banks on it being kind.

I just think it’s so fascinating the way that these two women are foils, even as El is trying to set up her and Orion as the ones truly balancing each other out. Every time she says that she’s balancing out her mom’s goodness, I need to shake her because 1) honey you are every bit as good as your mom, you’re just angrier, and 2) OPHELIA is balancing out your mom, you just don’t get to know it until after you survive graduation!!!

[wanderingthroughbooks]

It's been several weeks since I read The Golden Enclaves and I occasionally still think about how Liesel looked at El and went "well, I have to seduce her, for the good of humanity, in case I need to use my wiles to pull her back from self-sacrifice and/or madness."

[aridotdash]

Orion at the end of The Golden Enclaves, still able to absorb mals and their mana:

[with-my-murder-flute]

Anyway my favourite part of The Golden Enclaves is El's old classmates being absolutely ride-or-die for her, but she has no room in her internal narrative for being looked up to with admiration and respect so she just completely fails to process it even a tiny bit.

[chief-cook-and-librarian]

Liesel in The Golden Enclaves: love and friendship is great and all, but let's be efficient about it

[darlingofdots]

local potential evil witch absolutely outraged to discover that people care about her, more at six

[ace-and-ranty]

I've seen a number of people now say they don't get why the Liesel sex scenes were included, and I wanna come to their defense now.

I think the scenes make two perfectly valid points;

1) Casual sex can be good and healthy for you. I feel it was firmly stablished both times that El has sex with Liesel because she needs solacing, and sex is an uncomplicated way of making her feel good and grounded in her body. That's... literally it. El had sex because it feels nice. You don't need any more reason than that.

2) El and Liesel are bisexual. Very easy and direct way of stablishing both of these characters are bi. They are queer. They are into girls. I, for one, am fucking overjoyed. We love explicit representation in this house!!

I feel like the disconect is from people thinking sex HAS to be meaningful and profound? I, for one, think it's totally fine and sweet if sex is just something casual El does with a friend.

Which also brings me to my third point:

3) Liesel and El friendship arc! The first sex scene, El is convinced Liesel is doing this to get something out of her. By the second one, she knows Liesel is doing it just to help her. The sex is part of their mini-plot of becoming friends and allies, plus it ties into Liesel's mini character development arc of dropping years of obsessive revenge planning to go save the world with her new annoying hippie kumbaya best friend, and I, for one, think it's fantastic.

[chekovpavelandreievich]

okay because apparently I cannot stop thinking about the golden enclaves

I am thinking about the enclaves - and the maw-mouths at their center - as a reliquary. a box of bones on which hungry hopes are pinned. enclaves as a cathedral, a box for the box of bones. hiding the bones behind stone walls, locking them away from their context, opening an undying life but not one that can be truly lived

ultimately I love thinking about the enclaves as a metaphor for faith as much as it is for capitalism

[runawaymarbles]

A Deadly Education + foreshadowing that makes me scream into the void

[4phr0d17e]

el after casting a crazy huge spell: everyone looked suuuuper scared of me which was rly weird. didnt understand that at all. OH btw i was also wreathed in green smoke and covered in crackling lightning bolts and my eyes were glowing and you could faintly hear the sound of a far off chorus singing of the oncoming desolation of all things. if u even care

[imissthembutitwasntadisaster]

Obsessed with the way the Scholomance books are like the universe demands balance SIKE the universe seeks salvation

[dawn-the-rithmatist]

I think one of the reasons why I love El as a protagonist so much is that yes, she never uses her powers to hurt anyone, and yes, she saves people’s lives constantly. But at the same time, she’s portrayed as a bit of a misanthrope- she doesn’t like most people (and has good reasons for that), is constantly angry, is probably the biggest cynic in the books… I just have so much appreciation for the fact that she isn’t shown as particularly noble or kind or any of those traditionally “heroic” traits, but is so fundamentally good. It isn’t natural to her or just part of her personality- she has to choose it, again and again and again. El is such a good example that being “good” or “heroic” isn’t a character trait, it’s something that you choose, and there’s no excuse for not choosing it.

Throw in the way Ophelia is described as being everything El knows she could be, if she ever went maleficer, and it makes an incredible comparison. Ophelia is how it would look like for El to write off goodness/kindness as something for someone else who has different choices or different ambitions. She literally wrote off her anima- her own conscience- as something unnecessary given her position in the enclave and what she wanted to accomplish. El and Ophelia both have immense power, both have capacity to do terrible things to accomplish their goals, but one chooses power and the other chooses people.

Even at the end of the books, Ophelia gets a fucking promotion, even though everyone knows what she’s done. El, on the other hand, is described as being a bit aimless, realizing her dream needs to be accomplished by someone else, and needing a lot of therapy. She wasn’t even able to stop the use/creation of maw mouths outright- compared to Ophelia, her goals remain unaccomplished. And El, being the angry bitter person she is, takes that with a massive fuck you and keeps choosing the right thing with all the spite and hope in the world. These books are a testament to what it means to choose kindness and it’s done so, so well thanks to El.

Just,,, non-traditionally good characters. They mean everything to me.

[softness-and-shattering]

Golden Enclaves/scholomance spoilers

Speaking of Ibrahim and Yaakov. When El asks how Yaakovs doing and its obviously extremely painful to Ibrahim because they cant safely live together. The Dubai enclave opening up to anyone with the mana to help immediately. Waiting waiting waiting and then Yaakov is there, and he brought his slow-moving older relatives and theyre last in and El starts faffing around with chalk to give them time and then theyre there and theyre hugging and they made it and they can live here together now and be safe and be in love and Ibrahim hadnt even known if he'd got the text yet I absolutely bawled my eyes out.

And when Yaakov ran out the scholomance wearing his worn tallit 😭😭😭

There are so few good Jewish characters in general, and he's queer and he gets his happy ending with his "supposed to be his enemy" lover the both of them and they mean so so so much to me!!

[seagullcharmer]

and i said to him softly, gently, with all my heart,

"you're already dead."