#Golden Enclave spoilers

[maelancoli]

i'm kind of late to this but i just finished reading the scholomance trilogy by naomi novik and i feel like it is such an underrated urban fantasy?? taking the chosen one trope and turning it on its head with a fmc who has been prophesied to bring death and destruction, who is imbued with terrible power, but cannot even properly use said power to solve any of her obstacles because it would obliterate them and her soul. it takes a tired trope and the idea of an 'overpowered mary sue' and throws it back in your face by showing how all the power and destiny in the world is useless against a system filled with corruption that has burdened you with an easy way out (evil/destructive magic) that you can't take so now you have to work twice as hard as everyone else just to do simple, constructive spells instead of flicking your wrist and being done with it.

[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!!!

[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.

[explosionshark]

Besides the obvious I'm Gay And I Love Unhinged Women of it all, there are actual multiple reasons I loved the inclusion of El/Leisel in The Golden Enclaves.

I mean, for one, I appreciated the follow-through from The Last Graduate. El noticing Leisel's tits and being like "nice" and her subsequent brief acknowledgement that she's attracted to women sometimes felt kind of throwaway. I mean I definitely wasn't complaining, but she already had a boyfriend who I liked and was clearly the central romance of the book, so I expected that moment for Representation Points and that's it. When that thread was actually picked up again and followed in The Golden Enclaves it was unexpected but genuinely appreciated!

But beyond that I love how much it reinforces the value of relationships and connections in the book. Orion is the central love interest and he's a huge deal! But El's life isn't over when she thinks he's dead. She even talks about how she WANTED both of them to see other people post-graduation, to have different experiences, and the stuff with Leisel is basically exactly what she's talking about. I really love that Orion and El's relationship gets to remain dramatic and tragic and thematically important without becoming the MOST important part of the story.

[neathrablog]

Ok, Golden Enclaves spoilers.

Anyway, my unhinged, unsuppoeted theory(s) about Mawmouths.

Its obsured by history, but it feels strange that wizards went directly from "We need a single unusually powerful wizard to cast an enclave spell" to "lets perform an grisley human sacrifice of at least 2 people (1 core, 1 bait to get it away from the new enclave) thst creates an unkillable undying very hungry blob monster". Like there had to be an intermediate step there right?

So my theory is that the first mawmouth was concieved to be something like Orion during a Deadly Education. Something with human intelligence that would generste enough mana for a small enclave and to keep themselves sane. An eternal guardian that would roam around the enclave eating mals and converting them into mana.

Volunteers whose self sacrifice and pain, and continued commitment to that decision would essentially pay rent for the enclave (in this comparison, the Golden Enclaves would be like buying a house). A volunteer's family would all get guarenteed spots.

But something went wrong: maybe the law of unintended consequences or maybe someone designed the new enclaves to form too big; maybe nobody realized what being tortured into undeath would do to someone's reasoning - and the mawmouths came out like we see them in canon. I vote for the "enclave too big" idea because it seems to track most with the series's ideology.

They still wanted the enclaves. So they just justified it to themselves and kept doing it.

Second idea: if you could stop them hooking the mawmouth up to the enclave or disconnect it before someone got eaten, it would in fact stabalize and the core would be able to assert control over the hunger and basically be a blob shaped person. The reason mawmouths whose enclaves collapse dont come back to themselves is that the increased mana generated by eating more people is linear. The mana required to be sane is exponential.

Third idea: Orion is so sane up until the end of the story because he hasnt eaten any peopleand so can naturally generate the mana to stay in control, and New York is not automatically draining him of mana. Once he eats Patients however the mana demands from all those enclaves and from all the people overwhelm him.

[aridotdash]

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

[chill-reading-books]

Y'ALL EL HAS FOUND OUT ABOUT THE SECRET OF ENCLAVE BUILDING

THEY MAKE A MAWMOUTH

Now she's about to try to save Beijing enclave now that she's saved Lou

She's in the room where the "long life" spell has shattered

I think to myself, I bet that means she killed that mawmouth

She starts thinking, oh, this must be how the maleficer has been attacking enclaves. They must have figured out how enclaves are built and are attacking the weak point, this plate.

But.

IT'S THE DEATH OF THE MAWMOUTHS THAT DID IT

I SWEAR

EL IS TAKING DOWN THE ENCLAVES BY KILLING MAWMOUTHS

THE TIMING AND AMOUNTS MAKE SENSE

And the magic of it makes sense too: the mawmouths pay the manna debt forever after by their eternal suffering or something, yeah? But once they die... The enclave goes into forfeiture.

El was foretold to destroy the enclaves of the world, bringing death and destruction.

Now she CAN and it'll be GOOD and FINE and AWESOME!!

She kills mawmouths.

The enclaves are destabilized.

She makes Golden Stone enclaves instead to replace the ones made from malia.

IT'S PERFECT

Also, considering the way this tends to go, she'll probably come to the same conclusion about the real cause of the enclaves falling in the next few paragraphs. But I had to pause my audiobook and share this immediately :OOO :DD

[geraniums-red]

Naomi Novik - The Golden Enclaves

Book 3 of the Scholomance series

Previously reviewed here.

I agree with everything I wrote the first time I read this, so I'm not going to write it out again. I do have some further (significantly spoiler-y) questions, though.

How does Orion get mana from killing mals, and not malia? Do mals not count in the same way as all other living things? Is he actually running pure malia without realising it? Have we ever seen him actually generate mana? Are the rules just different because he's not strictly human?

How bad is Ophelia really? She's a fascinating example of someone who thinks in numbers and works via 'the ends justify the means', but it still seems like she's doing her best to minimise the harm done. She is a malificer to an extent that she can't use mana, which is presumably originally from malia generated from killing wizards who were going to be killed anyway for going malificer, so they'd still be dead either way. Her maintenance via draining her lab staff and repaying them with mana is a pretty ethical way to do it (although it would be coercion if their jobs depended on agreeing to it). Her use of her own baby to generate the mawmouth-human hybrid can also be seen as an act of sacrifice, and is certainly a lot more ethical than using someone else's child. She knows about the 'unique costs' of enclaves, and is using her power to push people to share more in order to avoid new enclaves having to be built or existing ones expanded. I do not entirely trust her - there's a good chance she would have or has had people murdered who got in her way - but I have a lot more empathy for her than I would have expected.

Once the enclavers figure out that mawmouths being killed is leading to enclave collapse, will they keep building new enclaves but keep hold of the mawmouths associated with creating the enclave? If they could be kept contained (admittedly difficult with an ooze) they would protect the enclave by eating other mals, and their diet could be supplemented with enclave mana and anyone foolish enough to attack the enclave. I don't expect that this would be a strategy that would work long term, as the mawmouth would eventually grow to the point where it broke out and went on a rampage, but I imagine it would seem like a good idea up until that point...

[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

[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!!

[celebibi]

sorta spoiler for scholomance but i finished the scholomance trilogy(?) today and ughhhh it nearly filled the void harry potter had given me. i loved it. where is scholomance tumblr i need it immediately i'm so conflicted by el x orion & el x liesel cuz orion is cute but i wasn't attached to him as much as the first two books. liesel and el surprised me, confused me (cuz el was literally like dreaming abt orion within hours), and made me so happy because yay casual bi/pan characters!

anyways i rly liked it

[rotationalsymmetry]

The golden enclaves:

I'm collecting influences, references. Orpheus and Eurydice. Tam Lin. And I did mention Omelas before, but damn, the Beijing chapter, that's a lot more direct.

And we aren't messing around with "maybe it's worth it" and we aren't messing around with "but maybe some people walk away, see what they can find somewhere else." We're getting the kid out of the closet.

We are having kids getting other kids out of the closet.

[shokuheshi]

The Golden Enclaves gave me INTENSE Orion Lake feelings!!! have some angsty doodles i did a few months ago  when i reread the book i’ll probably draw something more substantial

[monstersqueen]

“Because he understood my gift,” Deepthi said, low and terrible. “The Arjun who followed my warning, who lived, would have understood that I had made a choice. That I could have saved one—and so she, and you with her, had been taken in his place. And he refused that choice. There was no future in which he let me save him. So I didn’t warn him. I only gave him my blessing, and let him go.” Let him go despite her own grief, to have a brief time of love uncomplicated by fear, and to make the gift that he’d after all chosen eyes wide open to hand to Mum and to me, in every possible future that Deepthi could see.

oh -

oh i didn't get it the first time - it's not that he didn't want to live without them, or that he'd rather be eaten along with them, or that he couldn't stand to live on when they were traded for him - it's that he understood her. he made sure there was no future in which she could save him. not by accident by refusing to live at their expense, but deliberately. he made sure there was no him or them choice. he deliberately choose that there could not be such a choice. so she would have to choose the future where they lived

in every future where he could have lived he instead choose the same fate than in the one where they lived, so that the one where they lived would be the one she choose

that's. gods. that's -

oh my god

[lesbiantoaster]

The Golden Enclaves (The Scholomance Book 3) - Spoilers

I've just finished The Scholomance series by Naomi Novik and I need to write my thoughs because I have some opinions XD These are just my thoughs as 20+yo freshly after finishing the series in one go (+listening/reading some opinions on-line). Also english is not my first language so I hope my message won't be lost in traslation.

El is unreliable narrator but she's a great character imo. Yes, she's ulikable, stubborn, 17yo brooding edgelord full of trauma BUT (for me at least) she's an believable on top of all of that. What I mean by that is I can believe that this is what a 17yo girl would sound/think/akt like. That doesn't mean her actions are always right but who doesn't make mistakes (especially when they're a teenager) ? But despite all the trauma she's endured during her stay at the Scholomance as well as before that and loads of self-loathing she's always been a good kid at heart to whom the world/fate has been really unfair. I love her journey throughout the series I truly do even though this journey is just beggining, but that's what's amazing about this character because now evry reader can have their own headcannons about her future. And that's what makes El Higgins one of my favourite characters of all time and makes me love this character!

Orion on the other hand had been made dirty imo. I'm sorry I really wanted to like him but he literally has ZERO personality he's just a depressed mawmouth shaped like a boy who wants to hunt mals and be next to El... It's sad because his whole story is genuinely tragic yet I felt next to nothing while reading it (only after finishing the golden enclaves I've started to think about everything he'd been through...). Also kinda unrelated but WHAT is Orion now? Like is he human enough to idk... get old? Or will he remain a 17yo till the end of Scholomance? On that note if he'll get old like a normal human being then what will happed to Scholomance once he passes away? (I don't expect to ever recive an answer to any of those questions but I am curious about it).

So... what do I think about Orion x El relationship? Well I think it was good for them while they're in Scholomance and (of course) it was crutial for the plot progression. But do I think this has a future? Absolutely not. For the first two book I was authentically rooting for them. They were good for each other and helped each other grow and mature, but reading The Golden Enclaves I couldn't help but play this tiktok sound (the one that goes: "He is not 'the love of your life'! He's literally just a guy. Just hit him with your car!") in my head for most of the Orion-related parts. And while what happened between Orion and El was genuine and beautiful and was working pretty well for the time being but they're teenagers in their first realtionship (that was formed in confined space where death was waiting for them litterally behind every corner and for what they knew they could die in the next 5 minutes, and lets not forget the social structure of small comunity of Scholomance - and while you can find some analogies beteween that to the outer world, they're not the same) and I don't think it'll survive past the point of when their frontal lobe will be fully developed... But I do think they'll remind good friends after that. That's just my opinion!

And that's I'm SO glad that the Liesel x El subplot happened! Some people say it came out of nowhere just to get representation points but I disagree with that sentiment... Don't det me wrong - I didn't saw it comming until the scene in London enclave, but when it happened it cliked for me and everything from The Last Graduate till the end of The Golden Enclaves started making sense... (?) My interpretation of the situation is that El DID notice Liesel in Scholomance and WAS atracted to her (considering that El's our narrator and we only see her version of reality, everything we learn about the world is El's understanging and observations of it - we only know things she considered important enough to describe to the reader AND she considered Liesel to be worthy of describing her multiple times to this degree that we KNOW that during New Year's cleaning El was looking at Liesel's boobs and wasn't complaining about it (she was complaining that Orion wasn't doing the same thing) maybe a the time she wasn't considering herself being attracted to the same sex - it might be because she wasn't quite experienced with social interactions and it was all new to her.. I mean newer than to 'normal' 17yo who's just begining their dating life). The biggest tell for me that El was attracted to Liesel was her reaction when she figured out what Liesel was proposing to her in London. What I also like in golden enclaves is the character development of Liesel herself. Watchin how this prideful, cunning, inteligent and fierce girl starts to care (even deeply) for El and how this relationship catalyzes her own process of healing from all the trauma.

And don't let me get started on thie whole "cheating" discourse... The first time El and Leisel get intimate is when we are sure Orion has been eaten by maw-mouth and the only reason for El to go back to Scholomance is to kill said maw-mouth so Orion along others victims to can die peacefully instead of suffering in eternity. So she's grieving and everyone grieves differently and it's not our place to judge that. The second time on the plane is slightly more complicated but also I wouldn't say it was cheating (I wouldn't even say that El and Orion were dating again at that time... it was more of will-they-wont-they-situationship where Orion specifically asked El to kill him if his mother won't heal him - and we all knew she wouldn't), it was a shitty move tho... Let's remember we're talking about deeply traumatized and mentally fucked-up kids (ok... young adults). I don't condone what El did in that moment but I also try to remember the context of these decisions and I refuse to judge her by my standards (+ I highly doubt that after all of this El never mention to Orion what happened between her and Liesel, just because she didn't do it right away after the events from the book doesn't mean they wouldn't have talked about this - it's just that hiding this information from Orion doesn't sit right with my interpretation of El's character).

El's just a teenage girl who's going through her first love but it doesn't mean she's gonig to close herself from the world just for this boy she met in school (in contrast to her own mother who's the archetype of mourning widow). I just really want to hope that in the case things wouldn't work out between her and Orion it wouldn't be the end of the world for her.

I'd like to believe that what these kids started was a revolution at the core of the rotten magic society and the whole system build on death and suffering, and that the change will come (after some probably long and painful process but IT WILL COME - that's my headcannon and I don't accept any other outcome for my own mental wellbeing XD). But also alongside of the changing/rebuilding world these kids need to heal/grow/change themseves. They've been through some serious shit and need to redefine who they are and find their own place in the new reality. I'd love to read about older versions of our heroes (because I'm 100% sure they won't be the same kids we left at the end of the last book) but I also don't think we'll ever come back to this world to see what happened next with our beloved misfits but I really hope the future will bring more fanfictions, headcannons and other fan-media that will keep this world alive and will allow us to dive in this world once more!

All to all I loved the series! It's not ideal (in many aspects) but overall I've really enjoyed it & sincerely recommend reading it and to shape your own opinion on the matter! Please keep in mind that it's only my interpretation of the series which is based on translation of the books and my personal life experiences and if you disagree with me you are more than welcome to express it (I'd love to see other perspectives) but please don't send hate! Lots of love <3

[notsopersonalcharlie]

bro golden enclaves spoilers

but me when you find out that the big bad,the evil thing, the mawmouths come from enclaves i was simply losing it Novik does such a profoundly good job building up the story lines of “El i don’t want to go to an enclave Higgins” and “maw mouth the move evil thing in magic history” but extremely separately only for those two things to be one and the same it makes me want to sink to my knees and scream