#This is only giving me more Li Shanfeng feels of course

[strikeslip]

Absolute sidetrack, but how does anyone read these books and NOT come out of them with massive feelings about Li Shanfeng? Yes, he only gets one scene, but that one scene and the few other references we get to his story are already just so much.

Consider: One of the international conflicts regularly mentioned in the book is how the western enclaves took a large number of scholomance seats for themselves and their local independents, while eastern wizards had to compete for a small number of seats. Li Shanfeng's enclave was destroyed by a mawmouth when he was a child and then he went to the Scholomance. How many nights do you think he spent in one of those tiny rooms bordered by void thinking of all the dead children he didn't have to compete with? He's a genius anyway, sure, but what did his time in that box of horrors look like while he was inventing the reviser and god knows what else?

We know from the various places Li Shanfang is brought up as a historical reference that he came out of the Scholomance with offers from every enclave and took none of them, which is a hell of a parallel to El. But it goes further! He went back to the ruins of Shanghai and went up against the mawmouth with a group of his friends and family -- almost certainly including his friends from the Scholomance who saw him turn down all those offers and went with him anyway, his versions of Aadhya and Liu -- and he rebuilt the enclave. Who do you think he put on his council afterwards? The reason Li Shanfeng can defy all expectations of what an enclave leader should be and go out and build more enclaves instead of hoarding power at home is because he's still surrounded by those people. He's not just the Hero Who Decided To Kill A Mawmouth, he's the Hero Who Decided To Kill Colonialism and I would argue people were following him for that even before he stepped into a mawmouth. He could have gone to London. He could have gone to New York. He took the harder path.

I think Li Shanfeng is a version of El who compromised. He couldn't kill the mawmouth, but he could make it smaller. He couldn't fight the idea of enclaves, but he could distribute their power to more people. He couldn't build an enclave without malia, but he could make enclaves bigger for the same price and save a few more independents that way. And I think it's interesting that El keeps trying to hate him and doesn't quite manage it. I think that seeing him gives her a little bit of the strength that she needs at the end to go out and do the work that needs to be done after the uncompromising end, like a coda to the realization that if she hadn't gone evil already then she wasn't going to go evil. Li Shanfeng is a person who she doesn't hate, even if he couldn't save everyone. El is allowed to be a person who she doesn't hate, even if she can't save everyone. And then she gets to walk into that future and keep trying.

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.