#galadriel scholomance

[chill-reading-books]

Okay so, I finished the first scholomance book. Mom gives spooky warning about staying away from Orion, oooo! I'm also 25% into the Last Graduate and- word of Galadriel's power is kinda spreading and- I think it would be really funny if as graduation approaches more and more people try to join her alliance, and she wouldn't really turn most people away, and in the end her alliance is just "the whole school". I think that would be funny.

[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.

[izzenithal]

this is their whole dynamic and i love them for it

[nepttunnee]

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

[a-rayneart]

I REALLY loved A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik and will probably have more art as I work my way through the books

[emily-e-draws]

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!)

[summercosmos]

finished the scholomance trilogy and had to doodle The Girl Of All Time. she pisses me off@ so bad i need to put her in a blender

[ace-and-ranty]

also like. I love Orion as like. Person who isn’t a person. Child who was born dead. The whole section of the story where he starts straight up subjecting people to eternal torment for attacking El rings strange in contrast with everything else until you remember that his heroics were the byproduct of hunting maleficaria for mana, his actual goal. Guy who’s whole personality was built over a sinkhole that finally caved in. Lost all his morals

Ooohhh, I feel like this is a good time to use this quote from Naomi's AMA...

"(...) Once Orion does register El, he fairly quickly realizes that she is the kind of person he wants to be. Everyone around Orion constantly is telling him he's a hero, and meanwhile he's mostly just doing what comes incredibly naturally to him and thinking "this is great, I get to hunt all the time, and I'm a hero! :D" and meeting El and being forced to look at the system that has made him a hero and its unfairnesses makes him start to realize that he wants to truly be a hero, that this is something that he wants to choose, the hard and moral path (...)"

And also this quote from The Golden Enclaves...

“It’s both of you,” Shanfeng said. “You, and the child Ophelia made. The boy we heard about from our own children as they came out of the Scholomance each year of the last four. The boy who saved the lives of others, who took no payment, and paid no attention to which enclave they were from. Ophelia got—not the hero she wanted, but the hero she deserved.”

And of course this delicious nugget from The Lat Graduate:

The words are even engraved on the stairway railings and the upper molding of the library reading room, those precise words: to offer sanctuary and protection to all the wise-gifted children of the world, only absolutely nobody ever took them seriously. (...) Except, apparently, the Scholomance itself.

Orion and the Scholomance as parallels is absolute crack to me. Selfish machinations of powerful enclavers; run on the death of countless children; and told a beautiful golden lie that they believed in so hard, they built that lie into their true selves.

(With a little help from your friendly neighborhood mass-destruction witch :)

[jadempress]

Imagine you're in school, fall in love, and get pregnant. He comes from wealth, so you think you and your baby are going to live a nice cushy life with your new man. Then he gets mauled by a bear. He's eaten right in front of you. You grieve for him. You go to his family, hoping they'll take you in, but they're awful and they want to harm your baby. So you end up raising her alone. It's tough being a single mother, but you do your best to love and protect her. She grows up and goes to school. The school is known for its bear attacks, but what can you do? It's a good school, and you can only protect her so much. Eventually your baby has to fend for herself. You can't help but worry though. The cell service is terrible but you manage to reach her and warn her to stay away from bears. She seems happy though, and even tells you she's made friends. Finally she graduates, and you're so happy she's safe. She brings her boyfriend home to meet you. It's the bear that ate your boyfriend.

Anyway, that's what happened to Gwen Higgins of the schomance series.

[queer-book-character-tournament]

Character, book, and author names under the cut

Coronabeth Tridentarius/Judith Duteros- The Locked Tomb by Tamsyn Muir

Galadriel “El” Higgins/Liesel- The Scholomance Series by Naomi Novik

Viv/Tandri- Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree

Tommy Fairfield/Carter Batudev- Crushing It and Winging It by Jen Desmarais

[jalytown]

POV: you’re a mal and you just interrupted their study date session (rip)

(mini-rant and bonus under the cut)

i arise from the dead to share this because I am so brainrotted and also so goddam DESPERATE!!! I NEED people to read the scholomance series by naomi novik pls pls PLS i love them so much i'm actually going INSANE

also i tried out new brushes and a new way of coloring for this so idk how i'm feeling about it but i had fun i guess?? here's the flat colors before rendering because i like how it looks as well hehe

anyway i'm going to slowly spiral by myself about this series :DDD I NEED MORE PEOPLE TO TALK TO ABOUT IT AAA

[chill-reading-books]

Oookay. I've made it just into the ninth chapter in A Deadly Education. Spoilers ahead!

Now, what was that prophecy exactly again?... Laying waste to enclaves or something like that? At this point, I think that may come true in a rather different way! (And honestly I look forward to seeing it)

So, El has slain the maw-mouth now. She's absolutely an incredible person, working so hard to not hurt anyone and never touch malificing at all, being so loyal with those who worked with her, and then fighting this horrifying thing against ALL her self-interest.

Just now, Aadhya figured it out and confronted her about it, and El blurted out that she actually doesn't want to join any enclave at all.

All the ways the enclavers are privileged at the expense of their unaffiliated peers have been slowly built up over the course of this book so far, as well as El's resentment of them. Now, she gets to have an existential crisis about it, yay!

I see now how thematic this book is about social inequality and exploitative systems where the luxury of some is built off the misery and danger and hurt and death of others. And not in a dystopian way either! It's real people, all seeking safety and security and comfort, and falling into these self-sustaining patterns that perpetuate an enormous divide.

Anyway, I suspect El is not going to truly destroy the people, but upend and overturn and tear down all their comfortable systems with their built-in "acceptable loss" of the outsiders and the less powerful.

That's my prediction as I'm in the middle of reading her reflections on why she just can't stand the enclaves anymore, despite fighting enormously with her mother to try and join one when she was younger.

[ao-ihinata]

The cruel Prince trilogy 🤝 A deadly education trilogy

Book 1 : Iconic first kiss

Book 2 : BETRAYAL !!

Book 3 : " When I said I wanted to kill him I didn't mean it literally !! "

[crossedwithblue]

The Sharmas, and vegetarianism in India

I just finished the books and this stood out to me. One side of my family is Jain, a small religion philosophically very similar to Buddhism, with a similar emphasis on nonviolence and the complete avoidance of harm to any human being. This includes:

No meat, obviously. Eggs are also excluded (as in the more general Indian definition of vegetarianism) No root vegetables, even, because you have to kill the whole plant to get them. Interestingly, non-lethal animal products are fine - milk, honey, wool - so it's not the same as veganism. I'm not sure what the position is on the hidden life-cost of milk i.e. the death of male calves because it's a waste to keep most around. This is common enough that retaurants will have 'Jain options' on their menu/allow you to request a Jain version of a dish, and it's a widely understood dietary requirement (though most people in India seen to think Jainism is a branch of Hinduism. It's not, it's a completly splintered-off heterodoxy, but we don't need to get into that).

They also don't use leather or silk since that does require death to produce, though my granny does have a 'peace silk' sari that's made without boiling the cocoons.

No eating after sunset and no eating food kept overnight, because they had some concept of germ theory and knew that bacteria bred more after dark. Pre-fridges, this is generally a pretty good idea in a hot country, anyway.

A yearly ritual where you meditate and ask forgiveness from any creature of any kind that you might have injured, deliberately or not. It's meant to be an acknowledgement that you've done wrong and a meditation on forgiving other people because everyone's fallible. You also exchange this with anyone you can - friends, family etc. I have very very mixed feelings about this one, how valid and meaningful it usually is in-practice and its actual effect on most people's mental health, but I'll leave that out of this post LOL

In the same vein, a prayer ritual you do at the temple where you repeat the same request for forgivness while repeatedly moving from a standing position to kneeling and prostrated with your head on the floor, the gradual standing - kneeling upright - kneeling fully - completely prostrate timed to the lines of the request. As my mum pointed out, it's also pretty good exercise, like a slowed-down bungee squat that's also gentler on your joints. I can picture El doing it for mana.

If you thought this was intense enough, the monks and nuns take it to another level. They eat nothing but boiled vegetables, lentils and grains, and I believe are not allowed to wear any clothing but what is purely plant derived, so they are closer to veganism in that sense. They have little brooms they use to sweep the path ahead of them to avoid stepping on insects (which, since they spend a lot of time on the road physically walking from place to place, presumably slows them down as much as you might imagine. They wear masks over their face to avoid inhaling small insects and keep out bacteria as much as possible (presumably the tiny insects are more of a concern if, again, you're pretty much sleeping out in the open in a rural area).

Not Jain any more, but upper-caste Hindus from some regions, essentially the priest caste, are also pretty strict vegetarians to the point that they're quite snobby about it. They are vegetarian because they consider it necessary to ritual purity, and look down on people who aren't - according to my mum, who went to uni with a lot of people like that, the reason why they accepted her relatively easily was because she was also a very strict vegetarian. I'm not sure if those guys avoid root vegetables too - mum had to start eating them at uni, anyway, because she would have struggled for food otherwise.

The Sharma family's insistence on strict mana reminded me of these practices a lot. They won't use any malia because you cannot get it without deliberately causing harm to another living being, even if that's just a blade of grass. I don't know if Novik was aware of this but it's pretty plausible and if she was, it adds a lot of context to her making El half-Indian and giving her paternal family similar beliefs. My headcanon is that they are indeed Jain - there's a pretty big community in Maharashtra/of Marathi origin.

[fullmetalfisting]

ok I'm rereading the Scholomance trilogy by Naomi Novik and I'm at the part in the second book where Orion says, "Even my mom and dad, they always thought something was wrong with me....they always thought I was weird."

And I'm like. Can you imagine being a woman who gave herself a pseudo-abortion to create a child who was a ghastly, already-dead, always-hungry monster and then incubating him in your womb and raising him like a Normal Boy™ and then being like, "It's really weird that this nuclear weapon I made and impregnated myself with shows no interest in anything other than being a nuclear weapon. I should make him feel guilty about his lack of interest in this XBox I bought him."

[witchyamethyst]

I love El so much because she's never nice and she never has to becone nice as a part of her character arc. Sarcasim isn't just a tacked on aspect to prove she's "not like other girls" it's core aspect of her that gives her a genuinely witty and entertaining voice that's fun to read.