#shanfeng

[strikeslip]

Me, trying to describe the Scholomance setting from the point of view of an enclave leader for my game setting document:

Take two once-in-a-generation talents, put them through hell together, and sometimes they’ll fall in love, blow up multiple major pieces of infrastructure, and upend every plan anyone had for the next ten years. This probably shouldn’t be a surprise, but…

[dlyarchitecture]

[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We know from the various places Li Shanfang is brought up as a historical reference that he came out of the Scholomance with offers from every enclave and took none of them, which is a hell of a parallel to El.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.

[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 :)

[sweetmomentslove]

Photography : Shanfeng | Weibo @山风Save

Via Pinterest

[number63liveblogs]

The Golden Enclaves, Chapter 16

Okay, I do not think that Orion is going to lose his powers, because the law of balance has been repeated so many times, and on if Orion is going to lose his powers El is going to lose them too, and El still needs to murder all the mawmouths and put up all golden enclaves. Also I personally dislike the characters losing their powers at the end of the story.

I do wonder if this also saved all the other enclaves that were sitting on top of the mawmouths that Fortience had eaten in its long history, or if they had already been digested to the point where they no longer supported enclaves.

Also, Li Shanfeng is a fascinating person, and it’s a shame that we got this little of him (presumably, I don’t think there’ll be space for more of him in the last chapter). Sure, he’s done horrible things, but at the same time he comes off as very sympathetic. Like a person who has done the best he could have, with the cards he was dealt.

But of course he’s old and a seasoned diplomat, so even if he personally voluntarily took part in saving Orion when he didn’t have to it could be just because being on El’s good side is going to be very useful.

[chroma-imp]

Happy to report I stopped thinking about them. unfortunately I've moved on to being unwell about Li Shanfeng.

I have to stop thinking about El and Orion or I'll explode

[theinsightweb]

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[aishavass]

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[condotrend]

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[sandange]

Only a short one today, since I want to see if I can stretch this out to Thursday, and also I rewound a little too far and lost my place.

Given how things are going for El, I can both understand her being wary of a polite spell dragging her away, but also understand why they wouldn't want to be within range of her statue-making spell. A proper recognition of what she's capable of isn't amiss here.

I wonder if one day El will finally meet an authority figure that doesn't irritate or disappoint her (probably not, but it's funny to imagine her reaction).

Yup, there's the anger, and for good reason. El's reached the point where any papering over sins is worse than the act itself, especially since Shanfeng is so well known for his actions and his innovations, while hiding the whole mawmouth situation, especially since he survived an attack as a child.

*checks clipboard* Okay, looks like we have a capitalism metaphor, a climate change metaphor, but also there's just straight up racism and classism? Also the mention of Dublin hints at a touch of sectarianism, for flavor?

Oh God, so not only is Ophelia convinced her lesser evil crap will really work (from atop her high tower, of course), but she did it without actually understanding the forces she was meddling with? How did she think creating a mawmouth on a leash would work? That her little hooks wouldn't snap eventually once Orion knew? Gotta love those step 2: ???? plans...

The opening moments of El furious as she does everything she can to try and drag Orion out of the Scholomance is giving me flashbacks of 1. Susan in Thief of Time outraged at Lubsang Ludd"You...𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘰!" and 2. Annabeth Chase judo-flipping Percy when they're reunited at New Rome.

Just the most powerful "How fucking dare you, you goddamn idiot!" Tsundere outrage, with the added spice of "That's 𝘮𝘺 goddamn idiot!" fueling the fire.

El, honey. What, did you think Liesel would do when you forgot to check in? She's not a wait and see person, she's more likely to kick the door down and demand an answer, you know that. (also I think the audiobook narrator got a better handle on Liesel's accent in this one, she sounds more consistently German now.)

[strikeslip]

Today I chewed through the entire third Scholomance book in a night (it's YA, it's less than 500 pages, this is fucking easy mode) and anyway, The Golden Enclaves came for me EXTREMELY HARD when describing the one kind of game El got to play with the kids her age who didn't particularly like her, and also basically every time Liesel talked (Some of us KNOW HOW TO COUNT El) and I enjoyed this immensely.

[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.

[metataxy]

Novik’s ‘Golden Enclaves’ and Open-Access :D

Spoilers, spoilers, spoilers! 

‘Shanfeng nodded as if it wasn’t anything to do with him. “The compulsion also requires you to charge fair market value for the spell before you can share it. And the restrictions even carry over onto any improvements or modifications you make to the spells yourself. They were designed to be controlled. Unlike those.” He indicated the sutras strapped across my chest in their protective case.’

Looool, Novik made the Sutras follow copyleft :D El is making her own open-source community :D

[sunfungtechnologypvt-blog]

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[shanfeng]

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