#whoops that got wordy. have some brainrot

[dawn-the-rithmatist]

🚨🚨Spoilers for The Scholomance books!! 🚨🚨

I am so in love with Naomi Novik’s commitment to having her two main characters be Weird. I feel like so many novels start with “look how WEIRD and STRANGE this character is” and then walk it back from there until you see that they’re actually Just Like Everyone Else. (Prefacing this with the fact that weird is not said disrespectfully in any way, I heckin love these weirdos and think that weird people are the best people.)

The Scholomance doesn’t do that! First we get El, and it seems like her arc is going to be about overcoming her “evil sorceress” prophecy. Maybe she’ll use the power of friendship to trade for Not Evil spells, or she’ll convince the school somehow to give her other things. Either way, the narrative is set up so that we expect her to actively work against it. But that’s not the case!! We instead see her start to lean into that thing that makes her terrifying and unapproachable. In TLG, she’s throwing off killing spells left and right, and by the end she’s making plans around super volcanoes in the exact way she swore she’d never do at the start of the series. She’s still a good person, and she’s constantly learning to be better, but she doesn’t sacrifice her “weird” to do it- she just learns how to use it the way she wants, instead of how she’s expected to.

Then we have Orion. ORION IS SO INTERESTING. He’s clearly the knight in shining armor. Obviously Not Like Other Guys, but in a way that makes him an unapproachable hero rather than an unapproachable villain like El. At first, we expect to see over time that he’s just like everyone else- he’s lonely and isolated from the hero worship, he’s killing mals for the sake of friendships, etc. BUT INSTEAD WE GET THE OPPOSITE. Orion, instead of becoming more personable, gets WEIRDER. He’s faced with these reasons for killing mals and he replies with the fact that he simply. Does not care. He does it for fun and throws himself into danger because he wants to, even though it’s the last thing anyone else in the scholomance would want for themselves.

They don’t get less weird. They find people who love them in their weirdness, but they never back off from it- in fact, they continue to get weirder up through the end of the book. And that is so, so refreshing.