Scholomance book 1 again
May. 11th, 2022 04:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI got a comment that mentioned something I'd forgotten from book 1 so I looked it up and... ended up rereading book 1.
since yesterday.
ah well.
Thing I have realised: Narrator El describing her world and her place in it is vivid, clear, emphatic, and from the perspective of end of book two, very, very, wrong.
Even things that guided her logic and times you would think her being wrong would be a Darwin moment, you can look back with what we know from book 2, and see how both logics explain it.
Meaning I don't feel lied to by the author, I just feel like saying swears at her in an admiring tone, mostly.
The exception is the birth and death rate math, which is fundamental to all the other logic, and still, I cannot see as being accurate and consistent.
But, if El is completely wrong about that too, then that too would be consistent.
Because she is wrong about everything else.
To the point where I started typing examples but it's easier to say 'go reread the first few pages and do hollow laughs at how Wrong El is'.
There's some interesting wrong compared to book two where El insists the kids deaths feed the school, and the school is therefor out to get them. But book two rather depends on the school being what it says on the tin? So where *is* it getting the mana? And why do staircases get long and dark when you go somewhere on your own outside of usual hours?
Kids climbing stairs seems up there with situps and push ups for mana generation. If you have to make the mana to keep the lights on, more stairs on your own would seem logical.
But why is anyone sure the school is out to get them? Well if it is being fed by the deaths, that's malia, right? So it would be about as 'healthy' as a malificer, like it or not? Rotting from the inside, giving off bad vibes?
Making it difficult to run toward the danger and easy to stay away from the worst bits is obviously helpful if you're anyone other than El. So the whole bit in the library is explicable.
And if magical books have a tendency to disappear because they want to, and the scholomance has a gigantimous amount of books, but when you ask you very seldom get exactly what you ask for... why blame the scholomance? Why not... figure the ?books? Go?
And she chucks stuff into the void quite happily... well no, angrily and with great rage, having hated every book it handed her... and yet she knows mistreated books will Go and just not want to come back? That sounds like an El problem. Or, since literally everyone hates being there and almost everyone hates studying, if the books can sense that they're entirely unwanted, that sounds like an every child there problem.
Yet the library remains. And El is so careful with the library? So what all even is with El and books?
Got to be really polite to the good spell books... until El is convinced they're the school messing with her?
But the mortal flame spell is used for cleansing, like she asked for...
It do feel consistent if the author knows what they're doing and El is very Wrong.
But... the math of sorcerer death rates is consistent too. Just... well, I marked times it was mentioned in my paperback. Didn't mark anything about how sorceror families are large compared to UK mundanes. Didnt seem to be large.
Still, mentions are:
p9, "Most of the time less than a quarter of the class makes it through graduation, and eighteen years ago [...] only a dozen students came out, and they were *all* gone dark."
p12, "Mum offered to take me off, but I wasn't insane enough to let her. The enclaves built the school because outside is *worse*." [...] "Even enclave kids were getting eaten more often than not before the school was built, and if you're an indie kid who doesn't get into the Scholomance, these days your odds of making it to the far side of puberty are one in twenty. One in four is plenty decent odds compared to that."
p258 mentions the school was nearly abandoned when the graduation hall fire broke down but "then they'd be back where they began, with more than half their children dying. In the midst of that, London enclave more or less organised a coup, took the Scholomance over, then doubled the number of seats - the dorm rooms became significantly smaller - and opened the place up to independent students." [...]
"And it worked splendidly. The enclaver kids do make it out most of the time - their survival rate usually hovers somewhere around eighty percent, a significant improvement over the forty percent chance they've got if they stay home."
So that's the sorcerer facts of life, which ought to logically imply really large numbers of children getting started.
Or a shrinking magical population.
As for the local equivalent of muggleborns:
p53 about Luisa: "I didn't know much about her, except she'd been one of the exceptionally unlucky few who dont have wizard parents. The ability to hold mana does pop up in mundanes every so often, but usually they don't get in here, they just get eaten."
p191 "Doing magic in front of someone who doesn't believe in it is loads harder. Worse, if their disbelief trumps either your certainty or your mana, and the spell doesn't come off, you'll probably have trouble the next time you try and cast it, whether the unbeliever's still there or not. Do that a few times and you'll stop being able to do magic at all. In fact. it's entirely possible there are loads of unknowing potantial wizards out there, people like Luisa who could hold enough mana to cast spells, only they've been raised mundane and so they can't, because they don't *know* that magic works, which means it doesn't."
That's also the page that explains mundanes can easily kill mal because they don't believe in them.
So... Why? Would people like Luisa? Mostly get eaten?
El is so confident and keeps stating things as facts, but some things make more sense if you remember she's a sixth form student who mostly studies mass destruction.
The only other mention of kids raised by mundanes is p309 talking about induction and how every kid knows what to do "Unless you're one of the monstrously unlucky few like Luisa"
No numbers ever provided, but no other name either.
So probably rare.
So I'm back to: the math does not seem survivable, unless magical familes are gigantic in a way there's simply not time for among mundanes
or El's maths is very wrong.
But El is wrong about a heck of a lot, so, it would be consistent and in character...
since yesterday.
ah well.
Thing I have realised: Narrator El describing her world and her place in it is vivid, clear, emphatic, and from the perspective of end of book two, very, very, wrong.
Even things that guided her logic and times you would think her being wrong would be a Darwin moment, you can look back with what we know from book 2, and see how both logics explain it.
Meaning I don't feel lied to by the author, I just feel like saying swears at her in an admiring tone, mostly.
The exception is the birth and death rate math, which is fundamental to all the other logic, and still, I cannot see as being accurate and consistent.
But, if El is completely wrong about that too, then that too would be consistent.
Because she is wrong about everything else.
To the point where I started typing examples but it's easier to say 'go reread the first few pages and do hollow laughs at how Wrong El is'.
There's some interesting wrong compared to book two where El insists the kids deaths feed the school, and the school is therefor out to get them. But book two rather depends on the school being what it says on the tin? So where *is* it getting the mana? And why do staircases get long and dark when you go somewhere on your own outside of usual hours?
Kids climbing stairs seems up there with situps and push ups for mana generation. If you have to make the mana to keep the lights on, more stairs on your own would seem logical.
But why is anyone sure the school is out to get them? Well if it is being fed by the deaths, that's malia, right? So it would be about as 'healthy' as a malificer, like it or not? Rotting from the inside, giving off bad vibes?
Making it difficult to run toward the danger and easy to stay away from the worst bits is obviously helpful if you're anyone other than El. So the whole bit in the library is explicable.
And if magical books have a tendency to disappear because they want to, and the scholomance has a gigantimous amount of books, but when you ask you very seldom get exactly what you ask for... why blame the scholomance? Why not... figure the ?books? Go?
And she chucks stuff into the void quite happily... well no, angrily and with great rage, having hated every book it handed her... and yet she knows mistreated books will Go and just not want to come back? That sounds like an El problem. Or, since literally everyone hates being there and almost everyone hates studying, if the books can sense that they're entirely unwanted, that sounds like an every child there problem.
Yet the library remains. And El is so careful with the library? So what all even is with El and books?
Got to be really polite to the good spell books... until El is convinced they're the school messing with her?
But the mortal flame spell is used for cleansing, like she asked for...
It do feel consistent if the author knows what they're doing and El is very Wrong.
But... the math of sorcerer death rates is consistent too. Just... well, I marked times it was mentioned in my paperback. Didn't mark anything about how sorceror families are large compared to UK mundanes. Didnt seem to be large.
Still, mentions are:
p9, "Most of the time less than a quarter of the class makes it through graduation, and eighteen years ago [...] only a dozen students came out, and they were *all* gone dark."
p12, "Mum offered to take me off, but I wasn't insane enough to let her. The enclaves built the school because outside is *worse*." [...] "Even enclave kids were getting eaten more often than not before the school was built, and if you're an indie kid who doesn't get into the Scholomance, these days your odds of making it to the far side of puberty are one in twenty. One in four is plenty decent odds compared to that."
p258 mentions the school was nearly abandoned when the graduation hall fire broke down but "then they'd be back where they began, with more than half their children dying. In the midst of that, London enclave more or less organised a coup, took the Scholomance over, then doubled the number of seats - the dorm rooms became significantly smaller - and opened the place up to independent students." [...]
"And it worked splendidly. The enclaver kids do make it out most of the time - their survival rate usually hovers somewhere around eighty percent, a significant improvement over the forty percent chance they've got if they stay home."
So that's the sorcerer facts of life, which ought to logically imply really large numbers of children getting started.
Or a shrinking magical population.
As for the local equivalent of muggleborns:
p53 about Luisa: "I didn't know much about her, except she'd been one of the exceptionally unlucky few who dont have wizard parents. The ability to hold mana does pop up in mundanes every so often, but usually they don't get in here, they just get eaten."
p191 "Doing magic in front of someone who doesn't believe in it is loads harder. Worse, if their disbelief trumps either your certainty or your mana, and the spell doesn't come off, you'll probably have trouble the next time you try and cast it, whether the unbeliever's still there or not. Do that a few times and you'll stop being able to do magic at all. In fact. it's entirely possible there are loads of unknowing potantial wizards out there, people like Luisa who could hold enough mana to cast spells, only they've been raised mundane and so they can't, because they don't *know* that magic works, which means it doesn't."
That's also the page that explains mundanes can easily kill mal because they don't believe in them.
So... Why? Would people like Luisa? Mostly get eaten?
El is so confident and keeps stating things as facts, but some things make more sense if you remember she's a sixth form student who mostly studies mass destruction.
The only other mention of kids raised by mundanes is p309 talking about induction and how every kid knows what to do "Unless you're one of the monstrously unlucky few like Luisa"
No numbers ever provided, but no other name either.
So probably rare.
So I'm back to: the math does not seem survivable, unless magical familes are gigantic in a way there's simply not time for among mundanes
or El's maths is very wrong.
But El is wrong about a heck of a lot, so, it would be consistent and in character...
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Date: 2022-05-11 06:25 pm (UTC)