Deconstructing Wizarding School.

I want to create a brutal deconstruction for Wizarding Schools, I don't know why, maybe I'm just a little stupid, like you know how Madoka Deconstructed Magical Girls and how Narutaru is a deconstruction of Pokemon? How would someone go about deconstructing the visiting school. I was thinking about making it Scholomance, and having the headmaster Mr. Saturday "kidnap" kids with special powers, not quite "Orphanage/Boarding School of Fear" but something along those lines,maybe. I don't want it to be scary, but I want to emphasize that it's more of a curse than a gift.

Any ideas and such would be appreciated, looking to create a reverse battle harem series with all bishies who are also yandere, that's the only way I'll have it. So I guess basically Negima aimed at the adult female demographic.

edited 14th Dec '13 6:45:26 PM by Bileaf

Well, you could go real old-fashioned with the idea of witchcraft, where the power for it comes from demonic entities that the witches/wizards have to make sacrifices and/or sell their souls to.

Alternately, you could take the Witch Species concept to the point where there are selective breeding programs, and witches/wizards with certain magical affinities are paired together by the school/government to create powerful offspring, disregarding the students' wishes.

Or you could have magic just not be all that useful, and young witches/wizards are only still trained in it due to tradition. That way, when they graduate, they have these magical skills that don't do them much good (especially since they can't use them in front of non-wizards) and virtually no education in anything else, leaving them with few career prospects except becoming magical teachers and keeping the cycle going.

The Magicians is a pretty brutal deconstruction of escapist teen fantasy in general, and of Harry Potter and The Chronicles of Narnia specifically. I'd advise you to give it a look and make sure your ideas aren't too similar (and you'll get to read a really haunting / enchanting book, too).

edited 15th Dec '13 12:16:50 PM by Leradny

Having a magical gift usually means having great individual power. The forced training may be combined with forced indoctrination, allowing the teachers' organization/society to both grow and prevent the rise of powerful rivals. It would provide a reason for them to be doing it in the first place.

edited 15th Dec '13 5:08:38 AM by ManInGray

Maybe play with the idea of being 'chosen'. What if not all young wizards and witches got to go to Hogwarts? The protagonists could have special powers that sets them apart from the world at large, but what if they don't have the money or prestige to be selected by the 'Best' wizarding academy and are instead sent to an overcrowded, underfunded school with apathetic, jaded teachers and outdated spell books?

The school prepares it's students for their military careers, which are compulsory. (This only works if skilled magic users are enough of a minority for their deployment to change the tides of battle, and if the muggles know about them.)

And here's your problem. Know why you want to do it first. Is there something about this trope that rubs you in the wrong way, or do you think it is based on flawed or unfortunate assumptions? Once you figure that out, you can start thinking of what to do with it. Deconstruction, trope-wise, is about taking a trope apart and showing what would it realistically mean. Since you want to do that to Wizarding School, you'd have to think of several things: under which conditions organised schooling appears, as opposed to old master-and-apprentice system? What is the cause for that? How this school (or schools) operates and receives funding? Who are the students and the staff? Where do they live? These are just a handful of examples of questions you may want to ask yourself. Since you want a "brutal" deconstruction, you'll probably pick the nastiest answers to these.

The country could also use conscription in general, and all magic users ends up in various 'special' forces. Knowledge about them could also be limited to a small part of the military. ie be a military secret.

I thought I could have show the unfortunate implications of all that power really play up the historical fantastical racism against the Witch species. The Idea of subverting the so called "School of Evil" especially with Scholomance appeals to me, mostly because it's supposedly one of the real life schools for witchcraft, however; people have said it's the school for the devil. Why is that and why is it so hard to find information on it? lol.

Also I kinda want to show the unfortunate implications of having such power go berserk, as well as focusing on the otherness of Scholomance and the adult fear of having children being taken away just because they are odd.

It's obvious to me to choose the wizarding school setting because you could have a lot of tragedy start to unfold, even if the headmaster has could intentions.

What normally happens at a school (high school, college) , there are star crossed lovers, the fear of examinations, extreme anxiety, suicide, unrequisted love (At a good school). At a bad one, you see bullying, drugs and gangs, I could make a major tragedy unfold, and show what these children's family lives are like where they are from. I could show the best and worst of Muggle and Magical worlds that teenage escapist fantasies never touched upon is what I was thinking.

Note: Keep sending in your ideas I would love to keep reading them.

edited 15th Dec '13 9:06:48 PM by Bileaf

Play it exactly like Harry Potter, except point out all the people who are getting their bones vanished and casting explosive curses on their arms by accident rather than sweeping them under the rug as that series did, where it liked to pretend the casualty rate is totally under ten percent, guys, and nobody ever pulled off their earmuffs to see if Mandrake noises really did kill people.

edited 16th Dec '13 9:10:58 AM by Night

Speaking of the so called "School of Devils", maybe the wizards here had to face a Fantastic Racism from the muggles (if this school existence is not being kept in secret). Especially from The Fundamentalist, who might employ Church Militants in form of Mage Killers to keep an eye on this school 24/7.

Was thinking something like that, also the powers held within the school could actually be that dangerous or something. Actually don't know that much about the Witch Hunters I'll need to do some research. lols.

Thanks for the recs.

edited 17th Dec '13 7:59:49 AM by Bileaf

Another thing you could do is avoid the Power Trio dynamic that stories like Harry Potter and Percy Jackson And The Olympians did, which was to have a few students be main characters whom the plot basically revolves around. This is detrimental to the scope of the setting.

Because of this, everyone who doesn't have some personal relationship with the heroes takes a back seat to the plot, which makes it seem like the entire world (which ends up looking rather small) of the school revolves around a few select individuals. It also makes it seem like the other, more anonymous students don't have lives of their own, as everything they say or do is somehow related to the main characters. It's unrealistic that everybody knows the heroes' names, but the heroes only know a handful of others, at least on a friendly basis.

If you're going to write about a magical school, don't make the main characters all the popular kids. All of the students have their own issues to deal with, and in fact, maybe even the background characters and "anonymous" students we never see any focus on have their own arch enemies to deal with, their own individual quests and journeys, and their own lives independent of the "main characters."

A good way to achieve this would be with an Ensemble Cast, where there are many characters, not all of whom are connected, and all of whom are somehow vital to their own storylines. Because there's no point in writing about a school if we're only going to get a glimpse into three students' heads and only those three are truly important.

edited 17th Dec '13 12:36:16 PM by Lennik

I would guess that considering the danger such people with powers pose to the populace untrained it would have to be somewhat prisonlike, not allowing students out for holidays because of the risk and liability of the students leaving. Any signs of power incontinence sets back your graduation date indefinitely, etc.

Yeah, this is definitely, a good idea, I was thinking about setting up the school in an alternate dimension, that way, I can really emphasize the loneliness, "a place where time stands still." maybe.

Been toying with a wizard school. The teachers are not the teaching type, but were forced into the role by their superiors because they're the most knowledgeable in their fields of magic.

Magical community is a bit like it is in Discworld. Magic users tend towards extreme instability, and even with a higher institution to provide them structure they need strong, stable individuals to lead them by the nose, otherwise they'd descend into backstabbing and oneupsmanship.

Given this, the school of necessity strictly indoctrinates the students in a direction of friendship and camaraderie. Students that don't contribute to these goals are "removed from the equation", which is to say they are killed.

Bullies, Smug Snakes and Insufferable Geniuses are the obvious examples, but also those who don't show proper care and act in a reckless manner because they believe Adults Are Useless or who otherwise believe that only they are capable of solving a given problem, never mind that the teachers are bar none the strongest mages in the world (Meaning Harry Potter would be dead within five seconds).

edited 23rd Dec '13 1:48:39 PM by Eagal

Well I don't know know if I'll call it a deconstruction but American Horror Story Coven is set in a witch's school and certainly is a given value of 'adult'.

The Chosen One trope gets played a bit of with witches outright murdering each other over who gets to be the supreme.

edited 23rd Dec '13 6:24:40 PM by joeyjojo

I thought now about a setting on which magic users are quite rare when they're not offspring of magi (but, of course, many can be found, since [A Million Is An Statistic]). They're forced to go to a wizard school very early on and only return home for one week in the entire year; there, they teach the kids how to control their powers before it grows wild and consumes them (and cause damages to the environment in general). Since they are forced to learn from the magical schools the same way lessons are taught in the real life, it is far from cool/fun/awesome.

Magic users who are not under control of the government are considered heretics/dissenters, hunted down and killed, so they're forced to conscript and serve their country, isolated from their families for most of the time. These magi have their own territory on which they live and, most of the time, it is also where they work, similar to an Academy of sorts. Military is not the only service they can provide, as there are healers, architects, spies etc.

Aside from their onerous labor, the only good thing of being a magi (besides being able to act all sinister) is that they're respected by the people and don't need to worry about spenses and needs. That's pretty much all, since they're treated like slaves by nobles and aristocrats alike. Their children are marked with magic as well, being forced to undergo the same thing its parent(s) did.

I clearly didn't develop this much. That was just a random thought.

^sounds good

If you're going for the more Harry Potter style world where the masquerade is in forced and it's Genrally inherited you could emphasise the secret society aspect a bit more.

Wizard family's interested in mundane affairs would easily become the Rothschilds and Rockefellers and any bright young witches or wizards in school would be draw into that shady world.

Think The Skulls but with more occult rituals.

edited 25th Dec '13 1:48:57 PM by joeyjojo

I had a medieval setting in mind when I made that post, though. I forgot that the topic maker wanted a recent era setting. Maybe some of it can still be recycled...

Medieval is fine too.

Just looking for as many ideas as possible actually. Any ideas help me come up with my own, and I can see what other people are thinking as well, it's always a plus. Tangents are great too.

As for my own ideas, I'll probably reveal those when they are relevant, or when I actually write the thing. lol.

edited 30th Dec '13 1:27:52 PM by Bileaf

@Eagal, some of that is in From the New World, combined with some memory wiping to avoid upsetting the other students. Part of what drives the plot is that the memory doesn't entirely vanish.

You could have the school be very dangerous. All those magical abilities in one place in the hands of kids who don't know how to properly use them cant be very safe.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I think everyone is ignoring the obvious problem: If they're powerful enough, witches and wizards are going to be a caste higher than muggles. The fear of this happening is part of the reason for the various witchhunts throughout history. I'll leave the implications of such a scenario as an exercise for the reader...