History Literature / TheScholomance

** Downplayed with the London enclave. At one point they were considered the most powerful enclave in the world, but fell deeply into debt thanks to borrowing loads and loads of mana from other enclaves in order to survive the Blitz. When World War II ended, they no longer had the resources needed to maintain the Scholomance and handed management over to New York. By the time of the present storyline, they're still a very powerful enclave and New York's most powerful ally, but no longer quite the powerhouse they used to be.

* AlphaBitch: Chloe is briefly set up as one, but it soon turns out that she's a perfectly nice person who just never thought about the privilege she derives from being born into a powerful enclave.

** At the end of the first book [[spoiler:we are left uncertain if the plan to fix the scouring equipment worked, saving the graduating class, or if it failed and only succeeded in riling up the mals, dooming the graduating class and potentially endangering the entire school in the year to come. Not to mention El receives a letter from her mother warning her to keep away from Orion, without any further details.]] The second book reveals [[spoiler:not only did it work, Patience and Fortitude ate everything that survived the mortal flame before trying to eat each other as well, making the Scholomance almost entirely mal free except for the larval ones that were already in the school proper]].

* TheAce: Orion is a basically unstoppable monster-killing machine, in addition to being morally upstanding and an all-around NiceGuy. Deconstructed in that this results in absolutely everyone relying on him to the point where he has no friends and doesn't know how to be anything else. Deconstructed further in the second book, where [[spoiler:he reveals that he's been a BloodKnight whose sole desire since childhood has been to kill mals, and even having opinions about how people feel about being saved came later.]] Deconstructed further in the third book, where [[spoiler:we find out he's actually an EldritchAbomination created by sacrificing an entire graduating class the year he was conceived.]]

* MundaneLuxury: As the Scholomance is a SmallSecludedWorld and the students can only bring so many supplies without exceeding the weight allowance, basic necessities for everyday life such as clean clothes can be considered incredible luxuries by the school's low standards.

* DoubleMeaning: In the first book, El states that the school feeds on the students to keep itself running. She is speaking metaphorically--the school keeps itself running by using all the mana the students put it into using their work to maintain its protections, along with helping maintain the FoodChainOfEvil within its halls by having the mals snack on them from time-to-time. [[spoiler:Unbeknownst to her, she is also speaking ''literally'', as the Scholomance was created using the same methods to create a modern enclave, and its associated maw-mouth anchor, Patience, has been residing in the school and gnawing on its inhabitants since the start]].

* DidYouJustPunchOutCthulhu: Maw-mouths are one of the scariest mals of all. A group of ten adult wizards with months of preparation would be lucky to kill one after days of constant effort, and would almost certainly lose people. Prior to the beginning of the series, only one wizard is documented to have ever killed one, [[spoiler:and it's later revealed that this is a lie and he never actually managed to kill it. Meanwhile, El takes one out ''by herself on the fly in under an hour'', and that's just the ''start'' of her mawmouth-killing career]].

* ThereAreNoAdults: The Scholomance is built in the {{Void|BetweenTheWorlds}}, powered by magic, and [[GeniusLoci autonomous enough]] not to need adults on-site. Students are teleported in at the beginning of their freshman year and left to their own devices until graduation... hopefully to survive the [[BoardingSchoolOfHorrors monsters that stalk its halls]]. The original plans for it weren't ''quite'' as isolated, but wizard students are so attractive to mals that mawmouths showed up ([[spoiler:in reality they were there from the start because they had to be to build the Scholomance's foundation stones in the first place]]), and no adults dared take that risk to come in.

* UnreliableNarrator: El routinely tells the audience things that she believes at the time, that then turn out to be false--it starts in Chapter 1 of the first book, when she's sure that Orion was the one to chase the soul-eater into her room. More significantly, by the end of the second book, it's clear that [[spoiler:the Scholomance ''didn't'' want to make her go maleficer, and pretty clearly ''didn't'' want the mawmouth to eat half the freshmen in the first book.]]

* MurderIsTheBestSolution: Being stuck in a DeathTrap of a school, constantly attacked by nightmarish monsters and trained to take advantage of everything and everyone around for your survival is not very conductive to the students' sense of morality. A surprising number of students, not just maleficers, are willing to jump to murder to solve their problems. Need a boost of malia to help you make it to graduation? Murder. A dangerous mal is traveling near your room and you need a new one? Murder. A maybe-maleficer has hooked your enclave's most powerful wizard and might poach him for another enclave? Murder. Someone is doing better than you at school or has something you really want? ''Murder.'' Rarely does it ever occur to any of the students to just ''talk'' to each other.

* MundaneSolution: The major problem with the Golden Stone Sutras is that the final spell requires a tremendous amount of power and can only be channeled by a strict mana wizard, and after Purachana's death no one was able to handle the necessary power. Once the the modern Enclave Builders figured out the strict mana part was entirely necessary, they resorted to [[spoiler:creating a mawmouth out of an undying strict-mana HumanSacrifice just to work around the limitation.]] The solution El and her allies think of? [[spoiler:Have multiple strict-mana wizards cast the final spell as a circle working. They even have a handy supply of strict mana enclave builders ready to go from her family in Mumbai.]]

* ArtificialOutdoorsDisplay: When the gym was first built by the Kyoto enclave over a hundred years ago, it was in the image of a peaceful cherry blossom garden that stunned all the visitors and became the talk of the school. The display fell into complete disrepair after maintenance was cut back and left to the students, with all the plants dead and the colors washed out, making the the entire area look decrepit. [[spoiler:El restores it to its original appearance in the second book, traumatizing three-fourths of the school and making it the perfect hunting ground for mals to prey upon unsuspecting freshmen, the only students not experienced enough to realize that hanging out there is a terrible idea]].

** Anyone who survives the Scholomance will be an industrious hard worker with a multitude of practical skills, and able to cope with general privation inculuded but not limited to sleep deprivation, lack of food, and poor hygiene. And, not least, be a fully-trained wizard. As El notes, the reason the mals come after wizard children is that for the most part, a grown wizard is the apex predator of the magical world.

* PentUpPowerPeril: Some people have a limit for how much mana they can hold at any one time and need to bleed it off otherwise they might pop. [[spoiler:El doesn't have nearly the trouble that others have dealing with large amounts of mana and Orion seems to outstrip her even in adolescence if his ability to hold the whole New York Mana supply is accurate.]]

* ChekhovsGunman: In the first book, El mentions that band of indie punk wizards have been mooching off the London enclave by taking residence in the enclave's lining using some of its old lost entrances from World War II. The leader of these wizards, Yancy, shows up in the third book [[spoiler:and helps El and Liesel escape London after some members of the enclave council try to put El under their thrall as part of their political games]].

* SpoiledSweet: Many of the nicer enclavers, such as Chloe and Alfie, who can be generous once you get to know them and are seemingly ignorant of how lucky they actually are.

* SpoiledSweet: Chloe Rasmussen gradually proves to be this over the course of ''The Last Graduate''. By the time the book ends, El and her end up reasonably good friends.

** While most people who spend enough time with El are unsettled by her, the India enclavers (particularly those from Mumbai) tend to avoid her as much as possible. While El is uncertain whether or not they know about the prophecy her great-great grandmother made about her, they know her family well enough to know that if the Sharmas weren't willing to take her in, it had to be for a very good reason.

* CripplingOverspecialization: Any strong affinity has the potential to become this, but Galadriel's takes the cake. Hers is so geared toward dark magic that she can't take the normal shortcuts everyone else has access to without risking killing everyone around her. She's ''also'' geared towards spells meant to destroy ''armies''; while she can cast such spells far more efficiently than most people, they're still so expensive that she usually can't use them at all against the smaller-scale dangers she actually finds herself in.

* LanguageBarrier: As all the classes in the Scholomance are taught in English or Chinese (the latter a recent development), there is no point in sending a student there if they're not fluent in either or aren't good enough in languages to learn one of them early enough for it to matter. According to El, that doesn't stop a lot of desperate families from sending their kids anyway.