History Literature / TheScholomance

** A poignant part of Aadhya's backstory. [[spoiler:One of her grandparents practically locked up their entire family inside their home and refused to let anyone go outside so that way none of the mals could get them (or more specifically, their children). Aadhya's older sister (who was eight at the time), didn't understand this and grew frustrated with all the restrictions, which led to her escaping home to finally see the outside world. By the time any of the adults found out, it was already too late and a mal had already gotten to her. The entire experience forced Aadhya's parents to accept that keeping their children locked up away from the world to protect them wasn't something they could do forever and wouldn't be doing the kids any favors when they were gone, so they completely inverted their strategy. They made sure they had as mundane a house and knew as many mundane kids as possible, with only tiny locked-away rooms for training in magic, and tried to give her as much of a good life as they could before she had to attend the Scholomance]].

* AlchemyIsMagic: Alchemy is one of the three main tracks at the Scholomance, with dedicated labs and supplies. While all students take an alchemy every, only those going for the alchemist-track take the more advanced classes and spend more than the required amount of time in the labs. As the labs, much like the workshops for ShopClass, are frequent hiding places for mals, there's no point in going for the alchemist-track unless you have an affinity for it.

* ShopClass: The assignments are for magical artificing, and if you don't finish by the deadline, your work comes to life and tries to kill you.

* FreshmanFears: Freshmen are the biggest casualties of any one year at the Scholomance. They're the weakest wizards in the school ''and'' the most numerous, making them the prime targets for mals; at the bottom of the social hierarchy, so most of the upperclassmen, even stragglers and losers, have no issues taking advantage of them; and aren't used to life at the Scholomance yet, so they don't have the in-built reflexes and survival skills that their older peers have already developed. Those who don't learn quick are gradually winnowed out until only those who have what it takes to at least make it to next year, if not all four years, are left.

* TeenageWasteland: Averted. Despite being entirely made up of kids aged 14 - 18 with no adult supervision, things generally stay civil in the Scholomance. It helps that the school is dangerous enough on a normal day that no one is particularly eager to add fellow students to the list of things openly trying to kill them. There still might be students ''secretly'' trying to kill them, but they're more of an occupational hazard.

* FreshmanFears: Freshmen are the biggest casualties of any one year at the Scholomance. They're the weakest wizards in the school ''and'' the most numerous, making them the prime targets for mals; at the bottom of the social hierarchy, so most of the upperclassmen, even stragglers and losers, have no issues taking advantage of them; and aren't used to life at the Scholomance yet, so they don't have the in-built reflexes and survival skills that their older peers have developed yet. Those who don't learn quick are gradually winnowed out until only those who have what it takes to at least make it to next year, if not all four years, are left.

* UpsettingTheBalance: This one of the basic laws of reality as far as the magical world goes. If anyone does something that tips the scales too much in one direction, then the universe will engineer some kind of event to tip it back so both sides are more equitable. El initially believes that this is why she was born with so much power and prophecy of doom relating to becoming an EvilSorceress--both of her parents are paragons of goodness, her father having heroically died to save her mother (who had been pregnant with El at the time) from a maw-mouth during their graduation, and her mother being a IncorruptiblePurePureness GranolaGirl who heals other wizards for free. Therefore, their daughter being destined to be the worst evil wizard society has seen in centuries is par the course. [[spoiler:Of course, her theory is later proven to be wrong. While El was indeed born to correct an imbalance, it wasn't one her parents caused]].

* UpsettingTheBalance:

** ''The Golden Enclaves'' reveals that [[spoiler:this is part of why El was born. By slaughtering every student of one year in the Scholomance in order to create Orion, her wizard/maw-mouth hybrid LivingWeapon, Ophelia created a terrible imbalance in the universe that needed to be corrected. The universe responded with El, the only wizard powerful enough to eventually stop him when he finally gave in to his hunger, and able to end the injustices that are the maw-mouths. El having the strength to not only kill maw-mouths but do it easily has a more gentle use too, even beyond ending the suffering of those a maw-mouth has devoured--it allows her to create Golden Stone foundations in place of the malia-anchored ones, making her the embodiment of the change in magical society her parents earnestly wished and suffered for]].

* 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 luxurious by the school's low standards.

* ServileSnarker: El's mouse familiar Precious who, while loyal to El, has no issues biting her ear and protesting any actions her master commits or is about to commit that she doesn't agree with. Liu later notes that Precious developing an independent personality is another sign of El's affinity for destructive power.

* MutuallyAssuredDestruction: The eastern enclaves got the western enclaves who manage the Scholomance to add the Chinese-language track of general classes to the school and give them more Scholomance seats for their children to attend by threatening to create another Scholomance to compete with the current one. This is actually something that neither side wants, as there simply isn't enough indie wizard children to populate both schools and act as diversionary fodder without increasing the mortality rate of enclaver children. However, the threat had enough teeth that the Board of Governors relented and gave them what they wanted anyway.

** El's full name is [[Literature/TheLordOfTheRings Galadriel]] Higgins.

* EstablishingCharacterMoment: The first time we meet El, she's trying to find a simple spell to clean her floor, instead receiving hundreds of spells for laying waste to her enemies.

* FiveSecondForeshadowing: During the [[spoiler:rescue mission to save Liu]], El and her friends encounter the Seventh Sage of Beijing, the founder of the Beijing enclave. He helps them by [[spoiler:giving El a scroll that will take her to Liu]], and the last thing he says before disappearing is: "I'm tired of demons in my house." Later, in that very same chapter, [[spoiler:El learns that the creation of an enclave involves turning a strict-mana wizard into a maw-mouth]].

* CripplingTheCompetition: The competition for Valedictorian is so fierce that back in the old days, candidates were willing to resort to murder to take out their rivals. The school remedied this by having the rankings posted at the end of the first semester of a class's senior year so that way none of those in the running would know who was at the front of the pack until it was too late to matter. However, while that stopped most of the killing, it didn't prevent candidates from regularly sabotaging each others' work.

* ObviouslyEvil: The more malia maleficers take and use the harder it is to conceal resultant [[SupernaturalSensitivity tell]] [[RedRightHand tales]], until everyone can sense it. That's why everyone thought El was a maleficer, because her strong affinity for TheDarkArts gave her the aura of one (and her lack of displayed power only meant that she was bad at it). [[spoiler:What makes Ophelia Rhys-Lake so unsettling is how she's ''not'' this, looking like a perfectly ordinary woman who is neither supernaturally beautiful nor a decrepit hag. If it weren't for El's heightened SupernaturalSensitivity, neither she nor her friends would've realized she was a maleficer at all]].

* HadToBeSharp: 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.

** As the Scholomance was built by western enclaves and has only ever been maintained by them, a disproportionate amount of seats are allocated towards wizards in the western world, to the point the nearly every indie kid in the UK, including [[MageBornOfMuggles kids who don't even know they're magic]], gets a seat at the school. Compare that to the east, where the enclaves only have just enough to send their own children (and even ''that'' is a recent development) and a handful of seats for their own indie kids to compete viciously over. As there is a stark divide between the western and eastern wizards with minimal overlap, that means the eastern enclavers have less potential allies and recruits to choose from for graduation and thus lower survival rates than their western counterparts. This has become a major point of contention in the recent decades and drives much of the conflict of the second book.

*** The Jaipur enclave is allies with Shanghai and were the ones to give the enclave-building skills to a circle of wizards who lived in Pune in exchange for a book of spells the circle had co-authored together. When the circle fell to in-fighting, killing most of them off and ending the enclave before it could even be built, they took on a few of the survivors.

* ProfessionalButtKisser: Minion-track kids, who are non-enclaver students who aren't magically-talented enough make themselves useful allies for the Graduation Run (or do maintenance shifts) and don't have the social skills to make good connections with others. They instead resort to kissing up to enclavers and anyone else with enough talent and clout for whatever scraps they have left to throw them. Ibrahim is an example of a minion track kid, someone that El is surprised to realize actually does like people and isn't putting up an act.

*** The Munich enclave is said to be the most powerful of the German enclaves, and is integral to the backstory of Liesel. [[spoiler:Her father is a council member of Munich, and his wife is the daughter of their current Domina. He could've easily brought Liesel and her mother into the enclave but it would've meant losing his council seat, so he essentially abandoned them, only bothering to give Liesel a Scholomance seat to keep their mouths shut]].

** When you re-read the series, [[spoiler:it becomes much more obvious that the Scholomance is preparing El for her ''actual'' destiny as the destroyer of maw-mouths and the builder of Golden Stone enclaves, than preparing her to be an EvilSorceress like she initially believed for most of the books. For her senior year, it even gave her an independent study explicitly focused on nothing else but translating the Golden Stone sutras]].

* GoneHorriblyRight: [[spoiler:El's parents wanted the Golden Stone sutras for enclave-building badly enough to attempt {{summoning|Ritual}} them without naming [[EquivalentExchange a price]]. El's father got eaten by a maw-mouth, [[SinsOfOurFathers El herself suffered a miserable childhood]] and survived a maw-mouth attack, and, after everything, El shows up at her mother's house with the Sutras, and [[MyGodWhatHaveIDone Gwen takes it hard indeed]].]]
* GoodAllAlong: In ''The Last Graduate'', [[spoiler:El spends half the series thinking that the Scholomance is out to either kill her or drive [[ApocalypseMaiden her]] into embracing TheDarkSide (which means she ends up killing a lot of people), only to realize that it's trying to force her to ''save'' everyone in the only way it can.]]
* GoodIsNotNice: El is incredibly cranky and cynical, and so prone to self-sabotage she can't even ''pretend'' to be polite to enclave kids--but she also actively chooses, over and over, to be pure mana instead of using malia to make her life much easier. [[spoiler:In book 2, she goes from caring only about herself to refusing to let any of her friends die, and then from there to refusing to let anyone in her year die. She eventually comes around to trying to fixing the Scholomance so kids don't die, period. In book 3, she goes out and tries to save the world--not from some evil external threat, but from itself, and the pettiness, shortsightedness, and greed of modern wizards.]]

** Sir Alfred Cooper Browning, the founder and original architect of the Scholomance. When you think about it, every single conflict in the series can be traced back to the founding of the school. [[spoiler:The establishment of the Scholomance led to a dramatic decrease in the mortality rate for western wizards, which led to a rise in the rate western enclave were being built (and thus the number of maw-mouths translocated to the east). That eventually led to the collapse of Shanghai, whose revival and subsequent retaliation with sponsoring and supporting more easter enclaves started the LensmanArmsRace that culminated in Orion and El's respective births]].

** [[spoiler:The wife of Liesel's father is able to get away with essentially murdering Liesel's mother because she is the daughter of the Domina of the Munich enclave. Therefore, the only hope Liesel has of revenge is to become the Domina of a more powerful enclave]].

* StutterStop: One of the stragglers in El's year, Hideo, is actually a rather talented incanter--who is unfortunately inflicted with a horrible case of shakes (likely the result of either a failed poisoning or trauma) that make him interrupt his own incantations. Luckily for him, El's mother has a potion to help settle someone's nerves, and with some experimentation, her and Chloe manage to brew up a batch for him.

* BecauseYouWereNiceToMe: Inverted. Orion starts hanging out with El because she's the only person who isn't nice to him. Given the intense pressure the guy constantly feels from all the fawning adulation of his peers, it's understandable.

* ScrewTheRulesIHaveConnections: [[spoiler:The wife of Liesel's father is able to get away with essentially murdering Liesel's mother because she is the daughter of the Domina of the Munich enclave. Therefore, the only hope Liesel has of revenge is to become the Domina of a more powerful enclave]].

** It's offhandedly mentioned in the second book that the reason why there's no enclave in Pune is because the wizards who were going to build it immediately started infighting after receiving the enclave-building spells from the Jaipur enclave in trade. Most of them died, some joined Jaipur, and the rest renounced magic, purged their body of mana, and left to live ascetic lives in the woods. A seemingly innocuous fun fact [[spoiler:and one of the initial hints about the dark nature of modern enclave-building; it's implied the reason they began infighting is because they fell into conflict over whether or not to use the spells, knowing they would be condemning an innocent life to becoming a maw-mouth in exchange for their new home]].

* RewatchBonus: When you re-read the series, [[spoiler:it becomes much more obvious that the Scholomance is preparing El for her ''actual'' destiny as the destroyer of maw-mouths and the builder of Golden Stone enclaves, than preparing her to be an EvilSorceress like she initially believed for most of the books]].