YMMV / The Scholomance

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Is the Scholomance a poorly maintained death trap passively colluding with the mals it was meant to protect against in the name of its own inscrutable interests, or is it a poorly maintained death trap that is half crippled, working without any support, and making do with the resources it has at hand? Is it tormenting students with sadistic traps, or providing them with theoretically survivable challenges to strengthen and better prepare the survivors? Is it trying to break El and push her head first into the life of a dark wizard, or does it see her as a once in a wizard's-lifetime opportunity to solve some of its most intractable problems and go after the monsters it can't?
    • According to The Last Graduate, the latter answers are closer to the truth. Over 100+ years in operation, the Scholomance has gained a form of sentience. Taking its vague mission statement about sheltering wizard children as its sole guiding principle, it orchestrates an intricate Batman Gambit to push El and the other seniors on a path toward building a safer magical world.
  • Orion Lake. Specifically, his decision at the end of Book 2 to throw El through the portal, seemingly at the cost of being trapped forever in the Scholomance with a mind-bogglingly huge horde of mals. Did he think a Heroic Sacrifice was the only way to save her and contain Patience? Did he not want to burden her with being the only thing that could make him happy in a world without monsters to hunt? Or was he just so high on mana that he couldn't think clearly anymore?
    • The Golden Enclaves reveals that part of his motivation was his awareness that his mother had transformed him into a mana-sucking human-mal hybrid. However, this opens a similar question: did he stay in order to lock himself away and protect the world from himself forever, or because he knew he'd be rescued, and could gain more power to advance Ophelia's plans?
  • The Modern Enclave Builders and the binding curse they put on the spells. Were they trying to ensure that magical civilization would expand without the enclave spells becoming hoarded and lost, but didn't consider what the curse would do if better spells were developed? Or did they foresee other enclave building spells coming into existence and were so proud of their creation that they wanted to ensure their spells were the dominant ones used, even if it meant an ever increasing number of human sacrifices and mawmouths in the world?
• Angst? What Angst?: Much to El's frustration, Orion shrugs off all the painful and terrifying aspects of being at the school and doesn't fear monsters even when they get the better of him. He has a good share of angst in the third book but at the end, with the maw-mouth part of himself gone, he basically sheds the trauma of it and easily forgives his mother. Gwen has to gently tell an incredulous El that he doesn't need months of her care.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: Orion is a maw-mouth hybrid. Several readers guessed this as early as the first book, but it isn't until the third book that it's finally confirmed.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: Either Orion has some form of social disorder or he has been traumatized from a lifetime of people implying his self-worth comes from his ability to slay mals in their defense. His aberrant magical abilities and the habits they engendered probably didn't help either.
• Die for Our Ship: While Liesel is still an Ensemble Dark Horse for some fans, others view El hooking up with her a few times in the third book as an enormous betrayal of the El-Orion ship, although El did think Orion was dead when that started. These fans take out that frustration on Liesel.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Liesel isn't even mentioned in the first book and has her share of abrasive moments in the second one, but her status as a Femme Fatale and Drill Sergeant Nasty who nonetheless has moments of compassion and ends up working hard to save people have made her a highlight of the series for many fans. And that's even before she becomes Friends with Benefits with El in the third book. El openly states that Liesel is to her what she is to Orion.
  • Alfie, the leader of the London enclavers, isn't much more than a Minor Major Character, but is one of the best-liked enclavers due to his Nice Guy attitude and Barrier Maiden skills in the second book.
  • The unnamed Berlin enclaver who, in his sole scene, is the first to offer genuine rewards to anyone who will undertake a risky repair mission.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: To the whole trilogy. After working so hard to evacuate the Scholomance in book two, the third book ends with the Scholomance being rebuilt and put back into operation. But it's OK, because Orion will be there to kill all the monsters! Except that means he's right back where he started, except now he's an adult hanging out with high-schoolers to protect them. In the end, both El and Orion have been forced into lives they didn't choose, and the system that caused all the problems continues more or less unabated. Readers could be forgiven for wondering what the point of it all was.
• Genius Bonus: El references Thucydides's Trap when the students from the Shanghai and New York enclaves are about to fight. Thucydides's Trap is named after the idea that Athens and Sparta were destined to fight because they'd both grown too powerful, but it was actually coined in the modern age to describe a potential for war between the United States and China.
• Harsher in Hindsight: In book one, Chloe says that despite knowing him all her life, Orion only knows her name because his mother drilled him with flash cards. It's meant to be a joke about Orion's cluelessness, but hints at The Reveal in book three: Ophelia used those flash cards to turn Orion into a Manchurian Agent who she could rely on to advance her agenda.
• Magnificent Bitch: Ophelia Lake. It's rare to see a full-on Karma Houdini The Bad Guy Wins in a YA fantasy.
• Nightmare Fuel: Maw-mouths. They are thick, glossy blobs of Mal that are made up of the eyes and mouths of their previous victims, and it is believed that the people who maw-mouths eat never stop feeling it. Their consciousness lives on as long as the maw-mouths do, which is a long time, as there are only three four, after El kills one in Lesson One known instances of a wizard successfully killing a maw-mouth (which requires a Heroic Sacrifice). When El faces one down in "A Deadly Education" and it wraps its tentacles around her, the description sounds uncomfortably like a sexual assault.
  • Gets somehow even more horrifying when the third book shows us how maw-mouths get made. A strict-mana wizard is imprisoned in a crucible and crushed to serve as the foundation of an enclave, then forced to suffer forever as the heart of a maw-mouth. The description of Liu's broken body when El barely saves her from that fate is true Nausea Fuel, and that's when the process doesn't even finish.
• One-Scene Wonder: The Seventh Sage of the Beijing Enclave. He was in the Beijing hideaway when it became a natural enclave of its own accord, and is still around about 1,000 years later, popping in and out of reality whenever it suits his purposes.
• Tear Jerker: Several in The Golden Enclaves, but most notably when El visits Orion's room in New York. It's full of every kind of toy imaginable, all unused in their original packaging. Only the combat equipment looks like it was ever used. It just hammers home how Orion had nothing resembling a normal childhood.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Clarita. Her Beneath Notice Back Story of being an Unknown Rival to every other Academic Alpha Bitch in the school could have made her an interesting supporting character in the earlier sections of the A Deadly Education. Her plans to join the New York Enclave and her role in helping so many seniors make it out of the scholomance alive could have given her a prominent status for the scenes outside of the scholomance in The Golden Enclaves. Instead, she doesn't appear until the penultimate chapter of A Deadly Education and is barely mentioned afterward.
  • David Pires, the salutatorian who lost the valedictorian role to Clarita after spending years in an Assumed Win mode and later joins the climactic quest of A Deadly Education only appears for a few pages and gets no dialogue or onscreen notable accomplishments.
  • Maya Wulandiri is a high-scoring senior who has the interesting motivation of trying to get into a specific enclave because it will let her bring her whole family with her, but only gets a few brief scenes in chapter 12 of A Deadly Education.
  • Mage Born of Muggles Luisa is a Posthumous Character, even though many fans would have liked watching someone with little knowledge of the magical world try to navigate through the Crapsack World of the scholomance.
  • Shanghai enclavers Yuyan and Zixuan get little characterization and barely interact with El except while they're trying to kill her over a misunderstanding. Their magical skills, Zixuan's family relationship to Big Good Li Shangfen, and the way they get into a Love Triangle with Liu could have been explored more.
  • Sudarat doesn't have many scenes in The Last Graduate and is only mentioned a few times in The Golden Enclaves. It would have been interesting seeing her navigate her place in the world after losing her home enclave. She also never seems to find out that El's heroics inadvertently destroyed her enclave, when the fact that El saved her life and she seems like a decent and non-vindictive person could have given an interesting dimension to her interactions with El.
  • Despite being nearly a member of El's A-team, Chloe barely registers in The Golden Enclaves. Even when El learns about Ophelia's plans, she never even considers what she could do with an ally inside New York.

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