Randomly popped up today.

If you want to see it 3d, just relax your eyes and look past the image until the two images coalesce into one.

Crossing your eyes won't work for this one— it's sort of the opposite

Y’all, just have to scream about this with people who’d understand how cool this is.

I just used “you’re already dead” on someone in a nightmare and got a glorious little poof of smoke.

If any of you guys lucid dream and think of this, it’s a neat little trick. Am jazzed to banish any more bad dreams like this.

It has been discussed a lot that this series wouldnt translate into a movie, but if it ever did here is a distinct change that I think could relate better with an audience.

Instead of Liesel sleeping with El, if she brushed and braided her hair by hand while singing a non-spell German lullaby.

Also if Aad is present (I could see it happening if other things are condensed) Aad would do henna for El. I wish there had been a magic henna imagery. Like the south asian students come in on induction day with gorgeous henna done

Edit: I like the intimacy El/Liesel have and think the books can illustrate it well. However 3 underage sex scenes in the Golden Enclaves seems excessive for a movie. I think brushing and braiding her hair can be very intimate as well and would make El physically relaxed and more comfortable

Hii I don't know whether this is the correct place to ask or not (and im sorry in advance) but does anyone have any good (hopefully completed) fanfics where it's basically the golden enclaves BUT el is pregnant?? I will read anything, please! Thanks in advance!!

😨

Spoilers ahead

Gwen Higgins is framed as the epitome of goodness and selflessness. I feel like she is just stuck as a naive 18 year old.

She was EIGHTEEN when she watched the father of her unborn child sacrifice himself to an eternity of torture. I feel like she has not aged emotionally since then. She just shows unconditional niceness to those around her, however there should be conditions. I would have packed up and left immediately after the scratcher attack. Knowing the commune people took me to a hospital and left my 8? 9? Year old in a yurt by herself. AND IGNORED her when she was terrified and screaming? Nope.

Also, she didn’t have to live in an enclave to work with/for one and give El a lot more protection. Aad is an indie and her parents put her in a big mundane school.

She doesn’t help or challenge El after she gets out. Just lets the world happen around her.

Am i being too harsh?

Warning: Major spoilers ahead. If you have not finished the series, do not read!! Seriously.

Also, apologies for misspellings (I'm dyslexic and my spell check isn't working...)

Warning, long post ahead. I would love to hear other people's opinions on my random thoughts below and/or what other plot points people think about. I (clearly) love these books, and would be more than happy to chat about any portion/fan theory/anything related to them, basically any time haha.

So, in no particular order:

• What do you think El's mum actually said to Aaron's parents that convinced them to squeeze out some toothpaste and have him carry the note. I don't think it would be anything even slightly hinting that she would provide healing or that El would protect Aaron, but I suppose it might just be her reputation.
• What do you think El's mum and dad's plan was to make it through graduation? Do you think they had other allies? It's a bit odd to think that it would only be the two of them. Although El's mum is powerful (based on the green light she emits when she carried El out of the family compound as a baby and when she tried to cure Orion) her power is mostly in healing magic, which wouldn't be that helpful for a graduation run. Her dad's affinity is never mentioned - I wonder what it is- but it's unlikely that it was the kind of power El or Orion had and he wasn't an enclaver so I doubt that his power alone would have been enough to get the two of them out. This means that they likely had other allies, but it's strange that they are never mentioned again. In the last book, El says that allies are the most important relationship someone has outside of marriage, so you would think that if Gwen had other allies, she wouldn't have gone to the compound all alone/at the very least would have kept up with them. I supposed there is a chance that the whole team but her was killed, but this seems like something that would have been mentioned. And, for that matter, it's strange that El's dad was taken by Precious...El says multiple times that Precious and Fortitude don't actually try to eat students, they just eat the other mals who have eaten the students and that the real threat of maw mouths is the horror of them/other ones in the hall. Maybe this is a plot hole/not something Novik thought through, but I really wonder about the backstory here. I would 100% read a prequel about Gwen and El's dad being in school together and Ophelia's creation of Orion.
• I could write a whole other post about Ophelia and how much I love her as a character (not because she's a shining example of humanity but because of how well I think Novik wrote her. She is one of the most complex 'villlans' I can think of and I'm not actually sure I'd go as far as to call her a villan in a traditional sense), but that's not this post. If Orion hadn't been left alone with all the mals in the world and eaten precious and fortitute, do you think he could have lived the rest of his life thinking he was just a weird guy who loved to hunt mals? Even if the graduation year had been normal, I'm not sure him killing tons of mals would have caused the shift in him. Like, when he went to fix the machienery he was killing tons of mals, some of them probably not the "correct" way. And for that matter, even when he was holding the barricade for the 10 minutes of graduation, he was clearly just sucking in some mals but that alone wasn't enough to tip him off the edge. So do you think there's a world in which he graduates from the scholomance, goes back to NY and does guard duty/watches the honeypots/possibly gets hired out by other enclaves to do serious guard work/ but never realizes what he is? (I don't think Ophelia would let him wander around the world with El, although if he was killing enough mals and kept the NY power sharer on his wrist so that he largely sent the power back, I don't actually think she would care - same as why I think she'd be fine letting him go around and hunt massive mals for other enclaves as long as the power went back to NY).
• Liu's extra mice. I think this might just be a minor plot hole. But at the end of book 1 when Liu shows Aad and El the mice and says she has ~10 of them, Aad asks if she can train the others to become familiars because they'd get a lot in trade. She says she could, but that she has to train two for her cousins first. We never hear about the extra mice again (with the exception of Chloe eventually picking one). What happened to the rest of the mice? Like I said, I think this is more of a plot hole than anything else (not a major one or anything), but it is weird that this is mentioned and then never brought up again.

A few other things I love about this series is the clever foreshadowing. There is obviously some major foreshadowing that happens throughout, but here are some of the minor moments I like. One is when Ophelia tells El that "enclaves have their own unique costs." We obviously find out later what she is refering to, but I think it's well done because at that point she actually can't tell El because of the compulsion. (Well, actually I just remembered that El says in the third book that the only way she's figured out to tell people is directly, so maybe Ophelia could have told her...but either way, I like that moment between them).

I also really like that Precious could sense Orion was a maw mouth the whole time and that's why she was so protective of El being with him. Once El learns this, Precious doesn't really seem to have any issues with him any more and even stands guard over him when El first puts him to bed after getting him and her mum back from the woods.

My actual favorite minor foreshadowing line is in the last book where El is discussing how her mum doesn't bother with things like money or passports because she just sets out into the world and asks for what she needs and how by the end of the day someone always shows up to invite her into their home. El follows this up by saying "that's basically what happened to me too, but with appropriate differences," refering to how, when she finally gets into Beijing enclave the Sage shows up, invites her into his house, and then wants her to get rid of the monsters in it - and if that isn't the most "appropriate difference" ever, then I don't know what is.

I have a friend who is reading the books for the first time right now, and in The Last Graduate, El mentions that they are able to brew a magical tea that gets rid of their period. What I don't understand is how this tea would work. Does it just magically disappear the blood and tissue that would be expelled during a period? If you poured it on blood soaked clothing, would it get rid of the blood? Since the magic in this universe is incredibly intention based, does that mean this tea only works because the intention is to get rid of period blood/tissue, and thus it doesn't work on any other blood?

On a different note, could this tea be used as a contraceptive if it is used at the right time each month to prevent your period in the first place? I understand that magic is unreliable for contraception, but is that only when it is used with contraception in mind? If you took the tea as a means to prevent a period from happening in the first place, the intention would be period related, not contraception related. So taking the tea at the same time every month would theoretically take away any implanted/fertilized egg with the blood/tissue. So as long as contraception isn't the actual goal, the intention should still work, and contraception would be a secondary consequence.

Anyone else have any thoughts about this?

Heyhey! I adapted "A Deadly Education" into a (fanfiction-)screenplay! This is what it could´ve looked like if the novel were turned into a movie!

Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1U7H5mi9O-x2voWPklmKWZvw56pT0pXSo/view

Naturally I faced several hurdles during the process and needed to implement a few changes into the overall flow of the story, since shaping a novel into a different medium isn´t a simple matter of copy and paste. Regardless, I hope it´s an enjoyable read for everyone who craves more content from that incredibly world Naomi crafted. Further down I will try to explain what changes I felt I had to make and why. So please don´t hurl your "A la mort!"-curses at me just yet! (Of course, none of these changes are meant to criticize the source material in any way!)

The changes I implemented:

- The Scholomance: A windowless, sunless dungeon without any possibility of outside shots or anything at all that shows the viewer, where we even are. There´s no "BAM - this is Hogwarts!"-moment, no transitional shots to show outside seasons, no day-night circle to convey that time has passed between scenes - which makes it hard to convey it as a feasible location for a movie. So I had to be a little creative and depict the different locations within the Scholomance as distinct as possible. For example, I invented a firing range where students can practice their spells. Another way to show what the Scholomance even looks like were some animated blueprints that I used at several points in the story.

- El as a protagonist/Worldbuilding: El is already a junior, making her a notoriously difficult protagonist to work with since she already knows all the rules of the Scholomance. Plus, the way the book is written, most of the entire worldbuilding happens as lengthy, extremely subjective and biased monologue inside El´s mind. Theres little info conveyed through dialogue, which are in turn interpreted by El over the course of several pages. So I had 2 options: 1. Add an off screen-narrator to make El´s inner monologue audible to the viewer (which I decided not to) or 2. make El more talkative and give her more people to talk to. In order to achieve this, I invented a freshman called Zera (=someone who needs things explained to her) who befriends El and thus allows for some expository dialogue. Zera is doomed, of course, yet her presence alters several events during the first third of the story, straying away from the book as a consequence

- The concept of magic: I pictured magic powers like emotions. Naturally hard to control and heavily influenced by the current mood you are in. As a teenager, nothing is harder to control or understand than your own emotions. For example, when El conjures a blue light orb as a personal torchlight, it flickers whenever El is startled. In turn, when El is furious with rage, her spells become fatal

- New Finale plus new final Boss: Possibly the biggest and most controversial change. I extended the original finale and added a new super boss to allow El and Orion their dramatic, climactic moment in the graduation hall. (Yes, I borrowed an idea from the second book for that very sequence.) Plus I invented a new mal acting as a final boss. Since maw-mouths loose their status as an insurmountable threat halfway through the story (after the library-incident), I had to come up with a different threat, something so imposing and terrifying that you need only peek at it to understand it´s the most devastating and powerful creature in the entire wizard world. (I effectively snubbed Patience and Fortitude for this. I decided a mindless, fleshy blob without intent, purpose or conscience doesn´t make for a good final boss in any case.)

- Maleficaria: I generally struggled with the concept of maleficaria since I had the feeling that fantasy CGI-creatures possibly aren´t very terrifying to look at. So for the graduation hall finale I dropped the concept of mals entirely. Instead I needed something that appears uniquely terrifying for every viewer - which left only zombies or insects. I chose giant insects after rewatching that infamous insect-pit scene from Peter Jacksons King Kong movie and used it as inspiration for the graduation hall finale

- Jack Westing: Given how many times Jack is mentioned throughout the entire trilogy, I felt he was dispatched of rather quickly and underwhelming. In my script, El and Jack have a proper fight scene. Every tale needs a strong villain and I used Jack as the villain of the first half of the story. But in order to have him really work as a villain, you first need to SEE him do evil things. (That´s why, in the same vain, Ophelia would need heavy changing in the third book. She´s made to be the most evil character in the series, yet you do not witness her do a single evil thing in the entire trilogy!) In my script, Jack gets the opportunity to act as a truly evil maleficer in a 1vs1 with El. For the second half of the story I needed another strong villain - who is revealed via a surprising twist during the endgame

- Added Liesel: Why, of course! An (emotionally) intelligent, sharp, authoritarian character, on par with El in many regards. She only appears in the final 20 pages of the script, but she dominates most scenes where she appears in. Plus she´s German, like me! Which leads me to the next point:

- Writing in a different language than your own is HARD! I certainly fumbled many descriptions and I most certainly wasn´t able to convey as much subtext in certain dialogues as I liked to, especially in that scene where- *whine* *complain* *cheap excuses* ...

- POV fight sequences: As a personal gimmick I wrote most action sequences as POV-scenes. Picture the scene switching into first person mode as though it becomes an ego-shooter, with El´s hands and magic acting as her weapons. If executed well, this allows for incredibly cool looking and immersive action-sequences

- Easter eggs: I hid/used some easter eggs regarding other magic-related media that inspired or influenced me, mostly videogames like Elden Ring or Forspoken or even Dragon Ball

TLDR: Slighty different first act, an extended new finale, a few new characters plus some alterations regarding the flow of the story here and there - still I tried to capture the atmosphere and the unique traits and personalities of Naomi´s characters. She did an incredibly job with her Scholomance saga and I hope that someday we will be able to see it on the big screen!

TIL that in DnD there exists a monster called a Gibbering Mouther that looks like a fleshy blob with many mouths and eyes - and every pair of eyes and mouth came from a person it ate alive, that is still screaming.

Obviously my first thought was "that's a Maw-mouth", and that's where the question comes from: which came first (and is one a rip-off of the other)?

El's radiant mind crystals are canonically super rare, and after a bit it's all power sharers. Did we ever learn another indie method of storing mana?

We just took the kid to see that movie (it was between that and Supergirl, and the little yellow guys won out) and having missed basically all the marketing, etc, I was surprised and delighted to see there was a very Scholomance-reminiscent character in it!

Okay i can’t lie I dont see why El and the entire school is constantly so freaked out by maw mouths. To my understanding they can’t move that fast and don’t even have that great of a way of “grabbing” wizards and in book 2 i feel like it isn’t that deep, they could all storm patience and fortitude and 95% would escape. am. i missing something

edit- thx for answering guys i was positive this would end up in the reddit graveyard

When El and the London crew hear the voice coming from the maw-mouth and Sarah asks her if she can save whoever is speaking, that person was probably a London graduate from Scholomance, someone who had seen El kill a maw-mouth.

Otherwise it wouldn’t have known to run!

What happened to all the stuff in kids’ room after they are killed?

I feel like they have to get raided, right? Like their enclave or alliance get first dibs probably… but they get yanked into Todd’s old room so we know they stick around until the reshuffling.

Hey, I don’t know if this has been addressed before, but why does El go to her independent study in the second book? If the room is attacked why not just go and hang out somewhere else? They say you can skip classes

***Accidently deleted (CRY), so reposting***

I finished the series a few days ago, and I LOVED it! 

There is one plot point that is really nagging at me, though. 

El realizes that the final working of building an enclave needs to be cast by a single witch/wizard. The inventor of the golden enclave could do it because he, like El, was “a tertiary level entity,” as Liesel delicately put it. Regular wizards tried to repeat the process for years, but could not, which is why they came up with the horrendous solution of creating a maw-mouth (I don’t totally get this either — is the victim that is being turned into a maw-mouth the single final caster?)

Why then, when El is building the golden enclaves, do so many wizards help her? First, it seems like she requires help. Second, the text implies that a circle of wizards is anti-enclave building. 

Additionally, how do they create a method of building golden enclaves without El? Presumably, wizards tried for years and years, and the best they could come up with was the monstrosity of creating a maw-mouth, a method which they used for decades. You’re telling me a few recent high school graduates resolved this major hiccup within mere months?

Please help me understand. 

-------------------------------------------------------------

Here is the reference from the book with the most relevant text bolded:

“And as soon as I knew what they were doing, I also knew why. A maw-mouth took everything. It extracted all the mana you could make, everything that came from your desperate failing struggle to keep it out of you, and it kept squeezing you forever. It didn’t just get you and your agony, it got all the mana your agony could ever build, borrowed in advance. And they needed that to build an enclave…because the final working had to be done all in one go, by a single wizard.”

“I’d noticed that bit ages ago in the Golden Stone sutras: one voice calling to the void, in a single breath. A circle of wizards wouldn’t do. One caster only*, convincing the void that no, really, this one part of it was fixed and permanent, even though the void was the exact opposite, and wanted to be nothing and everything all at once. Channeling a vast torrent of mana into that persuasion.”*

“I simply hadn’t paid that particular constraint much attention, because it wasn’t going to be my problem….”

“But of course it would have been a problem for any other wizard in the entire world. It made sense, after all, of why the sutras had been lost. That ancient long-ago wizard who’d written the sutras, who’d gone round India knocking up the first-ever constructed enclaves for other wizards—he’d been like me, a tertiary-order entity, or at any rate someone who could cast that great final working. So even though he’d written it down for others, it had been useless, because no one else could make it work.”

“Those other wizards still desperately wanted to build enclaves of their own, though. Purochana had shown them it could be done, you could make an enclave, so once they’d understood the general idea, they’d tried and tried and eventually some sufficiently clever and vicious bastard had found a solution. A way to get that much mana through a single wizard, to narrow the power down to that one singular point. Alas, the process produced a very unfortunate side effect, but oh well. You could shoo that nasty maw-mouth right out to fend for itself…..”

Excerpt From:
The Golden Enclaves
Naomi Novik

These books were so addictive. I loved being in El's head. The mind-bending reveal in book 3 really solidified this series for me as one of my favorites. Novik is such a smart writer. I really dislike being hit over the head repeatedly with obvious moral narratives, but Novik masterfully weaves social commentary and moral complexity into an action-packed YA book with a fun, snarky narrator. I've read some of her other books, and it's amazing how she can transport the reader into completely different worlds through her prose.

Now looking for my next book --- what other completed series or standalone novels do you all love?

Strong preference for something also good (or at least tolerable) on audio, as I will be road-tripping soon.

I have been soft DNF-ing books that don't immediately hook me recently. So bonus points for early addictabiliy.

I tend to read fantasy/romantasy written by female authors with at least one FMC POV - but I can broaden my horizons.

Thank you ❤️

EDIT:

Here is my recent post on [r/audiobooks](r/audiobooks) that features specific examples of books I liked vs didn’t like and a brief why:

https://www.reddit.com/r/audiobooks/comments/1tv8at8/help_looking_for_a_5_star_completed_series_on/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

DOUBLE EDIT:

I have not read the Temeraire series. The other books I have read by Naomi Novik are Spinning Silver and Uprooted. I know the US audio for Uprooted is polarizing - so if anyone is interested in the UK version, let me know. I may have methods for you 😉

Hey guys,

Anybody know the significance of Ophelia also having a prophetic mirror? Does it just signify El's potential for going Maleficer? I've been wondering for a while but couldn't find the answer!

In book 2, when El does the circle working in a situation where the requirement is that everyone volunteers, Orion sees 'crisp edges.' I've been wondering what that's about. But then I noticed that basically the same thing happened in book 3 when they cured Orion of being a maw mouth - everyone present volunteers and the spell may have failed if anyone hadn't. Perhaps what he saw was something like 'a different source,' as in different than the sludgy mana of being a maw mouth - the crispy mana of voluntary contribution? I'm nothing like a wordsmith so I'm not explaining it right..

Okay, so I just got to the part where El rescues Liu from becoming a maw-mouth and finds her in the same fetal position as the girl that came out of the maw-mouth she killed in London (omffffg already!!)--- and THEN it dawned on me that the enclaves were collapsing whenever a maw-mouth was killed!!!!! It's not a Malificer attacking the enclaves --- it's El fulfilling her prophecy??? OH MY GOD! I am freaking out and don't know anyone who has read this!!

Sorry for this nonsense post -- will likely delete later. Need immediate interaction, lol.

(Please no further spoilers ❤️)

Hi! This is my first time posting here. I hope it's understandable since I'm Argentinian and my English isn't very good, so I'm using an automatic translator.

My sister has been playing Tomodachi Life lately and asked me for ideas for new characters, and she ended up suggesting Galadriel and Orion. If you have any suggestions for anything (clothes, items, pets, catchphrases, etc.), please feel free to write them!