Going off the previous ask, and this is gonna sound a bit odd: do you feel that NRC and RSA being two of the top schools in the TWST universe being male only influences patriarchal behavior?
Hm. That's honestly a pretty difficult question to answer. I would lean more towards no, but truthfully, I don't think we know enough about gender and stuff within Twisted Wonderland to accurately answer.
We know at least the Sunset Savanna is matriarchal, but we don't know about any of the other countries in Twisted Wonderland. Sexism DOES exist in some parts of the world, as evidenced by Epel. We can assume that he got his views from other people in Harveston, but we don't know if that brand of misogyny is typical in other places or Harveston is an outlier.
Vil is someone irl we would call progressive, but truthfully we don't know if other people in Twisted Wonderland would see Vil's disregard for gender norms as progressive or typical. Vil refers to Epel's weird sexism as old-fashioned, but I don't know if that's really an indication of anything. You hear people saying things like "why are you being [insert flavor of bigotry here], it's 2026 grow up." That doesn't mean that weirdo is the outlier; most of the time it reflects that whoever's calling that person out is progressive. Ultimately, I don't know if we have enough information to say how prevalent misogyny and patriarchy are in Twisted Wonderland as whole.
That being said, we do know in real life that single sex schools can inadvertently lead to sexist ideology, but I think this is more of a chicken or the egg kind of situation. US culture is very patriarchal and violent towards women (and honestly anyone who isn't a cis white man), so of course it's gonna bleed into systems within the US, including the school system. Is it really that all-boys schools are always just inherently patriarchal and lead to patriarchal values/mindset? Or are patriarchal values from society seeping into the school system and in all-boys schools, inadvertently reinforcing that worldview?
Not to mention, this isn't even really touching on irl reasons Yana made these schools all-boys schools. Unless she ever talks about it, I doubt we'll get a straight answer, but it could be that there's no in-universe reason for NRC and RSA to be top two best arcane academies and it doesn't mean anything. She could've just done it because those are our main schools and That's It. There's no in-universe justification and she simply didn't think about the ???? implications that would arise from it, which honestly, is what I'm leaning more towards. And that's why I lean more towards no: I simply think Yana didn't think about the implications at the time and so there is no grander in-universe explanation for it. Or at least, not one that involves gender and stuff.
