#buried deep

[disease]

“ARCHIVE IS MY KINK” | FEB 2024 PHOTOGRAPHY: ‘BURIED DEEP’

[crossedwithblue]

Balance and fair exchange in the Scholomance

I'm fresh out of my first Schlomance reread, and, besides thoroughly enjoying the foreshadowing, I have Thoughts about the ideas of balance and fair exchange in the series. I'm a scientist by training and Indian by origin, and both of those come into it.

Let's start with mass in and out of the school (because that was the start of this post). The seniors grow over the course of their four years - a lot. Between 14-18, most boys are going to have several growth spurts, and many girls might have reached their adult height but they're still gonna fill out into their adult body types*. We also know that the freshers get a very strict weight allowance. My hunch is that the collective allowance is the difference between the incoming freshers' and the outgoing seniors' bodyweight. This would preserve the mass balance within the school such that no mana is wasted on importing or exporting excess mass (more on that in a minute!). Presumably, the collective allowance is equally distributed, since if the enclavers had managed to skew it in their favour, it would most definitely be mentioned, plus this also fits well the the Scholomance's impersonal fairness**.

N.B. the collective weight difference is probably less than you'd think. Personally, I (cis woman) was already pretty much my adult height and weight at 14, it just redistributed itself a lot, from my tummy to my hips and breasts. The boys would definitely mostly pick up in height, but given that they were all fed up before initiation, even they'd probably have less of an overall weight difference than you'd think - which is why the weight allowance is so strict. Then again, any equipment they're taking out with them helps push it back the other way.

*(the malnutrition they face in the Scholomance would admittedly hamper their growth, but given that the boys manage to shoot up in height and the girls get their periods, and that they're able to keep up with the gruelling study and graduation-prep schedules, and that multiple people including El are described as putting on muscle, it does seem like the school is at least able to feed most of the kids well enough that they're reasonably physically healthy)

**(slightly but not entirely jossed by the short story in Buried Deep - it could still work in the framework of my theorising, if this was changed after the events of canon).

I typed all that out and then questioned how it makes the magical ingredients work. Food and water take care of themselves via excreting about the same, as do gases. My extremely morbid answer to this is, uh, dead bodies. And the mana generated by the schoolwork and the suffering and the deaths, I guess. IIRC people can very easily lose stuff or have it turn 'bad', so perhaps that helps with the balance of mass too.

Back to my point about importing/exporting mana - mana is a lot of things in this universe. It's bargaining power, it's currency, and it's energy. My headcanon is that the mana is actually the energy that should be wasted through heat when you do anything at all, but wizards have the ability to recapture and store it somehow - which is why everyone has a finite capacity. They're just, IDK, as close to a perpetual motion machine as you can get? Obviously far from perfect, since they have the aforementioned finite capacities and still need to eat and sleep etc. But the way mana is talked about is pretty similar to the way energy behaves in the real world, IMO. The Scholomance isn't terribly hard-rules with its magic but this is one that's pretty consistent. You can't create or destroy energy. You can't get something from nothing, that's not how the world works. Someone, somewhere, will pay the price, even if you don't know who or how or when.

This ties in extremely effectively with the idea of balance and fair exchange that's central to the Scholomance series. The enclaves can't stabilise space out of nothing, they have to borrow it from somewhere (plus the whol deal with enclaves in the first place - I won't spoiler it, but iykyk!). You have to do the work to build up mana, and malia use has its own terrible costs. Aadhya and El's friendship starts with Aadhya brokering deals; El respects and likes her because she does so fairly. The universe is a horribly, wonderfully fair creditor and debtor: it will always, always collect, but equally, it will always fulfil your sacrifices, even if you could never predict how any of it comes due.

For me, El and Orion being drawn to each other fits in with this. As far as I know, karma doesn't work in a 'sins of the fathers' way - why would it, when you're going to be reborn into your own consequences anyway - but El was born to be Orion's counterweight and balance, the golden child illuminating the dark void. I'm sure it's been said before it's very obvious symbology, but still worth including in the list of points. (Side fun fact: 'Deepthi' means 'light' in Sanskrit - it's a very popular name, and of course is El's prophetic ancestress's name. Coincidence? Maybe, but I doubt it very much).

I've talked quite a bit in my previous post about how it seems like Indian philosophy is very deeply baked into the worldbuilding of the series, and I think this is another case of that. Everyone's heard of the concept of karma, of course, but the Western notions of it aren't Thee most accurate. Karma in Indian philosophy and religion is a more long-term thing, there's no 'instant karma'. Most of the time, the karmic consequences won't manifest until your next life at the earliest - and, of course, your karma determines what your rebirth will be. Good karma means you end up as a noble animal, bad karma means you'll be an earthworm, just as examples. This also fits in pretty well with the mana/malia stuff, which I talk about a bit more in the first post.

So that turned into a bit of a ramble of science and culture in the worldbuilding, less coherent than I originally planned, but I hope someone finds this interesting and/or food for thought! Novik does such a masterful job of weaving allegory and philosophy into this series, I love it.

[lyndentree63]

I just finished the whole Scholomance trilogy and now I'm reading the After Hours short story and I'm crying over these freshmen who can have roommates and not be scared of mals 24/7, and can go home for Christmas. Is this what it feels like to watch your children after you break generational cycles of trauma and abuse?

[whilereadingandwalking]

Naomi Novik's short story collection, Buried Deep and Other Stories, features short stories that range from Greek myth retellings to Pride and Prejudice (but with dragons)—yes, literally, and I was surprised by just how good it was—to fairytale-like tales that only Novik could create.

This book is the collection of a serial novelist. Many of these tales are set in previous or future novel's worlds. That's not a complaint—"Spinning Silver" works on its own as well as a jumping off point for her later novel, and I loved our dips into Schlomance, Temeraire, and even an upcoming world. But it's worth mentioning as there are often two kinds of SFF story collections—a collection of tales from an author who's written many a tale here and many a tale there, and now they're all finally in the same place, and a collection of individual stories that all stand on their own and are written for their own sake. This is the former.

My favorite stories were the ones I hadn't read before, or that felt most divorced from their inspirations. "Buried Deep," the title story, is an astoundingly new and vivid take on the tale of the Minotaur and Ariadne that I will remember for quite some time. "Seven" is a tale of artisans and the guild of potters, of what constitutes art, of pale white clay rumored to be poisonous to its users. The eerie "Castle Coeurlieu" is a Borges-like tale of a mysterious tower and a game of cards and a princess trying to survive a plague. These stories are rich, compelling, and beautiful, and show Novik's brain at its finest.

Content warnings for violence, body horror, xenophobia, classism, anti-Semitism.

[smallredrobin13games]

IPR will be removing physical copies of Horse and Rider and Buried Deep from their stock pretty soon, you may want to order them while you get the chance.

Horse and Rider

Buried Deep

At present I have no plans to sell physicals myself or anything like that and I don't have any market stalls booked so broadly this may also be your last chance for a while.

[ah0yh0y]

thinking about Orion being a mythical figure in the scholomance like being known as like a Protector.After Hours was such a delight to read

[ellynneversweet]

After Hours is such a good little story. Love the little freshers starting out instant enemies and becoming friends, love that the protagonist (whose name I don’t know how to spell, because audiobook) is a little witch who passionately believes in fairytale logic and does mushroom magic. Love that the older kids are still kind of casually mean to them (shoving them out of the way to get the good supplies rather than shoving them into the path of a monster) because that’s how high school pecking orders work. Love that Orion, post-golden stones-resurrection, glows gold if you look at him out the corner of your eye and is just as weird and terrifying and painfully awkward as ever. Poor boy is ‘an adult’ and worse, an authority figure!

(I was terribly curious the whole way through whether any of the main trilogy cast would appear! On tenterhooks as to whether our baby heroes would fight the big scary monster or get rescued at the last second! I’m still curious why Orion was dressed like he was going out. I assume El was in town and twisted his ear and said ‘We. Are going. For tapas. Please put on a shirt that doesn’t have a hole in it.’)

[bakedbakermom]

i feel like if instead of just slapping it on the freshman summer reading list and then taking a test on Pride and Prejudice, someone had told me that it was a period-romcom best read in the most pretentious, scathing tones possible, with whacky misunderstandings and yearning covered up with snark, i would have liked it a lot more.

genuinely didn't "get it" until right now, as i am reading Naomi Novik's "Dragons and Decorum," a p&p/temeraire au crossover. now i have to read the real thing.