#the golden enclaves spoilers

[wanderingthroughbooks]

It's been several weeks since I read The Golden Enclaves and I occasionally still think about how Liesel looked at El and went "well, I have to seduce her, for the good of humanity, in case I need to use my wiles to pull her back from self-sacrifice and/or madness."

[with-my-murder-flute]

Anyway my favourite part of The Golden Enclaves is El's old classmates being absolutely ride-or-die for her, but she has no room in her internal narrative for being looked up to with admiration and respect so she just completely fails to process it even a tiny bit.

[dawn-the-rithmatist]

I think one of the reasons why I love El as a protagonist so much is that yes, she never uses her powers to hurt anyone, and yes, she saves people’s lives constantly. But at the same time, she’s portrayed as a bit of a misanthrope- she doesn’t like most people (and has good reasons for that), is constantly angry, is probably the biggest cynic in the books… I just have so much appreciation for the fact that she isn’t shown as particularly noble or kind or any of those traditionally “heroic” traits, but is so fundamentally good. It isn’t natural to her or just part of her personality- she has to choose it, again and again and again. El is such a good example that being “good” or “heroic” isn’t a character trait, it’s something that you choose, and there’s no excuse for not choosing it.

Throw in the way Ophelia is described as being everything El knows she could be, if she ever went maleficer, and it makes an incredible comparison. Ophelia is how it would look like for El to write off goodness/kindness as something for someone else who has different choices or different ambitions. She literally wrote off her anima- her own conscience- as something unnecessary given her position in the enclave and what she wanted to accomplish. El and Ophelia both have immense power, both have capacity to do terrible things to accomplish their goals, but one chooses power and the other chooses people.

Even at the end of the books, Ophelia gets a fucking promotion, even though everyone knows what she’s done. El, on the other hand, is described as being a bit aimless, realizing her dream needs to be accomplished by someone else, and needing a lot of therapy. She wasn’t even able to stop the use/creation of maw mouths outright- compared to Ophelia, her goals remain unaccomplished. And El, being the angry bitter person she is, takes that with a massive fuck you and keeps choosing the right thing with all the spite and hope in the world. These books are a testament to what it means to choose kindness and it’s done so, so well thanks to El.

Just,,, non-traditionally good characters. They mean everything to me.

[chief-cook-and-librarian]

Liesel in The Golden Enclaves: love and friendship is great and all, but let's be efficient about it

[runawaymarbles]

A Deadly Education + foreshadowing that makes me scream into the void

[seagullcharmer]

and i said to him softly, gently, with all my heart,

"you're already dead."

[pinkishdolphin]

I read the golden enclaves today and I was not prepared for the horror of how maw mouths are made. The imagery of Liu in the pile of bricks looking just like the person at the core of the maw mouth was vivid but the part that stuck with me was what got us to that point. Was just these people wanting to protect themselves and their families deciding that taking an innocent person and brutally torturing them for eternity is an acceptable price to pay.

And it’s worse because it’s understandable. It’s not a horrible thing that only someone who was born evil would do. It’s horrible because normal people go along with it and look the other way. It’s the horror of a mirror.

[themothersmercy]

Thinking about how El at the end of golden enclaves has everything she didn't want at the start of deadly education and it's all come about because she chose to do good and chose to fight and chose to care and chose to love and chose to defy the prophecy she heard as a child when it would have been /so easy/ to give in and that CHOICE to care is what triggered her starting to make friends and let down her wall and anyway choosing to go on and keep living and keep choosing good in the face of so many easy awful choices is beautiful and the point of life and I'll be crying about it for days

[dollygale]

uh oh! the girls are having character arc-destroying sex

[shirecryptid]

"You're already dead," I said. "But stay anyway. Stay with us, and shelter all the wise-gifted children of the world," and made all three of the spells into one: the terrible murderous truth I had to tell the maw-mouth, and the sutras' longing plea for golden shelter, and the beautiful lie that the Scholomance had been built upon, and into that working I poured all the mana that Shanfeng had given me, the mana that had been saved up to build a school to save the lives of children. The work that Orion had tried to make his own. I repeated the incantation in Sanskrit from the sutras, the incantation that really just meant "stay," and then Liu joined in, saying it in Chinese, the version she'd used in Beijing, and Aadhya said it with me the next time in English, "Stay and be shelter," and even as we were speaking I felt more jolting sparks going through me: Miranda and Antonio and Eman and Caterina had joined our human chain too, behind Khamis, and then there was a thump through us all like a lightning strike: Li Shanfeng had joined the line behind them. I gasped with the surge and said it again, stay, even though I couldn't hear myself speaking anymore; more hands and voices were coming, everyone on Shanghai's side streaming to join in, power crackling through the line into me, and then Liesel's voice was calling out over the noise, "Not in a single line! Get closer and spread out!" and she pushed in next to me, putting a hand directly on my back, another supporting branch. Alfie was right next to her, reaching to touch me as well with Sarah gripping his free hand. In another moment, his father was there too in a line behind him. Wizards from both sides were crowding in now, all of us saying it together: "Stay," getting louder and louder even as the Scholomance and Orion both shook from their foundations. He was getting heavier and heavier in my grasp, as if I was trying to hold him up, along with the entire school and all those other enclaves loaded up on his shoulders, against the dragging undertow of all the sloshing power of stolen mana draining away from under them. But everyone behind me was trying to help, trying to hold them - and then Ophelia and Balthasar were there, too. But they didn't join the chain: instead they came all the way up and put their own hands directly on Orion, next to mine. And then Aadhya, my darling Aad who'd taken that first mad flyer on me, gritted her teeth and put her hand on Orion too, and other people started to grab on to them, spreading out the weight, pouring in more mana. We were all holding on to him and just saying it over and over, stay, in all the languages of the world, and beneath our feet a golden light was rising up out of the widening cracks in the carved inscriptions, filling them in, starting to make them whole, and there was light all around us, warm, full of hope, as Orion lurched forward under my hands, like someone who'd just been pulled back onto solid footing. He gasped and reached out to me, reached his hands out to cup my face, and he said in a ragged, broken voice, choosing, "I'll stay. El, I'll stay," and kissed me, through our tears.

The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik

[novawinter]

So it turns out your dead son had a child and you’re all so happy get to meet her and have her in your life then your mother whose prophecies are always right declares her baby Hitler so you ask the love of your sons life to hand over her child for murder suicide but she runs for it with her child. Years later there’s the worst monster in the whole world trying to break into your house and your all in the magic circle trying to keep it out when your granddaughter wheel your mother in who announces that it’s time to welcome your granddaughter back she was never baby hitler in fact she just killed the unkillable monstrosity outside. Your mother just twisted the worlds because this is the best timeline.    

[wanderingthroughbooks]

Tossing your evil creatures created by human sacrifice in England into India to eat people there. Truly peak English colonialism behaviour.

[paradises-library]

The tea was even offered exactly in the same way that Americans always did it, namely with the faint hint that they didn't really understand why I might like some tea, but they understood that this was the appropriate thing to do.

The Golden Enclaves, Naomi Novik

[dawn-the-rithmatist]

The transition from “El sees a mawmouth and we have an entire chapter of her fighting it and a chapter after that if her being fucked up about it” to “El sees a mawmouth and kills it even though she hates it in part of graduation” to “El chasing a mawmouth down as it runs for its life” to “El kills a mawmouth offscreen when visiting her family”

[aridotdash]

Maw mouth, wearing multiple pairs of Groucho Marx glasses, trying to sneak past El

[runawaymarbles]

The Last Graduate reread + Goddammit moments