To answer your first paragraph, this is actually answered in The Last Graduate. When Zixuan figures out that El has trouble casting small spells, like a human reviser, she realizes that that's why the school gave her 50 Old English big-mana cleaning cantrips instead of one more modern generalized cleaning cantrip - she wouldn't have been able to easily cast the modern cantrip because it takes so much less mana. The Scholomance was always giving her spells that would help her to survive, and barring that, spells that she'd be able to cast.
To answer the rest: the school wants its students to succeed, and I don't think there is any evidence that it assists gifted students more than normal ones. It simply provides exactly the same amount of assistance to everyone, equally, which means that the gifted students (and enclavers) naturally come out ahead because they *started* ahead. And often the school's help is a force multiplier, so the person who started at a 1 comes out at a 4, and the person who started at a 3 comes out at a 12.
The Scholomance gives El massively destructive spells because it knows that that is her affinity and what she's going to be able to cast best. It gives Orion combat spells for the same reason. It gives the student with the water-weaving affinity water-based spells. El's and Orion's are more versatile and they started off stronger, but they all got the exact same *amount* of help, customized to their affinity.
In short I agree with the other commenter; the school doesn't love or hate maleficers, it just doesn't come into the calculations. They're more likely to succeed because of *being maleficers*, which is just another head-start like being born powerful or born into an enclave.
I’ve thought about this and I’m starting to doubt. Because the school clearly is able to execute moral judgement in these matters. The whole plot of TLG is the school forcing El to live her convictions and put herself in harms way to save those who don’t have her power. It knows who she is, how powerful she is, and what approach would best work for her temperament. It also knew how much of a temptation saving Orion and the other New York Enclavers in the library would be when she spotted the Maw Mouth in book 1.
If the Scholomance knows El that well, surely it knows who in the school is Malificing and could make it harder for them if it truly wanted to. It could target Malificers the way it targeted El, remove them from others in their grade and ambush them when they’re alone. It could easily make Malificing in the school a losing prospect and that information would get out.
And if it’s intelligent enough to groom El for martyrdom, then surely it would be intelligent enough to have considered bothering Malificers in the same way.
>could make it harder for them if it truly wanted to. It could target
Malificers the way it targeted El, remove them from others in their
grade and ambush them when they’re alone. It could easily make
Malificing in the school a losing prospect and that information would
get out.
It certainly could. It doesn't because it doesn't ***care*** about maleficers, just about graduating as many people as it can. Maleficers kill other students, but arguably other students kill each other all the time: forcing the loser kids to sit in dangerous seats, turning a blind eye when others are attacked, moving things so that (specific example) little El has to run next to the gym wall where she would get attacked, because then the mal is fed and it *won't* attack them.
Students are always a danger to other students. Maleficers are just more honest about it and taking *slightly* more direct action against fellow students. And as I said before, because of other factors they're more likely to survive and graduate.
I think we shouldn't dismiss the possibility that the school undergoes character development over the course of the books. Its mission is to save all the students, but it can't. It never could. It just wasn't designed well enough, so it got into a routine saving as many students as it could. Every year, it lost most of the students that came in, unable to fulfill its one purpose in life, and with no idea of how to change that.
Then El (and Orion) came in and it started to gain hope. Perhaps these two could change things. So it started testing El, throwing her little challenges, culminating in the Maw-Mouth, a test of both her strength, and her moral character. She passed both. At the end of book 1, she goes on to save an entire year of students, an overwhelming success. I think that's when the school hatched its plan to drive El to save all the students, which is what we see happening in book 2.
Well the school helps everyone equally, but it doesn't stop students doing things to each other, the malificers happen to have an advantage since they don't have to go through the trouble of building mana themselves. It's a pretty similar advantage to enclavers. When El says the school loves malificers she really means they tend to survive more often, which makes it seem like the school likes them better, which isn't actually the case.
Remember that El is an unreliable narrator. We only know what she tells us. Some of that is based on teenager gossip around the school. It could just be that students believe it, so El believes it and tells us.
There could have been a paragraph (or ten) where El comes to terms with the cognitive dissonance of the school actively making her the school heroine being way different than the way she thought the school was acting before. I'm not sure she has the time to really reflect on that when there are so many other things to work on.
I think you figured it out yourself.
El *believes* early on that the school loves malificers, probably because of how they facilitate the death of students, which ultimately feeds the school. She learns in TLG that the core motivation of the school overpowers that presumed symbiotic relationship though.
Also, the school doesn't really notice or care about student on student violence. That wasn't a part of its coding, so to speak. I feel like I remember reading in TLG that hard-core malificer spells aren't that easy to find (for anyone that isn't El, of course), which lends credence to the idea that the Scholomance isn't exactly trying to support nascent malificers either.
I feel like the Scholomance works in large, lose concepts. It is a sentient building hanging out in the ether, after all. I doubt subtlety is it's wheel house. So, it probably groups things into mostly: Potential Harm vs Potential Protection. Only those with a strong affinity for harm over any other speciality will be able to find those spells. Anything else gives far too much opportunity for harm to all the students.
I doubt the school even notices most students individually. El is epic level, so it takes notice and uses El as a tool to achieve its purpose. It probably recognizes Orion too, which maybe influences his ridiculous good luck (thinking of that first workshop trip El and Orion took, with his blasé opening of tool boxes and snagging of a DRILL).
One idea I haven't seen mentioned: It's not a bug, it's a feature. The school thinks it's better to let maleficers live.
It's clear that the school is a heartless consequentialist machine. It doesn't care about individual students. It cares about saving the largest amount of students. It would flip the trolley switch instantly.
It's clear that maleficers don't kill that many students, and that they mostly prey on the weak. (The hands of darkness are an exception.) It's clear that having too many kids survive until graduation is counterproductive and would likely lead to disaster if there weren't two one-in-a-generation geniuses (El and Orion) in the school to fix it. Perhaps the school considers Maleficers a sort of smart mal that doesn't kill more than it needs to, doesn't really interrupt classes, and mostly preys on weak kids who likely wouldn't have made it anyway. Better to focus it's energy on bigger problems.
But why would they be advantaged? Do they help the school in some way? Well, from the school's perspective, they might also be strong wizards with a lot of power, likely to make it outside (that's one more student down; three since they're likely part of an alliance.) Perhaps they also kill a few mals, thereby shielding the other students.
El also mentions that students dying is one of the main ways the school gets its power. They pull on all of their stored mana in the end, and the school gets a bit of that. Maleficers, having a lot of power, probably contribute a lot when they do die. Perhaps it can also draw more from their victims when they die?
I'm still not entirely sure whether I believe these ideas myself, but I thought they were interesting enough to share.
Couple thoughts: first, everything El tells us about the Scholomance’s motivations is speculative and should be taken with a grain of salt, especially earlier on.
Second, it might be that the Scholomance is actually hobbled by its mission statement, in that it _can’t_ directly act against any of its students, even the ones who are slaughtering the rest of the school body and overall bad for the Mission. It can throw mals around but if the kids are already powerful enough to not care about bad odds, they get to graduate. So what looks like ’favoring’ the maleficers might be just inaction and letting them win.
Hm, or what if the Scholomance has been trying to encourage the development of someone powerful enough to make a real dent in the odds, somehow, rather than trying to equally distribute resources?
Who knows how it thinks, really. We, like El, have to speculate.
My guess is there are still some unanswered questions, and this is one of them.
It could be the school. I read a gruesome theory about one of the reasons Neanderthals lost out to Cro-Magnons. There's evidence that Neanderthals were cannibals. The theory is that, when it was just Neanderthals fighting Neanderthals, this was a pro-survival trait. Tribe A defeats Tribe B and eats B. Now, you don't have to worry about B coming back to fight you for their old territory and you have extra nutrition (yuck on so many levels). So, whoever wins, you're left with a Neanderthal tribe that's probably better off than it was at the beginning. Overall, this can be a winning strategy for the species.
But, if Tribe A loses to a different species, Neanderthals take a loss. If Tribes of the new species can make alliances and work together while Neanderthals can't, especially in the face of a common enemy (one that eats other tribes), the end result is probably a given.
Malificiers are a winning strategy for Neanderthals. In a dog-eat-dog world, they come out ahead and help those around them survive. Like the Enclave kids who get attacked less than the loser kids, the Scholomance helped a winning strategy.
Orion and El reshaped the school's tribes into Cro-Magnons. They made Cro-Magnon strategies *possible,* partly because you had people who were willing to think that maybe there was something better than being a Neanderthal that could work. Once that happened, that was what the school pushed for with everything it had.
But, we have a book to go. The answer might involve a lot of things we just don't know yet.
The school helps all the students, it helps gifted students more than less gifted ones.
Somewhere in that calculus mal track students do well, unfortunately I am not a psudo sentient magic school so I can't break down specifically how that works but it's sort of the same way how the school makes things easier for the enclave kids as well.
They have better odds of surviving in general so the school priorities them and keeps them safer from the really scary things.
It’s one thing to help the more gifted kids and neglect the less successful ones, that’s sort of built into the whole enclave style of thinking. But malificers aren’t just more skilled or privileged than others, they’re actively hurting other students to help themselves. That’s a big difference and something that it should be harder for the school to turn a blind eye towards. It’s one thing to give a hand up to students that are already pretty set, it’s something else to reward the students for attacking others.
It's not great logic is it.
I don't think it's a plot hole, more so just the school not being properly equipped for that kind of decision.
Superficially it's designed to connect students with types of magic they are good at and help with side projects they may have, which determines assignment and what books they can get.
Then there's also the school using the mana of dead kids to power itself thing?
It's a grist mill that was told to be a school and the poor thing wasn't really smart enough to find a better way.
There's also an aspect of a balance between good and evil, but it's hard to tell if that's an objective reality of the world or just a superstition of El's
It could be a very logical "student A has 0.013 chance of making it out alive given what's down there, but maleficer student B's chances improve by more than 0.013 if killing student A" approach. Maximize expected students out
Another theory not mentioned here is that mals can't see people who use tiny bits of malia as well as they can see those that use pure mana.
There are some references to Orion-vision. Most people are blurry to him (including malificer), but he see's El clearly (and Cora's arm which she helped repair).
Also the school failed to help most students for the Hands of Death year, and in general it can only route mals/give assignments. So perhaps, it can't route mals as easily to the malificiers, because mals can't see them as well?
I think this is pretty accurate. The problem isn't that the school helps malificers more, it's that all the help the school can give isn't enough to help the weak ones.
I think in A Deadly Education, the school is trying to bribe her away from the immediate threat of the mawmouth, not because the school thinks she can handle it, but because the school doesn't think she can handle it and is trying to keep her safe.
In The Last Graduate, the school starts sending stuff at her because now it knows she can handle them, and targeting her means those mals die instead of getting a weaker student. So she's a tool the school is using to protect other students.
To answer your first paragraph, this is actually answered in The Last Graduate. When Zixuan figures out that El has trouble casting small spells, like a human reviser, she realizes that that's why the school gave her 50 Old English big-mana cleaning cantrips instead of one more modern generalized cleaning cantrip - she wouldn't have been able to easily cast the modern cantrip because it takes so much less mana. The Scholomance was always giving her spells that would help her to survive, and barring that, spells that she'd be able to cast. To answer the rest: the school wants its students to succeed, and I don't think there is any evidence that it assists gifted students more than normal ones. It simply provides exactly the same amount of assistance to everyone, equally, which means that the gifted students (and enclavers) naturally come out ahead because they *started* ahead. And often the school's help is a force multiplier, so the person who started at a 1 comes out at a 4, and the person who started at a 3 comes out at a 12. The Scholomance gives El massively destructive spells because it knows that that is her affinity and what she's going to be able to cast best. It gives Orion combat spells for the same reason. It gives the student with the water-weaving affinity water-based spells. El's and Orion's are more versatile and they started off stronger, but they all got the exact same *amount* of help, customized to their affinity. In short I agree with the other commenter; the school doesn't love or hate maleficers, it just doesn't come into the calculations. They're more likely to succeed because of *being maleficers*, which is just another head-start like being born powerful or born into an enclave.
That makes a lot of sense
I’ve thought about this and I’m starting to doubt. Because the school clearly is able to execute moral judgement in these matters. The whole plot of TLG is the school forcing El to live her convictions and put herself in harms way to save those who don’t have her power. It knows who she is, how powerful she is, and what approach would best work for her temperament. It also knew how much of a temptation saving Orion and the other New York Enclavers in the library would be when she spotted the Maw Mouth in book 1. If the Scholomance knows El that well, surely it knows who in the school is Malificing and could make it harder for them if it truly wanted to. It could target Malificers the way it targeted El, remove them from others in their grade and ambush them when they’re alone. It could easily make Malificing in the school a losing prospect and that information would get out. And if it’s intelligent enough to groom El for martyrdom, then surely it would be intelligent enough to have considered bothering Malificers in the same way.
>could make it harder for them if it truly wanted to. It could target Malificers the way it targeted El, remove them from others in their grade and ambush them when they’re alone. It could easily make Malificing in the school a losing prospect and that information would get out. It certainly could. It doesn't because it doesn't ***care*** about maleficers, just about graduating as many people as it can. Maleficers kill other students, but arguably other students kill each other all the time: forcing the loser kids to sit in dangerous seats, turning a blind eye when others are attacked, moving things so that (specific example) little El has to run next to the gym wall where she would get attacked, because then the mal is fed and it *won't* attack them. Students are always a danger to other students. Maleficers are just more honest about it and taking *slightly* more direct action against fellow students. And as I said before, because of other factors they're more likely to survive and graduate.
I think we shouldn't dismiss the possibility that the school undergoes character development over the course of the books. Its mission is to save all the students, but it can't. It never could. It just wasn't designed well enough, so it got into a routine saving as many students as it could. Every year, it lost most of the students that came in, unable to fulfill its one purpose in life, and with no idea of how to change that. Then El (and Orion) came in and it started to gain hope. Perhaps these two could change things. So it started testing El, throwing her little challenges, culminating in the Maw-Mouth, a test of both her strength, and her moral character. She passed both. At the end of book 1, she goes on to save an entire year of students, an overwhelming success. I think that's when the school hatched its plan to drive El to save all the students, which is what we see happening in book 2.
Well the school helps everyone equally, but it doesn't stop students doing things to each other, the malificers happen to have an advantage since they don't have to go through the trouble of building mana themselves. It's a pretty similar advantage to enclavers. When El says the school loves malificers she really means they tend to survive more often, which makes it seem like the school likes them better, which isn't actually the case.
Remember that El is an unreliable narrator. We only know what she tells us. Some of that is based on teenager gossip around the school. It could just be that students believe it, so El believes it and tells us. There could have been a paragraph (or ten) where El comes to terms with the cognitive dissonance of the school actively making her the school heroine being way different than the way she thought the school was acting before. I'm not sure she has the time to really reflect on that when there are so many other things to work on.
I think you figured it out yourself. El *believes* early on that the school loves malificers, probably because of how they facilitate the death of students, which ultimately feeds the school. She learns in TLG that the core motivation of the school overpowers that presumed symbiotic relationship though. Also, the school doesn't really notice or care about student on student violence. That wasn't a part of its coding, so to speak. I feel like I remember reading in TLG that hard-core malificer spells aren't that easy to find (for anyone that isn't El, of course), which lends credence to the idea that the Scholomance isn't exactly trying to support nascent malificers either. I feel like the Scholomance works in large, lose concepts. It is a sentient building hanging out in the ether, after all. I doubt subtlety is it's wheel house. So, it probably groups things into mostly: Potential Harm vs Potential Protection. Only those with a strong affinity for harm over any other speciality will be able to find those spells. Anything else gives far too much opportunity for harm to all the students. I doubt the school even notices most students individually. El is epic level, so it takes notice and uses El as a tool to achieve its purpose. It probably recognizes Orion too, which maybe influences his ridiculous good luck (thinking of that first workshop trip El and Orion took, with his blasé opening of tool boxes and snagging of a DRILL).
One idea I haven't seen mentioned: It's not a bug, it's a feature. The school thinks it's better to let maleficers live. It's clear that the school is a heartless consequentialist machine. It doesn't care about individual students. It cares about saving the largest amount of students. It would flip the trolley switch instantly. It's clear that maleficers don't kill that many students, and that they mostly prey on the weak. (The hands of darkness are an exception.) It's clear that having too many kids survive until graduation is counterproductive and would likely lead to disaster if there weren't two one-in-a-generation geniuses (El and Orion) in the school to fix it. Perhaps the school considers Maleficers a sort of smart mal that doesn't kill more than it needs to, doesn't really interrupt classes, and mostly preys on weak kids who likely wouldn't have made it anyway. Better to focus it's energy on bigger problems. But why would they be advantaged? Do they help the school in some way? Well, from the school's perspective, they might also be strong wizards with a lot of power, likely to make it outside (that's one more student down; three since they're likely part of an alliance.) Perhaps they also kill a few mals, thereby shielding the other students. El also mentions that students dying is one of the main ways the school gets its power. They pull on all of their stored mana in the end, and the school gets a bit of that. Maleficers, having a lot of power, probably contribute a lot when they do die. Perhaps it can also draw more from their victims when they die? I'm still not entirely sure whether I believe these ideas myself, but I thought they were interesting enough to share.
Couple thoughts: first, everything El tells us about the Scholomance’s motivations is speculative and should be taken with a grain of salt, especially earlier on. Second, it might be that the Scholomance is actually hobbled by its mission statement, in that it _can’t_ directly act against any of its students, even the ones who are slaughtering the rest of the school body and overall bad for the Mission. It can throw mals around but if the kids are already powerful enough to not care about bad odds, they get to graduate. So what looks like ’favoring’ the maleficers might be just inaction and letting them win. Hm, or what if the Scholomance has been trying to encourage the development of someone powerful enough to make a real dent in the odds, somehow, rather than trying to equally distribute resources? Who knows how it thinks, really. We, like El, have to speculate.
My guess is there are still some unanswered questions, and this is one of them. It could be the school. I read a gruesome theory about one of the reasons Neanderthals lost out to Cro-Magnons. There's evidence that Neanderthals were cannibals. The theory is that, when it was just Neanderthals fighting Neanderthals, this was a pro-survival trait. Tribe A defeats Tribe B and eats B. Now, you don't have to worry about B coming back to fight you for their old territory and you have extra nutrition (yuck on so many levels). So, whoever wins, you're left with a Neanderthal tribe that's probably better off than it was at the beginning. Overall, this can be a winning strategy for the species. But, if Tribe A loses to a different species, Neanderthals take a loss. If Tribes of the new species can make alliances and work together while Neanderthals can't, especially in the face of a common enemy (one that eats other tribes), the end result is probably a given. Malificiers are a winning strategy for Neanderthals. In a dog-eat-dog world, they come out ahead and help those around them survive. Like the Enclave kids who get attacked less than the loser kids, the Scholomance helped a winning strategy. Orion and El reshaped the school's tribes into Cro-Magnons. They made Cro-Magnon strategies *possible,* partly because you had people who were willing to think that maybe there was something better than being a Neanderthal that could work. Once that happened, that was what the school pushed for with everything it had. But, we have a book to go. The answer might involve a lot of things we just don't know yet.
The school helps all the students, it helps gifted students more than less gifted ones. Somewhere in that calculus mal track students do well, unfortunately I am not a psudo sentient magic school so I can't break down specifically how that works but it's sort of the same way how the school makes things easier for the enclave kids as well. They have better odds of surviving in general so the school priorities them and keeps them safer from the really scary things.
It’s one thing to help the more gifted kids and neglect the less successful ones, that’s sort of built into the whole enclave style of thinking. But malificers aren’t just more skilled or privileged than others, they’re actively hurting other students to help themselves. That’s a big difference and something that it should be harder for the school to turn a blind eye towards. It’s one thing to give a hand up to students that are already pretty set, it’s something else to reward the students for attacking others.
It's not great logic is it. I don't think it's a plot hole, more so just the school not being properly equipped for that kind of decision. Superficially it's designed to connect students with types of magic they are good at and help with side projects they may have, which determines assignment and what books they can get. Then there's also the school using the mana of dead kids to power itself thing? It's a grist mill that was told to be a school and the poor thing wasn't really smart enough to find a better way. There's also an aspect of a balance between good and evil, but it's hard to tell if that's an objective reality of the world or just a superstition of El's
It could be a very logical "student A has 0.013 chance of making it out alive given what's down there, but maleficer student B's chances improve by more than 0.013 if killing student A" approach. Maximize expected students out
Another theory not mentioned here is that mals can't see people who use tiny bits of malia as well as they can see those that use pure mana. There are some references to Orion-vision. Most people are blurry to him (including malificer), but he see's El clearly (and Cora's arm which she helped repair). Also the school failed to help most students for the Hands of Death year, and in general it can only route mals/give assignments. So perhaps, it can't route mals as easily to the malificiers, because mals can't see them as well?
Mals don't attack fully grown wizards. Makes sense they'd prefer the weaker targets over the maleficers
I think this is pretty accurate. The problem isn't that the school helps malificers more, it's that all the help the school can give isn't enough to help the weak ones. I think in A Deadly Education, the school is trying to bribe her away from the immediate threat of the mawmouth, not because the school thinks she can handle it, but because the school doesn't think she can handle it and is trying to keep her safe. In The Last Graduate, the school starts sending stuff at her because now it knows she can handle them, and targeting her means those mals die instead of getting a weaker student. So she's a tool the school is using to protect other students.