Books
I'm reading Naomi Novik's new novel, A Deadly Education. It's sort of a Hunger Games for wizards, I guess. I get the impression that the author heard all the "Hogwarts seems to be designed more to kill off the students than protect them" talk, and went, "But what if it WAS?" The biggest problem I'm having with it is that so far, it's 50% story, 50% worldbuilding infodump. And the worldbuilding makes me itch. The premise is that the world is crawling with evil spirits that like to eat teenage wizards (child wizards aren't nutritious enough, and adult wizards are too tough). So sending all the wizard teens to this completely lethal school that kills off fifty percent of them is great, because otherwise, 95% of them are killed off. And this school has only existed for a couple of centuries, tops.
It doesn't take a mathemagician to tell that if only one in twenty wizarding children survived to adulthood, wizards are going to die out long before they have a chance to build the damned school. So far there's also zero explanation why there are no adult teachers or maintenance staff in the school. And my main emotion, so far, is to side-eye the entire wizarding community and go, "This is the best solution you can come up with? Really? Reeeeally?"
What I'm hoping is that Things Are Not As They Seem, and the characters will discover this is a giant scam of some kind. But I'm not holding my breath.
Rants Talk to me
It doesn't take a mathemagician to tell that if only one in twenty wizarding children survived to adulthood, wizards are going to die out long before they have a chance to build the damned school. So far there's also zero explanation why there are no adult teachers or maintenance staff in the school. And my main emotion, so far, is to side-eye the entire wizarding community and go, "This is the best solution you can come up with? Really? Reeeeally?"
What I'm hoping is that Things Are Not As They Seem, and the characters will discover this is a giant scam of some kind. But I'm not holding my breath.
Rants Talk to me