#via shitposts

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.

I just finished the books and this stood out to me. One side of my family is Jain, a small religion philosophically very similar to Buddhism, with a similar emphasis on nonviolence and the complete avoidance of harm to any human being. This includes:

No meat, obviously. Eggs are also excluded (as in the more general Indian definition of vegetarianism) No root vegetables, even, because you have to kill the whole plant to get them. Interestingly, non-lethal animal products are fine - milk, honey, wool - so it's not the same as veganism. I'm not sure what the position is on the hidden life-cost of milk i.e. the death of male calves because it's a waste to keep most around. This is common enough that retaurants will have 'Jain options' on their menu/allow you to request a Jain version of a dish, and it's a widely understood dietary requirement (though most people in India seen to think Jainism is a branch of Hinduism. It's not, it's a completly splintered-off heterodoxy, but we don't need to get into that).

They also don't use leather or silk since that does require death to produce, though my granny does have a 'peace silk' sari that's made without boiling the cocoons.

No eating after sunset and no eating food kept overnight, because they had some concept of germ theory and knew that bacteria bred more after dark. Pre-fridges, this is generally a pretty good idea in a hot country, anyway.

A yearly ritual where you meditate and ask forgiveness from any creature of any kind that you might have injured, deliberately or not. It's meant to be an acknowledgement that you've done wrong and a meditation on forgiving other people because everyone's fallible. You also exchange this with anyone you can - friends, family etc. I have very very mixed feelings about this one, how valid and meaningful it usually is in-practice and its actual effect on most people's mental health, but I'll leave that out of this post LOL

In the same vein, a prayer ritual you do at the temple where you repeat the same request for forgivness while repeatedly moving from a standing position to kneeling and prostrated with your head on the floor, the gradual standing - kneeling upright - kneeling fully - completely prostrate timed to the lines of the request. As my mum pointed out, it's also pretty good exercise, like a slowed-down bungee squat that's also gentler on your joints. I can picture El doing it for mana.

If you thought this was intense enough, the monks and nuns take it to another level. They eat nothing but boiled vegetables, lentils and grains, and I believe are not allowed to wear any clothing but what is purely plant derived, so they are closer to veganism in that sense. They have little brooms they use to sweep the path ahead of them to avoid stepping on insects (which, since they spend a lot of time on the road physically walking from place to place, presumably slows them down as much as you might imagine. They wear masks over their face to avoid inhaling small insects and keep out bacteria as much as possible (presumably the tiny insects are more of a concern if, again, you're pretty much sleeping out in the open in a rural area).

Not Jain any more, but upper-caste Hindus from some regions, essentially the priest caste, are also pretty strict vegetarians to the point that they're quite snobby about it. They are vegetarian because they consider it necessary to ritual purity, and look down on people who aren't - according to my mum, who went to uni with a lot of people like that, the reason why they accepted her relatively easily was because she was also a very strict vegetarian. I'm not sure if those guys avoid root vegetables too - mum had to start eating them at uni, anyway, because she would have struggled for food otherwise.

Have I never told you about this?!

It was my last ever day in the teaching labs before they released me into the wilderness of an actual research group. I'd left my product in the vacuum chamber to dry out and crystallise overnight, and I came in bright and early to do my analysis and GTFO. The lab was very quiet BC almost everyone else had finished their last experiment.

So the good thing is, I did a few things right: I had my goggles on, and I didn't open the vacuum chamber until I'd put it in the fume hood. Sometimes people are a bit lax about that but I made it a habit not to be, and this time it really paid off.

Because as soon as I opened it and my product made contact with the air, it burst into green flames. A rather pretty green, like grass in video games, or like emeralds (though their colour comes from a different metal to what I had, but there are only so many colours compounds can be, I guess). The ash started floating off into the fume hood's chimney, which is good, because I really quite like not snorting unknown nickel compounds at 9am on a sunny Thursday morning. That might go OK, or it might land you in A&E, and on balance I'd rather not find out.

I checked my experimental protocol and risk assessment. It did not say anything about flames of any colour.

I called over the demonstrator, a PhD student who'd supervised me before.

He goggled at it for a minute and then called over the lab tech.

She goggled at it for a minute and then called over the head lab tech.

He goggled at it and then, slightly more quickly, grabbed a big beaker of sand and chucked the contents of the vacuum chamber in, thus proving why they pay him the big bucks.

The demonstrator, at this point, was taking a video which I asked him to send me (and is still somewhere in the bowels of my laptop, I hope - it might've been lost when I dropped my old laptop in the bathtub but regardless, he missed the best part of it and it will live on in my memory to my dying day).

The four of us continued to stand around goggling at it until the flames went out. I politely enquired as to whether I might try and isolate whatever had survived to analyse it, and was told in no uncertain terms that they were not letting me mess around with a completely unknown substance (nobody could figure out what it was or how it could have formed from any of the possible impurities. The lab techs said they'd have to ask the inorganic research labs but they never got back to me about it).

Or, more importantly, putting it in their delicate and expensive analytical instruments - not that they give the undergrads anything Particularly fancy, but still a stupid reason to have to replace a machine that costs thousands of pounds. Therefore, I went skipping off into the sunshine and proceeded to tell the story to everyone I knew (I'm SURE I've told it to you at some point, you probably just forgot).

So I just noticed this subtle parallel in incident in the Pinhoe Egg with Gwendolen's use and abuse of Cat in Charmed Life.

Gwendolen has been stealing Cat's magic from well before he was old enough to notice it or consent to it, and she gets angry with him when he takes back control over it. She feels she's owed it, she only cared about him for how useful he is. This also suggests that it's a relatively easy piece of magic to do (she's said to be a fairly average witch in terms of raw power), and that conscience/law are what hold most people back from doing it (though Cat being an infant at the time probably helps. It's also possible that Gwendolen herself, being a small child, didn't really realise what she was doing until later on).

Contrast this to the egg-hatching scene in PE, where Millie helps the egg hatch. Irene, Cat and Millie lend the egg their strength; Irene doesn't know how, so Cat 'does it for her'. The 'strength' required by the egg is physical, but it does seem that they're lending it magical strength and it's certainly done by magic. Again, this is the taking of someone's strength/power by someone else, but the difference is that Irene very clearly wants to help and has consented to lending her strength (by placing her hands on the egg), so Cat is only facilitating the process, and the power is ultimately being used for good, to save the griffin's life.

I'm sure there are other instances of strength-lending in the novels, but the ones I can remember involve a willing and deliberate lending of your own strength to someone else.