This week’s question from Fantasy with Friends is all about magical schools:
Do you enjoy books about schools of magic, or do you think they are overdone? Do you have any favorite magical schools or magical school books?
Which obviously immediately presents the massive Scottish castle in the room, hanging over the discussion. It was a hugely popular school story when I was younger, and it still is, and its fingerprints are inevitably all over a lot of the more recent magical school stories. Given the anti-trans views of the author, the frankly racist worldbuilding and character-naming, and the fact that the author uses her money to fund anti-trans lobbying, needless to say I hold no remaining affection for it. Generally I try to avoid interacting with people who continue to support the author and boost the books, because I don’t feel safe with them.
It gets more complicated when it comes to books that feel informed by the existence of that series. There are several published books lately that are apparently serial-numbers-filed-off fanfics, and I’m not entirely sure how I feel about that. I think… broadly supportive, because I appreciate people taking back their investment and turning it into something of their own. It really depends on how much work has been done to differentiate it from the original source text, and whether it’s fixed some of the underlying issues with it rather than just importing them.
(I’ve also undoubtedly read some without knowing, or at least without knowing before I actually bought it, because I didn’t actually read most of that series, and was never part of the fandom. Some stuff just sails over my head. I wish people would stop assuming the cultural supremacy of that series is so complete that everyone else must be able to recognise it!)
Anyway, to turn the discussion away from That Magic School, I do still enjoy the concept of a magical school story, both the ones that feel informed by the Enid Blyton genre of school story, and the ones that are more American like The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association. I’ve been especially enjoying ones that are told from a more adult point of view, like The Grimoire Grammar School and Emily Tesh’s The Incandescent: it brings a bit of realism to the genre — and frankly, updates it out of the early 1900s nostalgia fest.
It’s also worth remembering that there have always been other wizarding schools, like the school on Roke in A Wizard of Earthsea. That feels to me like it springs from different roots, and I definitely don’t feel like that kind of otherworldly wizarding school is played out as a story, nor so beholden to That Series.
So yeah, ultimately I feel like the subgenre got over-dominated by That Series and responses to it, and I’d love to see more fantasy schools that aren’t essentially based on British boarding schools of the early to mid 1900s… but I’m not averse to the subgenre automatically. Bonus points if you manage to be queer-inclusive!
