Scholomance Meta: Timelines
Nov. 14th, 2021 07:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sprocketA bunch of notes for... stuff... but mostly for complaining that some of the numbers don't line up, because that's how my brain works.
This starts with the assumption that A Deadly Education is set in 2020, and The Last Graduate in 2021.
In ADE we're told Gwen was "almost three months gone" with El when she graduated. Also, students are inducted into the freshman class when they're 14.
TLG pins down graduation and induction to July 2nd.
Based on that, and biology, readers can work out a rough birthdate for El. "Almost three months gone" pins conception around... May or April? Nine or ten months after that works out to somewhere between January and March the year after Gwen's graduation.
2021 - 18 = El was born January to March 2003. Gwen graduated in 2002.
El is extremely clear that, because "balance" Orion should have been born about nine - ten months after the Really Bad Year of 12 graduates, which is specifically pre-Gwen in canon. ("The last one of them was dead by the time Mum graduated the following year.") The year before Gwen was 2001, so... July conception = April/May 2002.
This is driving me up a wall, because I can't make that sort into El and Orion being in the same class. Assuming the Scholomance inducts kids who are 14 on July 1st or 2nd each year, Orion should be a senior when El's a junior.
The least-sloppy fix is that El has no idea of Orion's actual birthdate, but she does have a "balance" ax to grind, and she's just dead wrong about the timing. "Around the time Orion was conceived" needs to be pushed into fall 2001 at minimum to put Orion and El in the same class.
(There's some other fun possibilities, like skipped grades or hold-backs, that make no sense internally. Alternatively, you can move the year of the Hands of Death into Gwen's year, which runs into other problems, like "we're pretty sure Gwen is not a maleficer who helped slaughter her classmates for a malia power boost.")
Other numbers:
The Chinese Cultural Revolution: 1966 - 1967. Somewhere in there, the Shanghai enclave lost some wizards, and a maw-mouth took down the enclave. Ten years after that, Li Feng (Li Shan Feng in TLG_ spearheaded taking back the enclave. TLG also says that he went through the Scholomance "roughly forty years ago", organized the plan to retake Shanghai pretty much straight out of school, and he was Dominus of Shanghai "not three years out of school."
Note that "roughly forty years ago" is 2020 - ~40 = ~1980.
Following on that, note that "the Chinese-language track of general classes literally only started in [the Scholomance] in the late eighties. Before then, it was English or nothing, even after a good quarter of the school was coming in with some dialect of Chinese as their first language, and it only finally changed when the ten major Asian enclaves, Shanghai in the lead, publicly announced an exploratory committee to build a new school under their control."
I am Intrigued by this guy, who 1.) got through the Scholomance, 2.) organized a fight with a maw-mouth over an enclave, 3a.) won the enclave 3b.) won the Dominus title 4.) apparently kept organizing stuff like alliances with non-Western enclaves strong enough to pick fights over Scholomance seats before he was 35.
Other timeline stuff:
May 1880: the Scholomance is finished, and opens its doors (presumably on or around July 2nd)
1886: first failure of the cleansing mechanism. First fix; one adult team is completely wiped out, and the second has two survivors.
1888: Second failure of the cleansing mechanism. Second fix: Sir Alfred and most of his team are wiped out.
1891: Third and final failure of the cleansing mechanism. London takes over from Manchester, doubles enrollment, and invites the independents. Graduation hits status quo until 2020.
El's several-greats grandmother Deepthi would have enrolled around 1898 or 1899.
The US enclaves, lead by New York, take over Scholomance management "shortly after World War 2." This is probably around when Chloe's grandmother helps with the cafeteria improvements.
Around 1980 Li Shen Feng goes through the Scholomance; by the '90s there's Chinese-language classes supplementing the English monolingual teaching of the last ~110 years.
Gwen Higgins and Arjun Sharma start in 1998; their junior year is the class of the Hands of Death or whatever they called themselves (thanks El). Graduation in 2002.
Orion is born in mid/late 2002 and El in early 2003. Induction in July 2017, ADE starts in late may or June 2020 (three weeks to finals), TLG covers July 2nd, 2020 to July 2nd, 2021.
The final graduation is July 2nd, 2021. The Scholomance lasted about 141 years. As of the cliffhanger, the Scholomance is on its way to being blasted into nothingness / shoved into the void, El has been pushed through the gates into the wider world, and Orion has decided the best thing he can do is fight the scariest maw-mouth ever and die. I very strongly suspect this will be protested by El, vehemently.
This starts with the assumption that A Deadly Education is set in 2020, and The Last Graduate in 2021.
In ADE we're told Gwen was "almost three months gone" with El when she graduated. Also, students are inducted into the freshman class when they're 14.
TLG pins down graduation and induction to July 2nd.
Based on that, and biology, readers can work out a rough birthdate for El. "Almost three months gone" pins conception around... May or April? Nine or ten months after that works out to somewhere between January and March the year after Gwen's graduation.
2021 - 18 = El was born January to March 2003. Gwen graduated in 2002.
El is extremely clear that, because "balance" Orion should have been born about nine - ten months after the Really Bad Year of 12 graduates, which is specifically pre-Gwen in canon. ("The last one of them was dead by the time Mum graduated the following year.") The year before Gwen was 2001, so... July conception = April/May 2002.
This is driving me up a wall, because I can't make that sort into El and Orion being in the same class. Assuming the Scholomance inducts kids who are 14 on July 1st or 2nd each year, Orion should be a senior when El's a junior.
The least-sloppy fix is that El has no idea of Orion's actual birthdate, but she does have a "balance" ax to grind, and she's just dead wrong about the timing. "Around the time Orion was conceived" needs to be pushed into fall 2001 at minimum to put Orion and El in the same class.
(There's some other fun possibilities, like skipped grades or hold-backs, that make no sense internally. Alternatively, you can move the year of the Hands of Death into Gwen's year, which runs into other problems, like "we're pretty sure Gwen is not a maleficer who helped slaughter her classmates for a malia power boost.")
Other numbers:
The Chinese Cultural Revolution: 1966 - 1967. Somewhere in there, the Shanghai enclave lost some wizards, and a maw-mouth took down the enclave. Ten years after that, Li Feng (Li Shan Feng in TLG_ spearheaded taking back the enclave. TLG also says that he went through the Scholomance "roughly forty years ago", organized the plan to retake Shanghai pretty much straight out of school, and he was Dominus of Shanghai "not three years out of school."
Note that "roughly forty years ago" is 2020 - ~40 = ~1980.
Following on that, note that "the Chinese-language track of general classes literally only started in [the Scholomance] in the late eighties. Before then, it was English or nothing, even after a good quarter of the school was coming in with some dialect of Chinese as their first language, and it only finally changed when the ten major Asian enclaves, Shanghai in the lead, publicly announced an exploratory committee to build a new school under their control."
I am Intrigued by this guy, who 1.) got through the Scholomance, 2.) organized a fight with a maw-mouth over an enclave, 3a.) won the enclave 3b.) won the Dominus title 4.) apparently kept organizing stuff like alliances with non-Western enclaves strong enough to pick fights over Scholomance seats before he was 35.
Other timeline stuff:
May 1880: the Scholomance is finished, and opens its doors (presumably on or around July 2nd)
1886: first failure of the cleansing mechanism. First fix; one adult team is completely wiped out, and the second has two survivors.
1888: Second failure of the cleansing mechanism. Second fix: Sir Alfred and most of his team are wiped out.
1891: Third and final failure of the cleansing mechanism. London takes over from Manchester, doubles enrollment, and invites the independents. Graduation hits status quo until 2020.
El's several-greats grandmother Deepthi would have enrolled around 1898 or 1899.
The US enclaves, lead by New York, take over Scholomance management "shortly after World War 2." This is probably around when Chloe's grandmother helps with the cafeteria improvements.
Around 1980 Li Shen Feng goes through the Scholomance; by the '90s there's Chinese-language classes supplementing the English monolingual teaching of the last ~110 years.
Gwen Higgins and Arjun Sharma start in 1998; their junior year is the class of the Hands of Death or whatever they called themselves (thanks El). Graduation in 2002.
Orion is born in mid/late 2002 and El in early 2003. Induction in July 2017, ADE starts in late may or June 2020 (three weeks to finals), TLG covers July 2nd, 2020 to July 2nd, 2021.
The final graduation is July 2nd, 2021. The Scholomance lasted about 141 years. As of the cliffhanger, the Scholomance is on its way to being blasted into nothingness / shoved into the void, El has been pushed through the gates into the wider world, and Orion has decided the best thing he can do is fight the scariest maw-mouth ever and die. I very strongly suspect this will be protested by El, vehemently.