Shippers got their amortentia fix.

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"Fallen leaves and cold breeze and something faintly burning" point straight to the hodag. A worthy match!

Interesting peeks on magical New A'dam and other Confederation cultures.

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LOL at every single task becoming a life-or-death situation for Alex. Old pal Larry to the rescue, that guy is such a softie...

 

So after reading this chapter a nagging theory crept into my head, starting with a fact many people probably suspected after reading the prologue chapter, but was just confirmed in this last one:

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Jezebel Hucksteen joined the Deathly Regiment some odd amount of years ago.

Spoiler: spoilered for long rambling below:

Facts:

1. Jezebel was a contemporary of both Livia and Claudia Thorn
2. It was known, or widely suspected that Claudia was a squib even at this time.
3. Quimley was the Hucksteen's House Elf.
4. Quimley had chosen to stay with the Generous Ones rather than live with Wizards.
5. The Generous Ones only care about the bare details of the compact with Wizards:
   a.) A child from a wizarding family.
   b.) A seal from the Confederation
   c.) The compact is renewed every seven years.
   d.) They don't care about the lottery/secret-letters amongst the Elect, the actual identity of the child, or anything else aboveground so long as the above are met.
6. Gov-Gen. Hucksteen loathes Abraham Thorn personally.

Theory:
Jezebel was not the originally selected child for the Deathly Regiment. Livia or Claudia was chosen and Abraham did shenanigans to swap the sacrifice around.

Presumably not as ham-fisted as Darla Dearborn's attempt, but I would imagine that somehow subverting Quimley was involved.

Unconfirmed thoughts/possibilities:

• Quimley personally feels that he betrayed wizarding kind and deserves to exile in the Lands Below (which is why he is free to come and go if he truly wants to, but would rather not).
• Alternatively, he's been Confunded by Thorn into having a great deal of respect/subservience to the family of Thorn and was ordered to stay out of the way where he can't spill the beans. (Alexandra is fine, since she's a Daughter of Thorn.)
• Abraham Thorn truly is fighting against the Confederation and the Deathly Regiment, but he prioritises his family over nameless innocents.
• Therefore he will totally flip his lid if he realises Alexandra's personal geass with the Generous Ones.

edit: If the above is true, Alexandra really put her foot in her mouth with this latest task. Yeah, she wanted to make a point, but she probably has no idea just what point she actually just made. At worst, Hucksteen considered her to be a non-entity in his grudge, just a source of information on Abraham. Now he's probably wondering just how involved she actually is and Alex just painted an even larger target on her back.

Of course, that's par for course for her.


and just for fun...

Really far-fetched theory with no basis other than gut-feeling:
The Alta-California champion is Thorn or Medea under polyjuice.

 

Medea is polyjuiced as Hela, trying to teach Alex about trust and fools. Hela'd better check her tampon box for cactus curses, you don't hex and insult Charlie and expect no payback.

 

This latest chapter was really good. In fact after a bit of lull during the Pruett school chapters I think this story is on track to be the second best of the series.

 

Guess what? American wizards of old (the 80s?) had transfiguration rap battles. Gangsta!

 

I have a hard time with some parts of this last chapter.

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Like, Alexandra has been casting doggerel verse exceptionally well for her entire life, but loses to Larry in this part of the competition? Larry and Harriet were too good at this. That type of casting does not seem like something people would have practiced right?

 

I have to admit that, at this point in the series, I enjoy a certain amount of schadenfreude in reading about Alexandra being thumped around in assorted ways. I fear for Anna, though.

 

Expelled from Charmbridge, her wand confiscated and snapped multiple times, nearly eaten by at least four different kinds of magical creature, beaten and groped by hill dwarves, punched in the head by a school administrator, sentenced to life in prison, assaulted by psycho girl gang in the bathroom, nearly strangled, poisoned and burnt at the stake in the decathalon, and now dosed with magical date rape drugs and made to humiliate herself in front of a national audience.

Not to mention her friends and family harassed, obliviated and in one case probably kidnapped.

Alex has been through some shit this year. Hope she gets a chance for some kind of payback before it's over.

 

The blatant hostility of Raspire is beginning to beg disbelief.

 

I'm starting to lose interest in this fic.

It's all over the place with almost no plot development. Not only does the fic not feel like it is moving forward, the amount of shit that happens to AQ is verging on ridiculousness. It almost feels like the Author is not planning on writing more novels, so they decided to cram multiple years of plotlines into one story.

That and AQ is such an unlikable character that does not learn. Worse, she never suffers consequences for her actions, as she always finds an unbelievable way out. I have been actively rooting against her for a while, so she might actually learn and start growing up.

 

I think Alexandra does learn, just slowly. If you compare her with book one, she's grown up a lot, but she's still only 15.

By the way, for anyone who doesn't know - according to the numbers on Ao3, there are seven chapters left, so the book should be over in a little over three weeks.

 

I've written thirteen chapters (about 60K words) for book six so far. I have outlines for books six and seven. (Book seven will be the final volume.)

 

"All over the place" is literally right. This book jumps from one setting to another: the appealing board, the Ozarks, the Pruett School, Eerie Island, the Whites, the Decathlon... Each situation comes with a complete crew of new characters. This makes the book feel disjointed so far.

Obviously, signs point at everything converging in the grand finale about the Storm King Mountain mistery: Alex acquires the ability to open cracks between worlds, learns about the Confederation kidnapping children (Roger and very likely Bonnie; are the Elect desperate about losing their own kids and trying to find ways around the Deathly Regiment?), stows away a couple of conveniently powerful beings, rounds up her magical education and has some time for self-reflection with Lu and Dru, learns more about how (so far cartoonishly) evil Elly and Dick are, and off she goes to uncover the Big Reveal, which will give us new information about wizarding America's larger picture and/or Hucksteen's backstory. Throw in a Tournament Arc (tm) for some good, old-fashioned sports kicks.

Now, the big question is: will the payoff be worth it?

So far the series was a School Story, an American mirror of HP. Along four books we learnt about Charmbridge and its inhabitants. Continous exposure to a consistent set of characters allows them to be fleshed out in different situations, so they start to resemble real people.

The story has adopted a completely new structure. The old cast has been mercilessly dropped out and dozens of new characters flash in and out, leaving no time for them to become any more than mere plot devices, leaving us only Alex to cling to. And, let's face it, Alex can be a disgusting, sticky, smelly little thing to cling to. This new direction has the potential to alienate a part of the old crew of readers.

At this point, I remain mainly interested about the Confederation's story and whether or not Alex's birth was engineered by Abraham as a weapon against it. There seem to be a few sparse clues in the previous books that hint at Alex being more than just another gifted witch-child, and maybe a part of her character is somehow a consequence of Thorn's magical manipulation. But perhaps I am reading too much into those alleged clues.
--- Post automerged ---
One of the possible clues I was speaking about, perhaps the most transparent (Stars Above, ch. 9):

Dun, dun, dunnn. Why, indeed, is Abraham Thorn so protective towards Alex?

Another (World Away, ch. 42):

My (admittedly flimsy and far-fetched) pet theory is that it would be in character with what we know of stud Abe to perform some ritual on Alexandra that would turn her into a deadly time-bomb against the Confederation, while, at the same time, affecting her by enhancing some of her personal traits: reckless, bullheaded, unempathic when empathy gets in the way of her goals and, at the same time, immensely generous and self-sacrificing under the right circumstances. But perhaps I have read too many manipulative!Dumbles fanfics.

 

I've liked 90% of the new worldbuilding so far as well as her sisters, and Larry's characterization.

I agree the transition away from a school setting felt a bit abrupt. But I actually like the new setting bc Charmbridge was getting a bit stale and it was straining disbelief that that she hadn't been expelled yet.

Not the biggest fan of some of newly introduced teen characters. Probably bc we didn't get a ton of exposure to them to build them up.