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tolkien fan fiction survey

Tolkien Fanfiction Survey, 3rd Edition!

Tolkien Fanfiction Survey 2025, Last Call, with painting of the Lonely Mountain at sunset with Smaug circling by MissMachineArt

This is the last call for participants in the 2025 Tolkien Fanfiction Survey! We will close the survey on January 1. Signal boosts on other Tolkien communities, if appropriate, are much appreciated.

Do you read or write fanfiction based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien or a Tolkien media adaptation like the film trilogies or Rings of Power series? If so, we'd love to hear from you!

The Tolkien Fanfiction Survey first ran in 2015 and has run every five years since. It is run by Dawn "Felagund" Walls-Thumma, an independent scholar, and Maria K. Alberto, an assistant professor at Richland Community College. Both of us are also readers and writers of fanfiction ourselves. We are excited to introduce the third edition, which will give us insight into how the fandom has changed across the last decade!

If you choose to participate, we will collect basic demographic information and ask you about your beliefs and habits regarding reading and/or writing Tolkien-based fanfiction. Most questions are multiple choice, but there is also a space on each page where you can elaborate on any of your answers if you want to share more information with us. You can skip any question you don't want to answer and quit the survey at any time.

The survey will take about 20-30 minutes to complete.

Who can participate?

Participants must be 18 years or older.

We want to hear from both readers and writers of Tolkien-based fanfiction.
All levels of experience and involvement with Tolkien are welcome.
Readers and writers of fic based on Jackson's film trilogies, The Rings of Power, and other Tolkien-derived media are welcome as well.
If you read and/or wrote Tolkien-based fanfiction in the past but don't any longer, we still want to hear from you!

Click here to start the Tolkien Fanfiction Survey!

Art: "The Lonely Mountain" by MissMachineArt (CC license)

Bondi Chanukah massacre

Yesterday evening, two gunmen opened fire on a large crowd attending Chanukah by the Sea in Sydney. So far sixteen people are dead, with reports saying there were so many more injured that police had to drive ambulances back to hospital so the paramedics could stay behind to keep treating more victims.

I just don’t have words. I don’t know what to say. Violence like this is almost unheard of in Australia; we have no community script, just raw horror and grief. My heart is with the thousands of people - families and ordinary civilians - who went to the beach for an evening of joy and worship and are now in mourning. I’m praying as well for Ahmed al Ahmed, a middle-aged bystander (a fruitseller, the rumours are saying, and not in any way combat trained) who took it on himself to save potentially countless lives by tackling and disarming one of the gunmen, and who’s now in hospital recovering from the gunshot wounds he sustained while doing so.

Please consider donating to an Australian Jewish charity today. US and UK friends, it’s worth noting that your currency just about doubles on exchange, so a small donation can make a much bigger difference over here.

Jewish Community Appeal

Jewish Council of Australia

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Pinch Hit #121

This pinch hit is due two days after the main deadline; it's due at Friday 19 December at 9pm UTC.

PH #121: SMPLive, Roughhouse SMP, Mirai SMP - XYouly, Highcraft (Web Series)

Request 1 by serilly
SMPLive
Characters: cscoop (SMPLive), Traves (SMPLive), Joko (SMPLive), Worldbuilding (SMPLive)
My gift must feature one or more of my chosen character tags (giver's choice)

I love Joko/Cooper, they have a really fun dynamic that's like "when I like a guy so I have to psychologically torment him about it". I'm always interested in reading about them.
I also just love Travis in general, I think he's a very fun character.
SMPLive's world also has a lot of fun underexplored aspects for worldbuilding both from a metafictional (hits, the wheel, chats and the court system) and fully in-universe (the bread/void/salmon cults, Spawn City's economy, the server cop mechanic) perspective.
Likes: Fish hybrid Cooper, dog hybrid Travis, goober Joko (skin color matches emotions), courtroom drama, worldbuilding, shenanigans, light metafiction
DNW: RPF, explicit sexual content, power dynamics, chatfic, unrequested setting change AUs, superpowers, kidfic, graphic violence

No letter

Request 2 by serilly
Roughhouse SMP
Characters: Pokay (Roughhouse SMP), RoastedJames (Roughhouse SMP), Wuna301 (Roughhouse SMP), Michaelmcchill (Roughhouse SMP)
My gift must feature one or more of my chosen character tags (giver's choice)

I really really badly want to read Poke/James fic, there's like none!! I think they have a really fun dynamic, they're basically inseparable. I would say they're almost like the same mind in two bodies. They are infesting my brain lately.
I think this is my most wanted out of all my requests. There's absolutely no content for this SMP or these guys in general which makes me really sad.
I really like interpreting James as being like, very emotionally reserved and hiding it under being "the funny guy" and "the problem causer".
Likes: Alien (vaguely Slowpoke-esque) Poke, avian James, trans male James, mutual pining, chaos, avian courtship, the rest of Roughhouse terrorizing Michael, Michael/Luna as secondary pairing, Michael in general (he's really funny)
Other characters from RHSMP very welcomed as supporting characters, i.e. Beef, Dink, Burren, Crumb, etc!
As a heads up, if you include Luna in the fic, Luna uses they/them pronouns now, they used he/him when RHSMP was ongoing.
DNW: RPF, explicit sexual content, power dynamics, chatfic, unrequested setting change AUs, superpowers, kidfic

No letter

Request 3 by serilly
Mirai SMP - XYouly
Characters: Travis (Mirai SMP), Technoblade (Mirai SMP), Joko (Mirai SMP), Cooper (Mirai SMP)
My gift must feature one or more of my chosen character tags (giver's choice)

I am OBSESSED with the dynamic between Travis and Joko in Mirai SMP. They're very "toxic yaoi". However I'm really not a fan of the possession plot twist so please just disregard that entirely!
I would love to see some relationship study on how their roles sort of shift towards the opposite as the game goes on, with Travis hardening up and using his crazy emotional intelligence to read Joko like a book and Joko struggling to keep up his apathetic, intimidating persona.
Especially with how the underlying guilt Travis has with Cooper's death and his falling out with Techno plays into it. Super fascinating stuff.
I'd also really love to read an AU where they win and get out together with their plan to exploit the bounty on Techno.
The fic can be read on here or on Wattpad, no SMPLive knowledge is needed at all.
DNW: RPF, explicit sexual content, chatfic, unrequested setting change AUs, superpowers, kidfic, Amanda (I know she's canon in Mirai SMP, but I don't like that she is)

No letter

Request 4 by serilly
Highcraft (Web Series)
Characters: wtbarce (Highcraft), traves (Highcraft), JOKO (Highcraft), cscoop (Highcraft)
My gift must feature one or more of my chosen character tags (giver's choice)

This series is mostly episodic, so you most likely won't need to watch all of it if you've never watched it.
I have a couple different ideas in mind:
- Building off the SMP and "I raised his property value" where Cooper rebuilds Joko's house in the sky could be fun
- I love the modded episodes, especially the more fantasy-based ones like the Aether and the Twilight Forest ones, I'd love to see something based on one of those with worldbuilding and such
- I really love Travis and there's not a lot of good fic about any of his characters, so anything centered on him would be nice. A lot of stuff writes his characters as naive or childish when he's not and it frustrates me because I love how he's incredibly intelligent and can read people like a book despite his shenanigans. He's kind of a high int low wit type character.
Likes: Anthro dog Cooper, tired basemom Cooper or little bastard Cooper with no in between, Joko/Cooper, Travis/Barce, troublemaker Travis, adventure map worldbuilding, mod worldbuilding
DNW: RPF, explicit sexual content, chatfic, unrequested setting change AUs, superpowers, kidfic, graphic violence

No letter

Canon links: Playlist for Roughhouse SMP, partial playlist for Highcraft, link to fic for Mirai SMP

Comments are turned off for this community. To claim this pinch hit, please email the mods at yuletideadmin@gmail.com and:

Include the pinch hit number in the subject line
Include the recipient’s AO3 name in the subject line
Include your AO3 username in the body of the email

For example, if your AO3 username is yuletidehippo and you want to claim Pinch Hit #42 for AwsomRecip, you might email us with the subject line “PH 42 for AwsomRecip” and “I’m yuletidehippo on AO3” in the body of the email. As was the case previously, if you don’t receive a reply you did not get the pinch hit.

Also, remember our pinch hitters' prompts post! If you weren't signed up and you're pinch hitting, your rare fandom prompts are very welcome!

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fandom

oh, Hockey RPF, you're still a draw 😂

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(no subject)

On a lighter Parisian note, I read my first Katherine Rundell book, Rooftoppers, which I would have ADORED at age ten but also found extremely fun at age forty!

The heroine of Rooftoppers is orphan Sophie, found floating in a cello case the English Channel after a terrible shipwreck and adopted by a charming eccentric named Charles who raises her on Shakespeare and Free Spirited Inquiry. Unfortunately the English authorities do not approve of children being raised on Shakespeare and Free Spirited Inquiry, so when they threaten to remove Sophie to an orphanage, Charles and Sophie buy themselves time by fleeing to Paris in an attempt to track down traces of Sophie's parentage.

Sophie is stubbornly convinced she might have a mother somewhere out there who survived the shipwreck! Charles is less convinced, but willing to be supportive. On account of the Authorities, however, Charles advises Sophie to stay in the hotel while he pursues the investigation -- but Sophie will not be confined! So she starts pursuing her own investigations via the hotel roof, where she rapidly collides with Matteo, an extremely feral child who claims ownership of the Paris roofs and Does Not Want want Sophie intruding.

But of course eventually Sophie wins Matteo over and is welcomed into the world of the Rooftoppers, Parisian children who have fled from orphanages in favor of leaping from spire to steeple, stealing scraps and shooting pigeons (but also sometimes befriending the pigeons) and generally making a self-sufficient sort of life for themselves in the Most Scenic Surroundings in the World. The book makes it quite clear that the Rooftoppers are often cold and hungry and smelly and the whole thing is no bed of roses, while nonetheless fully and joyously indulging in the tropey delight of secret! hyper-competent! child! rooftop! society!!

The book as a whole strikes a lovely tonal balance just on the edge of fairy tale -- everything is very technically plausible and nothing is actually magic, but also, you know, the central image of the book is a gang of rooftop Lost Kids chasing the haunting sound of cello music over the roof of the Palais de Justice. The ending I think does not make the mistake of trying to resolve too much, and overall I found it a really charming experience.

No words are adequate

( Cut for discussion of antisemitic violence and a mass shooting )

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Wild motion

I've spent this morning at the pool, then fixing hooks to the living room wall from which to hang more string lights (the latest batch were made by hand in Shetland and each light is contained in a little glass, cork-stoppered bottle filled with tiny pieces of sea-glass), and now finally have a bit of spare time in which to write and catch up on Dreamwidth. It's a beautiful, crisp, clear wintry day, and I think Matthias and I will go out for a walk to take in the silvery-blue sky — and I might light the wood-burning stove for the first time this season.

Yesterday I had my final two classes for the year at the gym, which went well, as I was full of energy and determination. I've now been doing them both — power pump (basically lifting weights to music) followed by zumba (the cheesiest dances you can imagine, to the cheesiest music you can imagine; now that it's the lead-up to Christmas the trainer has added her warm-up routine set to a medley of Christmas songs that includes — I kid you not — an EDM-rap remix of 'The Little Drummer Boy') — for three years. The result of this is that I'm very strong, and my endurance and ability to dance in time with music without making mistakes (which have always been reasonably good) are satisfactory, but I still dance like a gymnast. I think I'm stuck with this for life. The hips don't lie, and in spite of it being twenty-plus years since I was a gymnast, some things never leave you, and therefore my hips don't move.

I also finally accepted reality and decided that (in spite of my usual track record) I will leave my contributions to Yuletide this year to my main assignment, plus the one treat I've already written. Usually I aim for at least four fics in the main collection, but I can't say that many of this year's prompts are really calling to me, and I don't think forcing things for the sake of arbitrary personal goals is going to result in decent writing.

That has left more time for reading, although the fact that I got so obsessed with one book this week that I reread it five times in succession (and then I reread it a sixth time yesterday) meant that I've only finished one other book this week: Night Train to Odesa (Jen Stout), a British freelance journalist's memoir of her time in Ukraine during the first year of Russia's full-scale invasion, and the various ordinary people forced to do extraordinary things (in the military, as civilian volunteers, in culture and the arts, over the border in Romania helping the first wave of bewildered and traumatised refugees) that she met. It's a well-told account covering ground with which I'm already familiar from other similar memoirs — raw emotions, injustice and atrocities, people rising with ingenuity, stamina and resilience to meet the moment because the only other option would have been to lie down, surrender, and cease to exist as free people of an independent nation — but I appreciated the features that made it unique. These included Stout's background (a journalist from Shetland who spoke fluent Russian and actually spent the first month of the war on a journalism fellowship in Russia — a surreal experience), and her familiarity with Ukraine (she had spent a lot of time there before, and has a particular love for Kharkiv city, and the frontline Donbas regions of Luhansk and Donetsk, and writes about their landscapes, urban architecture and people with deep affection).

I'm also making my way — for the first time — through The Eagle of the Ninth (Rosemary Sutcliff). Sutcliff is a glaring gap in my reading, and I'm on such a Roman Britain kick that I felt now was a good time to remedy it. Her books seemed like an appropriate winter reading project (the elegiac tone, the stark, austere landscapes), and I'm enjoying this first foray immensely, and wondering why I never tried them before now! (I have a vague memory of being given one book or the other in childhood and finding the dearth of female characters offputting, and that initial impression is probably the culprit for it taking me this long to pick them up.)

( Another December talking meme response )

I hope you've all been having relaxing weekends.

Current Mood: tired

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Reading material

Currently reading: Wicked

I used to think Wicked was hard going, the first couple of times I read it, but I guess I've got the hang of it now - I'm blowing right on through. (I'm not to the Kiamo Ko part yet, though, so I might be premature in saying that!)

I think I mentioned that I was reading the new Jenny Colgan - The Secret Christmas Library - and I ended up liking that one a lot. Very entertaining. I read a couple of holiday-themed romance novellas that I dug out of my collection - I'm in the holiday mood, I guess!

This morning I was reading an October Daye book - I'm blanking out on the name of it, but it's the one where we find out Stacy's real identity - but I stopped because it's pretty depressing and I decided I wasn't in the mood for that. (It's right on the tip of my tongue - Be the Serpent, is that it? It's late - or early, depending on your POV, and I'm not really all here right now.)

Maybe I should go to bed, actually. We're supposed to have a cold front - it's been 70-ish but it's supposed to drop to somewhere around freezing by tonight. By Texas Gulf Coast standards, that's like a blizzard.

Random perspectives in time

Eighty years before this year, WWII ended.

Eighty years before WWII ended, the American Civil War ended.

So we are as far away from (or as close to) WWII, as the people in WWII were from (or to) the Civil War.

IDK, it's interesting to think about. Something Elizabeth Samet has written about, a bit, too.

I only wrote a very short version of that fic where Steve Rogers was a civil war vet, who was frozen until Tony from Iron Man Noir found him, but I was always fond of that idea.

Current Music: Stalker's Tango - Autoheart

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books

Recent reading

Read Tied Up in Tinsel by Ngaio Marsh, one of the later installments in her Roderick Alleyn series (published 1972) and set against the backdrop of a country manor being restored by a wealthy eccentric, whose particular eccentricities include hiring a domestic staff consisting entirely of convicted murderers. I enjoyed this one a lot: Alleyn's wife, painter Agatha Troy, is the focal character until he shows up halfway through to figure out whodunnit, and I always love Marsh's Troy-centric novels; the wealthy eccentric was also a really great character. And it is, as the title suggests, seasonally relevant/a Christmas Episode!

Read The Night Guest by Hildur Knútsdóttir (translated from Icelandic by Mary Robinette Kowal), a novella about a woman who is either having a mental health crisis or in the throes of something more supernatural when she finds herself waking up each morning to the increasingly violent aftermath of apparent sleepwalking episodes. Shades of Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest & Relaxation, but darker/creepier/gorier. Do not read if you are particularly fond of cats. I picked this up after seeing a review from

rachelmanija that both piqued my interest and tempered my expectations, and I'm glad I went in forewarned that the plot's ambiguity is never actually resolved and nothing is explained; I didn't mind the Wouldn't that be messed up? Anyways I'm Rod Serling approach, but it would have been annoying to have expected answers that never came.

Have made some progress in the audiobook of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and this is hardly a new/unique observation, but it really is wild to read the classics that have become so diffused into general pop culture, because you'll be like yeah, yeah, we get it, it's a famous book and then you'll actually read it and it really is That Good???

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pinch hits

Posting; Pinch Hit; Betas

The DEADLINE is getting closer and closer!

At deadline time - 9pm UTC on 17 December - your Yuletide assignment must be posted (published, not a draft!) to the Yuletide collection as a complete work.

Before then, we need your help, Yuletide! We have an outstanding pinch hit (#121) for the fandoms:
SMPLive
Roughhouse SMP
Mirai SMP - XYouly
Highcraft (Web Series)

See details here. Please email us at yuletideadmin@gmail.com if you can help, and spread the word if you have friends who might be interested. This pinch hit is due at 9pm UTC on 19 December.

More pinch hits will be advertised at

yuletide_pinch_hits, especially after 9pm UTC on the 17th.

Additionally, we love beta reader volunteers! You can connect with writers at this post by filling out a Google form, or you can join the Discord and keep an eye out for beta requests advertised by members with the Hippo role.

Good luck to everyone facing down the deadline!

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keyword: villains

Star Trek: Villain's Week

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Creators Are Revealed!

Anon is now off on the collection, and everyone can see who made these fantastic works! At the time of posting we have a total of 141 works in this round’s collection! All of which can be found here.

The collection is now unmoderated and will remain open indefinitely for treats. Soon, we will do a wrap-up post for the community challenge!

As ever, as always, the mods appreciate every single one of you that help make this exchange what it is! Here's to another great year of more Rare Pairs cake! <3

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(no subject)

Sometimes I think that if I ever gain full comprehension of the various upheavals and rapid-fire political rotations that followed in the hundred years after the French Revolution, my mind will at that point be big and powerful enough to understand any other bit of history that anyone can throw at me. Prior to reading Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism, I knew that in the 1870s there had briefly been a Paris Commune, and also a siege, and hot air balloons and Victor Hugo were involved in these events somehow but I had not actually understood that these were actually Two Separate Events and that properly speaking there were two Sieges of Paris, because everyone in Paris was so angry about the disaster that was the first Siege (besiegers: Prussia) that they immediately seceded from the government, declared a commune, and got besieged again (besiegers: the rest of France, or more specifically the patched-together French government that had just signed a peace treaty with Prussia but had not yet fully decided whether to be a monarchy again, a constitutional monarchy again, or a Republic again.)

As a book, Paris in Ruins has a bit of a tricky task. Its argument is that the miserable events in Paris of 1870-71 -- double siege, brutal political violence, leftists and political reformers who'd hoped for the end of the Glittering and Civilized but Ultimately Authoritarian Napoleon III Empire getting their wish in the most monkey's paw fashion imaginable -- had a lasting psychological impact on the artists who would end up forming the Impressionist movement that expressed itself through their art. Certainly true! Hard to imagine it wouldn't! But in order to tell this story it has to spend half the book just explaining the Siege and the Commune, and the problem is that although the Siege and the Commune certainly impacted the artists, the artists didn't really have much impact on the Siege and the Commune ... so reading the 25-50% section of the book is like, 'okay! so, you have to remember, the vast majority of the people in Paris right now were working class and starving and experiencing miserable conditions, which really sets the stage for what comes next! and what about Berthe Morisot and Edouard Manet, our protagonists? well, they were not working class. but they were in Paris, and not having a good time, and depressed!' and then the 50-75% section is like 'well, now the working class in Paris were furious, and here's all the things that happened about that! and what about Berthe Morisot and Edouard Manet, our protagonists? well, they were not in Paris any more at this point. But they were still not having a good time and still depressed!'

Sieges and plagues are the parts of history that scare me the most and so of course I am always finding myself compelled to read about them; also, I really appreciate history that engages with the relationship between art and the surrounding political and cultural phenomena that shapes and is shaped by it. So I appreciated this book very much even though I don't think it quite succeeds at this task, in large part because there is just so much to say in explaining The Siege and The Commune that it struggles sometimes to keep it focused through its chosen lens. But I did learn a lot, if sometimes somewhat separately, about both the Impressionists and the sociopolitical environment of France in the back half of the 19th century, and I am glad to have done so. I feel like I have a moderate understanding of dramatic French upheavals of the 1860s-80s now, to add to my moderate understanding of French upheavals in the 1780s-90s (the Revolution era) and my moderate understanding of French upheavals in the 1830s-40s (the Les Mis era) which only leaves me about six or seven more decades in between to try and comprehend.

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rena

The Dog Days of December

Rena's been with me for almost a year, and she's been an affectionate, frisky, VERY smart, and wonderful companion. And on chilly nights she loves burrowing into HER blankies. I call this "The Morning Emergence".

Rena sleepy

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Sickly and lazy

I'm not doing so well at Holidailies - well, I've done a few entries, but it's already the 13th and I've done (pause while I go and count) five whole (short) entries. In my defense, I've been sickly, and it just seems not to be going away. Rob has recovered much better than I have.

We were talking idly about going to see Hamnet tomorrow, but really I intend to sleep all day, and the city holiday parade is also tomorrow - it's not impossible to get out during it, because it only goes down the main road and so you can get out by the back ways. But I bet we don't. We probably will go and get the fajitas that we put off last week - that will be Sunday, though.

(We can still go see Hamnet later, anyway - I assume it will still be around!)

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Erin Reads: Pet Shop of Horrors, Collector’s Edition, post 2 (volume 1, chapters 4-6)

Continued liveblog as I read Seven Seas’ new print edition of PSOH, and make sporadic comparisons to the original Tokyopop translation.

Chapters 1-3 were covered here. You can pick up the books with my affiliate links here. The rest of this post is the notes I microblogged in a Mastodon thread and a Bluesky thread.

( Dreizehn and Dragon and Dice, oh my... )

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Rec-Cember: Two recent short Murderbot gen fics

As I don't have the bandwidth for a lot of reccing tonight, here are two quick recs of short Murderbot friendship gen from the last couple of days that I enjoyed. Both of these are more bookverse than show-based.

Ransom by

BoldlyNo (400 wds, Gurathin-centric)
Augment-based ransomware! What a terrible/brilliant idea. This is short but complete-feeling and satisfyingly whumpy.

The Truth, Bitter as It Is by

HonorH (900 wds, Gurathin & Murderbot)
An even worse truth comes out about Ganaka Pit. I went into this fic worried that it would be terribly depressing, but it's not; it is much sweeter and kinder than it has to be.

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A couple of links

amperslashexchange just announced a collection delay and still needs pinch hitters! See if there's anything you can pick up here - there are some with bigger fandoms as well as some small fandoms.

Romance author Fern Michaels died recently, and I enjoyed reading this old article from early in her career (NYT archive article from 1978, not sure if it's paywalled). I didn't know that Fern Michaels started off as a writing duo of two different women! Apparently the one who eventually became "the" Fern Michaels took over the pen name later, but at the point this article was written, they only had three books out. The article is not at all disrespectful, and I was interested in the details of how the two women chose to position themselves in the market, which reminded me of our brainstorming process for Zoe a bit:

“There used to be a market for the little 60,000‐word romance with no plot,” Mrs. Anderson said, “but our publisher has become very demanding.”

Fern Michaels's books usually end up containing about 250,000 words.

Mrs. Anderson credits the success of the books to the authors’ attitude about women. As she put it:

“We don't have women love men who brutalize, beat and brand them. Our women don't put up with that.”

Anyway, I enjoyed this look at the state of the genre circa 1978, as well as the very early days of an author (or authors) who became a powerhouse in the 1980s-2000s romance scene.

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(no subject)

The Ukrainian fantasy novel Vita Nostra has been on my to-read list for a while ever since

shati described it as 'kind of like the Wayside School books' in a conversation about dark academia, a description which I trusted implicitly because

shati always describes things in helpful and universally accepted terms.

Anyway, so Vita Nostra is more or less a horror novel .... or at least it's about the thing which is scariest to me, existential transformation of the self without consent and without control.

At the start of the book, teenage Sasha is on a nice beach vacation with her mom when she finds herself being followed everywhere by a strange, ominous man. He has a dictate for her: every morning, she has to skinny-dip at 4 AM and swim out to a certain point in the ocean, then back, Or Else. Or Else? Well, the first time she oversleeps, her mom's vacation boyfriend has a mild heart attack and ends up in the ER. The next time ... well, who knows, the next time, so Sasha keeps on swimming. And then the vacation ends! And the horrible and inexplicable interval is, thankfully, over!

Except of course it isn't over; the ominous man returns, with more instructions, which eventually derail Sasha off of her planned normal pathway of high school --> university --> career. Instead, despite the confused protests of her mother, she glumly follows the instructions of her evil angel and treks off to the remote town of Torpa to attend the Institute of Special Technologies.

Nobody is at the Institute of Special Technologies by choice. Nobody is there to have a good time. Everyone has been coerced there by an ominous advisor; as entrance precondition, everyone has been given a set of miserable tasks to perform, Or Else. Also, it's hard not to notice that all the older students look strange and haunted and shamble disconcertingly through the dorms in a way that seems like a sort of existential dispute with the concept of space, though if you ask them about it they're just like 'lol you'll understand eventually,' which is not reassuring. And then there are the actual assignments -- the assignments that seem designed to train you to think in a way the human brain was not designed to think -- and which Sasha is actually really good at! the best in her class! fortunately or unfortunately .... but fortunately in at least this respect: everyone wants to pass, because if you fail at the midterm, if you fail at the finals, there's always the Or Else waiting.

AND ALSO all the roommates are assigned and it's hell.

Weird, fascinating book! I found it very tense and propulsive despite the fact that for chapters at a time all that happens is Sasha doing horrible homework exercises and turning her brain inside out. I feel like a lot of magic school books are, essentially, power fantasies. What if you learned magic? What if you were so good at it? Sasha is learning some kind of magic, and Sasha is so good at it, but the overwhelming emotion of this book is powerlessness, lack of agency, arbitrary tasks and incomprehensible experiences papered over with a parody of Normal College Life. On the one hand Sasha is desperate to hold onto her humanity and to remain a person that her mother will recognize when she comes home; on the other hand, the veneer of Normal College Life layered on top of the Institute's existential weirdness seems more and more pointless and frustrating the further on it goes and the stranger Sasha herself becomes. I think the moment it really clicked for me is midway through Sasha's second year, when ( spoilers )