Immortal Consequences

Immortal Consequences combines the concerns and aesthetics of the youth trend known as Dark Academia with the traditional young adult literary trope of the magical school.

Dark Academia is a subculture centered around an idealized version of liberal arts higher education, popularized by adolescents and young adults in the late 2010s and 2020s, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic years. It is characterized by a preppy Oxbridge or Ivy-league aesthetic in combination with Gothic style, self-conscious bookishness, a dark and pessimistic moodiness, and a sense of nostalgia and ennui. Precipitated by novels like Donna Tartt’s 1992 The Secret History, dark academia romanticizes the pursuit of knowledge while exploring ideas of its corrupting influence, especially around decadence and the loss of innocence. Other Recent key works in the genre include R. F. Kuang’s 2022 Babel and Leigh Bardugo’s 2019 Ninth House. Literary settings and situations often place characters in situations of obsession or competitive ambition, drawing on the real-life pressures for young people at top-flight institutions: Plots often draw on tensions between fairness and cheating, privilege and merit, and hard work and innate talent. Immortal Consequences follows this pattern, where the high-stakes environment pushes students like Wren and August, who describe themselves as “competitive arseholes,” into a relentless pursuit of becoming “the best.