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.” The Blackwood Academy emblem—“the carcass of an oak tree surrounded by bone fragments” (80)—is a trope of this genre, combining the Gothic elements of death and decay with the trapping of elite education.

The rise of Dark Academia has been partly fueled by the continuing influence of J. K. Rowling’s bestselling Harry Potter book series and franchise on successive generations of young adults. First published 1997-2007, this series was the first wide-reaching work to create a specifically magical academic setting combined with elements and stylings now strongly associated with Dark Academia. Young adult literature has long been populated with magical boarding schools that serve as both a haven and a testing ground for gifted adolescents. Early foundational examples include Poul Anderson’s Operation Salamander (1957), following a female student at a magical university, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea (1967), following a young magician in wizard school. The trope exploded in popularity following Harry Potter, taken up by writers such as Naomi Novik (A Deadly Education, 2020) and Soman Chainani (The School for Good and Evil series, 2013-2020) As all these examples show, works in the genre typically involve a secluded institution where students learn specialized skills, form intense friendships and rivalries within a house system, and navigate the challenges of growing up inside a powerful and inscrutable authority structure. Immortal Consequences builds on this familiar framework with Blackwood Academy, a supernatural school for the recently deceased set in purgatory. In a nod to Rowling’s school Hogwarts, Blackwood features competing houses like Pettyworth, a rigorous curriculum of magic, and a formidable, sometimes morally ambiguous leadership of Housemasters. Marie pushes the established boundaries of the magical school trope by placing her students in a version of purgatory, heightening the plot’s win-or-lose jeopardy and building the troubled, fatalistic tone of Dark Academia into the novel’s liminal setting.

Immortal Consequences brings these elements together to serve an audience of young adults eager for literature that fits with their cultural interests and aesthetics. By blending the magical school setting with the characteristics of dark academia, the novel enables readers to explore the pressures and concerns of real-life adolescence through a high-stakes, fantasy narrative.