Q is extremely tired from doing his first Real Magic ™ and so stays at the school, and the teachers assure him it’s all been squared with his parents so they won’t worry about him.

Er…unless there’s some magic fuckery going down on his parents, I’m pretty sure they’d still be worried? I mean, if my family member disappeared unexpectedly and then a complete stranger went ‘no, we’ve got him, it’s okay,’ I would not be un-worried. I would be extra worried. I would be fighting someone. Sheesh, even leaving the parents out altogether would be better than this. At least then we could assume there’s an ineffectual missing person file opened and no one at the school cares.

Q wakes up very confused the next morning.

From where he lay he took stock of the room he was in. The walls were curved – the room was in the shape of a section of a circle. The outer wall was stone; the inner was taken up with dark wooden cabinets and cubbies. There was a Victorian-looking writing desk and a dresser and a mirror. His bed was tucked into a wooden alcove. There were small vertical windows all along the outer wall. He had to admit it was a highly satisfactory room.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz-lksjdf huh? Oh. Sorry. Fell asleep in the middle of reading that.

He winds up having a meeting with the dean after some pointless descriptions of showering and wandering around the empty building. The dean explains that magic is real (duh) and they are Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy, and they’d like to offer him a placement at their school.

Q asks a few good questions, like if they’re an actual college and if they aware degrees, to which Fogg gives some very noncommittal ‘oh, but we’re so much better and wholly separate from all that bull’ answers. There’s some fiddly questions about how the school finds kids with magical aptitude, and then they say that Q will have to leave the end of his high school and start with them within the next two weeks.

And I just…have so many questions. Questions that Q will not oblige me by answering.

Like, Brakebills doesn’t do degrees, but at the end of five years he’ll be ‘a magician.’ So…what does that mean? Can he get a job with that? Is there a separate magical society that will recognize his status as a magician? This is actually really really important once you realize that Q will have to become a high school dropout to attend, because he’ll be pretty much committed to this maybe-maybe-not magical world.

What about Brakebills dropouts? What’s the attrition rate? Is there anything for people who dropped out of high school and then failed magic college and now have no formal education and also years missing in their history? It seems like Brakebills only recruits high-performing kids, so taking several years off would make whatever former plans they had pretty hard to go back to.

And then Fogg makes him decide right away. Which for Q isn’t that hard, because his character was specifically set up for this kind of a thing. He’s annoyed with his life and has no apparent goals, instead just following a template because of…peer pressure, I guess. It’s not really a big thing for him to give it all up and engage in the one thing that actually fascinates him. But what about literally anyone else? What if there’s some kid out there who’s great at math and wants to work at NASA and plot spaceship courses to Europa or something? She’s supposed to decide between her lifelong dream and a fantastical world of magic on such a pathetically tiny amount of information?

The fact that Fogg’s speech is practically designed for Q and Q alone and there’s no hint of anything that would convince other people kind leaves the impression that it’s highly manipulative. And add in the extremely fast decision time, and it more than kind of leaves that impression.

“Okay,” Quentin said evenly. “All right. On one condition: I want to start now. I want to stay in that room. I don’t want to go home.”

Oh, fuck you, Q.

Damn, that’s cold. Doesn’t even want to say goodbye to his parents after straight up disappearing on them? There wasn’t any indication that they had a toxic relationship before, or at least not to this level. And he doesn’t want to say goodbye to his friends, or even pack up his things?

Did the author just panic at the thought of writing his home life and forget that time skips are a perfectly acceptable thing? Possible, since we had to go through every moment of Q’s morning, including his shower.

They didn’t make him go home. Instead, his things arrived from home in a collection of duffel bags and rolly suitcases, packed by his parents, who had, as Fogg promised, somehow been squared with the idea that their only child was matriculating in the middle of the semester at a mysterious educational institution they had never visited or even heard of .

Um. Damn. That’s incredibly freaky. These people have the ability to mind-muck you into not caring that they’ve kidnapped your child. And the book passes it off as just a ‘whee, I get to be special even sooner!’

He didn’t even want to touch [his clothes and books] now. They were part of his old self, his old life, the one he was molting away.

This feels really unearned. Yeah, Q is clearly depressed, but even depressed people form attachments to things in their life and have hobbies and things they like, and Q hasn’t really displayed a ‘I hate everything about my existence’ mentality. He’s more in the ennui subcategory. Plus…nothing new and exciting has happened? This isn’t Harry Potter where the school is some fantastical collection of the super cool and exciting. It’s…a mostly empty manor house with the occasional oddity. And Q hasn’t done anything in this new world except one big magic display which he hasn’t even had a feels about yet, and all they’ve even told him about the world so far is ‘we can find people and we have tests.’

I’m just not feeling so blown away that it would make sense for someone to reinvent himself or feel like a new person.

Q notes that the notebook with the unpublished Fillory novel is gone, having gone missing during the exam process.

Then, since he decided to stay at the school early and it’s empty and boring and there’s nothing to do and WHY, he sits on his bed and mopes about his friends- I mean, Julia.

Did she miss him? Now that he was gone, would she realize she’d had the wrong man all along?

Um, probably not, since you were a wet blanket who hated his only hobby before this.

After yet more descriptions of doing nothing because nothing is going on…

Sometimes he burst out laughing out of nowhere, for no reason. He was experimenting cautiously with the idea of being happy

But

Why?

He’s a depressed kid wandering around an empty building with nothing to do. You are describing nothing interesting or magical or happy-making. We’re supposed to be impressed with the mere idea that magic exists, apparently, instead of getting a chance to play with it and learn about it. And I just really have a hard time with the idea that being 1) alone 2) directionless and 3) disengaged is somehow brining someone out of their depression. That…sounds like my worst nightmare, actually.

Brakebills was different [from Brooklyn]. It mattered.

B U T

W H Y

This whole section feels like the author is rushing, attempting to evoke an impression of importance and wonder without actually laying any groundwork and earning it. I’m sick of being told that Brakebills is super cool before anything even fucking happens. I know nothing about this world, the school, the magic system, jack nothing, and neither does Q, and you still want to pop off lines like this? Fuck that.