A School for Troubled Wizards is a manuscript by APieceofToast currently languishing in Development Hell. It's an Expy of the Harry Potter series, with an orphaned wizard attending a Wizarding School.
However, the parallels start breaking down quickly. For one, Troubled Wizards very much does not take place in an illustrious institution. The Archambault School of Magic and Arcana, known as the fifth best magic school in the US (out of the five magic schools in the US) is less of a prestigious seat of learning and more of a wobbly plastic chair in the corner that disruptive kids get put in. The only wizards who end up here are usually ones who suffer from debilitating problems, either magical or behavioral; often an inextricable mix of the two.
Enter one Hester St. John, the sole survivor of a mysterious gas explosion that left her with a badly scarred face, a short temper, and a tendency for things to burst into flame whenever she loses that temper...
This series provides examples of:
- Absurdly Divided School: Deconstructed - ASMA, like other magic schools, has five houses divided by magic type. However, the division isn't maintained very well, as the school doesn't have the budget to give each house separate dorms.
- Notable is that the proportion of students in each house fluctuates so badly from year to year that trying to build separate dorms is a mug's game. Like, when Hester enrolls, there are three times as many students in Blue than there are in Red, and in the 60s the school was almost entirely Red.
- As for the students, how seriously they'll take the division usually hinges on whether they play sports (because of the inter-house spoccor tournaments) and how old they are. The upperclassmen tend to care more because the school only gave up completely on having separate dorm spaces a few years ago. Hester herself is opposed to the division altogether, and expresses this by trying to drive Red's house points into the negatives.
- Abusive Parents: Not necessarily parents, but Hester has ended up with a variety of unsuitable legal guardians since her parents died, Aunt Beatrice in particular.
- Aerith and Bob: The main characters range from Cass (short for Cassandra) to Norma to Rory to Hester and Jerusha. Southern wizard families usually tend towards obscure Biblical names.
- After-School Cleaning Duty: This is the typical detention assignment. Sometimes it's held in the Mezz if the sump pumps aren't working and one of the kids in detention is small enough to get through the tight spots.
- All Crimes Are Equal: Why Hester protests the house points system - there isn't a set standard for how many points get deducted, so a lot of teachers just deduct twenty for any given misdemeanor.
- All Witches Have Cats: Hester feeds a stray cat behind the cafeteria and names him Firestar. Averted by her roommates - Norma's allergic, and Rory is afraid of cats.
- Animal Espionage: Rory uses her pigeon familiars as a big CCTV system, though people who know what they're looking for can identify which pigeons are Rory's by their huge, goofy eyes.
- Arc Number: Five houses, five wizards in a circle, and five main characters.
- Badass Normal: Mr. Ellery teaches at a wildly dangerous Wizarding School despite having no magic at all. Apparently he got into this line of work when he took an arcana course at his college for fun. He was expecting to just read Crowley, and then he walked in and the professor was sitting on a flying carpet. He shrugged and rolled with it.
- Dr. Stokes is also suspected to be this by the main characters, since he's never been seen using magic. This isn't actually the case; he's a necromancer. He just doesn't use his powers very often because he doesn't want parents making a fuss about it.
- Bad Powers, Good People: A core tenet of the series. The main characters' magic is emergent from their trauma, and the series focuses on them getting a handle on it and not letting it define them.
- Badass Family: The Stokes-Nim family includes a powerful necromancer, a once-in-a-millenium super mystic, and their teenage daughter who already has a hundred bird familiars. If you care to include Mr. Ellery, then there's also a mortal who can hold his own against several wizards at once.
- Big Labyrinthine Building: ASMA is on top of a demolished powerhouse and its associated buildings - but the basements weren't demolished. This series of basements is known as the Mezz; it's normally not accessible to students, but it floods when it rains, and the Mezz's sump pumps need to be turned on manually to prevent the school from flooding.
- Boarding School: ASMA.
- Boarding School of Horrors: An odd example - the faculty are largely decent people, but the school is shown to have budget issues, a hard time managing the dangers of magic, and a serious bullying problem.
- On the first day, there's an announcement telling the eighth graders to not shit on the floor, due to seniors telling them that there aren't any bathrooms being a long-running prank.
- The Mezz is a pitch-black, extremely waterlogged series of basements under the school. Norma asks how this situation hasn't given the entire school black mold, and Dr. Stokes can only respond with "I am contractually obligated to say 'magic.'"
- Not even the teachers are immune to the school's dangers - the theater teacher is possessed by a cursed puppet, and Mrs. Crookshanks lost her human body in the Mezz and currently exists as a humanoid pile of rats in a raincoat.
- Category Traitor: As a story that deals heavily in Fantastic Racism, this is a given. Somewhat unique in that different villains have different standards as to what constitutes a traitor, which greatly threatens the stability of Octavian's following.
- Corrupted Character Copy: Most of the characters, but there's two very standout examples.
- Hester is the daughter of two wizards who fought against a legion of evil, Nazi-esque wizards. Her parents were subsequently killed by one of them, but the attacker died while attempting to kill her. The key differences are that this happened when Hester was ten years old, and the cause of Octavian's death wasn't so much the Power of Love as it was the power of a baseball bat. The result is that Hester is less awed by the magical world and more angry and frustrated that her involvement in it killed her parents and almost killed her.
- The Furies are an Expy of the Marauders who tend to mix-and-match elements of each member; Peter is James Potter, Annabel is Lily Potter with powers of prophecy, Lyra is an odd mix of Petunia Dursley and Snape, Silas plays Snape's role while having a similar backstory to Remus Lupin, and Hal is a mashup of Sirius Black and Harry Dresden.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: Octavian Concannon is a wealthy American demagogue who got into politics seemingly for fun and quickly became a lightning rod for several disparate groups of people who see his rise to power as an opportunity to oppress others, all while he either encourages or ignores these actions.
- Dysfunction Junction: Comes with the territory. Hester suffers from rage issues brought on by her parents' deaths, Norma struggles with her status as a wizard and lesbian in the face of her overbearing mother, Jerusha is stuck with both post-concussion syndrome and the consequences of being Royally Screwed Up, and Rory grew up in a cult. Part of the reason Cass is elected head of their circle is that her specific damage - being transgender in an unaccepting family - is the least likely to interfere with her ability to make rational decisions.
- Enemy Civil War: The villains are all generally called "Octavian's people," but in reality they're made up of at least five distinct groups that tend to grind each other's gears.
- The Patrol: Effectively the magical world's version of the police; a mix of incompetent and flat-out malicious due to being a profession that's very attractive to violent individuals. They believe that magical society's power is in its strongest wizards, and that its military should rise to lead.
- The Thule Society: A continuation of the real-world Thule Society, inadvertently imported to the States by Operation Paperclip. The Society has similar tastes to your average Fantastic Racist; wizards good, Muggles bad, etc. This was the driving force behind the Great Occult War in which they attempted to break the Masquerade, but since losing the War the Society's membership and power has become a fraction of what it once was.
- The Known Unknowns: A loosely knit force of forums, YouTube jocks, and loads and loads of grifters who support the belief that an anonymous Internet presence known only as the Unknown has secret insider information on the Magistrate's activities. They believe in the pursuit of truth - or at the very least, trying to prove that "the truth" is on their side.
- The Brimstone Party: Comprised of aristocrats and politicians who think that the other factions can be steered to vote them back into office and give them tax breaks. Notably, they don't seem to have strong beliefs in anything other than that of their own competency and claim to power.
- The New Guard: The sole non-wizard faction involved with Octavian; the Guard is a group of Winchester-esque monster hunters who want to help Octavian deliver on his promise to stamp out all non-wizard supernatural creatures.
- Face of a Thug: Stokes is noted to be a large, intimidating man with a lot of scars on his face. He's also the most trusted teacher to the main cast and a loving father to Rory. Hester and her burn scar don't quite qualify for this because while well-intentioned, she's genuinely rough around the edges and jumps to violence far too quickly.
- Fantasy Gun Control: Zigzagged - because this book is set in the American South, a lot of wizards in Piccadilly Square can and do own guns. However, most of the book takes place in a school, so this trope applies to a certain extent.
- Generation Xerox: There's a few tendencies shared by both the Gal Pals and their parents' circle, the Furies.
- A teenage wizard circle that gets off to a bad start, but grows tightly-knit consisting of a hotheaded jock (Hester/Peter), their close friend and voice of reason (Cass/Annabel), a snarky and overachieving friend (Norma/Hal), someone who started out as a rival (Jerusha/Lyra), and a shy member who is seemingly inept at magic (Rory/Silas).
- Hufflepuff House: There are five Wizarding Schools in the US, broken up by region: the protagonists' Archambault School of Magic and Arcana, the Long Dark Wizardry School, Coeurvert Preparatory School, Teewinot Academy, and... St. Joan's Magical School. At one point Jerusha lists them on a whiteboard - as "the cool one," "rich kids," "rich kids with syphilis," "yeehaw," and "who cares."
- I Am Big Boned: Subverted - Cass gets annoyed with people who say this, since the girls at her old school used it to tease her.
- Jigsaw Puzzle Plot: Has some of this, most noticeably with the Furies. The group is mentioned in passing in book one. More detail is given in book two, with it being revealed that it was Hamburg and Stokes's circle in high school, but it's not revealed until book four who the other three members of the circle were: Hester's parents and Norma's mom.
- Kid Detective: An unusual case in that Jerusha leverages her status as an Alpha Bitch to be this. Hal Hamburg is mentioned to be more of a straightforward example when he was in school.
- Loophole Abuse: Due to the very specific constraints of magic, loopholes get exploited a lot.
- Norma is terrible at any form of magic that doesn't involve Laser-Guided Amnesia... and then she takes a psychology course and finds out that the brain heavily alters and "forgets" stimuli in the split second between sensation and perception. Once she starts thinking of all perception as memory, she gains the ability to create illusions.
- Mera Nim is a more disturbing example: the ability to take familiars is standard for mystics, and the process creates a group of animals of one specific species that are controlled by the mystic. Mera decided to try this with people.
- Muggles Do It Better: While Post-Modern Magik is in use, there are some instances where magic is bypassed altogether.
- The most obvious example is in combat: the rule of thumb is that once you can see the whites of the attacker's eyes, it's best to put the wand down and start swinging. The one exception to this rule is when guns are involved, in which case the objective also changes from "win" to "survive." The average wizard doesn't know how to kill with magic off the top of their head, while a gun doesn't need to know anything.
- Communication via magic is pretty behind - magic mirrors are the best that they've got, but they only work two-way. There's no magical equivalent of the internet, because wizards tend to just use the actual internet and let the Veil keep their corner of it inaccessible to mortals.
- Magical medicine outstrips mundane medicine in terms of sheer speed, able to seal wounds in a matter of seconds. Prosthetics are also mentioned - wizards can graft on new limbs that feel similar to the real things. But for things like diagnostics and disease treatment, they tend to fall back on the mundane stuff. It's mentioned that Hester's hearing aids could be replaced by the magic alternative, but it would be less effective.
- The broomstick industry was pretty much killed by Henry Ford. Flying vacuum cleaners are used sometimes, but generally by kids who don't have driver's licenses yet. Overall, there's a pattern of magical advancement getting kneecapped because the mortals figured out something more efficient, and it wasn't worth trying to top them.
- No Communities Were Harmed: Zigzagged. All of the main characters live in real life cities in the Southnote , and ASMA is explicitly stated to be on an island in Lake Martin
. However, Piccadilly Square is based off the town that the author went to college in; it's bright and sunny and the businesses are clustered near the school, but it's a ghost town during the summer. - Noodle Incident: Almost everything that happened while the Furies were in school is this.
- The first instance occurs before the Furies are even properly introduced - Stokes gives his condolences to Jerusha about her father, before admitting that the only time they interacted was when Hal shot him in the stomach while he was masturbating in a tool shed.
- There's a rumor Stokes was bitten by a vampire in his sophomore year - and then proceeded to somehow kill the vampire by biting it back. Stokes has a silver tooth, as it turns out, which becomes important later.
- Jokes about St. Johns being prone to vehicular manslaughter, mostly stemming from an incident where Peter ran over a Nazi with the Hamburgini. Hester fulfills the prophecy by running over an enemy combatant with the very same vehicle.
- Real Life Writes the Plot: Parts of the worldbuilding are influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic. Namely, the old wizard families, which are averse to technology, ended up in serious hot water when mass shutdowns forced school and work to be conducted online. Troubled Wizards being set 20 Minutes in the Future after the pandemic, ASMA has a recently instituted tech literacy class to prevent this sort of thing happening again.
