Legacy and Ruin: When Utopia Burns (Blood Over Bright Heaven)
Power corrupts and all that
It doesn’t begin as a ruin.
It begins as a dream.
A university of magical learning, steeped in legacy and brilliance. A place where minds are sharpened like blades and its students are shaped into something extraordinary. For a while, it even works, if you squint and pretend that the flagrant sexism doesn’t exist.
But dreams built on power rarely survive scrutiny (or the final acts of a desperate protagonist. See: The Hunger Games).
In Blood Over Bright Haven, M.L. Wang offers a rare twist on the academic gothic: the institution doesn’t haunt the protagonist, it seduces her. Where Richard Papen is drawn to college, and then the inner circle of one Henry Winter, it’s less seduction and more of a sense of entitlement.
For Sciona, gaining an academic place means so much more. It offers her purpose, structure, and a legacy to leave behind, rather than to step into. What unfolds is not the slow, crumbling descent of a dying school, but something far more brutal: an awakening, and then a reckoning.
This is where dark academia thrives: not just in the darkened halls and arcane lectures, but in the moment a student realises they’ve been complicit in something monstrous and immoral. The moment education stops being enlightening and starts being ideological. It's that unforgettable switch when they realise history becomes propaganda, used in ways to harm rather than to inform the present or future. And the pursuit of brilliance requires obedience to a system designed to hurt.
Sciona’s revelation isn’t just philosophical, it’s phyical, emotional, and, eventually quite literally explosive. When she understands the truth behind the founding and the moral compromises at its core, she does what many dark academia protagonists never dare to do.
She burns it down.
It’s a literal act of destruction, but also symbolic. It’s the rejection of a legacy of elitism. Of inherited knowledge that demands blood in return. Wang doesn't mourn the university’s fall, she gives it the death it earned. In doing so, she asks the reader:
What does it mean to destroy the place that made you, when staying would mean losing yourself?
Dark academia is often enamoured with the ruins of academia; old buildings, tragic endings, brilliant minds driven mad. But Blood Over Bright Haven pushes that narrative one step further. It’s not about mourning (or idolising) the ruin. It’s about choosing its demise. About rejecting a corrupted utopia in favour of something more honest, even if that honesty is jagged and raw and set to self destruct in 5…4…3…2…1…
Some legacies are worth preserving. Absolutely. There are traditions and histories we should be clamouring to maintain.
Others, honestly, are better left in ash.