"And his neighbors don't hate him because we're never going to throw a party in his room!"

"That'd help."

"So si-mei how are your classes going?"

"Not too bad? But my history class is... odd."

"How so?"

"I'm taking a modern Chinese history class, because it would have some useful spells--" Mostly about being subtle and hard to detect and hidden "--and because it would cover some material I already knew. But it definitely expects, mmm, different answers than my old school did."

"Well, yeah, your old school is full of blatant fascist propaganda."

"--We're communist???"

"They're basically the same thing."

(Comparative politics was not a strong point in Wei Ying's education.)

"--No?" (...not exactly a strong point of hers either.)

"They're basically the same because there's some asshole running around telling everyone what to do and you can't tell him to fuck off."

"The government knows what it's doing? And it's a lot better than, like, no government?"

"I bet if you just let people do whatever it'd be fine. Most people are cool."

...She has had a passing acquaintanceship with the concept that enclavers are weird, but she is getting a lot more familiar with the idea. "Is there are reason you think that?"

"I dunno, all the people I've met are cool? There's no government in the Scholomance and it's fine except when people take offense at Zaizai and try to start a war for no reason."

"So, the nice thing about leaders is that they stop things like that happening in the first place?" We shall ignore how effective that was at her old school.

"No, they don't, they just commit genocides themselves. The problem with governments is that they're run by people so you can't go 'we're improving on people by having a government instead.' It's people all the way down."

"But governments create laws and structures, and that helps people be better versions of themselves, and stops teenagers from starting wars at their schools."

"The purpose of laws is breaking them."

"No??? A lot of laws are to stop you from doing harmful or dangerous things!"

"Si-mei, I like doing harmful and dangerous things."

"Hopefully not to other people?"

"Nope! Not to other people! Only to myself! --I am a dangerous yet charming bad boy and you should flee before you are ensorcelled by my wiles."

"That's-- I don't want to say 'okay,' you should avoid hurting yourself, but... not so concerning?"

"Hurting other people is mean, I don't like being mean."