Trope Talk: Magic

Well, let's

talk

about

magic

. Now,

magic

as a

trope

is both a vague and very controversial concept in certain circles, so it's going to be a bit tricky to approach. Probably a good starting point is to define magic. Which would be nice if it were possible, but no one has ever found a sufficiently complete definition. So let's skip that and assume we all know what magic is. It's you know, magic. You'll know it when you see it. If someone throws a fireball or draws a glowing door in the air, it's probably magic. If it's in a fantasy world and it glows and it's not a mushroom in a cave, it's probably magical.

Let's go. In fiction, magic almost always comes in one of five specific forms, and these forms are: potions, charms and curses, prophecies, magical items, and spells. Each of these forms has its own literary uses and associated

trope

s, and origins in different cultural and historical sources, so let's look at them one by one. To start, drinks. This is actually really fun, or at least I think it's really interesting. Potions are such an important part of fictional magic because in the real world, magic and medicine have been equated for centuries, especially since the precise cause of illnesses was long unknown.

People could tell that certain situations could make you sick, like being around dead bodies, but it wasn't clear why, so magical explanations were suggested, like malevolent spirits, ghosts, vampires, or whatever. And although physical remedies were usually found and applied through trial and error, addressing the hypothetical magical cause was generally considered equally important. Ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt supplemented physical remedies with rituals or prayers to address the perceived spiritual cause of an illness in addition to the physical symptoms, so the idea of ​​a physical remedy with magical effects is known throughout the world, which resulted in an ancient tradition.

Presence in fiction. It is likely that alchemy is also partly responsible for the aesthetics of this concept, due to its focus on the distillation and purification of materials with magical properties, although it remains to be seen whether alchemy can be considered magical. Potions in fiction obviously have all kinds of effects beyond the medicinal or alchemical, with the love potion being a favorite. As a general rule, drinking a potion casts a temporary or permanent spell on the drinker. Let's

talk

about that. Charms and curses are basically the same thing. There is some kind of magical influence that sticks to a person until the time limit is reached or a condition is met that breaks the effect.

They are very popular in fairy tales, where cursed royalty is so common that one wonders how politics can happen. Sometimes there are transformations where someone is cursed and turns into a monster, an animal or something like that. Sometimes it's the classic version of "sleep until someone breaks the curse." Modern fiction also has positive charms, but they are not as common in most of the folklore I know. Sometimes there were fairy tales where babies were blessed with positive character traits, but there weren't that many babies with +5 fire resistance. Curses were also in vogue in ancient Greece, where they were written on lead tablets called Katadesmos before being filled with nails and buried underground to attract the attention of the chthonic deities who would carry out the actual curse.

They were sometimes used for love spells too! Charms and curses are also connected to the general concept of sympathetic magic, where by doing something with an object connected to a person, you also directly affect that person. I'd call it a voodoo doll for convenience, but that's a misleading term, because voodoo hardly uses sympathetic magic, and sympathetic magic was primarily practiced in medieval Britain, but you get the idea. Speaking of understanding, let's talk about prophecies. Prophecies in various forms appear in all types of media, from serious, life-defining coded matters to the occasional predictive dream. Predictions of all kinds are favorites in classical literature and folklore, mainly because there is literally no easier way to predict something than to explicitly tell the audience that it is going to happen.

The Oracle of Delphi is an ancient classic in this sense, and is responsible for a number of tropes related to prophecy, including the idea of ​​an oracle who has visions of a god and/or visions of the future by inhaling crazy smoke. Another old classic is that characters have predictive dreams, usually without any explanation as to how the character dreams about the future and often with some kind of symbolism that obscures the exact meaning of the dream. Think of Clytamestra dreaming that she gives birth to a poisonous snake before being killed by her son Orestes, or of Penelope dreaming that a flock of geese is slaughtered shortly before Odysseus returns and kills the suitors.

And in the Mahabharata, the antagonist, Karna, has a dream in which the protagonist Yudhishthira climbs a mountain of skulls to claim a small cup of nectar, foreshadowing his upcoming civil war with a ridiculous body count that Yudhishthira wins. Unlike most other types of magic we have identified, prophecies are rarely made intentionally, but are sometimes deliberately constructed and in such cases can function more like curses. Magical objects are another widespread classic with very ancient mythological roots. Perseus is given a helmet that can make him invisible and sandals that can make him fly, in the original story of Aladdin a genie sits on a ring, Kusanagi no Tsurugi can control the wind when shaken, and Irish mythology has the Four Treasures of the Tuatha dé Dannan, with an invincible spear, an incredibly powerful shining sword, a cauldron that can produce as much food as you need, and a stone that screams when the king sits on it.

Basically, household objects with magical properties were a staple of classical mythology and folklore, and could do almost anything, but sometimes came with caveats or limitations, such as a specific number of uses or being usable only by a certain type. of people. person or something like that. Not much has changed in modern literature, although mainly thanks to Tolkien and Michael Moorcock, evil magical items have become very popular, and thanks to some changes to Arthurian legend, magical swords specifically capable of choosing kings have gained some traction. considerable. And then there are the spells. The first problem here is that it is a very vague concept, but for a rough definition I'll stick with the D&D aesthetic.

A spell is when you wave your hands and something notable happens that isn't usually associated with hand movement: a fireball, a change in the weather, the spontaneous appearance of rats from 1d6 dice, whatever. It's magic in its simplest and most boring form: making something strange happen that normally wouldn't happen. At its most interesting, this category of magic includes things like summoning or mind control or whatever, and can include drawing a beautiful geometric pattern or magical circles, which seem to come directly from alchemical texts. Most precedents for this come from folklore figures of magicians with an incredible amount of personal power who they used to cast fireballs or lightning bolts or whatever, but in modern literature, worlds with magic often allow anyone to cast spells as long as you know the magic words or know how to draw the correct shapes.

Sometimes spells only work for chosen ones with latent power or something, but sometimes it's just a matter of the right words in the right arrangement, so this widely accepted precedent gives an aspiring fantasy writer a lot with what to work The bottom line is that most magic and fiction is derived primarily from mythological precedents and historically evolved attempts to avoid the gray area between the natural and the supernatural. But this is a lot to handle, so instead of lumping all of these things together under the umbrella of magic and leaving it at that, most fictional magic systems follow specific rules that help define what exactly magic means in this world where magic Magic is real and sometimes it sets you on fire.

So let's take a look at the most common models of fictional magical systems and the benefits of those models. The first paradigm is magic as science, which is honestly a very reasonable perspective in a world where magic can be said to be a fundamental force of nature. Science is the study of reality, and in a world where magic is measurably real, reproducible experimental evidence and all, magic would be science. In these systems, magic and science are considered the same, or one is a narrow branch of the other. This is often used to justify magic in a science fiction setting, but in more fantasy or urban fantasy settings it is usually treated as just another field.

Some people go to architecture school, others go to the school of conjuring horrors from the spaces between realities. You won't declare your major until your second year anyway, so there's plenty of time to choose. Interestingly, even some worlds that consider magic a science will distinguish it from science as a whole, treating it as if it were fundamentally separate from normal scientific things like physics or gravity. Either way, this system of magic will usually have very strict rules about what can and cannot be done, and may rely heavily on alchemy in terms of exact scientific proportions and materials used, diagrams drawn, or words spoken dramatically while shakes hands. waving in the air as if he simply didn't care about the generally accepted fundamental laws of reality.

This magical system is very concrete, although some writers do not treat it as such, playing fast and loose with the laws of magical science rather than defining something too rigidly. In its most powerful form, this system of magic has fully developed concrete rules, like real chemistry or physics. But many writers like to give themselves leeway and don't fully lay out the rules and limitations of their magic to keep things interestingly ambiguous. Next up is magic as divine or demonic, a classic straight out of the Malleus Maleficarum, where if you can perform magic it means you are close to Satan himself, or from another perspective, that your magic was a gift from a supernatural entity generally considered divine. .

This really depends on who makes the moral judgment. In this system, magic is a gift from some supernatural entity, often associated with limitations and especially a personality. Some supernatural entities do not allow their powers to be used in certain ways, or withdraw their magic if they see you abusing it. Sometimes the specific skills you gain are determined by the authorizing entity. Your fire god probably won't give you plant powers, your death god probably won't give you fancy fairy wings, that sort of thing. Sometimes writers play with this by simply having a god of magic in general, who allows magic to exist and empowers magic users to have fun.

In that case, the magic is unlikely to have a theme, but it could still have a personality, if the magic god is personal enough. The historical precedent for this type of system is twofold. There's the whole witch thing with Satan, of course, but there's also prayer. Many polytheistic religions had specific prayers to specific gods for specific things, which god you asked for help depending on who you were and what kind of things you needed help with. You didn't ask Anubis for help with childbirth or Isis to weigh your heart. It's not the same as empowering a thematically appropriate god, but it's clear where some of the inspiration came from.

Then there is magic as a rare talent, which can overlap with magic as something divine, but often stands alone. In this version, people with magic are, for some reason, born with the potential to do magic, while everyone else is bound by the laws of physics and such. Sometimes it works so that people with magical talents have the potential to learn all types of magic and everyone has access to roughly the same abilities, although possibly with different levels of personal power or ability, but some other versions make magical talents the same. People have unique talents, like someone who is born psychic or a shapeshifter or with pyrokinesis or something.

In some stories, the only people born with these types of talents will be demigods or only partially human, but in others it's basically a random coincidence. Sometimes these patterns overlap, where you can be born with general magical aptitudes, specific magical aptitudes, or both. Anyway, this magic system is one of the most flexible and easiest versions to play, because it basically has one mechanic: either you are magic or you are not. This version also has somevariants when it comes to specific magic items: sometimes magic items have their own magic, like batteries, and can be used by anyone, whether or not they have magical talent.

Sometimes this is not the case and they can only be used by magical people. As a final rarity, this version will often have some sort of rarity filter where non-magical people are physically incapable of seeing magic, as this allows the author to write a secret urban fantasy world without having to find out what effects the magic has. magic in nature. would have had in world history. Sometimes there's no natural filter for weirdness, but the wizarding world takes a Men in Black approach to making non-magical people see weirdness and just covers it up wherever it leaks. Generally this doesn't make sense.

But you know, magic. We will return to the problems of this model later. The next big problem is magic as a force of nature, where magic is not something that emerges in people or gods, but rather a vast primal chaotic force, which practically seeps off the planet, and can only be used by channeling it very carefully into controlled quantities. This version of magic is usually quite temperamental and may have a mind of its own, but if it does, it is very strange. What distinguishes this from divine magic is that this version of magic is greater than any god and much less willing to reason.

These worlds can have storms of magic, with natural magic essentially being a weather phenomenon that appears randomly, rampages through an unsuspecting city, and turns everyone involved into trees or something. Sometimes this version of magic is treated almost like radioactive materials: potentially very useful if carefully controlled, but capable of mutating or killing if the material is simply thrown away. This type of system is one of two solutions to the main problem of writing magic: if your story has magic, it runs the risk of becoming a Swiss Army knife that solves everything that is a problem in your story.

By making magic an incomprehensible primal force that risks consuming anything that uses it carelessly, you avoid the particular danger of making magic too dangerous to solve your plot problems. The other popular solution to this particular problem is magic as a system of ironclad rules, in which magic has very specific limitations and cannot be used outside of those parameters, as this places clear limitations on the magic and prevents it from being used as a quick solution. for a particular problem. In this system, magic is usually limited to a specific type of supernatural ability, such as piloting in Avatar or the alchemy system in Full Metal Alchemist.

In practice, this system gives some people the ability to do a strange thing, and to solve problems they have to use that ability creatively, rather than bending the laws of reality to fit what they want. let it happen. Magic as a system of ironclad rules is the most mundane of the great magical systems, because it basically extends the normal rules of reality with a very specific weirdness. There are two main problems that arise when writing magic systems: first, magic runs the risk of becoming too powerful if its limitations are not strictly defined, and second, it is difficult to integrate a magic system into worldbuilding, and as a result, some very entertaining stories involving magical systems tend to fall apart upon prolonged examination.

That first problem essentially boils down to magic becoming a plot device that removes the stakes of a given situation. One character died, but that's okay! Our local magician harnessed the power of love and simply resurrected him, the only price was a magical hangover the next day. Oh no, the Dark Lord summoned an army of the dead, but the arsonist had an emotional breakdown and burned them all. If the power and range of magic are determined by the emotional investment of the character performing it, then the stakes in any given situation quickly disappear, because once the magical character reaches a certain threshold of dismay, they tend to Fix everything.

Not to mention systems where magic itself has a mind of its own, where a problem can be solved through literal divine intervention if it goes against the grain of magic. When your world has this potential ex machina magic problem, you face two sub-problems: first, if you solve story problems with poorly defined magic, your audience will feel cheated, and second, if you set that precedent and then launch another one. problem with your characters but you don't use your established ex machina magic to solve it because you want this problem to have lasting consequences, your audience will be angry at the lack of internal consistency.

This ties into the problem I talked about in the character death video, where the presence of even an established means of resurrection makes each subsequent death of an unredeemed character feel emotionally manipulative and unnecessary. The problem of difficulty in building worlds is a problem in itself and tends to arise more in urban fantasy than in high fantasy, because while fantasy offers the opportunity to build a world that in principle can resemble anything, Most urban fantasy offers a world that resembles the known modern world. Introducing magic into the equation makes this difficult, especially if this magic has always been there.

Then the alternate history becomes much more complicated. Most urban fantasy worlds try to solve this problem by making magic part of a secret world where the magical world is kept carefully hidden and separate from the normal familiar world, but even this doesn't necessarily solve the problem because how is the magic kept? magical world. Secrecy is a major problem that is not always adequately addressed, and even when it is, it does not explain why members of the wizarding world do not mess with the normal world or, for example, do not take sides in historical conflicts or would work to prevent atrocities.

This makes even less sense in worlds where magical talent is statistically rare but appears randomly among the population, because then you have to think about uncomfortable things like: "How else would this vitally important historical conflict have played out if even a single member of the Did the losing side have the ability to set their enemies on fire with their mind? or face the unfortunate implications that their distant, secretive magical world has noticed the countless horrible injustices of normal human history, most likely including their own kin, and that none of them decided to use their vast cosmic powers to intervene, grab it, and resolve it.

Any historical conflict that has been primarily defined by technological superiority or a random illness fades away when both sides have access to magic, too. known as the ultimate leveler of the playing field, meaning, to take a simple example, that the United States becomes unrecognizable in this The world should consider how many conquests and atrocities are based on it that would have gone completely wrong if the losing side had had access to healing magic, teleportation, mind control, or even a 1d4 Magic Missile spell. What I'm really saying is that Ilvermorny is pointless. And I don't want to explicitly attack Harry Potter again, but how can his secret world stay secret for over a month when the members of his secret world are randomly born into extended families that are not part of that secret world?

That child will never be able to hide a secret from his own parents, or have a proper story for when his family asks him about his college applications at Thanksgiving dinner. It just doesn't make sense. If your secret world relies on an entire segment of the human population agreeing to keep it a secret, remember the old saying: "Three can keep a secret, if two are dead and the third is cursed to be alone in it." "God, this was getting long. So the bottom line is that world-building is hard, and it becomes even harder to be convincing when you're trying to build a world that looks identical to ours, but with completely different mechanics.

Magic has a huge narrative potential, but it's difficult to understand or prevent from derailing the plot, and there are ways to limit its use so that it doesn't become a complete story break, which usually involves setting strict rules or making magic too much. dangerous to use lightly. Don't think too much about the Harry Potter universe if you still want to enjoy it. So yes.