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- Posted: Thu, 30 Nov 2006 18:46:36 +0000
Ten years ago, very good authors wrote about magic. I love reading about magic. As a writer, I’m still defining my own. Ten years ago wasn’t that long (we don’t live on the internet).
But why can’t we have magic anymore?
Where’d it go from our writers?
Apparently, it left due to bad excuses.
Magic is silly
Apparently you haven’t seen the cat-translator or the sex chair. They’ve both been out for quite a while now. Every day, science is proving itself sillier and sillier.
Magic is for kids
Since when? Lucky Charms isn’t a story, fairytales and myths are. Going by that logic, you’re going to give kids stories of people hanging by their intestines, being raped by princes and wolves, and chopping off of hands and genitals. I don’t think Child Protective Services aggress with your idea of story time.
Fairytales originally almost all had rape, not just sex in them, and every one had violence. These weren’t things you told children until you wanted them to grow up.
Same with mythology. It’s full of gore, rape, bestiality, and violence.
Magic never started out for kids. That rule is not written down in any real creative writing book.
Magic is cheating
How so?
When you have magic, you need to give it rules. Otherwise, why can’t you just ‘magic’ all problems away? Why go through all those rituals? Because it has to be done that way or it won’t work.
Well written stories with magic have these rules very well thought and laid out.
Magic is a new type of energy, a new element, or a new pshyical force. It always has to fall into physics with what it can and cannot do. Magic is… well, like Magic the Gathering. All new rules have to fall into place with the rules already set down.
Sure there are exceptions, but gravity has exceptions. Light has exceptions. Elements have exceptions. But the exceptions only show up at certain times.
Magic has to work the same way. If not, it’s the author’s fault, not magic’s.
Also, magic sometimes has a religious connotation to it. Thus it needs to follow two large set of rules, not just one.
Magic is a small genre
High fantasy, magical realism, mythological, religious, magical girl, super sentai, magical creature, magical game, magical adventure, magical world… last I checked, those were genres listed as what agents did and did not want to represent. That’s a lot of magical things set into different categories.
Science explains it better
Really? Take the vampire or zombie. Biting people spreads the disease. But the zombie or vampire needs unaffected blood to survive. For some reason, neither really takes precautions not infect victims with the disease before eating what they want. Food management is really they’re strong point. Now, these things are supposed to the dead. How does a virus survive off dead flesh when it needs the host cells to survive and reproduce? How do these things move if they’re dead or are even missing brain tissue? A zombie without brain tissue can’t make itself move about. And why do they need brains or blood? Where’s the scientific explanation about that? These things have no predators. Why haven’t they taken over the entire world and then died of starvation?
Saying ‘A virus did it’ doesn’t make you a genius for replacing ‘wizard’ with ‘virus.’ In fact, magic could explain these things better. They’d explain the little quirks with ‘that’s how the magic works.’ Magic needs random blood fluids a lot (tears, blood, marrow, sometimes brain juice, even sex ‘juices’ sometimes).
Everything needs to be explained with science
A lot of things that fall into the category of sci-fi aren’t’ really ever explained. What’s a warp coil? How do teleporters and phasers and light sabers work? What exactly are shields? How come almost all aliens look like people or at least people in costumes? How do replicators make food in space? How does plumbing work in space? How do you recharge the weapons? Why are there never any seatbelts? Exactly how did Dr. Frankenstein bring the monster to life? Why didn’t the aliens from mars wear protective suits to keep our germs at bay? If they’ve been here for years, shouldn’t our flu have killed them off already? How do you get dinosaur DNA out of a mosquito from red blood cells? How do you get several dinosaurs, whose DNA you didn’t know enough about to differentiate between, from one mosquito? How can you make a clone of a dinosaur using frog DNA?
A lot of things in sci-fi aren’t explained. A lot of sci-fi rests on the reason of ‘because.’ What makes magic exempt?
Choose one or the other
Two large companies have spawned off a whole genre of mixing any genre they can. It started in the 1930’s and later another company came in with the same idea. These companies have done what seems to be every single genre out there, making great advances in blurring the line between magic and science.
They have spawned thousands of collectibles, hundreds of books, and dozens of television shows, both directly, and indirectly.
What companies did so much? DC Comics and Marvel. Yes. People with science fight alongside and against those with magic. And sometimes you just can’t tell. Sure they say it’s genetics that let people fly and conjure storms, but how does that even work? It should actually be magic, right? But the stories have brought in other magic that is moe magical, and science that is more ‘sciencey.’
You can say these things work because they aren’t serious, but in doing so, you point out that you know more or less nothing about the comic book industry whatsoever.
It's not popular, so dont do it (brought up by Jon Chong)
So are cowboys and detectives in moody lighting. They kinda went out of style. So did Nazis with some sort of superweapon or weird experiment.
But we've all seen those make the occaisional comback.
What excludes magic, which often finds it way into these comebacks?
Because magic is a crappy plot
Magic is not a plot. Magic is just part of a setting, or an action that can be taken.
Take the story of Troy. The real story: human drama. Shifting powers in the side of war.
What if Achilles were an alien that was impenetrable everywhere but his heel?
What if you left out the bits with the gods and just said that the weather cleared or that one side got the upper hand?
Not much would change in that story. The same characters would die, the same sides would take power, the same love stories would happen, the same horse.
Magic = Fantasy (brought up by Veive)
Funny, after the genre post, this is still perceived as a fantasy thread.
Odd.
Well, for further evidence, the following are not listed under fantasy:
The Death of Ivan Ilyich, by Tolstoy
The Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Overcoat, by Gogol
But why can’t we have magic anymore?
Where’d it go from our writers?
Apparently, it left due to bad excuses.
Magic is silly
Apparently you haven’t seen the cat-translator or the sex chair. They’ve both been out for quite a while now. Every day, science is proving itself sillier and sillier.
Magic is for kids
Since when? Lucky Charms isn’t a story, fairytales and myths are. Going by that logic, you’re going to give kids stories of people hanging by their intestines, being raped by princes and wolves, and chopping off of hands and genitals. I don’t think Child Protective Services aggress with your idea of story time.
Fairytales originally almost all had rape, not just sex in them, and every one had violence. These weren’t things you told children until you wanted them to grow up.
Same with mythology. It’s full of gore, rape, bestiality, and violence.
Magic never started out for kids. That rule is not written down in any real creative writing book.
Magic is cheating
How so?
When you have magic, you need to give it rules. Otherwise, why can’t you just ‘magic’ all problems away? Why go through all those rituals? Because it has to be done that way or it won’t work.
Well written stories with magic have these rules very well thought and laid out.
Magic is a new type of energy, a new element, or a new pshyical force. It always has to fall into physics with what it can and cannot do. Magic is… well, like Magic the Gathering. All new rules have to fall into place with the rules already set down.
Sure there are exceptions, but gravity has exceptions. Light has exceptions. Elements have exceptions. But the exceptions only show up at certain times.
Magic has to work the same way. If not, it’s the author’s fault, not magic’s.
Also, magic sometimes has a religious connotation to it. Thus it needs to follow two large set of rules, not just one.
Magic is a small genre
High fantasy, magical realism, mythological, religious, magical girl, super sentai, magical creature, magical game, magical adventure, magical world… last I checked, those were genres listed as what agents did and did not want to represent. That’s a lot of magical things set into different categories.
Science explains it better
Really? Take the vampire or zombie. Biting people spreads the disease. But the zombie or vampire needs unaffected blood to survive. For some reason, neither really takes precautions not infect victims with the disease before eating what they want. Food management is really they’re strong point. Now, these things are supposed to the dead. How does a virus survive off dead flesh when it needs the host cells to survive and reproduce? How do these things move if they’re dead or are even missing brain tissue? A zombie without brain tissue can’t make itself move about. And why do they need brains or blood? Where’s the scientific explanation about that? These things have no predators. Why haven’t they taken over the entire world and then died of starvation?
Saying ‘A virus did it’ doesn’t make you a genius for replacing ‘wizard’ with ‘virus.’ In fact, magic could explain these things better. They’d explain the little quirks with ‘that’s how the magic works.’ Magic needs random blood fluids a lot (tears, blood, marrow, sometimes brain juice, even sex ‘juices’ sometimes).
Everything needs to be explained with science
A lot of things that fall into the category of sci-fi aren’t’ really ever explained. What’s a warp coil? How do teleporters and phasers and light sabers work? What exactly are shields? How come almost all aliens look like people or at least people in costumes? How do replicators make food in space? How does plumbing work in space? How do you recharge the weapons? Why are there never any seatbelts? Exactly how did Dr. Frankenstein bring the monster to life? Why didn’t the aliens from mars wear protective suits to keep our germs at bay? If they’ve been here for years, shouldn’t our flu have killed them off already? How do you get dinosaur DNA out of a mosquito from red blood cells? How do you get several dinosaurs, whose DNA you didn’t know enough about to differentiate between, from one mosquito? How can you make a clone of a dinosaur using frog DNA?
A lot of things in sci-fi aren’t explained. A lot of sci-fi rests on the reason of ‘because.’ What makes magic exempt?
Choose one or the other
Two large companies have spawned off a whole genre of mixing any genre they can. It started in the 1930’s and later another company came in with the same idea. These companies have done what seems to be every single genre out there, making great advances in blurring the line between magic and science.
They have spawned thousands of collectibles, hundreds of books, and dozens of television shows, both directly, and indirectly.
What companies did so much? DC Comics and Marvel. Yes. People with science fight alongside and against those with magic. And sometimes you just can’t tell. Sure they say it’s genetics that let people fly and conjure storms, but how does that even work? It should actually be magic, right? But the stories have brought in other magic that is moe magical, and science that is more ‘sciencey.’
You can say these things work because they aren’t serious, but in doing so, you point out that you know more or less nothing about the comic book industry whatsoever.
It's not popular, so dont do it (brought up by Jon Chong)
So are cowboys and detectives in moody lighting. They kinda went out of style. So did Nazis with some sort of superweapon or weird experiment.
But we've all seen those make the occaisional comback.
What excludes magic, which often finds it way into these comebacks?
Because magic is a crappy plot
Magic is not a plot. Magic is just part of a setting, or an action that can be taken.
Take the story of Troy. The real story: human drama. Shifting powers in the side of war.
What if Achilles were an alien that was impenetrable everywhere but his heel?
What if you left out the bits with the gods and just said that the weather cleared or that one side got the upper hand?
Not much would change in that story. The same characters would die, the same sides would take power, the same love stories would happen, the same horse.
Magic = Fantasy (brought up by Veive)
Funny, after the genre post, this is still perceived as a fantasy thread.
Odd.
Well, for further evidence, the following are not listed under fantasy:
The Death of Ivan Ilyich, by Tolstoy
The Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Overcoat, by Gogol
