The Magic System Paradox

Comments · 3K

• TH

  @TheTaleFoundry · 1 year ago · pinned

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• RO

  @roboticjanitor3332 · 1 year ago

  Any sufficiently explained magic is indistinguishable from science.

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• NM

  @nmheath03 · 1 year ago

  Reminder that we live in a world with rocks that emit energy that can power cities or used to create weapons that can briefly summon a star in atmosphere, leaving the area inhospitable to humans for generations afterwards from a residual curse. But we just call it all &quot;radiation&quot;

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• TH

  @thatotherted · 1 year ago

  One of Tolkien&apos;s posthumously-published writings mentions that the Elves don&apos;t have any concept of &quot;magic&quot; and are confused by the way other peoples of their world use that word, because for them, the enchantments and illusions they (and others) create are just a natural part of life that makes perfect sense.

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• VE

  @Ves722 · 1 year ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=On9KHaBYzmo&amp;t=1035">17:15</a> don’t worry, we programmers have no clue what the code does either sometimes.

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• MA

  @majorfallacy5926 · 1 year ago

  The main distinction is between &quot;magic as mystery&quot; and &quot;magic as an extension of science&quot;. I like when stories have both kinds, the mysterious soft magic sets the vibe and the scientific hard magic gives the authors interesting what ifs to explore.

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• BE

  @bethmarriott9292 · 1 year ago

  &quot;It doesn&apos;t stop being magic just because you know how it works&quot; - Sir Terry Pratchett

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• 95

  @95rossc · 1 year ago

  “All models are wrong, some models are useful”, pretty much sums up trying to define a correct/superior way to imagine magic

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• BL

  @BlazeMakesGames · 1 year ago

  This is sort of the reason why I like it when a setting doesn&apos;t call magic &quot;Magic.&quot; In that world, magic is just a fact of life that can be studied and understood no different from things like chemistry or physics. Like you say, we tend to stop calling things magical when we understand how and why they work. <br><br>The classic example of this is the first episode of Avatar The Last Airbender. Sokka calls Waterbending &quot;Magic&quot; but only does so more to make fun of it more than anything else. And he&apos;s swiftly correcting that &quot;it&apos;s not magic, it&apos;s waterbending&quot; which is an ironic statement to us, where waterbending is in fact magical. But to them it&apos;s just a normal part of life so it makes perfect sense that they would think about it that way. <br><br>And as a result of how the setting is written that way, where bending is so normalized that it is a key part of many city&apos;s infrastructure and the daily life of countless people, it starts to feel normal. It no longer feels like magic, and whenever someone does a breakdown of magic systems, it almost always feels weird to talk about Avatar&apos;s bending like it&apos;s a magic system because by the time you finish the series, it stops feeling like magic.

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• BU

  @buffedsans8761 · 1 year ago

  I thought deeply about it, and from my perspective, the essence of magic doesn&apos;t lie in feeling special when you observe things that seem supernatural, but rather, the essence of magic lies in the feeling it evokes when we feel fascinated by something due to not fully understanding it. <br>Magic only speaks to our psychology as a species... We may fear the unknown, but other times we are fascinated by the unknown, and the feeling of wanting to understand the world was unconsciously captured by the most ancient authors in what we know as magic. <br>That&apos;s why the essence of magic lies in seeing something fascinating but at the same time not understanding why it happens... To be 100% fascinated by magic, when you see it in a fictional story, you must ask why it happens, but at the same time be fascinated by the fact that you won&apos;t have an answer. <br>We are simple creatures; it speaks deeply to the human instinct to want to learn, because learning was a tool for survival. <br>Magic lies in that feeling of a world we don&apos;t understand, one that you are completely willing to immerse yourself in... It&apos;s a feeling that doesn&apos;t last long, but that ephemeral feeling has inspired many stories. <br>Just think of ancient people like Isaac Newton himself. Imagine what Newton must have felt as he discovered mechanical physics in the solitude of the night. <br>Anyone who knows a little about Newton&apos;s life can guess that he felt as if he were discovering the secrets of the world and getting closer to God, since Newton placed great importance on magic, alchemy, and God. <br>The feeling of immersing himself in an unknown world was perhaps... magical for him.

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• BA

  @Baguette_on_a_chair · 1 year ago

  This helped a lot with working on conceptualizing my magic system. It’s been something I’ve been stuck on for years, but I think I know what I want it to be now. I want it to be completely unexplainable, there is no reason to it and the only way to really do magic is to believe, thus anyone in my system had the capacity to do magic and the people that can’t are the ones who try to explain it away. The reason my cast can go beyond their peers is because they stop trying to understand how it works, push that boundary of the why and just feel it push through them without the reason. Thank you, this was very enlightening

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• EC

  @EccentricGentleman · 1 year ago

  Here&apos;s relevant quote you might like...<br><br>&quot;Magic is nothing more then science dressed up. And Science is nothing more then magic explained.&quot;<br>- Doc Greene

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