Maybe not directly related, but this talk makes to me a very compelling point about how magic should work in satisfying fiction.
“The Last Unicorn” has magic that works this way, and it’s pretty good.
Sure, but in a ttrpg you need a system or spell casting classes will dominate too much
I feel like this is true if the reader is meant to have the perspective of the person who feels that something is magic (the Hobbits, in the example from your video). However, not all magic in fiction is like this, and sometimes the reader is supposed to mostly have the perspective of Galadriel, or to gain her perspective over time.
An example is Lev Grossman’s The Magicians. The reader has the perspective of the Hobbits at first, because that is the perspective of the main character. But the story has themes of “lifting the veil” of magic, and by the end both the main character and the reader have a more similar perspective to Galadriel.
I guess what I mean is, I agree with you and the video’s author in large part… but like… to broadly say that magic “should” be used in literature in a certain way ignores how it can be used in different ways to great effect!
You can also interrupt a cast by preventing the caster from providing one of the components of the spell
Funnily enough, in D&D 5E that wizard explicitly can cast that spell (if you’re equating Power Word Kill to Avada Kedavra)
Fun fact: “Ow, fuck!” also happens to be the last words of beloved children’s author Roald Dahl
Why does it have blue hair? I don’t think hair dye exists in a medieval world, or at least and easily accessible one
Urine showers with woad shampoo, it’s called fashion, look it up
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Hair dye actually has a long history.
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Magik
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It isn’t a medieval world though.
It is a fantasy world that merely resembles medieval Europe. You can see this in the way she cast freaking magic.
And even back then people dyed their hairs, yes including blue.
blue hair = 55+10+105510
Have fun!
You can show the asterisks by putting \ in front of them, like so: \*\*\* looks like ***
Not shown: me desperately hoping that my app is displaying markdown correctly.
thanks!
Magic? Nothing to blink twice at?
Hair color that’s fun for the player? Realism ruined.
It’s so funny when people get caught up with things like that.
It’s also funny but a little sad when people’s expectations of how colorful ancient times ought to be, or rather shouldn’t be, create standards of “realism” that are completely opposite to how history really was.
If you are going to write, say, fantasy - stop reading fantasy. You’ve already read too much. Read other things; read westerns, read history, read anything that seems interesting, because if you only read fantasy and then you start to write fantasy, all you’re going to do is recycle the same old stuff and move it around a bit.
-Terry Pratchett
“It” might not even be human, and could be part of a species that naturally has blue hair pigment.
“It” is also a fantasy character casting magic spells - it wouldn’t be far fetched that aesthetic magic exists.
Hair dye DID exist in medieval times tho, and in fact, even ancient Egyptians dyed their hair
Why is the LITERAL WIZARD not a tradwife lmao
Prestidigitation.
Caster: Ow fuck. I can’t believe you’ve done this!
