Trope Talk: Magic

"I have a great idea," I said, not having a great idea. "I'll write up a script about magic and how its historical roots are responsible for its portrayal in modern media!"
"Yeah! That sounds easy!" I said, thinking it would be easy.

Soooooo let's talk about ALL OF MAGIC AND MAGIC SYSTEMS BECAUSE HA HA APPARENTLY I LIKE TO SUFFER WHEN I ASSIGN MYSELF THESE TOPICS

EXAMPLES USED: Beauty and the Beast (folklore), Princess and the Frog (folklore), East of the Sun West of the Moon (folklore), Sleeping Beauty (folklore), Snow White (folklore), Diamonds and Toads (folklore), Oresteia, Odyssey, Mahabharata, Perseus and the Medusa (mythology), Aladdin, Susanoo-No-Mikoto, the Tuatha Dé Danann, Stormbringer (Michael Moorcock), The Lord of the Rings, King Arthur, Koschei the Deathless, The Shakespeare Code (Doctor Who), Doctor Strange, Thor, Thor Ragnarok, Slayers, Harry Potter, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Percy Jackson, The Dresden Files, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood

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[xxweirdofromspacexx]

There are no I’s in team, but there are five I’s in “I don’t care how big the room is, I cast fireball”

[philbertdallas]

"If it glows, its magic"
**looks at lightbulb**
Me: I knew it

[temporaltoast]

“You didn’t get babies with +5 resistance to fire.”
Now I just wanna have a fairy that gives the baby a ton of physical boons, like _and after the blessing of grace, they were given _*_THE POWER TO BENCH PRESS HORSES._*

[marvelousmaker]

Interesting character: a dyslexic polytheistic priest and the mayhem he causes by calling on the wrong gods

[MrJayEl]

"Don't think too hard about the Harry Potter universe if you want to be able to still enjoy it"

Yup. Pretty much it.

[hiimspee]

Harry: "Why don't wizards show themselves to the world?" Hagrid: "cause then everybody would be wanting magical solutions to their problems, wouldn't they?"

Que an entire seven books of witches and wizards literally not being able to accomplish anything without magic, ever.

Edit:it's worth noting that Hagrid would not be the most reliable of narrators, but its literally the closest anyone in the whole series comes to answering that "but why the secrecy" question.

[alecchristiaen]

magic as science: artificer, wizard
magic as divine: cleric, paladin, warlock
magic as talent: sorcerer
magic as force of nature: druid

[HexQuesTT]

"You didn't get so many babies with +5 resistance to fire" Leo Valdez baybee

[victorjacquet]

In France we litteraly have an sentence for the magic-ex-machina, it's "Ta gueule, c'est magique" wich means "STFU it's magic"
so yeah, NEVER do that trope

[chunkymonky]

I feel the Full Metal Alchemist "law of equivalent exchange" is a pretty good way to ground magic in reality. If i want to create an explosion i have to use something with the capability to explode, if i want to bring someone back to life I have to use the very specific ingredients of a human and then create a black writhing mass of suffering and lose an arm and a leg and my entire brother.


*Don't bring people back to life*

[Bueyedwof]

When using magic as a resurrection tool/Geat-Out-Of-Death-Free card, I personally like the FMA/Game of Thrones/ Pet Cemetery approach: "What comes out of the ground ain't what you put in."

[jmcarabio]

"Some people go to school for architecture, some people go to school to summon eldritch horrors from the spaces between realities"

Weeell I guess I know what I'll take in college

[torinsmith]

Some words of wisdom I've heard "What magic cannot do is infinitely more interesting than what it can do."

[PerverseMilk]

Fairy Tail could basically be renamed magic-ex-machina. Every story arc basically ends the same:

Bad guy: "BWAHAHA YOU CAN'T BEAT ME SO JUST TO RUB IT IN HERE'S ME HURTING YOUR FRIEND!"

Natsu: "Friendship"

Bad guy: "Nani!?"

Natsu: "FIRE DRAGON FRIENDSHIP FIST!"

Bad guy: "I am beaten! Though not dead. Cause I will literally be a good guy like....next week...."

[dysfunctionalcaterpillar]

I personally love the Eragon rules for magic. Namely:
Casting a spell requires the same amount of energy as if you performed the same activity mundanely. If you just flick a switch or throw a rock, that's fine, but if you try & cover a fell or ravine in thick mist, it will physically tax you.
You can store energy in precious gemstones or rocks to draw upon later, allowing you to cast spells that would normally be too much for you by leeching off their stored power.
Once you commit to a spell, you stay committed to it for good. If you want to excavate the side of a mountain, the spell will continue to draw power from you until the desired effects are produced or you die from the stress/strain of such a powerful spell.
I feel like these rules make magic fairer: now some scrawny little magic prepubescent can't run up to a book & cast the most powerful spell in existence, it takes immense power & training to even think about that.

This also allows me to picture powerful spellcasters as really buff people decked out in magical bling & I wouldn't give that up for the *WORLD*.

[sethgraham]

3 year later I'm still laughing at the image of Anubis panicked at the idea of helping delivering a baby

[dynamicworlds]

My friend came up with a pretty damn good definition, actually.

Magic: rules that break other rules.

[alguienanormal]

"A spell is when you wave your hands and something noticeably happens that is not typically correlated with the waving of hands"
Me: (waves hands at a theremin) I am a magician!

[teaparty]

Worldbuilding is hard. You know what's harder? Creating a magic system that is original, interesting, mysterious enough for plot, and works well with said world in general.

[oywiththewaywardtardis]

I just finished a series of books (the Winternight trilogy) that defined magic as “forgetting that things aren’t how you want them to be”. The best example off the top of my head would be “forgetting that the candles weren’t on fire” or “forgetting that anyone could see [character]”. It was a fascinating way of approaching the subject.

Also, it hilariously reminds me of Douglas Adams’s definition of flying which was “the art of throwing yourself at the ground and missing”.