When you watch a show where people are subject to Gravity, you don't have to explain the details of how Gravity works. It just works.
Making the Force the result of a giant galaxy-spanning energy being is about as necessary as explaining Gravity as swarms of invisible demons trying to pull everything down into the underworld. It's completely unnecessary, and the explanation draws attention away from the narrative.
You don't want your audience to be wondering how the fuck an energy being of galactic scale is supposed to work when you're trying to build tension and drama for the story's main conflict.
That's not to say you can't give any details, just that any explanation should be plot relevant. For example, Hamon in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure is explained as being (basically) internal energy that can be shaped to mimic sunlight. This explanation is plot relevant as it basically explains why you have martial artists punching vampires and zombies to death. Later on in the series, Stands are Fighting Spirits used to represent their wielder's fighting spirit. While figuring out an opponent's ability is and how to counter it is a core part of the combat, how the powers work is not actually ever addressed in detail. It's not important. They just work.
Making the Force the result of a giant galaxy-spanning energy being is about as necessary as explaining Gravity as swarms of invisible demons trying to pull everything down into the underworld. It's completely unnecessary, and the explanation draws attention away from the narrative.
It actually is, and you can even have it be an explanation in a setting -- mass creating living creatures that create demons? Sounds cool --
But the main point is the one that has been expressed so beautifully by @Admiral Skippy, and one I may have tangentially hit upon when describing controllable and uncontrollable magic...
Magic, to be believable for me, has to feel like a force. Something that is a part of nature, something both beautiful and terrifying, something that can be harnessed through possibly scientific means and great effort and is yet also utterly beyond human control.
It's whenever I feel I get on an airplane -- humanity has the means to conquer the skies and make use of it to make our lives convenient, but errors and the sheer overpowering nature of it all can still doom those risk using it. Or how we can use hydroelectric power and still get fucked over by floods.
The analogy is obviously not perfect, but magic should have that sense of being utterly inseparable from and integral to the world of the setting.
The magic "system" of the setting, i.e. the specific techniques as to how characters manipulate magic to their ends, are almost an afterthought in my mind.
I've felt that sense of integrity that others have described only very rarely.
Harry Potter is one example, with its atmosphere making it clear that this is a setting imbued in magic from its very foundation;
Harry Dresden describes magic in almost mystical terms as being linked to life and emotion;
Warhammer 40k has its Warp as an impossible-to-describe embodiment and manifestation of sentient emotion;
The Nightingale Floor describes the skills of the Tribe as innate and part of their very being without much further explanation...
It's a rare thing. Authors often mistake the magic "system" as being the important thing required to make a good fantasy story, but in actuality, they first need to make the existence of magic convincing.
Of course, it's a matter of perspective, right? You can write a character who uses magic all the time with little imagination and understanding, just like I use the results of modern science without understanding it.
But authors rarely write characters like thy, preferring to write from the perspective of those who would see it as a beautiful and mystical thing, and fail to convince me that it exists that way.
The Name of the Wind comes tobmind, where Rothfuss faffs about dozens of pages to explain how magic sympathy works and fails to make it remotely interesting.
The system was clever, but the magic was not interesting at all. Mechanics over substance, if you will.
Better to have substance and loose mechanics over detailed mechanics and thin to no substance.
One of the things about Sanderson's work I enjoy is that his magic systems are heavily integrated into the world building. Alethi warrior culture is in large part a consequence of shardblades existing. The magic is not added on into a setting, but underpins it.
This is why some D&D settings are kinda crap - they're generic medieval fantasy set ups with all this magic slapped on that should have huge social consequences but somehow doesn't.
That was one of the great things about Schlock Mercenary. The fans would point out problems to the author and he'd make it part of the story and worldbuilding. Shortly after introducing the teraport, Taylor read an article by Niven, asserting that the creation of "Receiver-less Teleportation" would cause a "very short war." Guess what he immediately put into the comic?
Late to the party, but @Claudette Savagely, and the other poster who have quoted me, I have not forgotten or missed your replies and I do intend to respond when I can. Unfortunately not sure when that is. My apologies.
E-Fuck phoneposting
What on earth is mundane about suddenly discovering you are a tiny cell in a giant mysterious animal? As I see the Star Wars 'verse, the big issue surrounding the force is one of morality - what is the force supposed to be used for, and why? How are force users supposed to live, and how much of things like the jedi code are human error or the arbitrary results of history? I personally hate the "monastic" paradigm and think it did a lot of damage to a lot of characters, which makes it important to understand where this paradigm came from and why it triumphed over healthier mindsets.
But, Star Wars aside, I don't think magic is supposed to be mysterious, or rare for that matter. I've seen people say before that they want magic to be rare, unpredictable, every bit unique, but personally I really don't like that kind of magic. I really think it should NOT be terrifying or majestic, but instead as natural as flying is for a bird. In fact I specifically think magic should make things like acrobatics and handling fire feel more natural to magic-users than they are for us poor klutzy monkeys. That's the whole point of magic as far as I'm concerned - to fix the crap that's awkward and broken about reality.
Consequently, I prefer worldbuilding where magic is either a biological trait of a species or pseudo-physics of a universe. I like magic that anyone can use if they put the work into studying it, though there may be differences in affinity between different individuals.
At the beginning, and even in the middle acts, of a story you can absolutely solve conflicts with magic without prior explanation or hinting because you are using that solution to establish the magic. Later in the story you only need to use or hint at it enough to make it not break versimilitude within the story. You don't need to establish the rules and you only need to hint at exactly as much as necessary to A) establish the tone and atmosphere for your story and B) Have even oblique hints as to the ending of the story.
This isn't just magic. If the cops come in and arrest the bad guy at the climax with 0 build up, you have the same problem. If the main character pulls a rocket launcher from nowhere and pastes everyone with 0 build up, you have the same problem. When the cops come in and arrest everyone at the end of Monty Python? It works because we have seen the cops before. Even when you do have 0 buildup (And Then The Animator Had a Fatal Heart Attack) it can work if it's in the tone you have established. If Gollum had bitten off the ring and fallen into the volcano without the enormous amount of setup that went into Gollum it also would've been a Deus Ex Machina.
Magic does not function differently from other tools here. You don't need the audience to understand your system to solve conflicts with it, you simply need to establish enough that it is as valid as other tools for solving the conflict. In the Star Wars example you need the same setup for the force allowing you to disregard a targetting computer to make an incredibly difficult shot that you need for Han coming back to save Luke.
(Also, 'at least hinted at them' is a clear violation of the direct proportionality noted in the rule)
The Force is a very vague magic system, but it barely solves any problems. Obi-wan uses it sparingly, it barely gets them through NH and then he dies. Luke uses it once at the very end to destroy the Death Star, at Obi-Wan's insistence. His character arc in NH is about trusting in the Force and letting go of his need to prove himsef. As the trilogy goes on, he (and the audience) learn more about it, so it accomplishes more.
That's not barely any. It includes the climax of the movie, among other things.
Lord of the Rings doesn't tell you much about the magic, but that's because barely any problems need magical solutions. You know what the Ring does and what needs to be done to destroy it. You don't know what Gandalf and Saruman can do, but they're not viewpoint characters and they directly counter each other, with Saruman being slightly stronger until Gandalf comes back as the White. Gandalf uses magic to beat the Balrog? Sure, but that causes another conflict; he dies and, not long after, the Fellowship is broken.
This is ignoring all the other places where magic comes up and/or solves conflicts in LOTR and the Hobbit. It's a gross oversimplification that also ignores the next two books in the name of hammering it into a 'Law' with questionable validity.
What are you talking about?
Sanderson doesn't talk about style, setting or worldbuilding. It is literally just "don't solve problems with magic unless the audience has some understanding of the rules."
Soft and Hard Magic, as Sanderson defines them, as well as the middle road, as Sanderson defines it, are all elements of style, setting, and worldbuilding.
And Sanderson himself admits that he's broken the rules. Any author worth their salt knows that there are no iron-clad "rules of writing". He doesn't present them as absolute advice.
The problem is not just the original blog post, but also how it propagates and is interpreted. You argued, in this post, and other people are arguing, in this conversation, that things that blatantly break the law actually totally fit by going through contortions to justify them
Didn't a major part of the plot of Sanderson's first Mistborn book hinge on a shocking reveal about the settings magic system, which had no prior explanation and came as a complete surprise?
Also, more pertinently, isn't this yet another tangent that deserves its own thread? Heck haven't we had this thread already? Go revive that if you want to talk about this, and stop shitting up Tempera's thread.
Didn't Sanderson already say "authors can break my rules and still tell good stories" and "sometimes I break my guidelines"?
Didn't Sanderson already establish multiple magic systems, whose rules weren't explained in the first one because Mistborn was always planned as a trilogy?
If you like, I can lay out what Sanderson was up to with Mistborn in a PM. It seems like I encounter a lot of people that don't understand how it's still following his Laws, in a sense.
Yes, this topic is a tangent. I wouldn't have commented on it if it wasn't already being misunderstood. I'll drop it.
Also, don't tell people to stop arguing about it if you're going to try and have the last word. Just makes people like me have to answer and keep the off-topic train rolling.
Also, don't tell people to stop arguing about it if you're going to try and have the last word. Just makes people like me have to answer and keep the off-topic train rolling.
I think our disagreement stems from you understanding my (and, by extension, Sanderson's) position as "magic needs to be explained before it's used."
This is not the case and I apologize, for I now see how I have been poorly making it.
I (and he) are of the position that "magic needs to be explained so the audience isn't dissatisfied when it solves problems". This doesn't need to happen before magic serves as a solution, but it has to happen eventually, before the audience is done with the story.
Note that I am not moving the goalposts and I say this to avoid such accusations. My mistake was being vague about when magic needs to be explained.
At the beginning, and even in the middle acts, of a story you can absolutely solve conflicts with magic without prior explanation or hinting because you are using that solution to establish the magic. Later in the story you only need to use or hint at it enough to make it not break versimilitude within the story. You don't need to establish the rules and you only need to hint at exactly as much as necessary to A) establish the tone and atmosphere for your story and B) Have even oblique hints as to the ending of the story.
You are saying exactly the same as the First Law: conflict solving with magic only works when you've established it, even retroactively. It's not about bringing up a wiki article before every problem, but rather letting the audience know, "hey, this stuff isn't just a plot device, it's a component of the world with unique rules."
Any fragment of knowledge that establishes magic counts as understanding it because "magic" is not a concept that's identical across every story. Gravity, time, space, cause/effect all operate identically across almost all fiction because the audience is intimately and inescapably familiar with such concepts.
But when you work with magic, the only rules are whatever you decide. Whether it's "The One Ring keeps Sauron around and can only be destroyed by going to Mt. Doom" or "The Force has to do with life and can achieve various unrelated effects", the lines are drawn entirely by the author.
Because no one's going to come along and say, "No, that's not how this fictional concept you made up works, author!" At least, no one will credibly be able to do that because they're not the (creator/creative team) of the story.
To give a pertinent example, Sanderson's big magic reveal at the end of Final Empire works because he explains it in two other books, which are part of the first Mistborn trilogy, which is just one of the multiple trilogies he's telling in that world with those magic systems.
The basic problem of
Lord Ruler is immortal and injury doesn't kill him, how do we stop him?
Oh, rip out the bracelets that keep him young so that he rapidly ages to a thousand year old helpless husk that you can just stab.
How'd you know that?
Oh, another character explained it to me, in unrelated circumstances.
is explained by previously established scenes. The protagonist uses a not yet explained power to solve a problem, but her solution is foreshadowed adequately.
If Sanderson never explained that power, I'd be pissed. Heck, if he didn't hint at it, I'd think he was a shitty writer even if he eventually explained it.
But he does both of those things, so I'm not angry and I think he's a great one.
Are you attempting to argue that because I violated the rule, it's illegitimate? Even if I hadn't acknowledged that my initial explanation was flawed, how would my interpretation of it factor into Sanderson's Law? If you view my statement as a violation of the Law, shouldn't you have argued that my understanding of it is incorrect and proceeded to explain why both Sanderson and I are wrong in our exclusive positions?
If that's a path available to you, go ahead, but your statement above is just faulty logic. Additionally, both Sanderson and I acknowledge that the Laws are not iron-clad. He calls them such, but he has always, to my knowledge, presented them as "guidelines which can still be broken to tell a good story".
But I shall respond to it nonetheless. If the story merely "hints" at how the magic works, then it has very little ground to solve problems with it. This is what Sanderson describes as "soft magic" (iirc, a term he borrowed from "soft and hard sci-fi"), as in Lord of the Rings. The audience doesn't know all of what the magicians and gods can do, but quite a bit is laid out about what they can't do, even if the rules are laid out indirectly.
For example, Gandalf's magic almost exclusively solves problems which have no mundane solution.
Rohan's king is possessed by Saruman? He's pushed out with the power of the White, which should have been Saruman's but was granted to Gandalf by the gods themselves.
The Balrog can't be killed with weapons? He uses magic to get rid of it; it still takes him away from the Fellowship, directly leading to its collapse, and ends up costing him his life. He gets another chance only because the gods ordain it.
What other things? I recall no other critical uses of the Force in "A New Hope". If you have examples, please present them.
Yes, it solves the climax of the movie. This is the only problem it solves, using established information and having justified itself as a valid option.
If you're opposed to my use of the word "barely", know that I mean it in the quantitative sense, not qualitative. I'll acknowledge that as another misstep. Certainly, it's a major solution, but it's still just one. Most of the problems in the plot (getting to Alderaan, escaping the Death Star, the final attack on the Death Star) are not solved by the Force. Thus, it can be vague, but still satisfactorily resolve conflict.
This is ignoring all the other places where magic comes up and/or solves conflicts in LOTR and the Hobbit. It's a gross oversimplification that also ignores the next two books in the name of hammering it into a 'Law' with questionable validity.
Soft and Hard Magic, as Sanderson defines them, as well as the middle road, as Sanderson defines it, are all elements of style, setting, and worldbuilding.
If you have read the blog post and understand how Sanderson defines these terms, why do you argue that Sanderson's Laws are invalid because they demand specificity? He acknowledges that they are far from infallible.
I'll acknowledge that I was wrong to say that the First Law has nothing to do with style, setting and worldbuilding, but your argument doesn't make sense to me.
The problem is not just the original blog post, but also how it propagates and is interpreted. You argued, in this post, and other people are arguing, in this conversation, that things that blatantly break the law actually totally fit by going through contortions to justify them
How does mine or anyone else's interpretation of the Laws count against their validity as writing advice?
Sanderson is the same as anyone who's had ideas and told them to someone else; people pass them on simplistically for the sake of brevity, transmuting their meaning into something else.
If I or anyone else is wrong in understanding them and present flawed examples, then correct us with a better interpretation. However, I do not see how I've misunderstood them, nor do I see how I've contorted my arguments to justify them. I'm interested in how you believe I've done that.
Magic does not function differently from other tools here. You don't need the audience to understand your system to solve conflicts with it, you simply need to establish enough that it is as valid as other tools for solving the conflict. In the Star Wars example you need the same setup for the force allowing you to disregard a targetting computer to make an incredibly difficult shot that you need for Han coming back to save Luke.
My suspicion is that there's a semantic misunderstanding here.
Magic (and "magic systems") is a label for a number of things that are cosmetically but not structurally similar. Some examples:
Demonology/necronomicon/etc in Lovecraft: technically "magic"
Vague authority-based supernatural effects in LoTR: technically "magic"
Faux-Latin wand gesticulating in Harry Potter: technically "magic"
Mechanically parametrized Vancian spells in Forgotten Realms: technically "magic"
Ms. Frizzle's inexplicably versatile class vehicle: technically "magic"
etc
Obviously this sampling is particularly ridiculous, but it's meant to be illustrative: nobody would claim that "magic" fulfills the same narrative and structural role in Lovecraft as it does in Magic School Bus.
I think this is part of what @Havocfett was objecting to (feel free to correct me) when [checks profile] he asserted that Sanderson's First is Objectively Bad when applied to some kinds of fiction. Like, imagine you're watching that Magic School Bus episode where Ralphie is sick and they take a field trip into his throat to learn about the immune system, and they just get to the point where the white blood cell is eating the bus, when suddenly Strawman Brandon Sanderson bursts in and goes, "This is wrong! Nobody ever explained that school-bus-magic could present antigens recognizable by the human immune system! Stop pulling stuff out of your ass!"
My personal interpretation of Sanderson's First is that it uses the term "magic system" in a very different way than how we're using it here. In particular, Sanderson uses that term to refer to a very specific thing that is cosmetically magic, but also has very specific structural premises—let's call it a Sandersonian Magic System, or SMS for short. SMSs are constructed in a very specific way that already presupposes the existence of internally-consistent simulationist worldbuilding or whatever (this is, I think, the other part of @Havocfett's original point). Because of this, all worlds that contain SMSs must necessarily be worlds in which magic benefits from being constructed according to the First Law.
I actually think that this is one of Sanderson's—and his First Law's—main failings: there are a lot of assumptions around what he's saying that he doesn't make clear. Maybe it's because he's not aware of them, maybe it's just because he thinks they're so obvious and straightforward that, hey, who wouldn't believe that they were true? This is supported by his little convention panelist anecdote:
Brandon sanderson's blog said:
I said something I took as a GIVEN. [...] It was the thing that I assumed was the first law of magic systems.
[...]
And every other person on the panel disagreed with me violently. "If you have lots of rules and boundaries for your magic," they explained, "then you lose your sense of wonder! Fantasy is all about wonder! You can't restrict yourself, or your imagination, by making your magic have rules!"
I was dumbfounded. Suddenly, I realized that most of the reading I'd done on the subject had been produced by a segment of the population who liked a particular kind of magic. However, there appeared to be another complete school of thought on the matter. I struggled to defend myself for the rest of the panel, and left thinking that everyone else there must have really weak magic systems in their books.
But regardless, I'll add another assertion of my own to this—an SMS is structurally but not cosmetically identical to, well, all the other "tools" that @Havocfett mentions:
If the cops come in and arrest the bad guy at the climax with 0 build up, you have the same problem. If the main character pulls a rocket launcher from nowhere and pastes everyone with 0 build up, you have the same problem. When the cops come in and arrest everyone at the end of Monty Python? It works because we have seen the cops before. Even when you do have 0 buildup (And Then The Animator Had a Fatal Heart Attack) it can work if it's in the tone you have established. If Gollum had bitten off the ring and fallen into the volcano without the enormous amount of setup that went into Gollum it also would've been a Deus Ex Machina.
I think of Sanderson's First Law as not just a statement about SMSs, but also a statement about every other kind of structural device of this type.
So, effectively, Sanderson has made two mistakes (or abides by two obvious truths, depending on your point of view):
Sanderson is trying to make a general statement about fiction, but he is, at core, a fantasy author, and, in the spirit of "write what you know", chooses to localize his (structural) advice to the specific thing in his particular stories which fulfills that structural role: magic.
Sanderson is trying to make a general statement about fiction, but he is, at core, a simulationist world-builder who values internal consistency, and presupposes that these are values that all readers hold.
I don't think that makes him wrong, though. It just stops him from being wholly right.
I think I just learned why multi-quotes persist between threads.
edit: going to tag @Reveen here just in case he wants to join in on this particular fantasy magic clusterfuck, since he posted a response in the other thread
edit2: I realize that I glossed over just how SMS is constructed such that it presupposes worldbuilding etc. So I'm happy to elaborate on that if people want, although I don't personally think it's super interesting.
Maybe writers should stop coming up "rules" and "laws" for writing and then immediately walking back on it to say "Well, you can break it if you waaaant...". This isn't just for magic and shit, 90% of bad and harmful writing advice is clickbaity shit that starts with the words "Rule", "Always", or "Never". Just stahp.
At the very least it will cutdown on the number of people playing telephone with Sanderson's Law and unironically treating it as an ironclad rule, and infecting another batch of wannabe writers. It's like a virus.
Certainly, Sanderson's mistake was using "Laws". Such a term has connotations of being unbreakable and, presented by a successful author with multiple fantasy series to his name, I can see how some might consider it absolute.
What's your solution, then?
Going with absolute advice won't work; there's no tenet of writing that's identically successful across all of it. Feel free to try and find one.
Perpetually acknowledge that everyone's just figuring it out as they go along? That might work, but would it really help uncertain potential writers?
Be in depth, don't just give cliff notes, focus on teaching the core concept of how to construct a story first and "how do I write how the elves pick their noses" a distant second.
Yes? I don't think uncertain potential writers benefit from acting like established writers have the answers from on high. They benefit from knowing that everyone starts out having no idea what the fuck they're doing, and they'll get better by doing what they did, by fucking doing it, with understanding how stories are constructed as a base.
Be in depth, don't just give cliff notes, focus on teaching the core concept of how to construct a story first and "how do I write how the elves pick their noses" a distant second.
Yes? I don't think uncertain potential writers benefit from acting like established writers have the answers from on high. They benefit from knowing that everyone starts out having no idea what the fuck they're doing, and they'll get better by doing what they did, by fucking doing it, with understanding how stories are constructed as a base.
edit: going to tag @Reveen here just in case he wants to join in on this particular fantasy magic clusterfuck, since he posted a response in the other thread
My response is more to do with the dumb ways writers frame their advice that makes uncritical people take things completely the wrong way, but whatever.
The problem with Sanderson's ideas is that he completely misses the forest for the trees as to why people put magic in stories. I mean, if he's a "simulationist" of course he'll do that. But for this specifically he's not paying attention to what role the magic plays in the story. He just treats it as a setting fact like in an RPG sourcebook. That doesn't help when giving the magic a place in the story, themes it represents, and the emotions and feelings it inspires for the characters. The importance of magic in a fantasy story isn't to solve problems or not solve problems, it's to give the story a mystical or mythological backing that supports the tone and themes the writer wants to employ in their story.
Now, constructing a magic system isn't necessarily bad. But it's only really necessary or important for certain kinds of formats. It works with serial format stuff that focuses on anime-ish action hijinks, where what powers characters have and how they're employed forms the basis of the direct conflict of the story, or a similar kind of setup involving intrigue or something, or if it's some kind of fantasy-scifi hybrid kind of thing. It's really important if you're writing the sourcebooks for your new RPG.
But for writing fantasy stories in general? I don't think the approach is even slightly useful. It certainly won't make the story you're creating with your magic more good, it might make it more internally consistent. But internal consistency is just a matter of basic writing competence.
That's the main problem. Sanderson using a ton of words just to say "be internally consistent", and adapting it to specify an entire genre in a really clunky way, and then his fans running around taking his words as gospel at total face value.
Also, I just think the concept of simulationist writing is kind of garbage. At best it just sounds like a recipe for meandering, pointless serials that don't have central character arcs or themes.
Can we not have casually dismissive remarks on Harry Potter as if JK Rowling didn't know what she was doing with her setting's magic? Because that brand of total bollocks has been done to death.
Rowlings worldbuilding is fantastic at doing what it's meant to do, giving the world a sense of wonder and adventure without bogging down the story in magical minutiae so the characters can solve their problems in relatively grounded ways. You don't need to know how it works or what spells can be combined to do what fiddly thing.
Can we not have casually dismissive remarks on Harry Potter as if JK Rowling didn't know what she was doing with her setting's magic? Because that brand of total bollocks has been done to death.
I think you may be reading too much into what I'm saying? I mean, this isn't the point of my post. It's... not even a throwaway joke. And for the record, I like Harry Potter. It's a fun story and I grew up with it.
And hey, I totally admit it, I did it because it was low-hanging fruit. But it's low-hanging fruit because it's true, in an asinine reductionist way. And I'm already being an asinine reductionist about LoTR and Magic School Bus, so I might as well be an equal-opportunity one and do it for HP too.
edit: I want to clarify that I tagged you purely to inform you that this thread existed and we were all moving here, and not because I was responding to you in particular. I think we're saying completely orthogonal things. Sorry for any confusion.
The importance of magic in a fantasy story isn't to solve problems or not solve problems, it's to give the story a mystical or mythological backing that supports the tone and themes the writer wants to employ in their story.
To a degree, I actually agree with you on this. Magic shouldn't be just a tool for the plot and it can greatly reinforce thematic goals.
But I think your view on magic differs from Sanderson's as well as my own.
Obviously, I can't directly speak for him. But, when I read Sanderson's works, it's always seemed like he's more concerned with making worlds unto themselves, with magic serving as another, usually central, component of that world, rather than aligning it to theme or tone.
I take a similar approach. I'm not overly interested in reinforcing themes and tone; I view characters as working better for that.
Rather, I see magic as part of a wider world, not a story element. I try to make it as innate a part of the story's reality as the physical phenomenons of gravity and light are in ours; imperfectly understood, but immensely powerful and virtually omnipresent. And characters use it to solve or not solve problems because it's a force in their world and they have goals that can be achieved through it, even if it's just violence.
Dark Souls seems to be a good mid-point between your view and mine; even with its gaps in internal logic, the magic reinforces themes and serves to solve/create problems.
Perhaps that's a shortcoming of mine as a storyteller, though.
I feel like I'm stepping on a landmine, so luckily I'm going to sleep so I'll get to see how big the explosion is when I wake up, but I'm pretty sure that Sanderson's choice of magic is very thematic.
He uses it as part of creating a society/world that helps back his plot and its themes.
Like, random example from a one-off book of his: The fact that in Peacebreaker magic involves 'Breaths' and each person has one (from birth, but they can buy and sell them) and that losing it in some way diminishes them obviously ties into some of the themes of exploitation and power, as well as into one character's question of whether he deserves it.
He's considered a God because he came back from the dead, but to keep from dying his needs to 'eat' one Breath each week. So each week, someone, a child or an old woman or whatever, is brought to him to give up their breath and become 'drab'. I say give up because it's made to be voluntary, which has both plot and thematic significance. (So he asks himself what right he has to this, he doesn't believe he's really a God, even though he supposedly came back from the dead, etc, etc. It's a driving part of his character, and if the magic system didn't make it so that every week he was *taking* *something* from people, it would not resonate as well.)
So, like...the magic isn't somehow just standing there unconnected to the themes in that case, even if the full range of possibilities that could thematically be drawn from it aren't explored, in some cases.
*****
And honestly, I'd be willing to bet it was the same for all of his works, or at least a lot of them. Sure, some elements are there for there to be cool powers to have contrast with each other, but a lot of it is designed to back up worldbuilding and plot-building...which doesn't exist outside of themes.
Dark Souls seems to be a good mid-point between your view and mine; even with its gaps in internal logic, the magic reinforces themes and serves to solve/create problems.
Uh... well, the magic you can use in the game aren't connected to the themes. But those are just an in game weapon. The larger magic of the world itself is absolutely tied to the tone and themes of the game. The slow decay of the world into entropy, rebirth symbolized through fire, the endless cycle and limbo between light and dark. The larger mechanics on the Dark Souls universe are way more on my side of the argument. It's a heavily thematic world where the particulars of places and people don't matter and the themes are baked into the game down to it's mechanics.
, it's always seemed like he's more concerned with making worlds unto themselves, with magic serving as another, usually central, component of that world, rather than aligning it to theme or tone.
The problem with this is that it draws an arbitrary distinction between world, story, and tone that does a disservice to all of them. In the best stories, the world can tell the story and communicate tone just as well as the content of the story itself. Dark Souls is a pretty clear example of this, the game is great at telling a story through the visuals of it's world.
This is something that stories set in fantastical settings just tend to do. Lord of the Rings can tells a good huge chunk of it's story and themes just by having it's characters trek from point a to point b. Do you wonder why so many fantasy stories have a travelogue format? Because LoTR did it and it was really effective.
Sure, you can't expect most newbie writers to be able to pull this off. But thinking about fiction in this forest for the trees kind of way precludes people thinking about fiction in this way in the first place.
I feel like I'm stepping on a landmine, so luckily I'm going to sleep so I'll get to see how big the explosion is when I wake up, but I'm pretty sure that Sanderson's choice of magic is very thematic.
Maybe? I don't read his work. I'm just going off what he says here, and people seem perfectly happy taking his advice in the most literal way possible.
Link to an explanation of Vancian magic I came up with that shoehorns in the stuff that has been done to Vancian magic in Pathfinder as part of how it works. Read the whole thread, there's two or three questions I answered outside the first post that I've been too lazy to edit into the first post.
Someone explain the history of Vancian magic to me, because I didn't know what Vancian magic was until I played Dark Souls. I only knew "mana bar" and that was it.
Someone explain the history of Vancian magic to me, because I didn't know what Vancian magic was until I played Dark Souls. I only knew "mana bar" and that was it.
Vancian magic is the spell slots system usually used in D&D for magic. It's named after Jack Vance, who invented the system as part of his novel Dying Earth. Said novel had a reason for the system in the way Wizards chose to cast magic, but the reasoning doesn't work for a lot of stuff it's been used for since, so I gave a go at making an explanation that would work for all Vancian casters.
I feel like I'm stepping on a landmine, so luckily I'm going to sleep so I'll get to see how big the explosion is when I wake up, but I'm pretty sure that Sanderson's choice of magic is very thematic.
He uses it as part of creating a society/world that helps back his plot and its themes.
I feel like in general this is the biggest part of any magic system. Not "how does it work" or "how do we even define the word magic" but "how does magic interact with the story?"
In my experience magic is more often than not defined by the setting rather than the other way around. To try and provide some examples:
-Is magic an inherently usable force within the universe? If so then whatever systems are in place will have been thoroughly studied to the point that it would be similar to science. Depending on the time period you place your story in, it might even be used as alternatives to real life technological advances or be merged with them, like using fireballs as propulsion for engines. If not, then it will probably be treated with suspicion, awe, fear, or any number of extreme reactions when it is discovered, and the "system" for using it will basically be "I'm going to try to use this and pray that I don't die in the process."
-Is magic reliable? Then if so you probably have your traditional wizard schools and whatnot where magic is popularized and studied as if it were a field of science. If not then you basically have your Warhammer 40k scenario where magic users are treated with scorn and suspicion.
-Can everyone use magic? In general the answer is no, so divisions are created in the world between magic users and normal people, and there can be strife that results from those divisions. Or maybe magic is a thing that only the extremely powerful or divine can use like in myths, making it revered and feared in equal measure.
You can talk about the different ways to define it and so on, but at the end of the day what's most important about magic is how it plays into the story that you are creating.
And to be honest a very viable reason for even having magic in the first place is so you can see dudes hurl fireballs around or use Ancient Civilization Laser Beams on their enemies. For all the talk of fascinating ways to have magic interact with society, never underestimate the appeal of just watching people throw lightning around or things like that.
