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Zero consistency to magic systems. I get it, having all sorts of spells in the story is fun and gives a lot of creative ways to make fights more interesting, but...
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If teleportation magic exists, why don't people who own it teleport everywhere?
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If time travel magic exists, why isn't everyone doing everything in their power to get it and use it? Looking at you, harry potter.
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The villains usually have spells that are supposed to be ultra powerful and can kill anyone quickly but somehow it doesn't work against main characters and there's no excuse for why fights drag on for so long. Imagine seeing the villain introduced by vaporizing someone but never seeing them do it again.
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Main character(s) breaking the rules of magic just because...
I'm a fan of stories like Avatar the last airbender or Witch Hat Atelier because their magic is very consistent. It makes things way more interesting when a character can't just pull something out of their ass to save them in the middle of a fight.
Shoutout to every story that alludes to the fact that mages can run out of mana but is insanely inconsistent how and when it happens. Sometimes they spam spells for hours and sometimes it's just "Oh no, I can't use [spell] anymore because... Um... The plot says I can't!"
Harry Potter was the worst culprit for a lot of these. The author was just writing a fun story that she threw together wildly. She didn’t care about consistency in magic… which is the UNDERLYING PREMISE OF THE ENTIRE STORY. But, cool it’s a Coming Of Age story with a mix of the Hero’s Journey in there, and a few odds and ends from other stories and mediums. There’s enough fun to suspend disbelief… but, upon further inspection you wish you just hadn’t inspected further.
I can give the first half of Harry Potter a slack because it's pretty laid back and whimsical. As soon as it tries to take itself seriously it kind of falls apart for me. God, deathly hallows sucked.
I stopped reading after the 4th book at release. Never really had interest in picking up the next couple of books.
When my interest in "well, might as well give it a go again" started back up, JKR started to go insane and now I don't want to have anything to do with the series anymore
I remember when all the controversy started I thought wow, this must be exaggerated somehow, and sought out what she had actually said. Oh. My. Fucking. God. When she was challenged she didn't just double down, she quadrupled down, and then some. Loathsome woman, just awful.
Why couldnt she just fuck off to a tropical island and stay off twitter? Same thing with notch (guy that created minecraft)
I was reading the books religiously through middle and high school, as the movies were coming out… but, the movies finally caught up with the books for me, for some reason I didn’t get around to reading the last one before the movie. Anyway, I’ve NEVER gotten back to it. I’ve tried, but the magic is gone. The author is outspokenly uninclusive while her books, the original world she built, is all about inclusivity. I can’t fathom how separate and different her works are from her blatant bigotry. Fucking. What.
For a woman who wrote "it matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be." She seems awful fucking concerned with what categroies people were born into.
If only there was an epic saga about the conquering power of love over bigotry that she could read. Maybe one involving a boy who lives or some fantastic magical beasts?
She started the series on benefits, and ended them a billionaire.
"It matters not what someone is born" is a very unfair sentence, what you are born can set the difficulty level of your life to extra easy or infinite pain regardless of your will and efforts. The anti-suicide nets off the windows of the iphone factories are not there for people born in a rich family.
She likes the slytherins and Snape. The warning signs were there from the beginning.
The series goes from "magic wands require extreme responsibility and must be used carefully," to machine gun wands.
Eliezer Yudkowsky can be a bit preachy at times, but he did a good job of pulling on threads in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality to try to get to a fairly consistent model of magic
One of the things I enjoy most about Sanderson's work is his attention to detail in his numerous magic systems.
And the imaginative variety. The magic system in the Mistborn series was fantastic and unlike anything I had ever read or even imagined. And then he adapted it consistently to an industrial age, and somehow made it work. Respect to Sanderson.
Same reasons I find extended comic universes to be appalling. Why don't superheroes just use all of their powers all the time? Why isn't the more powerful superhero conveniently here right now? Why do we have to pretend there is a struggle?
The minute 2 or more superheroes are put together, it's basically ruined cause all their powers are only used as convenient for the story.
I think the web novel Worm does this really well. I recently got it recommended to me and am enjoying it immensely! :)
Shoutout to every story that alludes to the fact that mages can run out of mana but is insanely inconsistent how and when it happens. Sometimes they spam spells for hours and sometimes it’s just “Oh no, I can’t use [spell] anymore because… Um… The plot says I can’t!”
hhahahaa, just like reload when dramatically appropriate.
There's a thing I heard somewhere about how your magical system needs to have a balance between how well it's understood vs. how useful it is, or else it will break the plot.
If a magic system is extremely useful, then it must also be extremely mysterious, so that you can say "Well, it can't immediately fix all problems because the gods work in mysterious ways." Gandalf or Tom Bombadil seem incredibly powerful, but they don't solve all of the problems in Middle Earth, and that's okay because they're terribly mysterious.
If a magic system is extremely well understood in-universe, then it has to have hard limits on how useful it is, so you can say something like "Well, the Law of Equivalent Exchange says that to solve all our problems would require a blood sacrifice of the entire population, so that's not an option."
If your magic is pretty well-understood AND very useful, then by all rights it OUGHT to solve all your problems, and when it doesn't then readers rightly begin to question why any of the plot needs to happen at all (see, for example, the time turners in Harry Potter).
If teleportation magic exists, why don’t people who own it teleport everywhere?
Another wizard and I absolutely wrecked our DM's in game economy just teleporting everywhere. Wizard Instant Shipping Inc.
Checks out lol, it's a busted ability
If teleportation magic exists, why don't people who own it teleport everywhere?
Because you die and a copy of you is created.
If time travel magic exists, why isn't everyone doing everything in their power to get it and use it? Looking at you, harry potter.
It can only be used by women who have borne children, to travel to a point before they bore children. Obviously, this means their child disappears from existence.
The villains usually have spells that are supposed to be ultra powerful and can kill anyone quickly but somehow it doesn't work against main characters and there's no excuse for why fights drag on for so long. Imagine seeing the villain introduced by vaporizing someone but never seeing them do it again.
The main character leaves his normal life when a villain’s casual disappearing spell actually “doubles” him, resulting in the origin of his heroic power.
Main character(s) breaking the rules of magic just because...
Because schizophrenia. Main character hears voices and they occasionally meld into a chorus in a way that produces unique magical outcomes.
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