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Comments
My appreciation for low magic is based on stuff like LotR and The Witcher, where the worlds themselves could be considered heavily magical but that power doesn't lie in the hands of the perspective characters, forcing improvisation in the face of magical obstacles and adversaries. For much the same reason, I like The Empire of Warhammer Fantasy, since they're a Renaissance-style civilisation while the rest of the world is in a medieval stasis, and while they have access to decent magic, it's much less cost-effective than their technology and less effective than the cohesion and grit of their soldiers.
Even ridiculously fairy-tale settings sometimes do stuff like this. The Legend Of Zelda, for instance, tends to give Link a minimum of magical gear. Usually there's some kind of mildly magical sword in the game and lately an arcane sidekick, but for the most part, you're using bizarre technology and steel to think and fight your way out of most scenarios. Some games prove an exception (Majora's Mask's masks, or the ocmbination of magical arrows and spells in Ocarina of Time), but mostly it's some kid with no innate magical ability using whatever tools he can scrape together to save the world from an evil wizard and I think the whole experience is stronger by disallowing the player access to too much overtly magical stuff. Slaying a volcano dragon is just kind of sweeter when you do it with a hammer and a greatsword, you know?
But, as I mentioned above, it's mostly a matter of taste. I love me some realism, but that's not really the driving factor of this -- I just love to see mundane solutions to magical problems.
I don't think Link is really an appropriate example. Over the time of the games he's been able to command the elements, turn into a wolf, and ride a magical bird through the sky, teleport, see the unseen with his magical trinkets, and the Master Sword is explicitly magical. A better example would be the literary Conan who knows about magic but doesn't trust or use it.
The problem with 'mundane answers to magical problems' is that it tends to end in only stabbing things with your sword. Zelda's a problem solving game so it's more explicit there, but most novels and films do not examine the hardships and just go with a 'he's just that good' solution.
I don't see the point of realism in fantasy. Fantasy is supposed to be about imagination and 'realism' just limits it.
Yeah, but any single given iteration of Link only has a few magical trinkets, and the Master Sword has no particular powers beyond "fucks up Gannondorf real nice". Most of it is using your items to solve problems and your sword skills to solve nastier problems.
And conversely, the problem with magical answers to magical problems is that magic is so abstract that a production can wheel out a new rule or some bizarre exception and we have to accept it, so the problem-solving process can be just as lazy. At its worst, a mundane solution might be boring, predictable and stupid, but it essentially makes sense. A decent magical solution does too, within the established rules, but if we're comparing worst-to-worst, then a magical solution might just be a tension-killing handwave or something.
^ So you'd like Avatar more if, for example, they worked out each movement and exactly what it does to the element (e.g. this technique allows earth benders to raise the earth as a pillar that is 6 meters high and 1 meter wide, nothing more, nothing less)?
>Come back to topic
>Find Alex and Malk doing their thing.
forzare. i need to borrow your hose.
>Master Sword has no particular powers beyond "fucks up Gannondorf real nice".
The master sword shoots laser beams dude. And yeah, it's using items, but most of those items are magical. He has a plethora of abilities in each game, none of them subtle, and most of them magical.
>At its worst, a mundane solution might be boring, predictable and stupid, but it essentially makes sense.
Yeah, no. See a lot of sword vs. sorcery stories depend on the stupidity of the caster for the swordfighter to stand a chance. Magic vs. magic might be asspully at worst, but an aspect of magic I didn't know about is easier to buy than a swordsman just suddenly shutting down all of an opponents defenses.
^^^ Not quite. I just think there's an excess of using their martial magic as a means of ranged attack rather than something more creative or interesting. What if a Firebender caused compressed combustion under their feet during combat, launching them around their adversaries for a better position? Or --and this is probably too brutal-- what if Waterbenders boiled the water content inside the human body? Airbending as a means of shifting the alignment of ranged attacks? Earthbending used to make an improvised, whip-like weapon out of sand?
Stuff, I guess, that would support martial arts rather than more or less replacing them. Apart from that Waterbender example.
^ But then you have other examples, such as Hellblazer. Sure, Constantine more or less understands and sometimes uses magic, but his biggest advantage has always been his cleverness and wit, right up to tricking the Devil into curing his lung cancer.
Haven't you two had, like... this exact same argument before?
I'm getting serious deja vu here.
I'm honestly beginning to get annoyed that Alex and I can't engage in good-natured discussion without people who weren't even initially involved in the conversation complaining about it.
It is our fate to ever be apart, it seems.
-cough cough-
They've done all of this and more (metalbending, redirecting lightning, bloodbending, sandbending, bending plants, etc.) in the first series alone.
EDIT: Ninja'd
Although it is difficult for anyone but the more advanced benders, because it's no longer raw manipulation of their elements. They have to seek out the water in people/plants, they have to Bend each individual grain of sand, they have to focus their Firebending explosively- and look at how that ends up for Combustion Man.
It's difficult and not something to do lightly.
> But then you have other examples, such as Hellblazer. Sure, Constantine more or less understands and sometimes uses magic, but his biggest advantage has always been his cleverness and wit, right up to tricking the Devil into curing his lung cancer.
That's true, but Constantine is a very different kind of story than say Zelda or even the Dresden files (though there are spiritual similarities in the latter case) It's more of a horror story. Keep in mind, there are quite a few stories where Constantine just runs into creepy shit and does what the thing asks of him. Even in those stories the magic is fairly OTT (I mean, summoning three lords of hell is pretty big work) as well as continually walking in and out of hell. His smarts and his magic are one.
I'm not saying every magician need be fireball-spewing. I'm a fan of the chicanery myself. There's nothing inherently wrong with low magic settings or settings with wizards as antagonists but it's been done so often with people attempting to copy Tolkien or Martin and done so poorly.
So in the end, there's nothing wrong with the low-magic setting despite my preference for more flashy (and preferably drug-induced and mind bending) magic, but oftentimes it sends off warning bells of someone trying a bit too hard to be clever and 'real'.
^^Sort of. Sandbending and Bloodbending are probably insanely difficult but metalbending is only difficult because it's a very new technique. By Korra an entire city's police force knows metalbending, and low level firebenders can generate lightning to run power plants.
That's what I like about this series, it shows how it's magic and technology grows over time (often VERY rapidly).
^^^ > children's cartoon
> boiling someone internally using the contents of their own body
welp
But now the problem I see is that it's a setting where using one's powers for a deadly ranged attack is easier than more creative applications. What use is combustion footwork when you can just set some guy on fire and be done with it?
^^ At the same time, a high magic setting often sets off the other klaxon and I begin having visions of stuff like Warcraft.
When your opponent can easily deflect or avoid said blasts of fire?
^Because it's super difficult.
Spark Sparky Boom Boom Man can do it, but he's mute so there's a hint that there's some savantism going there.
Guru Pathik mentions that Metalbending is really, really difficult, actually. Because metal isn't Earth itself, you have to search out the impurities within it and bend those.
Toph was able to do it because of her unique ability to see Earth with her feet.
this
is rather silly, given the constraints placed upon Benders in the first series.
Not boiled alive. You can control their bodies with it, though.
^I also think Toph being a founder of the police force is rather odd concerning her anti-establishment tendencies.
I'm not so sure. I'm inclined to believe that 70 years of experimentation and refinement can create something simple enough to be taught to the masses.
I found this odd too. Granted 30+ years can do a lot to change someone, especially if said someone was a pre-teen.
Fair point, but now we're at a stage where the martial arts tend to get lost in the magical metagame anyway, and it also raises the question of what a normal firebender is capable of if both shooting fire and using combustion propulsion are so difficult, given those are the most combat-applicable uses of fire as a free-flowing tool. Given that there's such a thing as metalbending, I suspect firebenders don't manipulate the shape or temper of their weapons, and more minor fire-based powers seem pretty redundant next to flint, tinder, oil and dry wood if basic non-combat application is what you need.
wat
Sure, if they deliberately made metals as impure as you can get them. But that leads to a lot of other bad roads. There is a reason we do not use impure metals, after all.
I mean, during the entire war with the Fire Nation, the Fire Nation explicitly kept Earthbenders on metal ships because they couldn't Earthbend on them. There was an entire episode dedicated around this. Aang had to go into the ship itself and bring all the coal they were using to fuel the ship to get the Earthbender prisoners to riot, for god's sake.
Shooting fire is difficult? I'm fairly sure that shooting fire is one of the most basic applications of it, actually. Throwing fireballs is like, the first thing people are taught.
They do. Again, war with the firebenders, metalbending is not common except it is in korra, etc.
That's explored within the series. There's an entire plot where Jet discovers Iroh and Zuko as Firebenders because Iroh heats his tea without a kettle, and there's a scene in the first season finale where Zuko stops himself freezing in the North Pole by using firebending to regulate his body temperature.
There is also Waterbender-based healing, as exhibited by Katara.
Perhaps I misunderstood, but I thought Malk said that setting someone on fire is pretty difficult. But if Joe Firebender can throw a fireball, then it makes more sense.
I'm pretty sure that setting someone on fire deliberately is fairly hard, but throwing a fireball is fairly easy and is done by a lot of firebenders, and has the byproduct of setting them on fire.
Insofar as general combat application goes, I don't think there's a particularly huge difference. Especially if your basic fireball is difficult to dodge.
Fireballs are easy because firebending at its core is based around short, high-energy, bursts of movement to generate fire, which lends itself to short bursts of fire.
Propulsion is possible, but usually not that efficient because most firebenders can't sustain streams of fire that are powerful enough for very long (except at one very specific instance).
It's not that difficult to dodge. Only about as difficult to dodge as having a giant boulder thrown at your head.
Which is also partially because of, well, balance. The other nations are at war with the Fire Nation in the first series, so they can't give either side a definitive advantage.
As such, we rarely see Waterbenders (Because the Southern Tribe is decimated and has maybe a couple dozen people alive in it, the Northen Tribe is decimated from the war and the events of the first season finale, and the only other Waterbenders are a bunch of yokels living in a swamp), there is only one Airbender in existence, and the Earthbenders are the people who get the most focus but are also solid and inflexible.
don't forget that the firebenders were doin it rong