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Comments
This is a good example if they had a particularly notable relationship.
But this is too abstract and distant to matter much. Unless we're sympathetic with specific characters on both sides, or our protagonists on one side look to be in a particular pickle, conflict between soldiers on different sides of a battle is expected, normal and not particularly interesting.
Again, a duel doesn't tell us much without additional context. In the context of cinema or a video game, a violent conflict on its own, without character support, can be temporarily engaging. This is much less likely in a literary context, because the written word carries action much less effectively than audio-visual mediums.
Magic is abstract enough that we absolutely require more detail for the conflict to actually hold any meaning whatsoever, even in general terms. After all, the words "combat" and "scheme" inherently carry conflict. The term "magic" doesn't, but we know all stories have conflict, so it demands elaboration anyway. It's possible for a writer to leave the conflict at "there was a battle between two sides" in the combat scenario, technically (even if that isn't advisable), but it's almost literally impossible to leave it at the magical equivalent of "a spell was cast". We might ignore the combat equivalent because it doesn't inherently draw us towards questions, but the magical example is so abstract that further detail is highly desirable.
Sure, if you really like battles, you might want to know who the sides were, why they were fighting and what ended up happening. But you don't have to like magic to be curious about "a spell was cast". Why? By whom? For what reason? What happened then? It could be anything for any reason, and tell any kind of story (barring those that adhere to absolute realism or non-fantasy speculation). Even though a spell is cast, the story could spend its time dealing with its fallout in a completely realistic fashion via any means. But the political scheme plot will always be political, and the combat conflict will always be martial in nature.
This is why I consider magic to be something of an "absolute container", second only to the concept of a story itself. It describes nothing but its own abstraction.
It follows this pattern:
As do all of the examples described.
And I guess this is what I'm disagreeing with.
Conflict requires motivation. A magical spell is not interesting on its own; rather, it influences the narrative via a few questions:
- Who cast the spell? On whom was the spell cast? Who else is involved?
- Why did they cast the spell? Why are other people involved?
- What did the spell achieve?
In terms of narrative, these can be simplified further:
- Who are the people involved?
- Why are they performing their actions?
- What is the effect of the framing device on the sequence of events?
Magic follows along this pattern. Let us take your earlier example; a witch transforms a prince into a frog.
- A witch cast a spell on a prince. A peasant girl is involved due to her nature making her a prime target for breaking the spell.
- The witch cast the spell in the prince because she felt angry that he spurned her. The peasant girl is involved because she does not want the prince to be stuck as a frog forever.
- The sequence of events therefore follows the peasant girl's meeting of the frog, the witch's efforts to stop her, and the eventual resolution as the peasant girl kisses the frog.
Similarly, a plot follows the same concept. Take Dishonored, in which the main conflict is combat, but the character gets involved in both magical and political schemes, and both magic and political schemes are used to support the primary conflict, which is combat in the form of assassination.
So, while this is true while looking at it from one direction, by looking at it in terms of how magic actually influences the story, it acts exactly the same as many other narrative tools, such as politics and combat. It can set up a conflict, or it can support another conflict.
The situations magic can provide can cover more than either combat or politics; but, ultimately, the differences are just window dressing, and do not alter the fundamental story beneath.
Yes, but it doesn't have what a story or magic has in its most abstract form of concept -- the inherent demand for elaboration. Barring the lack of solid resolutions to the scenarios you provided, they essentially contain complete information.
This is the crux of it, I think. While a variety of contexts that ask the same essential questions, none are so abstract as magic (or the idea of a story in abstract). A political scheme will always be a grab for power on someone's part, and combat will always use violence as a means of resolution. They inherently contain information that magic as context doesn't.
This is true insofar as there are only a handful of truly different stories (according to common wisdom), but the point I'm trying to make is that as soon as you say "political scheme" or "combat", you're filling in details in a way you don't when you say "magic".
Politics does not inherently involve a grab for power. That's what people often use it for, but that is not all it does.
It can also affect the status quo- making an alliance with a candidate for the crown in order to lever his support for elven rights, for instance. It can affect anything that a human being could reasonably affect.
That is not how it is used, but it is how it can be used.
So, if we go back to this, I will present you with two scenarios.
One; a prince was just turned into a frog.
Two; a group of soldiers just fought another group of soldiers.
Neither conflict inherently contains any answers about the conflict. We know that the prince was turned into a frog; we know that a bunch of dudes just fought a bunch of other dudes.
Neither contains complete information; you don't know the why's of it, you don't know how it fits into the sequence of events, you don't know how it fits into the overall narrative.
Or; this is to say, combat as a means of conflict can be boiled down to "Two or more people are engaged in a martial altercation", and magic as a means of conflict can be boiled down to "Someone or something has been affected by an external influence in a way that violates real-world physics." Neither inherently contains more or less details than the other; magic just has more window dressing.