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Comments
Pretty much all I wanted you to say.
So, wait, where was our disagreement, again, then? I've lost myself.
I managed to figure mine out properly here, at least.
When you said there wasn't any reason from a narrative standpoint for magic to be incomprehensible.
Oh. I meant that it shouldn't be entirely incomprehensible, but I think we can all agree on that. That's the point that I was originally trying to make.
entirely incomprehensible = cthulhu?
Although I also dislike the element of chance playing a key role in . . . well, any work of fiction (outside of works where gambling is a main plot point, I suppose). 'S just less interesting, to me.
I wouldn't call Cthulhu magical, in light of him being a being from outer space and supposedly within the bounds of known physics (He has dimensions and form, for example)
then again, lovecraft i have not read
Er...no. A lot of the point of Lovecraft's work is that "known physics," and indeed, physics as comprehensible by humans, might well represent a tiny portion of the universe, and that's scary.
Not sure I phrased that well, though...
If anything, Cthulhu is less comprehensible than magic, if that makes sense (it probably doesn't make sense phrased like that, but you know what I mean). Like INUH said, that was what Lovecraft was going for; a chief element of his works was that the most frightening things are the things we can't begin to comprehend or define, and the idea that most of the universe is incomprehensible to us.
hence why i saiid supposedly. i'm just saying what little i know and deduce from the fact there are illustrations of the guy
no he does not
The reason he breaks your brain is that you expect him to but he doesn't.
^^Yeah, the existence of illustrations of Cthulhu always bothered me. There were idols that were supposed to represent him in the story (the illustrations you'll see of him are based on those), but I don't think his true form was supposed to be comprehensible.
That said, Cthulhu's some of Lovecraft's more grounded work. I never understood why it became his most well-known story.
because it's the most comprehensible
also because racism and such.
Yeah, there's racism in a lot of his work, but I don't think there's any in At the Mountains of Madness.
What about a system where there are both magic as science and magic as the unknown?
That's how stuff like Harry Potter works, where we don't know how exactly things like Harry surviving work, except for Dumbledore's guesses (Which we have no reason to believe they're accurate, although there's no reason to doubt them either, i guess)
The problem I have with this entire argument is that it looks as magic as simply "a way to do things". Which is a very constraining interpretation. In the real world, mysticism isn't about bolts of lightning or moving things without touching them. I don't know if there is a way to say what it is about--the quest for something missing, something transcendental. In real life, it's the sort of thing that brings people to great power, even if it doesn't involve fireballs: it creates an unmistakeable confidence, charisma and vitality.
That may be a slightly romantic view of its results, admittedly, but in fantasy, it is the case that striving for the transcendental gives you superpowers, because it's a literalization of a spiritual journey. Now, you can remove the transcendental from the equation, but in my opinion that makes things boring, and makes your characters flat (in fact, I'd say that's the point of removing it: to make it boring, mass produceable, to allow one to rely on spectacle without particular elaboration). But in any setting, people will still have some yearning for the transcendental--it's human nature. Denying it leads to flat characters, and making the spiritual journey something that doesn't coincide with your magical system is, symbolically speaking, awkward. Like jigsaw pieces that don't quite fit together.
The earlier Harry Potter books were good about this, I think, but around the 4th book it started to feel less like wonder and amazement and more like "epic struggle of good vs. evil."
That actually makes a good deal of since, just from a "Harry finishes his training so he can go kick Voldemort's ass" perspective.
As Malk pointed out, the Harry Potter books don't address the OP's complaint because they treat magic as a system with rules and laws behind it.
Wait, so it only counts as magic if you have absolutely no idea how it works?
It's very possible to have widely-known magic that still has a hell of a lot of mysteries, unplumbed depths, and the generally unaccounted-for.
Morrowind. Worse, as your stamina dropped (quickly) you'd have a pretty high chance of failing almost any spell ever. Even worse, it consumed MP anyway, and it didn't regenerate until you rested. It was 18 different kinds of miserable.
It probably would have been less irritating and more interesting if it wasn't tuned quite so harshly, or if you only failed spells at the borderline of your abilities.
That, basically. If there was no pattern to it whatsoever it wouldn't be very much worth the trouble of having in your story except as The Bad Thing you want to keep locked up.
the whole mysterious forces beyond our comprehension thing.
It doesn't mean you can't know "I point teh stick at the red thing and things go boom", but the whys, the hows, and all that is what separates mystery from mundane.
It's the difference between mysterious forces and understandable forces. Magic can still operate on cause and effect, but there's a lot of difference between "I say shabazalam and the feather floats" and "If anyone says shabazalam, feathers float" and there's even difference between that and "the specific combination of the syllables sha,ba,za, and lam makes feathers float but changing the last syllable makes elephants float instead".
And there's nothing to say you can't have other forces at work, either, that aren't magic.
Well that's the thing though. Presumably someone had to know what they were doing to make the red stick of explodey.
Or maybe the stick was made by God, or Demons or something.
Not necessarily. It could be as simple as "I threw the stick in the magic font of power and when I drew it out it made the red thingie explodey".
It is, but that's not what I'm trying to get at. The complaint is not that most fiction uses magic and that characters in it can use magic and know how to approach it, but that often times, it's approached like a science, where the characters have a clear understanding of how it works, where it should work and, most importantly, what makes it work. It isn't magic if you understand it well enough to manipulate completely to your whims and understand it completely. It's just science by another name.
Or alchemy. whatever works.
I guess part of my problem with rule-less magic is that it's so easy to fall into using it as a crutch. When your magic system has no rules, there's nothing stopping you from just coming up with some spell that solves anything because fuck yeah, magic. Or conversely, to find a way to solve the problem without readers just saying "Well, why not magic it away?"
I'm going to use Mistborn as an example again, because I fucking love Mistborn. The magic systems in those books, Allomancy, Feruchemy, and Hemalurgy, are very strict, but also interact in a lot of really interesting ways. Being Mistborn makes you more powerful than an average person, but it doesn't make you a god who can solve every problem with a snap of your fingers.
If Vin could just defeat the Lord Ruler because of some spell that was just fuckawesome powerful, that would be lame. Instead, she uses her knowledge of the world's magic to figure out his weakness.
Some of the coolest stuff in the series comes from the rules lawyering, and having the magic have actual limits and stuff made it more interesting than if magic was some nebulous, mysterious thing where anything could happen.
But then, I'm really really tired and I've been playing TOR for hours and my brain is kind of mush, so this post was probably pretty terrible at arguing my point. blargh
wait, is this all just a crappy semantics argument, cuz I hate those
EDIT: fucking shitty mobile site
It's not really semantics unless we start trying to define magic and science, but we did that by the beginning of the discussion, really.
That would betray a lack of understanding of how storytelling works.
Brandon Sanderson is an interesting example, because the magic isn't quite as defined as you think it is.
Within the context of the Mistborn universe, the rules are so clearly defined as to not actually be magic- it's a form of science. But way up there, with Odium and everyone, the cosmology is not nearly so clearly defined.
For example, did you know that the world of the Mistborn series exists in the same universe as the world of The Stormlight Archives, and both series' magic is fed off of the gods there? Yet TSA really doesn't have anything like the Allomancy in Mistborn, and instead everything is powered off a mysterious energy called 'Stormlight' that nobody really understands.