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Magic vs Magik: Part 2


Fhaolan

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Now we move on to ‘magic’ as used by unicorns.

 

Pseudo-psionics: And the third, and least popular one in mythology is the one that is most often seen in modern fiction. Where the magician simply wills something to happen and it happens because he’s just that cool. There might be some waving of hands around, and some nonsense chanting just to set the mood, but it’s the effort of will that is important and it’s entirely possible to bypass the dressings leaving only the will behind. For those used to Dungeons and Dragons, that falls into this magic style. There’s some dressing added to make it superficially resemble the second style, but it’s just dressing. Especially in later editions of the game where the dressing is easily bypassed via feats or something similar.

 

That’s not to say this *doesn’t* show up in mythology anywhere. It’s a staple in more Eastern mythologies where willpower, correctly focused, can do wondrous things. Usually however, these wondrous things are highly internalized, allowing the practitioner to perform physical feats far beyond mortal understanding, or affect the spirit world in some way (crossing over with the first style.)

 

MLP:FiM gives the impression of following the third style the most, which makes sense given it’s influences. Magic can do anything at will. Nominally only Unicorns can perform this kind of magic, using their horn as a focus. But because it's the same focus for all spells, it's not truly Symbolic of anything. And the caster has to learn ‘spells’. But once learned, the caster can spam that spell as desired as long as they have the willpower to do so, with no reliance on symbolic tools or external powers. Willpower here being a consumable resource. However, pegasi have very specialized magic with their ability to walk on and manipulate clouds as if they were solid objects, and earth ponies appear to have the ability to manipulate the growth of plants and animals in a preternatural way. None of this via manipulating external spirits or using symbolism directly.

 

Which throws Twilight’s lab in a weird light. She (and presumably other unicorns) seem to approach magic the same way as Alchemists did, using advanced symbology and similar techniques to break magic down into consumable chunks, and building up magic repertoires from that knowledge. But when it actually comes to casting spells, it all comes out as pseudo-psionics. Which again, is very D&D, from 1st edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons onwards when spell research was introduced.

 

FYI: Here's where my title for this topic comes into play. Magik is a pretentious alternate spelling for magic, used to differentiate between stage/performance magic and 'real' magic. It goes further than that: Depending on who you're talking to, any one of these three styles could be Magik while the others are just fake magic. The even more pretentious Magick is used by several religions to refer to their own practices to mark them as being 'even more real' than any of the other religions that espouse Magik as a real thing. I'm waiting for a Majhick, or Magichk to be introduced as the next step up. Any moment now.

 

As I mentioned in my blog post about Dungeons and Dragons, limitless magic can cause problems with worldbuilding, but more obviously affects drama potential. If Twilight can simply cast a spell and get rid of any problem, then the writers have to put more and more effort into invalidating Twilight. Having her not be around, or be oblivious to the problem, or put some magibabble (the equivalent to Star Trek technobabble) in place so that she *can’t* just poof the problem away. If becoming an alicorn increases her effective power, the writers have given themselves an increase in this specific problem along with it.

 

Watching the episodes back to back shows that Twilight’s effective power is highly variable depending on the exact writer involved. I believe this indicates different levels of awareness of this problem with the individual writer. More experienced writers, or those who have done longer-term projects before, are likely aware of this problem and work to keep Twilight’s abilities within a reasonable boundary. Less experienced writers, or those who in the past concentrated on one-shots rather than continuing series, are the most likely to use ‘limit breaks’ and boost Twilight’s abilities in some way, forgetting that they then will need to allow for these increased limits later as Twilight will have no reason to not use that tool/technique to break past that limit. I know that the writers of MLP do care somewhat for consistency and character growth, according to various interviews, so when they do fall prey to this kind of thing it is accidental and not deliberately ignoring long-term effects. It's very much the BMX Bandit and Angel Summoner issue:

 

Rarity is a problem here as well. She has occasionally demonstrated power beyond that of the average unicorn (I hope), to levels that even oblivious and naïve Twilight should have noticed by now. She can manipulate several hundred objects simultaneously via telekinesis during a musical number, many of which were of significant weight. She can manipulate the weather directly to produce *patterns* of cloud formations, something that only pegasi are supposed to be able to do. She may be limited by the types of spells she can cast, but the power behind that telekinesis is astonishing. Again, I hope this is unusual for unicorns, because if it isn’t it invalidates a lot of the struggle the ponies go through on a daily basis. It does make the various fanfictions that depict a slightly older Sweetie Bell becoming a prodigy, Twilight’s student and perhaps successor to the Element of Magic far more reasonable. If, of course, she has inherited the same potential that Rarity is currently displaying.

 

How to fix this as a writer? Well, simply being aware of it helps a lot. Magic has to be limited, otherwise it consumes the plot and becomes the only real answer to any problem, to the point that it trivializes any obstacle. This third style of magic is prone to this problem above the other two, because it doesn't have a built-in limiter. You don't have to convince an external power to do these things, and you aren't limited by your tools. So as a writer you have to deliberately restrict yourself and restrict the magic of your characters. Most importantly, keep your limitations consistent. Arbitrary limitations are fine, as long as they're *always* applied, and avoid putting work-arounds in your writing, because once you let that genie out the bottle, it ain't going back in. Once a work-around is applied, there's no reason why the character won't use that work-around repeatedly.

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