I can appreciate fantasy in whatever form it comes, but this video touches on a few points that I feel are frequently underappreciated aspects of so-called "soft" magic systems, i.e. those whose...
Exemplary
I can appreciate fantasy in whatever form it comes, but this video touches on a few points that I feel are frequently underappreciated aspects of so-called "soft" magic systems, i.e. those whose rules and limitations are ambiguously defined. As of late, I've been reading a certain amount of literature on contemporary trauma theory (Cathy Caruth, Ruth Leys, Ian Hacking, etc.), and I have to say that the narrator's point about the variability and unpredictability of trauma is highly suited for magic systems serving as representations of said condition, whether the word "trauma" is used in them or not. The self-contradictory influences of the Ring on Frodo, for example, are very much in line with the nature of anxiety as "both cure and cause of psychic trauma" (Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy, 28) in the real world. In this sense, trauma and its constituent parts can only very loosely be defined as discrete, predictable entities. I agree with the video's narrator that my preference in literature is to read with the purpose of learning more about problems that we face in the real world; fantasy serves to abstract an issue out into a context that frees me from many preconceived notions I might have, and thus allows me to appreciate the deeper meaning of the text with fewer mental roadblocks.
I have some amount of interest in the intrinsic structure of "hard" magic systems—I'm reminded here in particular of the personalization of alchemical techniques in Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, and of the aesthetic beauty in the naturalistic physical techniques of bending in Avatar: The Last Airbender. But at some level, the most striking moments even in these works are those in which something inexplicable happens. Perhaps when some emergent and therefore undefined property of the magic system takes the foreground, like the attitudinal synthesis of bending techniques in Avatar that implicitly subvert the divisions of the whole magic system; or when hard limits are applied to soft objects, like equivalent exchange to the "value of a human soul" in Brotherhood. So even within what I would consider hard magic systems, there is power in blending the knowable and unknowable—as soft magic systems often do from the outset.
I actually haven't read any Brandon Sanderson, so I can't comment on his work in particular. However, I felt while reading George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series (spoilers below) that the ambiguity of many of the manifestations of religious worship throughout lent themselves to the chaotic human elements of the series. Pretty much everything to do with the Lord of Light is ambiguous, and for a while (as I recall) it is unclear to the audience whether the deity is even "real" to begin with. Given some creative interpretation, one could certainly do a reading to the contrary: did a shadow really kill Renly Baratheon, or was he murdered in cold blood? If read allegorically—as a conduit for the fantastical delusions that people often prefer to attribute to disaster—the interpretation provided in the texts themselves are simply one version of the story among potentially many, the others perhaps being associated with the mental handling of traumatic events by those involved, directly or tangentially.
I rewatched Ari Aster's Hereditary with a few friends last night, and was reminded of how much I valued the unclear levels of supernaturality in the events of the film. One could make a strong argument either for or against the idea that there was never any "king of hell" involved with the family to begin with, and indeed that every instance of otherworldly presence is simply a byproduct of some manner of hereditary (!) schizophrenia inherited from the family's creepy deceased matriarch. I feel that soft magic systems in general are somewhat more suited to allow for ambiguous readings of the works they make up, which has always been something I've valued in literature, film, and other media. Whether or not you agree with such a reading as the one previously expressed (not to imply that these things are all or nothing), it certainly offers a compelling analogue to psychological problems that people face in the real world in a way that is challenging to replicate through a strictly hard magic system.
I'd be curious to hear what other people have to think about this. I don't actually have that strong an opinion on the matter, and it's not something I've considered in any particular amount of depth beyond my commentary in response to this video. If you have a different take, I'd love to give it a read.
I think soft magical systems definitely have their place in stories, but just like hard magical systems, which equate more to science than magic except for the results, it depends on how you use...
I think soft magical systems definitely have their place in stories, but just like hard magical systems, which equate more to science than magic except for the results, it depends on how you use them. I think the most famous soft magical system would be either the magic found in Lord of the Rings (though I don't know much lore about Middle-earth, there's a chance that Tolkien explained it more in detail in his other works like the Silmarilion) or the magic found in Harry Potter.
What I mean with how it's used to me means how often it is used in the plot. The more you use your magical system, the more people will want to know about it, especially if you use it get characters out of sticky situations, or to move the plot forward in significant ways. I think JKR especially is guilty of turning magic into a plot device, and you can see a lot in the series that she makes up stuff as she writes. Examples from the top of my head: Felix Felicis, a potion that makes you really fucking lucky, is mentioned for the first time in the 6th book, as are Inferi, the Harry Potter version of zombies. While the potion is very hard to make, it simply existing throws up a multitude of questions, like why don't people use it during important tasks like fighting the dark wizards? Using it too much incurs heavy side-effects, but there are capable brewers on both sides of the war, they should be churning out the potion so it can be used in situations where failure is not an option.
Inferi are mentioned for the first time in book 6, but JKR claims in the very same book that they have been used to attack people the last time Voldemort was in power as well, but everyone simply forgot to mention it for the first 5 books.
In Middle-earth and LotR, it's done in a better way I think, because the magical aspects are contained. Aragorn calls forth the ghosts, they're ghosts because they broke a vow, and he can free them from it because he is the king by birthright. It's contained because the ghosts wouldn't help anyone else, hell, they almost kill Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas when they enter their domain to ask for help, and because desperate times call for desperate measures. One of the most famous criticisms people leverage against LotR is the deus ex machina also called The Eagles, because, if the Eagles can get in to rescue Frodo and Sam at the end, why can't they just fly in, drop the ring Mt. Doom and fuck off. I haven't read the books (stopped during the first, Tolkien's writing is just to dry and descriptive for me, same reason I don't really like A Song of Ice and Fire), but in the movies this isn't explained very well, but the reason is that the Eagles are proud and arrogant, and the only reason they even help is cause Gandalf has a favour good with them, and they can't fly in while Sauron is active because the entire point of the mission is to do it in secret so they don't get spotted, which you can't do with huge birds.
I think soft magical systems have just gotten a bad reputation because when they're used badly, or when authors, who wrote an entire 7-book story using soft magical systems suddenly want to overexplain it really, really badly (I can rant about this for hours), it gets very obvious where soft magical systems fail. But that doesn't mean that they are bad in their entirety, that just means that as an author you've exerted them to the max and you're using them to hide inconsistencies and holes in your plot.
I also think that hard magical systems have problems, because more often than not, when an author is more interested in worldbuilding that in actually writing a plot with compelling characters, the story gets lost in the details. This isn't just about magic, but more of a critique of overy detailed worldbuilding in general. I'm looking at you George. FINISH THE BOOKS, GEORGE.
I tend to agree. What you're saying sounds a lot like Sanderson's First Law of Magic, which people like to bring up to put down stories with "soft" magic, but what Sanderson actually says is: "An...
I tend to agree. What you're saying sounds a lot like Sanderson's First Law of Magic, which people like to bring up to put down stories with "soft" magic, but what Sanderson actually says is: "An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic." I don't think this means that you need to completely lay out all the rules of magic in your story, or even that you need a "magic system" with rigidly defined rules or laws. I think what it really means is that if you haven't laid the groundwork earlier in the story for whatever magical solution you're using, your reader is going to reject it. Lots of stories with "soft" magic still do this well, they just go about it differently, by showing the magic early in the story, in situations that are similar or that lend themselves to extrapolation to later events.
You're so, so right. This basically puts my entire post to shame, because this sentence is the essential part of it. It works in LotR with the ghosts, because it is set up, explained, and paid...
An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic.
You're so, so right. This basically puts my entire post to shame, because this sentence is the essential part of it.
It works in LotR with the ghosts, because it is set up, explained, and paid off. It doesn't work as well with the eagles because the set up happens in a different book. Same with Harry Potter.
It's kind of interesting, because you realize that soft magical systems are really just a version of setting up events and paying them off. Hard magical systems are the same, but you have more explanations around this because some authors (and readers) just really dig having a detailed framework that they can understand and take apart. This extends to worldbuilding in general, because magical systems, hard or soft, are part of that, and you have authors that really enjoy creating detailed, cohesive worlds where everything is explained (like GRRM and Tolkien) and sensible. GRRM is honestly even more extreme than Tolkien cause he realized that he really just wanted to write encyclopedias instead of booksFINISH THE FUCKING BOOKS GEORGE, Tolkien always planned to create a sort of mythology for the British Isles, which is why he created Middle-Earth. JKR wrote a good story, seemingly put her good author abilities into cooldown doing that, and decided to add more and more bullshit because she wants to be like GRRM and Tolkien without putting in the work they did to make the world make sense.
Well, I can't take credit for that part, that's a direct quote of what Brandon Sanderson calls his "first law of magic". I do think it's a pretty good rule of thumb, though, and it doesn't just...
This basically puts my entire post to shame, because this sentence is the essential part of it.
Well, I can't take credit for that part, that's a direct quote of what Brandon Sanderson calls his "first law of magic". I do think it's a pretty good rule of thumb, though, and it doesn't just apply to magic in Fantasy novels. Readers are going to accept a solution to a problem more readily if you have laid the groundwork beforehand, whether that solution is magic, a character, or just a mundane skill or object. There's a reason the "rule of three" is a thing in writing. We are satisfied when we notice patterns and see them pay off, but using an element that hasn't been sufficiently foreshadowed to solve a major conflict can feel arbitrary or unsatisfying. It's like the reverse of Chekhov's gun: if a gun is fired in the third act, you need to have shown it (or a proclivity for the character to carry a gun, or something like that) in an earlier act.
As to your comments on Rowling, I tend to be a little easier on her when it comes to this (her awful personal crap and politics completely aside). She was writing for kids and she almost always does foreshadow her solutions earlier in each book, it's just that she does it pretty obviously and pretty rarely does so across books. She does a perfectly serviceable job of it, there's just not a whole lot of finesse or artistry to it. If the kids learn a spell you can pretty much guarantee they're going to need it by the end of the book, and there's not usually a whole lot of effort going on to be subtle about it or plant those seeds more than one book in advance.
I can appreciate fantasy in whatever form it comes, but this video touches on a few points that I feel are frequently underappreciated aspects of so-called "soft" magic systems, i.e. those whose rules and limitations are ambiguously defined. As of late, I've been reading a certain amount of literature on contemporary trauma theory (Cathy Caruth, Ruth Leys, Ian Hacking, etc.), and I have to say that the narrator's point about the variability and unpredictability of trauma is highly suited for magic systems serving as representations of said condition, whether the word "trauma" is used in them or not. The self-contradictory influences of the Ring on Frodo, for example, are very much in line with the nature of anxiety as "both cure and cause of psychic trauma" (Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy, 28) in the real world. In this sense, trauma and its constituent parts can only very loosely be defined as discrete, predictable entities. I agree with the video's narrator that my preference in literature is to read with the purpose of learning more about problems that we face in the real world; fantasy serves to abstract an issue out into a context that frees me from many preconceived notions I might have, and thus allows me to appreciate the deeper meaning of the text with fewer mental roadblocks.
I have some amount of interest in the intrinsic structure of "hard" magic systems—I'm reminded here in particular of the personalization of alchemical techniques in Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, and of the aesthetic beauty in the naturalistic physical techniques of bending in Avatar: The Last Airbender. But at some level, the most striking moments even in these works are those in which something inexplicable happens. Perhaps when some emergent and therefore undefined property of the magic system takes the foreground, like the attitudinal synthesis of bending techniques in Avatar that implicitly subvert the divisions of the whole magic system; or when hard limits are applied to soft objects, like equivalent exchange to the "value of a human soul" in Brotherhood. So even within what I would consider hard magic systems, there is power in blending the knowable and unknowable—as soft magic systems often do from the outset.
I actually haven't read any Brandon Sanderson, so I can't comment on his work in particular. However, I felt while reading George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series (spoilers below) that the ambiguity of many of the manifestations of religious worship throughout lent themselves to the chaotic human elements of the series. Pretty much everything to do with the Lord of Light is ambiguous, and for a while (as I recall) it is unclear to the audience whether the deity is even "real" to begin with. Given some creative interpretation, one could certainly do a reading to the contrary: did a shadow really kill Renly Baratheon, or was he murdered in cold blood? If read allegorically—as a conduit for the fantastical delusions that people often prefer to attribute to disaster—the interpretation provided in the texts themselves are simply one version of the story among potentially many, the others perhaps being associated with the mental handling of traumatic events by those involved, directly or tangentially.
I rewatched Ari Aster's Hereditary with a few friends last night, and was reminded of how much I valued the unclear levels of supernaturality in the events of the film. One could make a strong argument either for or against the idea that there was never any "king of hell" involved with the family to begin with, and indeed that every instance of otherworldly presence is simply a byproduct of some manner of hereditary (!) schizophrenia inherited from the family's creepy deceased matriarch. I feel that soft magic systems in general are somewhat more suited to allow for ambiguous readings of the works they make up, which has always been something I've valued in literature, film, and other media. Whether or not you agree with such a reading as the one previously expressed (not to imply that these things are all or nothing), it certainly offers a compelling analogue to psychological problems that people face in the real world in a way that is challenging to replicate through a strictly hard magic system.
I'd be curious to hear what other people have to think about this. I don't actually have that strong an opinion on the matter, and it's not something I've considered in any particular amount of depth beyond my commentary in response to this video. If you have a different take, I'd love to give it a read.
I think soft magical systems definitely have their place in stories, but just like hard magical systems, which equate more to science than magic except for the results, it depends on how you use them. I think the most famous soft magical system would be either the magic found in Lord of the Rings (though I don't know much lore about Middle-earth, there's a chance that Tolkien explained it more in detail in his other works like the Silmarilion) or the magic found in Harry Potter.
What I mean with how it's used to me means how often it is used in the plot. The more you use your magical system, the more people will want to know about it, especially if you use it get characters out of sticky situations, or to move the plot forward in significant ways. I think JKR especially is guilty of turning magic into a plot device, and you can see a lot in the series that she makes up stuff as she writes. Examples from the top of my head: Felix Felicis, a potion that makes you really fucking lucky, is mentioned for the first time in the 6th book, as are Inferi, the Harry Potter version of zombies. While the potion is very hard to make, it simply existing throws up a multitude of questions, like why don't people use it during important tasks like fighting the dark wizards? Using it too much incurs heavy side-effects, but there are capable brewers on both sides of the war, they should be churning out the potion so it can be used in situations where failure is not an option.
Inferi are mentioned for the first time in book 6, but JKR claims in the very same book that they have been used to attack people the last time Voldemort was in power as well, but everyone simply forgot to mention it for the first 5 books.
In Middle-earth and LotR, it's done in a better way I think, because the magical aspects are contained. Aragorn calls forth the ghosts, they're ghosts because they broke a vow, and he can free them from it because he is the king by birthright. It's contained because the ghosts wouldn't help anyone else, hell, they almost kill Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas when they enter their domain to ask for help, and because desperate times call for desperate measures. One of the most famous criticisms people leverage against LotR is the deus ex machina also called The Eagles, because, if the Eagles can get in to rescue Frodo and Sam at the end, why can't they just fly in, drop the ring Mt. Doom and fuck off. I haven't read the books (stopped during the first, Tolkien's writing is just to dry and descriptive for me, same reason I don't really like A Song of Ice and Fire), but in the movies this isn't explained very well, but the reason is that the Eagles are proud and arrogant, and the only reason they even help is cause Gandalf has a favour good with them, and they can't fly in while Sauron is active because the entire point of the mission is to do it in secret so they don't get spotted, which you can't do with huge birds.
I think soft magical systems have just gotten a bad reputation because when they're used badly, or when authors, who wrote an entire 7-book story using soft magical systems suddenly want to overexplain it really, really badly (I can rant about this for hours), it gets very obvious where soft magical systems fail. But that doesn't mean that they are bad in their entirety, that just means that as an author you've exerted them to the max and you're using them to hide inconsistencies and holes in your plot.
I also think that hard magical systems have problems, because more often than not, when an author is more interested in worldbuilding that in actually writing a plot with compelling characters, the story gets lost in the details. This isn't just about magic, but more of a critique of overy detailed worldbuilding in general. I'm looking at you George. FINISH THE BOOKS, GEORGE.
I tend to agree. What you're saying sounds a lot like Sanderson's First Law of Magic, which people like to bring up to put down stories with "soft" magic, but what Sanderson actually says is: "An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic." I don't think this means that you need to completely lay out all the rules of magic in your story, or even that you need a "magic system" with rigidly defined rules or laws. I think what it really means is that if you haven't laid the groundwork earlier in the story for whatever magical solution you're using, your reader is going to reject it. Lots of stories with "soft" magic still do this well, they just go about it differently, by showing the magic early in the story, in situations that are similar or that lend themselves to extrapolation to later events.
You're so, so right. This basically puts my entire post to shame, because this sentence is the essential part of it.
It works in LotR with the ghosts, because it is set up, explained, and paid off. It doesn't work as well with the eagles because the set up happens in a different book. Same with Harry Potter.
It's kind of interesting, because you realize that soft magical systems are really just a version of setting up events and paying them off. Hard magical systems are the same, but you have more explanations around this because some authors (and readers) just really dig having a detailed framework that they can understand and take apart. This extends to worldbuilding in general, because magical systems, hard or soft, are part of that, and you have authors that really enjoy creating detailed, cohesive worlds where everything is explained (like GRRM and Tolkien) and sensible. GRRM is honestly even more extreme than Tolkien cause he realized that he really just wanted to write encyclopedias instead of booksFINISH THE FUCKING BOOKS GEORGE, Tolkien always planned to create a sort of mythology for the British Isles, which is why he created Middle-Earth. JKR wrote a good story, seemingly put her good author abilities into cooldown doing that, and decided to add more and more bullshit because she wants to be like GRRM and Tolkien without putting in the work they did to make the world make sense.
Well, I can't take credit for that part, that's a direct quote of what Brandon Sanderson calls his "first law of magic". I do think it's a pretty good rule of thumb, though, and it doesn't just apply to magic in Fantasy novels. Readers are going to accept a solution to a problem more readily if you have laid the groundwork beforehand, whether that solution is magic, a character, or just a mundane skill or object. There's a reason the "rule of three" is a thing in writing. We are satisfied when we notice patterns and see them pay off, but using an element that hasn't been sufficiently foreshadowed to solve a major conflict can feel arbitrary or unsatisfying. It's like the reverse of Chekhov's gun: if a gun is fired in the third act, you need to have shown it (or a proclivity for the character to carry a gun, or something like that) in an earlier act.
As to your comments on Rowling, I tend to be a little easier on her when it comes to this (her awful personal crap and politics completely aside). She was writing for kids and she almost always does foreshadow her solutions earlier in each book, it's just that she does it pretty obviously and pretty rarely does so across books. She does a perfectly serviceable job of it, there's just not a whole lot of finesse or artistry to it. If the kids learn a spell you can pretty much guarantee they're going to need it by the end of the book, and there's not usually a whole lot of effort going on to be subtle about it or plant those seeds more than one book in advance.