I've been thinking about what makes Diane Duane's Wizard's Oath so much more of an ideal for good people than other kinds of magic in fiction. I hypothesize that her wizards are not only told but shown to have the business of going around healing and fixing rather than...
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...on making things better, building and healing, day by day.
Sometimes there are apocalypses to prevent. The people who prevent them aren't famous and don't get banquets, they're just told "Well done." The older wiser wizards are less powerful...Show this thread -
...because that's how magic works, but they know more and are more experienced and it's okay for them to be in charge. When you're young, you're strong, but that doesn't make you not stupid. It is not your destiny to overthrow the old corrupt order...Show this thread -
...and grab all the status and end up being in charge.
This is what a mentally healthy empowerment fantasy looks like.
Contrast any other power fantasy.
Compare the normal operation of a healthy scientific field.
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PS: These tweets are about literature and psychology. You would be unwise to draw inferences from them about questions of fact, in science or elsewhere. Reality did not give you a wizard's power. It may not hand you a wizard's problem. But you can still have a wizard's morals.
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...fighting Evil most of the time, and the Lone Power is not only told but shown to manifest in many small slow cruelties and the process of entropy. The Lone Power is shown to tempt everyone, not just bad people, into cruelty in the name of good ends. Everyone in...
...the Universe has to deal with that, everyone has their problems. There isn't a designated victim class and a designated evil class. There isn't a threshold of suffering below which we say someone has it "better" and stop sympathizing with their pain. Wizards are...
...to protect everyone, always, and the idea that anyone doesn't deserve protection from entropy is obviously the Lone Power's lie. Entropy will never be cast out of the universe. There will never be a revolutionary epoch where the work of wizardry ends. It just goes...