this bit is super interesting: robert e. howard grew up in texas and was exposed to a lot of violence growing up and "grew up a lover of all contests of violent, masculine struggle." conan the barbarian was born in the heart of a texan. it all makes sense now
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gonna refocus on D&D and gary gygax b/c i think there's an interesting way D&D serves as a "memetic bottleneck" here. little gary was into LARPing, pulp fiction, and wargames. idk anything about pulp fiction or wargames. let's click on wargames first
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Gyga
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wargaming was invented in prussia and used for military training; attracted attention b/c they beat france in a war in 1870
h.g. wells "developed codified rules for playing with toy soldiers, which he published in a book titled Little Wars." adorable!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wargame#W
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wow wait okay the full title of the book was
"Little Wars: a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books"
bruh now it's less adorable c'mon
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Wa
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ok now pulp fiction. this bit seems important: "During the economic hardships of the Great Depression, pulps provided affordable content to the masses, and were one of the primary forms of entertainment, along with film and radio."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulp_maga
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this is starting to feel like a huge topic. here's an incomplete diagram of the influences we've traced so far. i am still mostly drawn to understanding the D&D bottleneck, as the place where pop magic switches tracks from stories to games
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there's something you kill about the nature of magic by forcing it to fit mechanically into a game, tabletop or video or otherwise. the way it's usually done magic becomes something dead you control, rather than something alive you have a relationship to
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One way to get at the distinction: is magic something you use (LH), or is it something you relate to (RH)? In Young Wizards (RH), magic often uses the heroes. It has intentionality, and also a moral component. Compare to e.g. Harry Potter, esp. HPMoR (very LH).
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Kind of reminded of brandonsanderson.com/sandersons-fir, where the author recounts being in a panel on magic in fantasy and holding it self-evident that magic has to have rules, only to be surprised by every other panelist disagreeing with him.
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He makes an interesting point that the more the author wants to use magic for solving problems in the story, the more mechanistic and understandable it has to be - because otherwise it comes across as a deus ex machina. But that easily robs it of some of its, well, magic.
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i liked this post a lot when i first came across it and/but i think there's a way around this. if magic is more like consorting with demons (say) it can be not very mechanistic but still not *arbitrary* - demons are characters, they have personalities, etc.
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i think you can do magic in a style where powerful magic happens for narratively satisfying reasons even when the magic isn't mechanistic by making the magic more *alive*; i think patrick rothfuss successfully does this in name of the wind, eg
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Yeah agreed. (Hmm my vague recollection of Name of the Wind is that the magic felt pretty mechanistic to me but then it's been years since I read it so maybe I misremember.)
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some of it is and some of it isn't! that's part of what i like about it, he gets to contrast them. sympathy and sygaldry and most of the others are explicitly pretty mechanistic and naming is explicitly something else entirely
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