Modern Fantasy usually avoids becoming sci-fi by having its fantastical elements tempered by rarity and accessibility; e.g., the existence of wizards in THE DRESDEN FILES doesn't matter because such things are niche and too divorced from normality to change things macroscopically
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Replying to @Nymphomachy
fantasy also generally has very strong anthropocentric aspects to its magic--doing things that would alter the human condition is invariably somehow Beyond The Pale and requires Great Sacrifice and Difficulty
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Replying to @perdricof @Nymphomachy
hence it being normal and easy in The Magicians to jaunt around the multiverse, but impossibly difficult to (say) cure cancer, or perform cosmetic surgery on yourself, because Sickness and Being Plain are just things the human must learn to live with
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Replying to @perdricof @Nymphomachy
Stuff like Mage the Ascension gets explicit about the meta nature of this - whenever you try to do something in the normal world you're fighting "the consensus" of what is and isn't possible here, and the rules literally change if you just abandon Earth for Doissetep
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
like i can give considered genre analyses of this trope but there's also a part of me that's always just screaming BULLSHIT!
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like seriously even if you want an anthropocentric universe, building conservativism into the fabric of reality is just lazy, caveman science fiction at its worst
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currently in the middle of CONTROL, which i'm loving, where the universe is affected by human minds and culture--but weirdly, in ways we can't predict or understand like a meaning you're always just in the edge of grasping
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rather than human culture simply setting the parameters of reality with no other inputs in that function, which is just uninteresting the author's biases reflected back without addition
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Replying to @perdricof @Nymphomachy
I would say that just saying the setting of Mage: the Ascension is "human culture decides what's true with no external inputs" is deeply unfair That doesn't actually make any sense -- then normal mundane scientists would never be able to disprove theories, etc.
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This was always my big problem with the setting. Fighting for consensual reality is a neat *idea* but you dig down at all and it just dun' work. It's one reason I much preferred the whole semi-gnostic "fallen world" idea they went with for Awakening.
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Awakening's setting and Ascension's aren't *that* different if you really get into the lore underlying Ascension, Awakening just moved it to the forefront
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this whole thread is fun and yet i am overcome by melancholy it feels like a mourning for a childhood none of us can return to just imagine if it were still 1997, and we were all in someone's basement, eating pizza and drinking two liters, digressing over ttrpgs
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Mood.
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