The Magicians: "They just slapped each other over and over, for hours"

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > TV IV > The Magicians: "They just slapped each other over and over, for hours"

Turin Turambar: Jun 5, 2011

Oasx posted:

At its heart The Magicians is a pretty depressing book and a big part of that is finding out that magic is not just waving a wand and saying a few words, but a tough and gruelling process. So far the series just seems like a generic low budget fantasy show with pretty people, all the flavour is gone.

And apart of that I think they are diminishing the depressed main character angle, which is the pillar of the first book (and how magic isn't going to fix his psychological problems). .

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Turin Turambar: Jun 5, 2011

Ersatz posted:

I frankly think that the show goes too far in shifting Quentin away from competitive rear end in a top hat and toward sad sack. He was always depressive in the books, but it was also obvious that he was a smart guy with potential that he'd earned through hard work, and that made him a lot more likeable to me.

An example that immediately comes to mind is that, in the first book, both during the Brakebills exam and in a demonstration on the first day of class, he's asked to perform stage magic, and he's not only competent, he's genuinely impressive. In the show, when he's asked to perform magic as part of his exam, he immediately fucks up by dropping his deck of cards.

I'd much rather watch an rear end in a top hat with talent than a nice guy who is afraid of his own shadow, but somehow lucked into being important, for no apparent reason. The flawed-but-talented rear end in a top hat also works much better thematically.

It's perhaps the biggest difference. Yeah, they have invented too entire new plotlines like the NY #1witch-bitch, but Quentin is supposed to be core of the story. Of a depressed, competitive, conflicted rear end in a top hat they have made a... sad very dorky guy. It seems they weren't capable of all the psychological nuance so they did the opposite of "show, don't tell" (they started the series telling us how he went to a mental hospital, because you see, he has *problems*), and just basically made "dorky, typical socially-awkward, kind of pitiful guy who falls in Harry Potter world".

# ¿ Feb 23, 2016 21:53

Turin Turambar: Jun 5, 2011

WarLocke posted:

Was the scene in this last episode with Julia and Kady's mom casting the tandem spell the first time they've shown spellcasting include chanting as well as hand movements?

Pretty sure prior to this (and IIRC it was the same in the books) that while there were sometimes material components to spells there's never been explicit mention of verbal components/chanting.

And I forgot Josh found Teletubby Universe and got his freak on. Didn't he talk about several places he'd been, like the vaguely wushu-sounding reality where there was no ground and everyone lived on mountaintops and he hooked up with a warrior princess wife or something?

Quentin used chanting when trapping Julia's dead brother in the stone.

# ¿ Feb 25, 2016 22:15

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > TV IV > The Magicians: "They just slapped each other over and over, for hours"