|
Wizards are usually either somehow limited or stupid, because otherwise they'd focus their efforts on making their setting not-medieval because being surrounded by poo poo sucks.
|
#
¿
Feb 24, 2021 06:26
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 23, 2024 23:10 |
|
|
Even if wizards just have no interest in improving the world and magic just can't provide basic sanitation, if magic is just a thing that can be taught, all the kingdoms in the world would be investing into big universities to fill their armies with fireball machines. You wouldn't want people to be powerful freelance wizards like D&D seems built on. Or maybe you'd send secret assassins after any powerful wizards who go wandering off like in Dark Souls. Tulip posted:Any setting that has FTL is fantasy anyway. But also fantasy settings shouldn't invent "systems of magic" hard agree on that. I've had seen too many discussions with star wars nerds who try to figure out the power levels of Yoda vs. the Emperor and how its "unrealistic" that somebody who wasn't already deemed significantly force sensitive enough was able to use x amount of force power and just man, the force is about how smoking weed and listening to strawberry alarm clock will end with your dad loving you. Power levels are such a dumb concept because they were originally introduced as part of Dragonball trying to dip into sci-fi after being mostly fantasy and power levels were the way that aliens measured all this magic poo poo. And then it turned out that scouters just didn't loving work, earth fighters had wildly variable power levels that bounced up and down and everybody could just reduce their signature to nothing or just rocket off the scale. The entire concept was entirely meaningless on purpose. Although as Dragonball Z went on, all the concepts that were initially subversions wound up getting played straight after a while. It turned out that a lot of people got really into that scene of a character being amazed at a guy powering up to some hitherto unknown level.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 24, 2021 22:14
|
|
|
Usually people talk about the continuum between sci-fi and fantasy in terms of sci-fi stories being silly or mystical enough to count as fantasy, but what about the other end of things? What about fantasy that is complex enough and rigorously coherent with how the mystical elements work that it's basically a science? I think the Witcher series seems to have that kind of attitude where monsters are creatures that have been comprehensively studied to the point that fighting them is practically an engineering problem. There's also Fullmetal Alchemist, where a lot of work is done to frame alchemy as a science, even though it seems like magic. Kind of like steampunk since it's sort of it a earlier period, but it's borrowing from classic conceptions of alchemy instead. Paracelsus-punk.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 8, 2021 04:31
|
|
|
Another thing fantasy has in its favor is that they don't get bogged down by futurism where they have entire stories based around exploring the implications of technology that will probably never be developed. Fantasy stories can lose track of relatable human elements in other ways, but at least they won't get sidetracked by obsessing over the idea of what will happens when the day inevitably comes that everybody has dragons that need to integrate into society.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 12, 2021 18:49
|
|
|
I feel like sci-fi also has an easier time differentiating itself from other sci-fi than fantasy does differentiating itself from other fantasy. A lot of fantasy gets stuck in a hole of being just another LotR/D&D pastiche. Elves and dwarves you have to work uphill trying to differentiate from other elves and dwarves (and if you don't, they'll end up kinda flat), but the trappings of sci-fi were born out of genuinely speculating (or plausibly guessing) at the future of humanity, and it doesn't feel as much like a hack move to put in lasers and spaceships without explaining the speciifics. That's just casual realism, since most stories with cars don't feel the need to get into how internal combustion works.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 21, 2021 04:21
|
|
|
A lot of fantasy winds up pulling from a wide variety of time periods, which can get a little muddled. I think a lot of people blur together the renaissance, medieval, dark, and ancient periods. Of course, when you diversify into mixing influences from different regions, it gets more plausible, but some settings just get stuck into throwing around centuries and millenniums as everything's stuck in stasis instead of either being in decay or advancement. Sci-Fi sometimes gets stuck in a similar rut, but then it often winds up being some kind of commentary on how some changes will end at some point. And when the setting broadens to an interstellar scale, then it's plausible that some planets may be in ascension even while others are in decay.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 27, 2021 05:06
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 23, 2024 23:10 |
|
|
The witchers are the product of human mutation experiments with ridiculously low rates of survival, and on top of the impracticality of finding more children to have an 80% chance of murdering, the people who knew the formulae all died (at least for the Wolf school). And then the Cat school is an offshoot that tried to mitigate some of the side effects and wound up producing overly aggressive and easy to anger witchers. It's like space marines, but it's also like turnspit dogs crossed with former professional warrior classes like knights and samurai. What I have my doubts about is how apparently there's a popular religion that has decided to exterminate all mages when magic is an actually tangible thing with regular uses in the world. I get that Radovid is crazy and most people just go along because of being able to loot the rich, but if magic is so widely used, you'd think that more people would defend mages or there'd be some kind of sanctioned version of magic that the church would allow just for practicality.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 27, 2021 23:45
|
|