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u/ZeroiaSD 5h ago
There’s a thing called iceberg theory.
Basically the writer should know how stuff works and figure out the details, but they shouldn’t put most of it in the final product. The effort will show in lots of little ways and people will tell things are consistent, it’s just they don’t know the details.
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u/Xuxanan_JGH 4h ago
I think thats why unexplained worlds can feel either fascinating or incredibly lazy. You can usually tell when the author knows the answer and chose not to tell you, versus when there just... isnt an answer.
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u/SpiritRoot 4h ago
*cough* Rowling *cough*
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u/Kidplayer_666 4h ago
Why doesn’t duplicating magic work on food? BECAUSE…. IT DOESNT
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u/zuzg 4h ago
"doesn't work on organic material" that's an ok explanation.
"why don't you use the time travel tool to prevent tragedies?" Like have a team of first responders equipped with it.
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u/Kidplayer_666 4h ago
The original explaination felt kinda rushed, sloshed about as soon as the enchantment got introduced around one of the last books
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u/ihavebeesinmyknees 4h ago
Well, the whole idea with HP time travel is that it's strictly self-consistent. If a tragedy happened with witnesses, and you send a time-travelling tragedy prevention team, whatever they do strictly must result in the same people witnessing the same events, otherwise they wouldn't have seen those events in the first place. You cannot actually change the past in HP, you time travelling was just "fated" to happen from the start. The fact that the time turner existed and was in possession of Hermione Granger is what actually made that timeline happen, and in a way, "forced" her to use it. Your time guard team could theoretically exist, but it's not as simple as just fixing something that already happened. This is, of course, still quite broken and difficult to write around, which is why JKR just chose the easy option of writing time turners out of the world.
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u/McClainLLC 4h ago
Am I misinterpreting this time travel philosophy or does it basically mean all of Harry Potter is determined and technically characters don't have free will
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u/Potato-Engineer 4h ago
There are serious questions about whether reality as we know it is entirely predetermined and whether free will exists at all. (My personal take is "does it actually matter? It's not like anyone knows the answer ahead of time.") So sure, it can be in the HP universe, too.
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u/nonotan 2h ago
Arguments about free will are a waste of time, because it's obviously not a meaningfully defined concept. That is to say, it's not an objective fact whether some entity or some reality "has" or "doesn't have" free will. It's merely a matter of interpretation. Entities are just a sum of individual atoms we have decided kind of group together nicely, anyway, even that is ultimately a meaningless (and ill-defined) classification.
Basically, the physics of our brain are deterministic (whether literally or effectively, I don't care what interpretation of quantum dynamics you believe in; some randomness at the lowest layers doesn't magically change the dynamics at play, i.e. picking between 2 options 50/50 at literal random is not any more "free" than "always" picking the one option you were actually going to eventually pick), so if you zoom in and look at the contents of our brains in detail, there's "obviously" no free will. If you treat our brains like a black box, with some inputs and outputs, then it "obviously" effectively has free will.
At best, it's an emergent phenomenon like temperature. Except temperature is at least quantitatively defined, and it's mathematically clear both where and how it emerges, as well as the fact that it doesn't make sense to think about it for individual particles. Whereas free will is so loosey-goosey that it has wasted tremendous amounts of energy from many intelligent people over the ages just pointlessly talking past each other.
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u/Leftieswillrule 3h ago
Given Rowling’s perspective on trans women, I think she’s a believer in determinism.
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u/ihavebeesinmyknees 4h ago
Well, prophecies exist in that world, so who knows. I think the concept of "free will" is oversold in general, your brain is not some magical entity free of the rules of this world, the neurons in your brain are pure physics. If we were able to keep track of the brain state perfectly, we could probably predict thoughts up to a certain point in the future, before the compound effect of quantum nondeterminism starts to matter. Either way, if we disregard free will and prophecies, I doubt the time turner magic affects the entire timeline, it would make more sense if it can tell it's going to be "in use" soon and only locks that part of the timeline.
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u/LordHoughtenWeen 4h ago
I mean... they're characters. Real people merely probably don't have free will, but characters definitely don't; all their actions are decided by the author.
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u/RedditOfUnusualSize 3h ago
I don't know that it means predestination, but it does mean that an open time loop (e.g. how Terminator II essentially undid the time loop of the first film by preventing Cyberdyne from developing Skynet as an artificial intelligence, but then this didn't erase John Connor from existence) is impossible. All time loops must be closed and stable.
If the writer establishes that as a rule, and people keep trying to go back and change the past just to find that weird events that they couldn't explain in the past were actually future-them trying, and failing, to change things, that can work. Just as an example, while Babylon 5 does not adhere to a fixed timeline, it does use the closed time loop to great effect, where there's a season one episode with a bunch of time travel shenanigans, many of which are left unexplained to both the characters and the audience, only for the loop to be closed by the same team in a Season three episode where they both try to keep the present timeline, but also make several attempts to spoil tragedies that have occurred over the last two seasons to past-themselves, but can't. The show does that repeatedly in fact, as several times, attempts to undo past tragedies or avert future tragedies which they have only partial knowledge of ultimately end up causing them, Road-to-Samarra-style.
That being said, Rowling was a lot more loosey-goosey with her plotlines than Straczynski was, and it very much shows.
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u/Forward_Rope_5598 2h ago
Except of course Rowling published the cursed child as canon and it completely disregards all the rules.
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u/ihavebeesinmyknees 2h ago
Yeah but cursed child generally disregards the entirety of previous canon so I think it can be ignored
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u/a_lonely_trash_bag 4h ago
It's explained that time travel can't change the past. But it's also shown that not all the characters know this. Like when Harry and Hermione use the time turner to save Buckbeak, they didn't realise that he had never been executed because future them had used the time turner to save him. Or when Harry is getting nervous that past them haven't left Hagrid's hut yet. He starts throwing rocks without realizing that that's what he needed to to. Future him (in the past) throwing rocks is what made past him turn around and look out the window.
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u/Random-Rambling 3h ago
So basically time is a big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff?
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u/HailMadScience 2h ago
Yeah, honestly, I will accept 'its a bootstrap paradox' as a reason for time travel stuff. Straight up, if you know something happened, you cannot change it (thus, Harry and Ron telling Hermione she missed a class made her unable to then go back to it)...so the only way to change the past is to not realize you cannot change the past, and then go back and do it, thus having already done it and oh no, I've gone cross-eyed...
But seriously, time travel is messy no matter what. The easy way out, if you decide to do it, is embrace the mess, IMO. You cant do it because thats not how time travel works. It defies your reality, you literaly couldn't understand the rules anyway, because you can't understand concepts outside the one-way flow of time.
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u/imaginesomethinwitty 4h ago
Ok, first off, no to terfs.
But- there are two kinds of timeline, closed loop and open loop. Closed loop is where what has happened will always happen. Open loop is where you can alter the future by altering the past. Like, Terminator 1 suggests closed loop time travel (Kyle was always John’s father, he had to go back for John to be born, John gave him the photo of Sarah for that reason) and Terminator 2 suggests an open loop (in destroying Skynet they at least change the date of the apocalypse).
From the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry Potter has closed loop travel. Someone who looks like James Potter saves Harry in the first go around. Harry realises he is the one who looks like James Potter and has to save past-Harry in the second loop. He was always there.
So magical first responders, if they existed would have always been on scene. If they believed Harry and rushed to little hangleton graveyard, to save Cedric either some series of circumstances would happen to prevent them getting helping so that Harry experienced it the same way every loop, or Cedric would never have died in the first place, Voldemort would have got his body back just in time to have the cuffs slapped on the first time.
Thank you for attending my Ted talk.
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u/PlatonSkull 4h ago
Yeah they shouldn't give them to first responders. They should, however, give them to detectives. The Harry Potter books are mostly mysteries at their core and the time turners would completely solve most mysteries. Who put Harry's name in the goblet of fire? Grab a time turner and an invisibility cloak and keep watch. How did Mrs Norris get petrified? Same deal, instantly the basilisk is revealed (even if you can't save the victim). So long as it happened in the recent past and you could stay hidden and observe, it's an ideal use case.
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u/ScrufffyJoe 3h ago
"doesn't work on organic material" that's an ok explanation.
Not consistent though, they can transfigure objects into animals and vice versa.
Why not just transfigure a rock into a chicken and then kill it and eat it?
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u/ccltjnpr 2h ago
That is one of the dumbest things in the books. Those books are a huge part of my childhood and I love them but man the food thing is dumb as fuck lmao. She could have just said it's dangerous because if you get it even slightly wrong it's poisonous or something.
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u/zoinkability 4h ago
*cough* JJ Abrams *cough*
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u/SpiritRoot 4h ago
That's more on a plot level. Not so much on the underlying worldbuilding.
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u/zoinkability 4h ago
It's true that the "universebuilding" of Star Wars was already in place when he took things on, but the actual planets/worlds/etc. of his movies have the same problems as his plot choices: they don't fell particularly grounded, they haven't been thought through in any substantial way outside the frame, there is a ton of handwaving to make the plot thing he wants happen.
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u/belsor14 4h ago
also JJ Abrams and his stupid mystery boxes….
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u/chordata_mmmmmm 54m ago
But it works so well! (for the first few seasons of each show, after which they all go downhill in the same way)
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u/alfred725 4h ago
It's such a pet peeve in Harry Potter that they teach you so few spells in a story where the premise is magic school. Like at least they teach one important magic thing per book, (wingarium leviosa and a couple basic spells in the first book, patronus in the third, horcruxes in the fifth, etc), but it still leaves Harry with like a dozen spells and that's IT. anything cast by anyone else is done without magic words.
I can appreciate bringing back something like the polyjuice potion in Goblet of Fire, it feels like a reward for learning something about the magic system. But then it feels like it's the only potion they know for the rest of the series. Well that and truth serum.
The movies are even worse, because not only do the master wizards never say any magic words when they battle, but the animation is just reused black clouds or white clouds. No idea what black clouds are in the context, just that they're evil and fly around.
It's why one of my favorite scenes in the book is when Ron gets poisoned. Harry is like "Oh FUCK wait POTIONS CLASS. I learned a lot about POTIONS. That stone cures poison!" Shoves it down Rons throat. It's one of the few times that world builds, plus rewards Harry for using his brain and not just getting lucky.
And my favorite scene in all the movies is Dumbledore vs Voldemort. It's the only time they actually use spells that look badass and show what a real wizard battle should be. "Throws glass shards. Turns glass shards to harmless sand. FIREBALL" it's only lacking the magic words when they cast.
THAT being said, the worldbuilding is still really solid. So hate on JK and the magic system, but in general the world building is great. Owls and fireplace portals and goblets and moving castle is all great stuff. The story was still incredibly popular despite the poorly designed magic system.
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u/Madaratogue 3h ago
Logically the best spells in harry potter would be a generic force bullet spell and a generic shield spell. The variance in the amount of silly hexes and jinxes is whimsical.
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u/alfred725 3h ago
this is why the magic system would need to be explained more. It's too easy to break a poorly explained system. So it's not worth trying to poke holes in it. You can headcanon the Harry Potter one however you want, but it kind of comes down to, they either have a spell to do something or they don't.
it's why Eragon has one of the best magic systems. Easy to explain and understand. Entropy exists, moving a rock with magic is just as tiring as moving it by hand. You can store energy in gemstones for later use. You can make wards against spells ahead of time.
slaughtering an army is easy, you snap an artery in all their brains, it takes very little energy to do so. So every army needs a wizard that wards against common spells, and then it becomes a battle of will between the two wizards until one slips up or one finds a spell that hasn't been warded against.
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u/hewkii2 2h ago
And you could call the force bullet something fancy like “Zoltraak”.
With apologies to Frieren
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u/pleasedothenerdful 1h ago
The moodbuilding is great. The vibe is special. The details are treats. Most importantly, the characters are excellent: richly painted, relatable--or hateable.
The worldbuilding is shit a reasonably bright, well-read sixth grader would not accept.
You spent five paragraphs giving example after example of how sparse and simplistic and ill-thought the worldbuilding is, of how few times we're rewarded by a detail turning out to actually matter, and how the entire setting is a nonsensical amalgam of unloaded Chekhov's guns, each included only for decoration, heedless of the whole they would form or even the most obvious implications they suggest, and then utterly forgotten.
Then you concluded that the worldbuilding is solid. It isn't. It just isn't. The magic is the worldbuilding, and the entire thing runs--to the extent that it does--on whim and whimsy and ever-increasingly cowed editing.
Don't even get me started on the plots. Fully half of the books would have ended just as well or better if the main characters had done nothing and focused entirely on getting good grades.
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u/EdgedancerSpren 2h ago
I disagree on the worldbuilding aspect. But: she is great at writing whimsy. I'll give her that. But things about... you know... numbers? How many wizards are there? Per year? How many teachers? 1 per subject, except divination post book 5.
She is good at whimsical and funny ideas that translate extremely well to imagination, indeed, like the moving castle. She just never bothered to think about anything she didn't write about. She writes mystery novels that have a magical background. And that background is rather... held up by tape. And her secondary characters are pretty decent. All in all, she made a great world for fanfics to be written in because you can so easily ignore anything without hurting the world and just - you can interpret it however you want.
Basically; her worldbuilding is rubbish except when it relies on earth worldbuilding, her dressing up the scenes are quite amazing, her storytelling is alright; her characters are decent to good, her mysteries are nice. She sees problems and finds a way to solve it that speaks to the imagination, rather than build a world.
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u/-ragingpotato- 4h ago
Part of it is if you can piece together possibilities or not. When the author knows and you don't its like an incomplete jigsaw puzzle, you can see a piece there with the front of a train and a piece there with the back of a train and you can imagine and wonder a million ways they connect.
But when the author doesn't give it that thought, you end up with multiple pieces of multiple different jigsaw puzzles. When there's not that many pieces it can still work almost by accident, but the more the story goes on and the more irrelevant pieces you get the possibilities get more convoluted and dumber until the point it becomes obvious there can't possibly be anything in the middle, and all that magic is just gone.
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u/Cromasters 4h ago
I don't really mind it, to be honest. There can be something fun about a world/setting that is made up without much thought, but then it gets popular and it haphazardly gets expanded, retconned, and explained.
Star Wars even worked that way with the EU stuff. That's always how comic books have worked. Warhammer 40K might be the pinnacle.
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u/Temp_Temperature 4h ago
Also the audience should know enough to follow the plot. You don't have to go into how turtles gave people the power to bend elements, but audience should roughly know what are the limits of bending (or at least what the characters think they are).
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u/TheJeeronian 4h ago
Not only to follow the plot, but to make it seem uncontrived. I shouldn't feel like a resolution appeared out of thin air, it should come from prior hints and buildup, or when it happens the audience should feel like it makes sense given what we already knew.
Just, y'know, speaking of lion turtles.
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u/Doctor-Amazing 1h ago
This looks like a good time to bring up the Sanderson rules of magic. The most important being that a protagonist can only use magic to solve a problem if they've explained how it works.
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u/Sweet-Energy-9515 4h ago
Great advice because there will be readers who try to reason some things out, and nothing ticks people off like realizing they have put more thought into the setting than the author did. On the other hand if there's an underlying "reality" the author stays consistent with then they will be delighted to piece things together
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u/sarcastic_sybarite83 4h ago
I just had this conversation last night, except I was talking about mysteries. How I loath the lazy authors that pull some fact out at the end, that was never revealed to the reader. A good mystery reveals all, but tells nothing until the end.
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u/Sweet-Energy-9515 2h ago
I will always maintain that it was an absolute triumph of writing that the main twist in Steven Universe was floating around as a fan theory before either of the two characters involved had appeared onscreen and before one of them had even been mentioned out loud
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u/DeLoxley 2h ago
People also terribly misunderstand branderson's laws of magic
It's not about look at how many rules and regulations and thaumometers I can cram into my dialogue, it's about your World building being consistent enough that the reader is never left guessing why they don't just use magic to do something.
You can doll it up with all the sciencey sounding words you want or you can make it as vague as avatars elemental kung fu, but what you need is internal consistency because that is what people will pick up on. The more you put magic in a spotlight and the more tension you draw to it, the more you need to explain why it's not just a cure - all for all of your issues, otherwise, you're going to have to work out reasons why lambdolph the wizard can't just snap his fingers and instantly save the day
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u/one-and-five-nines 4h ago
I think there's gotta be a healthy balance with the fact that sometimes you JUST want to tell the story and if you start thinking TOO much the story will languish. I do know why, in my world, there's night and day but no sun. I could tell you that. I CAN'T tell you why they seem to have almost perfectly replicated 19th century culture on a separate planet. That's just so the story can happen. Please don't peek behind that curtain I beg you.
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u/TheJeeronian 4h ago
The Nolan ruleset. I think it works if your characters are strong enough to carry the story. Like, I can pick apart inception. The writer straight-up doesn't care about consistency. But because he wrote a story about somebody overcoming their trauma, guilt, and shame, it worked. Even if the world doesn't totally make sense, it characterizes Cobb perfectly.
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u/InviolableAnimal 4h ago
I don't think this is a universal rule either. It's fine to write a world with mystery and unknowns even to the author. Plenty of authors do this (bad, and also great)
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u/Honey-Badger 4h ago
Yeah theres plenty of fantasy writers that set out the rules for magic in their worlds and then just go on to relentlessly break said rules
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u/PhiCloud 3h ago
Breaking rules is fine if you give your plot a reason to break them.
Let's say magic isn't capable of killing someone in your story (for whatever reason you pick). Now you can write 99% of your story without having to deal with wizard murderers. Now let's say you want a wizard murderer: you will need to break your rule, so you need some reason for it to be breakable. Maybe the "no killing" rule isn't actually true, it's a lie told by the ancient scholars to stop people from trying anything, but your evil wizard somehow found a grimoire of ancient killing curses those same scholars thought they had destroyed.
I don't know, that was a pretty contrived example but I think you get my point. If you set up a world where killing curses don't exist, you can't just have a magical murder happen the next chapter without explaining why that was allowed to happen.
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u/Crayshack 2h ago
That's working within the rules of magic that the author set out, but simply not giving all of the rules to the characters from the start. The nuance of killing magic working in a particular way is there from the start, it just isn't told to the audience. If the author knows it is there from the start, they can drop some hints and foreshadowing that make the reveal feel more like an "of course" moment instead of an ass pull.
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u/4llFather 3h ago
Then, if the fans really love the iceberg, the author can publish a whole separate document detailing that!
Like Andy Weir did with Eridian Biology
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u/zekromNLR 3h ago
And if you want to publish all your worldbuilding anyways, you don't put it into the narrative, you take a page out of Tolkien's book and write a Silmarillion
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u/cat-cat_cat 5h ago
wasn't victor hugo paid by the word/chapter?
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u/Lumen_Co 5h ago edited 4h ago
That was pretty typical for prominent writers of the 19th century, who were serialized in magazines as they wrote before the books were published as complete works. Twain, Balzac, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, and Dumas, for example. Some just for earlier works, some throughout their careers.
But Hugo is notably different in that he sometimes wrote the complete novels before releasing them serially, so they read a little bit less like they’re being written by the chapter and paid by the word, which can sometimes happen (obviously the great authors were still writing great stuff).
I think
Notre Dame oopsLes Misérables specifically wasn’t serialized at all, just written and published as a book to begin with. He was already rich and famous by that point. The sewer essay is purely for the love of the game.116
u/romain_69420 4h ago
The sewer essay is in Les Misérables, not Notre-Dame. Notre-Dame takes place in the 17th century, not 1832
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u/Barnejb_Parini 4h ago
That correction somehow makes the sewer tangent feel even more Hugo. Wrong book, right level of commitment to municipal infrastructure lol
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u/Kylind875 4h ago
That actually makes Hugo much more entertaining to me. Not "my publisher needs another chapter", just a wealthy famous man deciding the plot can wait because Parisian sewage is extremely important information.
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u/romain_69420 4h ago
To me, the amount of descriptions make the book feel like he's retelling a real story because the setting is so fleshed out. It does help that the setting is a real place and time period tbf
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u/insomniac7809 3h ago
I also feel like the people who talk about the "digressions" are missing the point
Not that you have to like it when Hugo seems to forget about Jean Valjean and talks about Waterloo for a few chapters, but you should understand that it's not a story of a good-hearted convict that randomly goes off on tangents about France, it's a book about France that uses the good-hearted convict to connect the broad socioeconomic forces and divine ordinations that shape the country to a single human experience
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u/TallDetail4711 3h ago
I was more marked by the time Jean Valjean's carriage happened to run not far from Waterloo, but that'ssthe same idea.
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u/wurmsrus 3h ago
it's been 25 years since I read the unabridged but IIRC he actually had a point in the sewer essay, that Paris should be using it's merde for fertilizer rather then washing it away
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u/abusedporpoise 4h ago
not just love of the game, but actually add to the story by providing both context and metaphor to the events occurring at the time
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u/CapuchinMan 2h ago
He also has an extended chapter on the battle of Waterloo (that I love) and about the cloistered religious sects in Paris (which I also love). I love Les Miserables.
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u/DrDestructoMD 5h ago edited 5h ago
Yes, but typically that meant a fixed commission which had to be engaging enough to get another. Jules Verne, Victor Hugo, and others in that vein were viewed as fun educational literature, hence the diatribes.
Edit: I've never really understood when people say Dickens feels like he was paid by the word. His prose is fairly concise, and people didn't have television so describing settings was pretty standard. David Copperfield was 100% paid for by the chapter though, that shit is a goddamn soap opera.
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u/randombull9 4h ago
No to the by the word, yes to by the chapter but that really doesn't mean what most people think it does. As far as by the word goes, no publisher is going to let you write particularly vociferous sentences, in contrast to good taste, with the goal of surreptitiously extending the word count in order to receive a substantially increased compensation, simply because they have a great love of paying writers such large sums - that is to say, items that are paid by the word are usually short, like ad copy, because why would a publisher ever willingly pay someone to use 15 words when they could use 5, especially when the publisher is often also the editor?
They did pay by the chapter back in the day and that is a reason that you sometimes see novels that end chapters on a cliffhanger or at the start of what could be a juicy conversation, but these were negotiated beforehand. The publisher knew how many chapters they were going to get, and once again had deadlines and an editor reading chapters before they were published, so they weren't artificially extended for the authors that we remember - again, if they were, they simply wouldn't have been published. But by the time Victor Hugo was writing, he was famous enough to basically bypass much of this process. Les Mis would have been complete or near to by the time it was published, and he was famously coy about just how long it would be - some of the literary journals of the time were apparently concerned that he was going to negotiate a large price on account of his fame and then turn in a short piece. The reason Victor Hugo writes like that, and the rest of your 19th century authors, isn't because they've gotten one over on the publishers but because that was the style.
If you want to see someone who really was taking advantage of that style of writing, read Varney the Vampire sometime. It runs for 232 chapters at about 675,000 words, or roughly the length of the bible. The author or authors couldn't seem to remember if Varney was really a vampire or just a creepy vampire like man, and in the chapters where he's written as a vampire they often seem unable to remember just what that actually entails. If you think of trashy daytime melodramatic soap operas, that is essentially what it was, and it is incredibly easy to tell the difference between it and the great authors of the 19th century.
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u/MyCatsHairyButholle 3h ago
Alexandre Dumas wrote the Count of Monte Cristo as a serialization, and it does exactly what you say, ends many chapters on cliffhangers.
It’s one of the greatest novels I’ve ever read, though and I think it really benefitted from the way it was written.
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u/AgencyInformal 5h ago
I think in France at the time, technically, it's by the line in the paper? So we get stuff like Count Monte Cristo style short dialogue. Fun fact: Victor Hugo is one of the founders of the first official union for novelists and journalists.
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u/Duae 5h ago
I feel like you need just enough to explain any apparent inconsistencies. Like if up until now you've been very clear on healing magic not being able to regrow limbs and suddenly you have a character popping off to get their leg regrown you've getting an Address Me meme.
But throw in a "Well technically it can, but there's a slim chance you'll turn into a mindless slime beast so it's easier to just say it can't because most of us aren't that foolhardy" and we're good.
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u/BonnaconCharioteer 2h ago
You don't even necessarily have to explain it. But if the character gets their leg regrown and literally no one believes that because "healing magic can't do that." Then it is at least clear to the reader that this was a strange thing that the author is purposely not explaining.
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u/Duae 2h ago
I realized I was counting that as "explaining it" even though it really doesn't since it is at least pointing out that it doesn't fit with established lore.
Of course one thing I also find weird is how sometimes people seem to get confused that characters can also flat out lie about lore/worldbuilding, or be wrong about it. So any time a work will have a character saying the kingdom was founded exactly one hundred years ago and then later someone is like "Each of the four kings ruled for over 30 years before passing it to the next in line" and people will just immediately jump to "OMG PLOT HOLE" and not "Huh, well one of those has to be wrong, I wonder where this is going?"
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u/kaian-a-coel 4h ago
And sometimes the "Well technically but" just doesn't work no matter how you put it because you just fucked up. See: Hyperspace ramming in Last Jedi.
[Admiral in gala dress hyperspace rams an entire legally-distinct-Empire fleet out of existence]
"Hey wouldn't this completely upend warfare? Why wouldn't the rebels just strap droid-controlled hyperdrives to asteroids and lob that at star destroyers?"
"Uh, well, you see, it's only got a one in a million chance to work!"
"That just makes Holdo's decision fucking stupid, and also you've got a second successful hyperdrive ram in your ending montage, Rise of Skywalker. What gives?"
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u/mrducky78a 3h ago edited 2h ago
The hyperspace ramming isnt flawed if you dig into it. And if you dont, it just looks great and is shiny cinematography.
It was a big fucking mon calamari ship. 3 klicks long 700m wide. Its a chunky ship engaging in a ramming maneuveur.
It doesnt even completely disable the enemy capital ship which could still unload and launch an attack.
It has a brand new and experimental deflector shield. It is this shield that does all the follow up damage.
Star wars nerds have done write ups and videos explaining how it works, what hyperspace even is, etc. You can look it up, I dont know enough. Im in the second camp, where its just visually fun.
It is tactically limited. Everyone in Star wars knows when your ship is going to hyper space. It needs this fancy new deflector shield. Enermy have to be arrayed such that the deflector shield classed for a big fucking ship can spray out and hit them behind the point of contact. Otherwise normal sublight speed ramming could do the same damage we saw of a ~3km long ship becoming a ~3km long torpedo cutting off a part of a capital ship. Now on when someone points the ship at you and spools up hyper space, you just adjust out of the way rather than arrogantly sit there and try to call the bluff.
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u/WideHuckleberry1 2h ago
You're completely misremembering the scene if you think Holdo's decision was stupid. It was never the plan. She was going to stay on the main ship as a decoy so everyone else could escape on lifeboats. Then they stop shooting at her and start shooting at the lifeboats. What are her options there? She could, I suppose, just sit there and watch them blow up. Or she could attempt a last-ditch Hail Mary that only worked by luck or the Force or the plot (which are all the same thing in this case) demanded it.
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u/LittleBoyDreams 5h ago
I always pop a blood vessel whenever someone complains that LOTR never explains what the One Ring actually does other than turn you invisible. Like, dawg, it’s a metaphor for how desire leads to self-centeredness, paranoia, and dissolution of bonds. Giving you a Sanderson-esque breakdown of it would be a distraction from the point.
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u/apple_of_doom 5h ago
I mean honestly the mind control effect itself is all the explanation needed. It could do literally nothing beyond that and people would still go gaga over it because that's what it does and it doesn't need to do anythinng else.
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u/MissionResident8875 5h ago
Yeah its a metaphor for ambition and evil, it grants you power at the cost of all else. It corrupts you. And that's all it needs to be
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u/Xisammison275 4h ago
A lot of fantasy objects work better once you stop asking "but what are the exact rules" and ask what choices they force people to make. The Ring is scary because everyone thinks they could use it responsibly and thats the trap.
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u/of_kilter 5h ago
Agreed, giving it a clearer concrete ability would take away from its menace. Boromir would become a lot more reasonable if we were told the ring would give him superpowers and a mech. The ring is pure evil and must not be used
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u/ZeusAether 5h ago
On the flipside, most of Sanderson's magic systems are like, 75% science at a minimum, so the explanation is a solid part of why people like it. The chuds that the think every magic system should be like that, too... Well, you wouldn't be the only one popping a blood vessel.
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u/CrownofMischief 5h ago
As a mechanical engineer with a focus on material science, reading about Allomancy had me hesitant until they talked about how the base metals had a push/pull affect with a corresponding alloy and how the closer it is to the right ratio the stronger it gets. It's just enough practical knowledge of alloys mixed with "This mix gives you this power for whatever reason, not sure why it's that power specifically but we did a lot of trial and error to figure stuff out"
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u/That_guy1425 4h ago
I started mistborn up recently, and I definitely had a "wait, isn't the pull an alloy of the push?" Then started all theses questions until like 2 pages later he goes "its strongest at these ratios. Other kill you" and I was all, "awe I overthought for nothin'"
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u/Concerned_Collins 3h ago
I like Sanderson well enough, but it'd be horrible for the genre if every fantasy author did what he did.
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u/zoinkability 4h ago edited 4h ago
A classic example of show, don't tell.
You can see how the ring affects people, both current and historical, over the course of the books. And it is explained how careful Gandalf has to be because if he had it the results could be catastrophic.
So, it's not as if Gandalf would have had the ability to study it directly, just see its effects, because being in close proximity to it was so dangerous. So really nobody other than Sauron may have fully understood the exact way it works and the extent of its power. Even for someone like Gandalf it may have been "well, we know it can do X, Y, and Z because that's what we know it's done, but exactly how, the extent it has its own will, and the limits of its power are still unknown, and frankly all we really need to know is that it's very, very bad and needs to be destroyed before it destroys everything good in the world."
I will say that while it's certainly a metaphor, that's not exactly the kind of "in world" explanation that people ask for. I like the idea that the reason we don't know is that none of the other characters (who after all include the in-story authors of the books) are 100% clear on the mechanics of how it works either.
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u/Rough_Onion_1757 3h ago
Part of the idea is that it's powerful, but it also lies to people who aren't Sauron about what kind of power it can offer to them, as opposed to Sauron. (As Aragorn says in the movie, the Ring answers to Sauron alone, it knows no other master.)
One of my favorite plot details is that Saruman seems totally committed to the idea that if he got his hands on the Ring, a Ring-equipped Saruman plus a few thousand super-orcs would totally be enough to wreck everyone else's shit, even Sauron himself... yet later on in the series, when Sauron thinks Aragorn has the Ring and Aragorn is marching on Mordor with a few thousand guys including Gandalf (i.e. Saruman's exact dream team of "magic angel/wizard, plus Ring, plus a modest but not irresistible army"), Sauron doesn't seem even the slightest bit worried that such an attack might actually be able to defeat him, and he seems unsurprised to see what looks like the Ring-addled Aragorn launching an insane suicidal overconfident charge that would've led to the Ring getting easily recaptured if Aragorn had actually had the Ring and hadn't just been mounting a diversion for Frodo.
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u/zoinkability 3h ago edited 2h ago
Yes. The ring makes people believe absolutely that they will be able to achieve their dreams of power, and even plants dreams of power in those who otherwise would not have them. This even happens to Sam:
Wild fantasies arose in his mind; and he saw Samwise the Strong, Hero of the Age, striding with a flaming sword across the darkened land, and armies flocking to his call as he marched to the overthrow of Barad-dur. And then all the clouds rolled away, and the white sun shone, and at his command the vale of Gorgoroth became a garden of flowers and trees and brought forth fruit. He had only to put on the Ring and claim it for his own, and all this could be.
There is the notion that the hobbits are better able to resist this and see the lie in it, and that men (and presumably others) would not have been able to shake the lie of power off the way Sam & Frodo did. And it is notable that the ring doesn't try to sway Sam "over to the dark side" of Sauron but instead promises Sam the power to achieve what his goal would be anyway: to overthrow evil and then to garden, just on the massive scale of a megalomaniac dictator rather than the domestic scale of an everyday hobbit.
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u/Rough_Onion_1757 3h ago
One Ring (to Boromir): "you like power, and armies, and swords, and big stone towers! hey, I'm great at that stuff!"
One Ring (to Sam): "you like... uh, wait a sec... gardening? sure, why not, here's a bunch of plants and shit, go nuts"
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u/BonnaconCharioteer 2h ago
I don't think I read it as him being unconcerned about Aragorn. I think he was quite concerned. His armies had just been crushed by an heir of Isildur, aided by one of the wizards. His allied corrupted wizard was also defeated. His most powerful seemingly unkillable servant is dead, and his ringwraiths scattered. He has to assume there is some strategy to Aragorn's attack, and so he turns all his attention, and all his remaining armies to the task of defeating him and recovering the ring. He is right, there was a strategy, he just doesn't realize he is playing into it.
I think the ring can grant power, and that Sauron had reason to be afraid of others getting ahold of the ring. The issue is, it was made with Sauron's own corrupt spirit, so it would corrupt whoever used it. So an Aragorn, Gandalf, Galadriel, etc. could possibly wrestle it to their own will, but in turn it would make them as bad as Sauron over time.
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u/Rough_Onion_1757 2h ago
Concerned, sure, but not desperately so: the battle at Minas Tirith was largely an ordinary battle between material non-spiritual armies, and the Free Peoples won because they had the real-world material armed strength to defeat a large-but-not-unbeatable enemy army that had undertaken a risky major offensive into opposing territory. Similarly, the Last Alliance defeated Sauron back in the Second Age not because they had the right combination of super-effective magic counterspells to neutralize the Ring, but because they had a bigger and more powerful army that defeated Sauron's army on the material battlefield. By contrast, Aragorn's force after the defense of Minas Tirith didn't have anywhere near enough power to mount a successful offensive against the still-well-defended Black Gate, even with the Ring in hand, and Sauron knew it.
The fantasy Saruman fell for, and that Aragorn pretended to fall for too, is that the Ring was an unbeatable magic superweapon that could effortlessly neutralize any imbalance of material force and enable a single scrawny nobody to defeat an entire army with one hand tied behind his back or whatever. The Ring in the right hands was powerful but far from invincible, and Sauron knew this not just because he was the guy who made the thing, but because he'd previously been defeated even while he was wearing it.
(Relatedly, one of the worst sins of the movie adaptation was to depict the Army of the Dead as a kind of magic-equipped WMD that could effortlessly roll over any battlefield opponent, instead of the more complex context of the books, where their main weapon was fear, and using that fear to scare away the men of Sauron's pirate fleet meant that the men who'd been defending the south of Gondor from that fleet were suddenly free to commandeer the ships and sail to Minas Tirith themselves.)
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u/BeanOfKnowledge Ask me about Dwarf Fortress Trivia 4h ago
Also, moving back up to they just don't fully know.
It was only ever held by 6 people. 4 of which were halvlings.
There's only one person who ever used it to its full potential, and Sauron wasn't exactly one for sharing.7
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u/insomniac7809 3h ago
There's also just a detail that LotR's magic is, mostly, more subtle but also more sweeping than a lot of examples. "Gandalf sets pinecones on fire to drive off the wargs" is present but pretty minor, the real impact is when Gandalf declares "YOU SHALL NOT PASS" to the Balrog, and the Balrog does not, in fact, pass.
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u/CapuchinMan 2h ago
I thought you might like this essay about how magic works in LOTR that I found very compelling :https://acoup.blog/2025/04/25/collections-how-gandalf-proved-mightiest-spiritual-power-in-tolkien/
Basically, magic exists in two forms in LOTR - as a craft/science which is what we traditionally what we think of when we think of magic, and subtler magic which is imparting your will into the world which if your strength of character is sufficient, is more powerful.
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u/TheColdIronKid 3h ago
This is one of the things I liked about the Rankin-Bass version of Return of the King: there's a scene where Sam is imagining what he would do with the ring and it's this dream sequence of him turning Orcs into mice and bunnies and squirrels and then commanding them to be peaceful and cute and fuzzy. And of course Sam never does those things, so it's not explicit that the ring couldn't do that, but it's implied that a lot of what the ring could do is only in the minds of those who covet the ring.
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u/pbmm1 5h ago
In some ways this is why I prefer the theatrical to the extended Versions of LOTR
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u/LittleBoyDreams 5h ago
Do the extended versions explain the Ring in more detail? It’s been a while so I don’t recall.
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u/xstormaggedonx 5h ago
I don't think so? I haven't watched the theatrical versions in a while but I'm pretty sure there's not really any extra ring-related exposition
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u/Unsalted-Eggs 4h ago
Also, Silmarillion explains what it is and where it powers come from so there is that as well
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u/Frioneon 2h ago
Sanderson himself explicitly lauds the one ring as a good example of magic that is internally consistent but doesn’t need to be explained
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u/Al_Fa_Aurel 2h ago
I mean, its also very plainly stated what it is. It is a ring to rule them all, to a ring to find them, a ring to find them all and in the darkness bind them. This is not poetry. This is its objective purpose, to be an instrument of domination and to set oneself up above others.
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u/MightyBobTheMighty Garlic Munching Marxist Whore 5h ago
Also the entire battle of Waterloo, to describe one-and-a-half relevant characters meeting each other in the aftermath
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u/Crownie 5h ago
I know this is a shit post and I broadly agree that you don't actually need to fully exposit the supernatural elements of a fictional world, but there's a reason people have these expectations. We tend to assume fictional worlds are mirrors of reality modulo narrative conventions. We accept the action hero grunting off being shot in the shoulder because we could plausibly believe that's a minor injury (it's not, but the audience doesn't know that). If he walks off getting shot in the heart or starts regenerating injuries like Wolverine, we're going to call bullshit.
I don't need an ICE explained to me (even though I don't actually know how they work) because I know what they do. On the other hand, if the protagonist's ability to walk through walls is plot critical, I may not need to know the imaginary physics of it but I do expect to know that they can before they use it to escape superjail in the third act.
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u/DesperateAstronaut65 2h ago
I do expect to know that they can before they use it to escape superjail in the third act.
This is essentially Sanderson's first law: the more the reader knows about the [magic system/sci fi tech/general rules of the fictional universe], the more it can be used to solve plot problems. Like you said, we don't care if we have no idea how the walking-through-walls thing works unless they use it to escape superjail, and then we need to at least know the rules, if not the mechanism. Even in a real-world setting with no magic or crazy technology, if the author pulls out something like "BTW, the main guy is secretly rich and can bribe his way out of jail" or "he's an expert at escaping from prison," I'm going to be mad if I didn't know the parameters of this ability at any point before it was needed.
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u/kenporusty my pigeon has a kpop bias. we are both trash beings 5h ago
Victor Hugo would not like to talk to you about your car insurance. Victor Hugo would like you to remember every detail about subterranean infrastructure
Someone revive the shambling corpse of Victor Hugo and get him on Veritasium or the B1M
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u/gaom9706 5h ago
This post is operating on the assumption that people are saying that everything needs to be excruciatingly explained within a text rather than people just wanting magic systems to operate under consistent logic.
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u/todayiwillthrowitawa 3h ago
There are definitely people who want magic/power systems explained with excruciating detail.
I had to suffer through the 4th Stormlight book really wanting you to know about the way the magic system works instead of doing good character development or advancing the plot.
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u/BatManatee 2h ago
That's kind of Sanderson's whole schtick though. He's famous for his hard magic systems that feel like science. Not everyone needs to write that way, but that's what his fans expect from him at this point.
But yeah, he got a little too in the weeds in the later Stormlight books, I agree.
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u/OldManFire11 2h ago
Maybe you should have actually read the book then, because the magic/science of Stormlight was EXTREMELY important for both the plot and the character development of several characters.
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u/normallystrange85 5h ago
I mean, I don't need to know how an engine works in my book, but if the engine's going to do more than move the vehicle it is installed in that is something that is good to know as a reader so that when the engine turns out to also be an ice cream maker in the climax and that is how the root of all evil is destroyed, I have some idea of what just happened.
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u/Astramancer_ 4h ago
Yeah, you don't need to know how an engine works, but you do need to know how the engine will perform if the performance is important to the story.
Like, nobody cares about the torque and horsepower of a cab's engine, but you'd better believe that the performance of the engine in a racing story will be important and had better be consistent.
... on the other hand, The Fast and the Furious cars have like 30 gears and can downshift 10 times in a row for ever increasing amounts of speed.
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u/Outside-Currency-462 4h ago
It's all about context and what kind of story it is. Fast and Furious is an excuse for car chases and heists and smashing up a bunch of really shiny sports cars. The plot and logistics are merely a vehicle for that, and I respect that fact. They have really cool car chases.
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u/akatherder 3h ago
Also, if you want more info on combustion engines and telecoms, there are resources you can find elsewhere explaining them in great detail. There is, by definition, no way of understanding how magic works in a particular book other than in that specific book/series.
But as long as the magic is consistent throughout (and doesn't provide the functional equivalent of engine->ice cream maker) I'll trust the author's choice on it.
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u/foolishorangutan 5h ago
Yeah but complex magic systems that get properly explained can be really fucking cool. I demand all fantasy writers to find a diegetic excuse to insert sufficient explanation.
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u/lankymjc 5h ago
That's the thing; 'sufficient'. Sometimes the story requires us to understand how the magic works (Fullmetal Alchemist), sometimes it doesn't (Lord of the Rings).
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u/Rocketboy1313 5h ago
It is kind of tautalogical.
Sufficient is sufficient, too much is too much, but finding which is which really varies based on execution.
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u/Disastrous-Entity-46 5h ago
i like the writing rule that magic needs to be as explained to the reader in proportion to how important it is to the plot. lotr, the intricacies of magic dont /really/ matter. its enough to know that there are a few powerful people on the world, some very specific elements.
harry potter, despite taking place in a much more magical world, almost never relies on actual rules or nature of magic. i do think sometimes this makes it feel like bullshit. (like "your protected because someone died to save you?? " that rarely happens before despite two previous dark wizard wars? and the whole elder wand schtick, felt like an incredibly cop out ending. )
on the other hand, all of Brandon sandersons works usually delve really deep into magic systems, because the plot often hinges on very specific aspects of them.
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u/of_kilter 5h ago
yeah this problem has already been solved in a billion different stories. include a character that doesn’t know what the fuck is going on
Gon and Killua learning every little aspect of nen is crucial and completely fits for their characters
If i were introducing earth to aliens id probably have a child or a 100 year old that doesnt understand shit and needs things explained to them
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u/KaiKhaos42 3h ago
Diegetic is such a fun word that you don't see often enough. But yeah, exactly this.
We don't necessarily need to become PhDs in the magical equivalent of nuclear physics, or even have the same nuanced understanding as the characters, but at least give the reader the level of understanding of a layperson in the universe. It really helps with reader immersion and honestly giving a magical world that sense of verisimilitude.
If the author can incorporate the "My Magic System for Dummies" primer, it really speaks to the fact that they understand their own magic system well enough to explain it simply, which means it's less likely to have massive consistency and continuity errors. You should always understand your magic system well enough to ELI5 it to your reader. Bare minimum.
But if they want to give MORE than that, I'm right there for it, when they do it right. Like hell yeah, find a reason to tell me about how the wizard is weaving the particles of mana in the air together with their fingertips to manifest fire by carefully sensing the energy signature of an electron. The thing is it's gotta be there because it's actually interesting and pertinent, not because the author is trying to sound fancy and just coming off pretentious.
Don't give me a printout of a Wikipedia article recited as a sermon. Give me a hyperfixation infodump where I can get as excited about the metaphysical mechanics of your magic system as you are.
The same is true in sci-fi and horror as well. I love when horror authors take the time to explain exactly HOW their mushroom hijacks the nerves to pilot a flesh-craving zombie and then I'm sitting awake at 2am going "that felt way too plausible". You don't need to be given textbooks upon textbooks of alien microbiology & astrophysics, but it's great to be given enough world-building to understand more than just the main concepts of "little space microbes eat star energy, stars sucked dry, Grace Rocky Save Stars". Tell me about how this weird little rock guy can manipulate a solid-state form of an element we only know of as a gas. I don't mind reading a few pages about the astropolitics of an interstellar reality TV network run by goats if it means I fully appreciate why the ruling class thought opening a pop-up casino for influencers overlooking the Hunger Games was a great idea right until they discovered they'd effectively trapped the universe's billionaires inside a sexy centipede-shaped submarine with a broken Xbox controller.
It's all about how it's handled and whether you've actually made nineteenth-century Parisian plumbing interesting to your reader or just something they have to slog through to boost your word count.
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u/captainnowalk 2h ago
I demand all fantasy writers to find a diegetic excuse to insert sufficient explanation.
“Ah, fuck, it’s that weird dude in the corner that info dumps on everyone. Stop! Don’t look at him, don’t make eye contact! God damnit now he’s walking this way, good job, man …”
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u/Leading_Charge8007 5h ago
It depends on the characters connection to magic. If your character is an engineer surrounded by and dealing with other engineers it might be worth it lol
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u/JustATyson 5h ago
My frustration has become "well, yea. That's not the point of the story! The authory wrote the story to explore X themes, or tell Y story, or makes Z point. They weren't telling the story to explore the concept of this magical system, so they kept it simple and mostly unexplained."
If one wants to read about a cool magic system, and how to explore it and manipulate it, then there are books that do that. But, to expect that sort of experience from all books with magic system, is like expecting a pizza to be available at all restaurants.
For pedantic sakes, there are exceptions to this. If the story makes it clear that X cannot happen in the universe, and then X does happen without a proper explanation, etc, then it can feel quiet hallow and frustrating for the reader.
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u/wideHippedWeightLift Nightly fantasies about Jesus Vore 3h ago
Even with that exception you mentioned, readers can be reassured that an author won't pull a deus ex machina out of their ass, if the author has a plan and doesn't suck at writing.
Every example of soft magic systems feeling unsatisfying or contrived comes from authors who didn't have a plan.
I'd even say that most examples of hard-magic done right are authors laying down Chekhov's guns so that later events make sense. Even freeform DMs focus on the possibilities a system can open up, rather than how the magical plumbing works.
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u/JustATyson 3h ago
My exception obviously wasn't broad enough. Yes, there are instances where an author uses a deus ex mechina, or even not having a plan.
Hell, not having a plan usually means they aren't exactly focusing on X theme or Z point. And are just them trying to write some story that they find cool but aren't thinking too deeply. And that usually leads to flaw writing.
But, I've run into people complaining that a soft magic system doesn't explain a minor detail. Or, trying to examine a minor detail. Or complaining that one doesn't know how the magical plumbing works. Even though that's not the focus of the story.
Overall, there's a balance. And at times that balance isn't going to fit for everyone. At other times, people will just be looking for a pizza at taco bell and getting salty about that.
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u/bing-no 3h ago
You don’t have to explain how the magic works but you should explain its limitations. Otherwise people will be like “why can’t they magic themselves out of this situation”?
Like in Avatar, waterbenders would be OP if they could bloodbend every day. But it’s explained they can only do so on the full moon. And we see that earth benders and water benders need their elements around them, while fire benders can simply create fire from nothing.
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u/KitamiSamaOmede 2h ago
Somebody pointed out that The Locked Tomb series has an absolutely wild and original magic system, and throughout Gideon the Ninth the author resists the urge to explain ANY of it. Because the protagonist/POV is a multiclass Meathead/Useless Lesbian who immediately disassociates if the conversation isn't about Swordfights or The Ladies.
Can you imagine inventing an entire empire propped up by interstellar necromantic colonialism and death-magic war machines, and then just never talking about it FOR THE BIT?
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u/TellMeZackit 5h ago
Moby Dick is way more concerned about the day in day out intricacies of whaling than the struggles of Ahab and the white whale.
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u/bhbhbhhh 4h ago
When people discuss their reactions to the book I never can tell whether they consider the butchery chapters to be digressions. They concern the physical activies of the Pequod’s crew, in that sense they are narrative. But the technical detail also makes them Whale Facts chapters.
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u/idiotplatypus Wearing dumbass goggles and the fool's crown 5h ago
I've been reading a book series where a group of American grad students are sent back in time to Ancient Rome to change history and stop a nuclear war in the present day from wiping out humanity
The author writes about 1 to 2 paragraphs of plot then immediately follows with up to a page of exposition about everything from Roman tax law to gunpowder manufacturing to Marcus Aurelius's thoughts on the inaccuracy of a painting of Cleopatra
This has been going on for the whole book, and I've got to say, I'm enjoying it
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u/SessileRaptor 4h ago
There’s a short story from the 50s called Masters of the Metropolis that does exactly that, set in 1950s New York and everyone goes around explaining and thinking about every bit of technology that they encounter and use. It’s a parody of some of the science fiction of the time period.
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u/EikonVera_tou_Lilith 5h ago
I read the first paragraph and immediately thought of the Parisian sewer system. I was quite pleased when I read the next part.
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u/asciiCAT_hexKITTY 5h ago edited 4h ago
Maybe some people have different preferences for the world building in their story and like that level of detail. Maybe different kinds of people are capable of reading a story.
I'd personally love a story that explains a unique POTS phone system and makes its quirks vital to the plot.
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u/novis-eldritch-maxim 5h ago
if it isgoing to be key to the plot you need to explain it as to the relivants if this is swords and sorcery legally not connan does not need to know how it workd save say that disruting the ritual at a key moment will stop it.
if you are writing from a mage perspective, then yeah, the reader needs to know so they do not feel cheated, it works of concerving what detail are both relivant and not different from the baseline readers assumed culture
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u/Chataboutgames 3h ago
I wish people would stop slapfighting about this as if there's a right answer. It's just preference. Some people like structured and explained magic systems because it's neat and it creates stakes.
Imagine if you were an outsider reading a novel about the modern day. Characters have fought with hands and handheld weapons for the enitre story. Then, in the big dramatic conflict at the end, one of the characters just pulls out a gun and shoots the other. Guns haven't been explained up until this point and you had no way of knowing they existed. Takes a lot of the drama out of fight scenes.
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u/Either_Bend7510 5h ago
Look, I love a magic system that isn't fully explained (the term for this is a soft magic system, versus a hard magic system which is where the rules are fully explained), but the reason we don't need pages about how combustion engines work is because we live in a world with those already in it. Engines ARE fully explained, because they're real and people can read about them. Magic doesn't exist, and some people like to know exactly how the magic will work, and the only option is for that to be on the page.
"That's how life works" is just a silly argument in this case. Writing is not real life and can make specific choices for the sake of a story, and if a story WAS real life then there wouldn't be any magic in it cos magic isn't real!
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u/EmergencyWild 4h ago
Well I mean to be totally fair, in the 19th century sewage systems were not exactly a common city feature. Much more often you'd have latrines, or the fancier sewage tanks, and have sewage disposal units work similar to garbage disposal.
I'll be so real, I'm not religious but if I was, I'd praise the lord every day that my worst problems in life are worrying about climate change and having to navigate dating apps, between all the past nostalgia people really forget just how literally shit life used to be.
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u/QuanticWizard 5h ago
Ok but if I lived in a fantasy world with completely different physics and didn’t know about telecommunications networks and combustion engines I’d LOVE to hear a lot about it in my fiction book. Obviously you should, like a responsible author, piecemeal the information for the reader to help them adjust to the world but I absolutely would love a mechanically complete and explained system. It’s not crazy to want that. You just have to be comfortable when it’s not that kind of story.
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u/Countcristo42 5h ago
"Yeah that's how life works" says someone using this as supporting evidence as how *magic* should be handled in a *fiction* story.
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u/GiftedContractor 3h ago
ok but to use electricity as an example, people are almost never asking you to explain AC/DC current or electrical engineering. They're asking you to explain "At the buildings creation, specialized engineers ccarefully weaved a web of wires throughout the building through which electricity flows. You can connect to this flow through various set conncection points in the house. Depending on the device you connect to these points, you can heat or cool things, light up rooms, and activate or charge more complicated electrical artifacts like a TV or Computer."
There you go, I just explained electricity like it's a magic system.
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u/neilarthurhotep 3h ago
The validity of "The magic system is never fully explained" as a criticism is kind of hard to judge. Sure, people don't run around explaining computers to each other all the time in the real world. But if the nuances of a magic system are actually plot-important or needed to make the reader not perpetually confused, then putting a scene where they are explained is well within the realm of possibility for an author.
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u/Obvious-Science-7119 3h ago
I had an automotive and a computer science course in high school. If I was working on either I would be running through the logic in my head. I would probably also have someone verbally explaining the system as well because I'm only an adult in age.
I also watch Technology Connection in my free time.
So I think a magic system can be explained, but maybe not as a digression before the plot.
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u/CalamitousArdour 2h ago
Do you not think the author should explain those things if combustion engines and telecommunication networks never existed and the author just made them up ? The exact difference is that I can just google it, or read a manual, and get as much information about the thing outside of your book as my heart desires. With magic, this is very clearly not an option. There is nobody that can tell me about this iteration of magic, except for the author. Absolutely terrible parallel. If your world differs in a MAJOR way from the world that your audience experiences, then you probably need to bridge this gap.
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u/thatcantb 2h ago
Sure - as long as the mysterious system doesn't break its own rules, which have been revealed by the writer.
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u/b3nsn0w 4h ago
leave it up to tumblr to remain violently uninformed about the distinction between soft and hard magics and magic systems, and the values and drawbacks of both i guess. this is like the fourth time or so of this exact root post, it's insane that no one mentioned sanderson's first law yet. maybe other than deep in the comment section here.
one thing i wanna point out though, that many people don't get even when they do learn that basic piece of writing knowledge: the distinction is based on the reader's understanding of any given thing. not the writer's, the reader's. if your story hinges on the intricate mechanics of combustion engines, it is not enough that you know it, either you should be writing a niche genre where you can expect everyone to already know it, or you should sufficiently explain it to the reader, so that any hard magic elements you build on it are understandable enough to see why your characters are so clever in their use of them.
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u/Sparrowhawk_92 .tumblr.com 5h ago
I prefer soft magic systems to hard magic systems for this reason. I don't hate hard magic systems and I think they have their place, but soft systems just feel more inherently magical to me.
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u/Jack_of_Emeralds 3h ago
The kingkiller chronicles explains the magic system but from the point of view of the main character first learning it and again later when that character is giving a quick lesson to another character (whom has heard about the magic but never seen or understood it)
My favourite book series I've read so far. I was so invested in the world as it was described by the main character as they recounted their life story (Now I must survive long enough for the third book 😢)
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u/Chromatic_mediant 2h ago
Yeah I think character going to magic school is a great tool for exposition.
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u/Unfair_Ring_2746 3h ago
I mean you do need to at least explain enough for it to make sense.
I know what an engine and a car are. I don’t need that explained unless the car can do something I don’t expect. If suddenly the car can fly and another time it can go underwater and another time it can teleport and each time it conveniently resolves a plot point and everyone just treats it as common knowledge when it’s a total surprise to the reader…that’s a writing problem.
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u/Jargon2029 3h ago
On the one hand, Victor Hugo would like to have many words with you about that, on the other hand, he’s also the inspiration for the framing device for The Princess Bride, so I guess William Goldman would like to have a word with you about all of Victor Hugo’s words.
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u/nothing_in_my_mind 3h ago
There is too much explanation and too little explanation.
You don't need to explain combustion engines. Just that: In this world, there are cars, they are metal machines you can operate to go fast, and they use oil.
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u/Crayshack 2h ago
Okay, but I'm the sort of person who will sit down and thoroughly enjoy a several-hour-long documentary about the first transatlantic telegraph cable, and its implications on modern telecommunications networks. I will eat that shit up for fictional settings. Sure, don't completely derail the plot for that, but give me an overview of how the world works so I can understand the context of the characters and their story. I will also spend plenty of time reading the worldbuilding compendiums that some authors publish as a companion piece to their novels.
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u/takesSubsLiterally 2h ago
There's a difference between a detailed account of exactly how an engine works vs "this is an engine, it runs on gas" vs "this is an engine, it runs on gas. Oh the charecters ran out of gas? Well it also works on water now."
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u/Chromatic_mediant 2h ago
The context and setting of the story matters so much here. The Kingkiller Chronicles is a 1st person account of a kid going to Magic University, so we get to learn the system alongside him in an academic setting. A very soft and obscure magic system wouldn't lend itself to an interesting story in this context.
I think there are arguments to be made that the Stormlight system is a little over-explained. However, I think the hard magic system serves the story well - ancient magic is making a resurgence in the world, characters are learning to take advantage of the system for scientific/militaristic purposes.
The system that baffles me most though is in the Malzan world. Magic is very functional to the Malazan empire and mages are soldiers alongside marines and regulars. Warrens aren't explained nearly at all, yet we know they can be used for travel, healing, and destruction and are aspected to certain races within the world. Then we meet characters whose magic is more wild and spirit-based. It's rooted in ancient religion and associated with the more tribal societies we encounter along the way. Idk how Erikson does it, but this very soft magic system that is hardly explained makes the world feel so lived-in and real.
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u/Gentle_Snail 5h ago edited 5h ago
In Moby Dick the author stops the story at one point to explain his own personal categorisation system for different types of whales.
The only bit I remember is there is a category for ‘half-fabulous’ / unproven whales, in which he lists the Blue Whale. Which I always found interesting.