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#like GEE its such a mystery right?? CLEARLY bad writing. i mean what could POSSIBLY show WITHIN THE STORY that
mettywiththenotes · 2 years
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I find it funny how BNHA is one of the most popular anime/manga and yet people seem to forget almost everything that happens. like how.
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sol1056 · 5 years
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How do I define a magic system, so it doesn’t seem like a god in a machine type of thing?
Rules, limits, consequences – and don’t make the story’s resolution pivot on magic. (That last one is probably the most crucial, really.)
You don’t have to explain the rules in the story, but they must be somewhat intuitive by virtue of consistency. If a character can only do X magic when it’s night, make very clear it’s night, the stars are visible, and never, ever break that rule. Some readers will miss it, some will put the clues together, but you’ll write with an assurance that will make pretty much all of them roll with the system as internally logical, just on gut instinct. 
Limits are something that tends to get explained, because it’s useful for adding tension. Although you might not want to do a hard system (hard as in outlined and nailed down with very specific rules and limits; Sanderson’s novels are entirely hard magic vs Tolkien’s novels are soft magic), it’s still good to elucidate the limits so readers can get worried. 
A limit doesn’t always have to be explained, but like rules, it should be implied by context. It’s like… we know from the real world about how fast a given kind of horse can go, so if a horse is written going twice that fast, some readers will call foul. And even people who don’t know horses will give you the side-eye if you have the horse running for days on end without rest (unless you have some kind of worldbuilding detail to handwave that). 
So, a rule is what you can do, and a limit is how much you can do — and consequences are what happens if you do everything right, everything wrong, or something you shouldn’t, or do more than the limits say you’re allowed to do. Consequences will vary based on the situation and context, but they should always be present.  
Consequences are simply the cost of doing a thing (anything, regardless of value or intent), and the cost depends on the metaphor you’re using to conceptualize the magic. If you think of magic like technology, well, there’s a cost in the time to learn it, and a cost in terms of what it, well, actually costs to purchase. But you don’t feel physically exhausted after using your phone, I mean, you might, but that’s not inherent to the phone. 
If your metaphor is that magic is like running, then you’d have a physical cost like feeling drained or getting shin-splints, but you probably wouldn’t have a cost in terms of learning to put one foot in front of the other really fast. 
My favorite metaphor for magic is treating it like a complex area of study. It takes concentration, checking your work, and the ability to think logically and clearly. You might have eye strain, a headache, or just feel dull-minded after an hour or more hammering at an equation. You won’t necessarily have a cost in outright physical exhaustion, and the monetary cost might be little more than the effort of getting a library card. 
There are two reasons for consequences. One is that we’re dealing with a gaming-influenced genre, and a game gets boring if someone can power up to the point they can destroy worlds without breaking a sweat. Just like you’d expect a character to get exhausted if they push past their physical limit, consequences penalize them for pushing past a magical limit. 
The other reason is that consequences are the best way to introduce (or raise) stakes. Take the rules (ie, only magic at night) and the limits (ie, cannot do it for more than ten minutes): what happens if someone tries to do magic for twenty minutes? Lose their voice, or hallucinate? What if they do magic during the day? Maybe they have nightmares? What if they do magic for longer than ten minutes and it’s during the day? They get all of the above plus go bald?
And then you put the character in situations where magic — during the day, for ten-plus minutes — is their only option for getting themselves or someone else out alive. If you’ve done your groundwork, the reader will be on pins and needles, knowing the character is choosing a path that’s going to have severe consequences. 
Of course, then you do need to impose those consequences — or find some clever loophole in the rules and limits. Frex, a solar eclipse is one of the oldest ways around ‘only happens at night,’ but hey, it works, and it’s observing the letter of the law: the sun is gone, ergo, it’s not-day. 
The last one is the biggest, and it’s one of the reasons authors like Sanderson rely on hard magic. It’s a lot easier for the reader to visualize (and recognize) the validity of those loopholes if they have a fairly solid idea of how the magic system works. 
If, say, magic is like water, and the story consistently shows magic acting like water, the reader won’t see it as a deus ex machina but as a clever loophole to have the protagonist use magic that has the properties of ice. We know ice = water, so the final resolution to defeating the bad guy doesn’t violate our understanding of the metaphor.
If you look at older fantasy works (Tolkien being the biggest name, of course), the magic is usually soft. From start to finish, exactly what Gandalf can and can’t do, or how much he can do, isn’t explained (and I should note that he doesn’t do a great deal of it, either, which makes it harder because there’s no laundry list to derive rules or limits). 
However, the pinnacle of both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings isn’t magic at all. In one, it’s a man shooting an arrow at a dragon; the other, it’s three hobbits in a volcano, and one falls in. (Note: there is an extremely subtle magic going on there, that’s foreshadowed quietly and explained very clearly, and that final showdown is internally consistent with the explanation given.) For the most part, though, the resolution comes from reasonable actors and their believable actions, so it doesn’t require we know more about the magic than we’ve previously been told. 
If you feel the impulse when writing the resolution to have another character exclaim, “I didn’t know you could do that!” and the protagonist say in awe, “gee, I didn’t know, either,” you’ve just instinctively lampshaded your own deus ex machina. What you want is a surprise not for the unexpected but for the obvious, once the characters (and reader) have hindsight. Of course water has more than just its fluid state! The magic’s not been bent out of shape; we just hadn’t considered all the possible implications; now that we realize that, it’s obvious that was the best way to defeat the Big Bad. 
That said, one of the most satisfying resolutions (admittedly also harder, but that’s what makes it satisfying) is when you have magic throughout a story… and the resolution is entirely independent of magic. In other words, if the reader hadn’t been so focused on the world’s rules and limits around magic, they could’ve realized every ingredient was right there for an incendiary flash-device that would blind everyone and allow the good guys to get away. 
Granted, that’s a lot harder, because that means you have to come up with a way to get out of a (hopefully) really sticky and intense set of dire straits without being able to use Stuff You Made Up. Basically, you went through all the work of setting up this convenient system… and then setting it aside for the harder work of characters rolling up their sleeves and wading into the fight. 
As a good example of that kind of magic-is-everywhere except the resolution, get a copy of Rokka: Braves of the Six Flowers. There’s an anime version of the first light novel, from a few years ago, but the novels have been translated up through volume 6. Yamagata is an author who writes phenomenally tight stories; every single word and detail is a clue. 
It starts off with a very D&D-like premise: six heroes are mystically chosen via a tattoo that appears on them, and they must journey across the land to fight the oncoming evil. The six meet up at a temple, and from there they’ll set out to battle. Except there’s two problems: one, a barrier’s suddenly appeared, locking them all in, and two, there’s seven of them, not six. 
It’s basically a locked-room mystery, filled with magic and the usual tropes and a few totally unexpected twists that in hindsight were laid out perfectly. At least for the anime, rewatching meant catching a dozen or more clues in every episode, even in throwaway lines, and I’m told the light novels are all that times ten — and the resolution never lies in magic. It lies in something in the real world, some facet of geography or climate or physics. 
That takes a lot of work, and it’s really a story where you have to work backwards from the end, to make sure every clue is laid down but just enough obscured by various red herrings. When the story makes sense backwards – each clue leads to another – then you’re ready to tell it forward. Hard, but boy is it satisfying to get to that conclusion. 
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the-desolated-quill · 7 years
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Flesh And Stone - Doctor Who blog
(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. If you haven’t seen this episode yet, you may want to before reading this review)
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Oh bloody, buggering hell! It was all going so well until Moffat decided to get all clever-clever with it! Why can’t he ever just keep things simple?!
Flesh And Stone picks up immediately from where The Time Of Angels ended. The Doctor shoots the gravity globe at the same time the group jumps, causing a gravitational boost that propels them onto the ship, where its artificial gravity catches them (I’m not touching this scene with a barge pole. I’m just going to put it down to Doctor Who space logic and move on).
Now credit where its due, I thought the first third of Flesh And Stone was exceptionally good. Having done all the creepy, atmospheric setup in the previous episode, it’s all systems go here. The scene in the corridor was incredibly tense with the Weeping Angels slowly advancing on them in the deadliest game of Grandmother’s Footsteps ever played. And then it gets even more frightening when the Doctor needs to turn the lights off in order to open the door.
The Weeping Angels are presented as a powerful force to be reckoned with here. Despite magnetising the doors, the Angels are still strong enough to break through. Guns don’t work on them. The forest gives them plenty of places to hide (brief side note, I love the idea of the ‘oxygen factory’ being a forest on a spaceship), and to cap it all off the Angels are still playing mind games with Amy, forcing her to count down to her death. It’s immensely creepy.
But the undisputed star of the show has to be Matt Smith. He runs the whole gambit of emotions here. He’s funny and quirky, but at times often callous, like when he talks to Angel Bob and repeatedly makes puns about being alive. The scene where he leaves Octavian to die was really impactful. You can tell he doesn’t want to leave him, but he also knows he has no choice and that there’s no way to save him. The look of sorrow and guilt on his face really punched a gut. And he clearly cares a lot about Amy and her safety. There are a few points where he almost coldly dismisses her fears, but only because he’s thinking desperately of ways to help her, and his raw anger and distress when Amy is left alone in the forest was very powerful indeed.
All in all, this was shaping up to be a pretty awesome episode.
And then that fucking crack showed up!
With the possible exception of Bad Wolf in the first series, the series arcs in New Who have always been consistently rubbish, but at least RTD kept them in the background as Easter Eggs until the finale. The cracks in time seemed to be going the same way until this episode where they just barge into the story, wrestle the spotlight away from the much scarier and more interesting Weeping Angels and completely trash the creepy atmosphere. I’m not saying the idea of a crack in time that can erase people from existence isn’t interesting, but there’s a time and a place. Moffat might as well have just stuck his own butt crack into the episode. It would have had the same effect.
And if that’s not bad enough, Moffat then begins to reduce the threat of the Weeping Angels not just by putting them on the backseat, but also by changing the rules. The scene where Amy has to walk through the forest alone with her eyes shut should have been utterly terrifying, but it’s ruined by Moffat’s own idiotic handling of the Angels.
The Doctor tells Amy that it’s possible to trick the Angels into thinking she can see them. But... they already know she can’t see them. She has to keep her eyes shut otherwise she’ll die from the Angel in her mind that they implanted. So why would they be fooled by that? Also how the fuck are you supposed to trick somebody into thinking you can see them? A woman stumbling around in the woods with her eyes shut isn’t going to fool anybody. Then there’s the added issue that all of this implies that the Angels have control over their quantum locking abilities, and I’m pretty sure it’s not supposed to work like that. They’re supposed to freeze whenever anybody looks at them, including each other. If they have the ability to just turn it on and off whenever they feel like it, why bother doing it at all? Why not just pounce on their victims and get it over with? And if they have control over it, how were they defeated in Blink?
And then Moffat commits the ultimate sin.
WE SEE THE ANGELS MOVE.
Apart from the fact that it completely robs them of what makes them so scary in the first place, it also completely contradicts what we already know about them. Think back to Blink. When Sally Sparrow was roaming around that house and found the TARDIS key, how come the Angels didn’t attack her? It was because we, the audience, were looking at them. This is demonstrated when Sally walks past an Angel, obscuring our view of it, and we see it change positions. This was a really clever idea and a great way of getting kids involved with the story. Up until now, The Time Of Angels and Flesh And Stone remained consistent with this too. We are, in a sense, protecting the characters from harm. So when Amy is surrounded by Angels in the forest, they should not be able to move because we’re still looking at them. But oh no. Moffat just wants us to forget about that now because it’s suddenly inconvenient to the plot. And that’s always been one of the biggest problems with Moffat’s writing. It’s hard to be invested in a story when the established rules can just randomly change whenever the writer feels like it.
In the end it suddenly becomes abundantly clear why the crack in time really showed up. It wasn’t to propel a series arc. It was merely to provide a convenient deus ex machina to vanquish the Angels without the characters having to lift a finger. In fact, with the Angels now erased from time, the story doesn’t even make sense anymore. If the Angels never existed, how did the spaceship crash? And how does River Song think this is going to earn her a pardon? Technically it never happened. Why aren’t there a bunch of soldiers standing around, scratching their heads, wondering what they’re doing there?
Oh yeah. I suppose I should talk about River Song’s bullshit mystery. So she’s in prison apparently for killing a man. A good man. A brave man. The best man she ever knew. A hero to many.
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Well gee. I wonder who this could be referring to. I mean it could be anybody. No, but seriously. It’s definitely Rory. (Did you know people at the time actually, genuinely speculated that? Those fucking idiots).
And then... there’s the ending... Oh Jesus.
I don’t think there are words that have even been invented yet to express how fucking inappropriate this is, but sod it. I’m going to try anyway.
For starters, this is a family show. I don’t think kids should have to be subjected to the sight of Amy trying to get into the Doctor’s pants. Second, this has become a recurring problem in Moffat’s stories. He has often stated that his stories have a sexual undertone to them, most notably The Empty Child two parter with the Doctor and Captain Jack comparing sonic screwdriver sizes, and a lot of his female characters are often reduced to these kinds of one dimensional, dominatrix-y types, which is sexist as shit. And third, this scene just comes right the fuck out off nowhere. There’s no build-up to it whatsoever and it doesn’t actually serve a purpose. No. Yuck. Take it away.
Cut out all the pointless bullshit with River Song and Moffat’s crack (in time. Come on guys. Grow up), The Time Of Angels and Flesh And Stone could have been an excellent two parter and a worthy successor to Blink. Instead, while there are some good moments here and there, the whole thing just feels like a squandered opportunity.
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