﻿On any given Magic card, there are two types of text. The first is the rules text, the words that
describe what the card does and determines how it impacts a game of Magic. The other is flavor text,
which is just there for, uh, flavor. It's a little fragment of storytelling in a game whose structure
doesn't really allow it tell a cohesive or linear plot. If every bit of flavor text for
every single card was irretrievably lost, the game of Magic would still play exactly the same, but
these bits of microfiction provide world-building and sometimes character development,
and while a lot of them are admittedly pretty forgettable, there are a few that have stuck with
me, and none more so than Beast of Burden. Beast of Burden, in just three lines of text,
tells a moving story about the character Karn, The Silver Golem. It tells this story effectively,
in large part, due to a single word, an apparently minor choice in diction that makes it instructive
for both the craft of writing and also, like, the human experience. So let's dive in.
Before we talk about Karn's story, we need to talk about Urza, his creator. Urza was a regular
artificer turned nigh-omnipotent wizard, tasked with defending his home dimension from Yawgmoth,
another nigh-omnipotent wizard, and his Phyrexians, a techno-nightmare hivemind looking
to forcibly convert the multiverse to its dread gospel. The war between Urza and Yawgmoth is very
macro-level, Warhammer 40k, cosmic scale stuff: it spans millennia, includes reality-tearing
magic and technology, and sees multiple planes of existence get obliterated as prelude to the
main conflict. To stop an enemy as existentially dangerous as the Phyrexians, Urza has to apply
his cold artificer's logic to his entire world, resorting to increasingly ruthless acts that
require progressively greater sacrifices until, at last, Urza realizes he has more in common with
the cold machine god he's fighting than the lowly mortals he's supposed to defend.
But before Urza completely forsakes his humanity, he makes Karn. Urza had started
thr Tolarian Academy to study time magic, but an early experiment went catastrophically wrong,
resulting in pocket dimensions where a day outside them is a century within. Not one to let a mass
casualty event go to waste but unable to send regular people to his beach that makes them Old,
Urza discovers that silver is unaffected by the temporal disturbances for some…reason…and so
creates Karn, the Silver Golem, capable of passing through the pocket dimensions at will.
And Karn is great. He's a hulking robot, functionally indestructible,
and would be more than capable of tearing enemies apart were he not fully sentient and
a committed pacifist. Karn is a gentle soul, one who cares about life in all its forms,
an artificial being who nonetheless thrums with empathy and humanity. He is, in other words,
about as different from Urza as he could possibly be. He's Frankenstein's monster cast in silver,
slowly learning that the real horror is the one who made him.
And so we have the card itself: Beast of Burden, an incredibly forgettable card from the Urza's
Saga block that depicts, not Karn, but a random golem in Urza's army. I'll show you
the flavor text, and if you'd like, see if you can spot the word I'm so excited about.
“If it’s meant to be nothing but a machine,” Karn finally asked Jhoira,
“why did Urza build it to be like me?” Okay, what's the word? It's "finally."
To see what "finally" does here, let's see what the effect is without it.
“If it’s meant to be nothing but a machine,” Karn asked Jhoira,
“why did Urza build it to be like me?” Here, we still have Karn's realization that he
was made as a tool, that his purpose in life was callously decided by a ruthless man, that, despite
his compassion and intellect and just general personhood, he was built to be something less than
a person. The dull automaton that looks like him is compelling evidence of these things. And Karn,
without the word "finally," has his epiphany that he is not meaningfully different.
Epiphany, a word borrowed from the spiritual, is the moment of revelation, the crystalized second
of a new thought replacing the old. James Joyce explicitly invoked the idea of the epiphany in his
writing, and indeed a lot of Modernist fiction–and especially Modernist short fiction–can be
thought of as focusing on a secular epiphany. In Joyce's Araby, for instance, a young boy becomes
disillusioned with love and adulthood after receiving poor customer service. The climax of
the story is the moment of epiphany. And it is a moment, a point that neatly divides the boy's life
into what came before and what came after. But if we put the word finally back in Beast of
Burden's flavor text, we don't have just one moment. The realization is the same, but the
timeline is longer. By saying Karn finally asked, it says that this thought had been percolating in
him long before he said anything about it. It was a slow, stumbling revelation, not the awful eureka
of catching a cheating lover in the act but the gradual accumulation of suspicions until , without
warning, they break through the denial. Within the word finally, you see the way Karn fought against
accepting this realization, knowing it in whatever his analog for bones are but refusing to give it
the words that make it so terribly true. Without the word finally, we have a moment, but with it,
like the time-ravaged island of Tolaria, a moment holds an era, one of doubt and denial.
I like this for several reasons, but the biggest is that a slow, halting acceptance
of an unpleasant truth is a lot more in line with my experiences than the sudden epiphany.
And i don't think I'm alone: if people in general were quick to accept the new,
then acceptance would be the first stage of grief, not the last. Exposing someone's cognitive
dissonance would make them immediately reevaluate their beliefs instead of, as the studies suggest,
digging deeper into their convictions. The epiphany as a sudden moment of change makes for
good fiction, serving as a sort of shorthand for the actual process of someone changing their mind,
but the actual process is slow and uncomfortable, a step back for every two forward,
less a clean break, more of an erosion. And so in the flavor text of Beast of Burden,
couched in a story of god-wizards playing 8D chess, elder dragons claiming dominion over the
world, forces primal and incomprehensible and melodramatic, we have a protracted realization
that’s recognizably human amidst the space opera’s deafening noise. The realization itself–that Karn
has been manufactured by a conscious but uncaring maker as a weapon in a cosmic war–is not the most
relatable, though it does echo our anxieties about the meaning of life and our place in the universe,
but the way he realizes it, the way he fights against it, the way he sees the truth
in not the sudden brilliance of a lightning bolt but eyes acclimating to the darkness?
That’s the humanity right there. More than Karn’s goodness, his pacifism, his deep sorrow for every
life thoughtlessly crushed by warring gods, it’s Karn’s denial that makes him so recognizably a
person. It’s his doubt. It’s his ability and willingness to turn from a terrible truth,
and his clumsy bravery to at last face it, that Karn truly joins us humans, not ecstatic with
epiphany but despaired and relieved in a cruel truth we finally accept as true.
Thanks for watching this mini-essay! It’s a lot shorter than what I usually write,
and I am working on a longer piece on Final Fantasy 7 and post-modernism
that will hopefully be out sooner rather than later, but because I’ve, you know,
really been putting in a lot of time on that video to deliver as high quality a product as possible.
I wanted to try out something a little different in the meantime.
Let me know what you think if you’d like more of these shorter essays in the future.
Thanks for watching! This is a much shorter essay that I usually write, and I am working on a longer
piece on Final Fantasy 7 and post-modernism that will hopefully be out sooner rather than later.