a lonely old woman and her husband decide one morning that they're going to make themselves
a child out of gingerbread an outlet perhaps for their years of Sorrow a simple baked good
but when the woman opens up the oven to check on her confection out leaves a living animated
gingerbread boy somehow it's not a Magic Oven the old lady isn't a witch it just
happens unaccountably someplace far away a man is traveling on holiday it's a bright hot country and
as the sun goes down each evening his shadow looms larger than ever on the wall and then finally one
day it decides to go off on its own the man wakes up and finds himself shadowless somehow
the man doesn't even really question it he's just mildly annoyed not to have a shadow anymore
often away in a kingdom you've likely never heard the name of before a queen sits sewing at her
window as she watches the beauty of the falling snow outside she absently pricks her finger
the sight of her red blood on the snow framed by the ebony wood of the window inspires her in
that moment she wishes for a daughter as white as snow as Redd as blood as black as Ebony and
soon as fate would have it she delivers just such a girl the most beautiful in all the land somehow
there's no ritual involved here no Wizardry and they're far from the age of Gene editing
so after all of this you kind of have to ask what gives how does a baked good just come to
life how does one's own shadow gallivant off into the night without them how does
one predestin the birth of their own child just by making a wish to the evening snow
the answer the one and only answer they're fairy tales and yes yes I know you've heard it a million
times ooh fairy tales are weird how many videos are there on this platform promising to expose
the true dark origins of your favorite Disney movie hey excuse me oh sorry Frankie not new
your videos are great it's kind of a tired topic isn't it the weirdness of fairy tales but that
sort of Senseless quality it's one of the really unique things about these stories sometimes they
just legitimately don't make sense and against all the wisdom of modern fantasy writers I want
to take sec to show you why that senselessness that lack of rationality is such a wonderful thing
good
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one thing modern High fantasy authors seem to love is rationality taking magic and just
trying to explain how and why it works really well systematizing it into a body of rules and
practices that produce reliable results and to their credit it is a lot of fun my go-to example
of this will always be petrograph's series The kingkiller Chronicle which goes so far as to
invoke the laws of thermodynamics to imagine a sort of quantum physical magic system which he
calls sympathy the basic premise is that if you can truly believe that two things are the same
they become essentially the same move one you move the other heat one up the other one warms as well
but of course energy cannot be created or destroyed so there's some efficiency lost in
this process a thing becomes far heavier when it's technically two things at once you necessarily
lose some heat when you try to warm one thing that is actually two that's really a children's
introduction to sympathy there's so much more Nuance to it if you read the books but you
get the point it's almost a science of course it takes place in a fictional Universe with different
natural laws so to us it looks like magic but within the Canon of the story it's a system which
can be experimented with which produces repeatable results how is that not technically science that's
actually kind of a big question and kind of hard to answer succinctly so we are going to make an
entire different video about it over on our nebula Channel ad free here's the link on the screen take
a sec put it in another tab but suffice it to say that this sort of systematization is
a very rational approach to what we call Magic very concrete and very canny great for clever
applications and little mechanical twists and of course extremely popular in fact probably the
most successful High fantasy author alive today Brandon Sanderson is famous for creating magic
systems one after the other after the other can't get enough and his audience can't seem to either
but rationalizing your magic doesn't always have to look quite this way doesn't quite have to feel
like secondary World science sometimes magic is simply rational in that it's consistent and
woven into the fabric of the setting talking animals for instance aren't something we have
in reality if you came across a talking animal you'd probably assume some kind of trick was
being played on you or that you were having an utterly impossible inexplicable magical experience
the kind of thing that would only happen in a fairy tale what if they had systems of speech
would that still be magical it doesn't happen in realities so it might still kind of feel magical
from a distance right nevertheless it would register differently wouldn't it more controlled
more canny than those magical fairy tale encounters the book Watership Down which we made
a whole video about a while back does precisely this it's about rabbits rabbits who have stories
who have mythology who have pride in history and meaningful World Views and very rationally those
things affect their world the tales they bring with them inform the lives that they lead the
decisions they make even the architecture of their boroughs this level of detail can be very powerful
for a variety of reasons not just because it can make a piece more believable more immersive or
heighten the payoffs all things this approach can certainly do but also because it adds a depth and
richness to the experience things feel like they have a causal relationship this way they feel
intertwined the magic necessitates the results it informs the setting in the world of the king
killer Chronicle they find ways to use sympathetic magic in their technology setting the stage for
a potential future advance announcements when people stop thinking of arcanists as witches and
burning them alive in Brandon sanderson's stories there's a patternicity and logic to the magic that
makes it feel almost like a video game at times giving the reader the impression that if only
the characters look hard enough try hard enough there's some application of the magic that will
save the day in Watership Down the rationality and systematization of these rabbits lives and
psyches turns them into people in a way that would otherwise be extremely difficult to accomplish
powerful stuff on the other hand I've watched plenty of budding World Builders strained to
find the sense in their magic work for weeks or months or years to make something intricate and
canny almost as if they're at work solving a puzzle rather than trying to tell a story that
can be fun in its own way but I swear so often I catch a whiff of Shame wafting off this kind of
World building a desire not just to write fantasy or incorporate magic but to excuse the presence of
those things a need for it to be as realistic as possible to make it mature and reasonable
and as we'll discuss in our forthcoming video why magic systems don't feel magical this can actually
have somewhat of a dampening effect on the way the magic feels to the audience but systematization is
only one method people use to rationalize or in those more cynical instances excuse their
magic sometimes it's a bit more of a hand wave than an explanation perhaps the entire fantasy
of your story operates on the simple premise that a wizard did it all the magic descends from Magic
in the Disney adaptation of Pinocchio the puppet comes to life because the Blue Fairy hears his
father's wish and brings forth the magic which will set the stage for the story Rumpelstiltskin
comes to bargain with the young lady in a deadly situation and we see the miracle of straw spun
into gold the key to bluebeard's closet of Horrors is impossible to clean once soiled with blood
no explanation given except for the fact that its owner is the infamous mysterious Bluebeard
a figure who it's pretty unsurprising to see in possession of such Oddities all of these are what
I'm going to call magical agents the actors who bring the magic into the story The World Is Not
assumed to be fundamentally different from ours unlike in highly systematized rational stories
like the kingkiller chronicle or Watership Down instead we can rationalize that because these
figures the benevolent fairy the conniving imp the murderous ogre are themselves capable of breaking
the rules any breach and rationality trickles down from them or at least someone like them they allow
us a way to accept the presence of magic without needing to explain it most fairy tales fit into
this category I mean it's in the name fairy tales you expect a fairy of some kind to come along and
Supply a bit of magic although sometimes the magical agent doesn't even do anything magical
they just open the gates of fantasy this second approach the magical agent as a facilitator
rather than a practitioner seems to be a bit more common in modern Works which tend to be a bit more
character driven a little subtler in execution in Oscar Wilde Story the fisherman and his soul the
fisherman cuts his shadow away from his feet in the light of the full moon because a witch told
him to a magical agent gave him the means and Magic ensued in Lord of the Rings The Shire is
a fairly simple fairly un magical place until until Gandalf shows up and starts lighting pine
cones on fire or whatever Wizards are weird in Pan's Labyrinth one of my favorite movies literal
fairies lead Ophelia into the Labyrinth where she meets the Seder Thon who sets her on the winding
path into her own personal fairy tale this is probably one of the simplest and most effective
ways to explain a Story's Magic one of the oldest too it's how a great many people explain the
existence of the entire universe after all how could something come from nothing there must be
a supernatural Source a magical agent magic that exists because something magical did it the end
then there are stories that just really don't care that much that don't need anything concrete
or explicit or digestible to excuse the presence of magic all they require is a reason an emotion
that the magic represents a metaphor it conveys a theme it helps to build which is why lacking
a better term I'm going to call this thematic magic think of Little Red Riding Hood you could
consider the wolf a magical agent but outside of his intellect and ability to speak what magic does
he Supply he's more of a device isn't he a tool used to create a scenario illustrate a moral the
wolf speaks not because the laws of the world he occupies dictate that he should be able to
not because he's the key to the gates of fantasy for the characters in the story no the wolf speaks
because he must or there is no Story the same is true of the tortoise and the hair by the standard
of a highly systematic sized causative world like that of Watership Down by all means the ability to
communicate between species with something akin to English should have afforded these
Woodland creatures a different standard of living shouldn't it shouldn't they be developing their
speech their technology their industry they have the language for it yet here they are the same
old Woodland creatures speaking purely because if they didn't there would be no race and no story
that's a very simple understanding of this concept but it gets way more interesting when
you start talking about magical realism which is essentially my favorite genre in France kafka's
metamorphosis Gregor samsa wakes up one day as a bug that's it he just does in the movie The
Curious Case of Benjamin Button a baby is born as a tiny old man and grows up in Reverse grows down
I suppose into a young man and then eventually a child baffling the world and certainly baffling
us the audience in the movie The Killing of a sacred deer the protagonist accidentally kills
a man by performing surgery on him while under the influence of alcohol and from that point Han
is plagued by a curse that forces him to choose a family member to kill as compensation or to
watch them all die slowly none of these pieces offer an explanation because they really don't
need one the magic isn't there to be studied it's their to help us study Gregor samsa becomes a bug
because that's what he feels like to those around him useless despicable burdensome Benjamin Button
ages backward as a meditation on mortality change and lost time our surgeon from the
killing of a sacred deer is cursed as a question of lives and how we value them a trolley problem
to make us squirm in our seats thematic magic is only rational in the sense that it says something
meaningful about the story it is excused by the value it offers our interpretation of the story
we need not question it further but the reason I wanted to make this video is because I really
don't think magic always needs some kind of excuse it doesn't need to be systematized or rational
doesn't need to serve as a device or a metaphor and despite their magical agents despite the
Thematic magic they may conjure this is something fairy tales often Embrace in a very unique way
sometimes your Shadow runs away sometimes a wish is enough to change the course of Fate
that's just the way it is we don't need to know why together these irrational moments paint a
vision of a world that is inherently magical they speak to an underlying acceptance that
such things could happen a sentiment that in a world of instantaneous answers and analytical
YouTube videos I sometimes worry is fading not everything has to make sense not everything has
to be beautiful these stories seem to say that sometimes for no discernible reason the world is
just a little more magical than we expect it to be and that I think is a wonderful notion
however even an inherently magical world still has some rules being okay with magic just being
magical doesn't necessarily answer the question of complexity with all your other World building does
it it can be hard to figure out how this whole fictional World thing works but fortunately I
recently found something that will absolutely help you it's a 12-part video series called
creating unique and Powerful worlds taught by many time author and professor of fiction link and
Michelle he walks you through how to begin your new world what the Ripple effects of that starting
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and I would definitely hurry because those slots are going to fill up fast once you've
finished this class creating unique and Powerful worlds please come back and tell us the impact
it's had on you as a Storyteller I cannot wait to hear the success stories anyway that's all
for this one thanks for watching and keep making stuff up I'll see you next week bye