went to a book discussion

[calimac]

Today was the quarterly meeting of our mythopoeic book discussion group. Most of us were there in person. One attendee came in by zoom from 2000 miles away. Another came in person from 2000 miles away. She was visiting.

Our topic was Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones. I reported something I found it has in common with The Lord of the Rings, which is: that the movie is very pretty, but the book is far better. I would peg it as my third favorite of all DWJ novels, #2 being Archer's Goon and #1 Fire and Hemlock. One thing we liked about it is that the lead character is a very old lady, which is rather unusual, even though she's not really a very old lady but is under a spell. One thing we did not like about the movie is that it robs Sophie, for that is her name, of her agency, which is one reason why it's so boring but the book isn't.

One other thing making the book interesting that's absent from the movie is the mind-expanding glimpse of what is at least putatively our world from the viewpoint of an alternative fantasy world.

In the course of more general discussion about books we've read lately, I came across a new wrinkle in pronunciation. I'm used to Stephen Colbert pronouncing Gollum (gaul-um) as if it were golem (go-lem). But here somebody was pronouncing golem as if it were Gollum. The two words have of course nothing to do with each other. Gollum is an intensely human (for a sufficient definition of human), intensely tragic figure who has fallen into a personal hell through his own greed, and is trying to get out but never quite succeeds. A golem is a mindless robotic servant creature made of clay. They're nothing alike. Attempts to find a connection via folk etymology, which is postulating sources by what a word happens to sound like to the hearer, are an inane form of literary analysis.

I opined that some movie which I'm not going to name was passingly enjoyable to watch, but the supernatural part of the plot did not hang together. Others said that people like it that way. I had my doubts to this, but instead merely said that "I consider a dislike of incoherent and inconsistent magic systems to be a feature, not a bug."

Comments

[sturgeonslawyer]

> "I consider a dislike of incoherent and inconsistent magic systems to be a feature, not a bug."

I consider magic systems to be a bug, not a feature.

[calimac]

Any magic implies a system, a way in which it works. But it doesn't have to be spelled out and emphasized in a mechanistic way, which is the sort of thing I expect you mean by 'magic systems' when denigrating them.

However, when you don't work it out, even without making that explicit to the viewer or reader, then sometimes you become incoherent and inconsistent in its application, and that's what I'm denigrating.

[sturgeonslawyer]

That is an aspect of "magic systems" which I particularly abhor; even in the realm of TTRPGing, before COVID brought our gaming group, after so many years, to an end, I-as-gamemaster was moving toward a dice-free and rules-free format.

But, to me, there is something inherently chaotic about any magic worthy of the name. It may have rules for us rule-bound creatures to follow in invoking it, but once invoked, it will do as it will do and there is no way to truly control it.

[calimac]

"it will do as it will do and there is no way to truly control it."

Then that's the system, the way in which it works. And as long as the author makes sure there aren't inconsistencies and incoherencies - which are not the same thing as "it works one way this time, another way another time" or "we don't understand why this happened" - that's OK.

In the case I was referring to, the problem was with a particular tool the heroes used to do their magic, or not. Sometimes they used it for the purpose, sometimes it had nothing to do with it. It wasn't that it worked sometimes and not other times, it was that the entire premise of the movie kept turning on and off randomly.

[sturgeonslawyer]

Wow. I don't know what movie you're referring to, but (unless there were some kinds of magic they could do with the dingus and some kinds they didn't need it for), it's kind of pointless.

It seems to me that by your definition pretty much any description of magical devices or events fits into some system or other, and - using your definition - I'm okay with that; but it's not the definition I use. Rather, I'm talking about any set of explicit and reliable Rules that magic only and always obeys. That's not magic, that's just technology by other means. If it ain't mysterious, it ain't magic.

(And, no, "we don't know why it works" isn't the same as mystery. Physicists don't know why the Universe works the way it does, they seek equations -- many of which I certainly don't understand! -- to describe how it works, but any discussion of why is either "it works this way because of other equations at a deeper level" (i.e., water has the properties it has because hydrogen atoms and oxygen atoms behave in certain ways, and atoms behave those ways because protons and electrons behave in certain ways, and...), or else pure speculation of the order of "Why is there something instead of nothing at all?" -- but I wouldn't call physics magic.)

[calimac]

It was, as I said, a passingly enjoyable but not really very coherent movie.

When I wrote "magic systems" I was quoting myself from the meeting, and that was just the term that came to the top of my head. No, I was not thinking specifically of Rules-oriented systems, and in fact I'm on record somewhere as disliking all such systems, except in specifically humorous material. In Harry Potter, for instance, say the words and wave the wand and the spell nearly always works, and if it doesn't, something has gone wrong which you can diagnose and fix. It's like auto repair. It's not magic, it's engineering - or so I thought until I realized that this kind of magic was originally imported into fantasy lit by the Unknown Worlds writers from The Golden Bough, where magic works this way.

I like magic that's tentative, mysterious, magical. I have a leaning towards magic that works the way charisma works. It's moderately reliable, but it doesn't always work, and it can't be taught: you either have the talent or not.

[sturgeonslawyer]

Your last paragraph: Exactly.