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Damn that slaps so hard.
THIS. THIS FUCKING TROPE.
I find it strange that so much of anime is about the power fantasy of improving yourself, often with the help of some externality, until the protagonist can become self reliant. Then it turns out they are the ancient ubermensch and they can just clap everyone in existence. Maybe it was always about the power fantasy of complete domination for these otaku/weebs? :thinkin-lenin:
Hey yall, let’s imagine something different! What would a writer that was interested in more liberatory, justice based, social-istic (at least) themes do for a setting?
Like Xanth, everybody gets a unique talent but most are pretty useless? A story that starts off like the pic, but the pov characters are all the normals and they help lead a revolution to a more just world?
In my book’s setting, anyone can learn magic, but the time, teaching, and practice required isn’t allotted equally. Different learning styles and material conditions mean that people who would be talented sorcerers end up doing mundane work augmented by magic.
One part of the history though is that there’s been a history of laborers who used magic derived from servitude to cause a class-based revolution. The nobles who practiced fancy complex magic were few in number and lacked the experience to fight a long war with farmers who water crops by hauling thousands of gallons at once or cleaners who can sweep a castle with a single wind spell.
The tools of their oppression (being railroaded into service-based magic) became their liberation. Centuries later, that informs policy on magic and how it’s accessed.
Magic should be presented as universal, with everyone having access. Class position and education may affect your ability to effectively utilize it. In my book I treated it like literacy.
In my novel nothing stops any character from learning magic (better thought of as being based on chi but I’ve not picked a word) but some of the most powerful characters are able to inscribe chi “shortcuts” into people with no chi practice/ skills allowing them to use magical abilities without any formal understanding or awareness of chi.
In the setting for my book, everyone starts out human but during puberty they become a magical race based on their material conditions. Everybody assumes that the long-lived, super smart and extremely fast Elves are the best race that the best kids become when they get the best education, but the deep lore is that that’s what you turn into when you have a giant pile of money and those assumed advantages are the result of hundreds of years of propaganda and the only real difference being an elf makes is just that you consume three times as much as everybody else and live longer.
I have a magic system that makes people feel an inherent attachment to the world and people around them. The same way you would feel hungry if you don’t eat, you’d feel a natural disgust with yourself if you tried to hoard resources. Work is rewarding and being an adventurer solving problems is a lifestyle that you choose, retire from, or do casually.
In the continent of interest there are two different communes and one kingdom. The kingdom only lays claim to the land that they can reliably provide food for. Taxes are modest. Yet the existence of the inherent hierarchy disgusts the leaders of the communes. So when word gets around that the kingdom is raising an army, the leaders of the communes go through extralegal means to assist a vigilante, his friends, and a diaspora to attack the kingdom. Both communes decide to not intervene to keep the peace as a treaty demands and they look the other way as adventures fight in conjunction with the vanguard (e.g. “I don’t conscript them, how am I going to give them commands?!”)
No chosen ones, communes get plenty of screentime, and the main character develops from wanting to be a proud, pious knight for the kingdom into a drug smoking traveler who just wants to help solve the existential crisis facing the continent. There are lots of instances where people highlight how differently one could consider being part of a society like not paying for basic food and shelter. Tilling the fields in volunteer work and a popular excuse to exercise mana. BEEG BEEG LIBRARIES. People will only try to maim each other at worst during wartime and avoid carrying escalating weapons like swords and spears because they don’t want to kill each other (which highlights how dramatic it is to say you want to kill someone).
I like it! The main character of my book is a cat-person, and while she has been told all her life that that means she’s supposed to be dexterous conniving and flirtatious, she ended up being a 6’10" brick shit house of a woman who is super straightforward and physically imposing. One of her hangups is that she has still internalized her racial stereotype and feels bad for not living up to it, but over the course of the book she realizes that the magical phrenology she was taught growing up is all fake.
:lenin-heart: I’m in love already
Is this a published book or still something you’re working on? I haven’t read fantasy in a while and this sounds interesting. Also I’d much rather buy a book from a comrade than some publishing company.
Still working on. I’ll definitely be posting about it here when I’ve got the first draft done.
Alright, keep us in the loop comrade 👌
or how about magic is taught as something that comes from bloodline but in reality is just something anyone can learn to do
Ooh that’s a good inversion. You could have a magic kropotkin give up the royal secrets ans teach the masses magic lol
:kropotkin-big:
This is basically the entire plot of The Legend of Korra
I wish Korra actually showed that life was worse for non-benders. Other than the one scene with the gangsters Korra fights in episode 1, we don’t see at all how benders are the ruling class. We should have had scenes of proles walking to work while waterbenders surf past on a magic wave and drench them all in slime water. We should have seen non-benders struggle for warmth in their apartment that doesn’t have power, while a firebender lights a cigarette outside. Or a bricklayer breaking their back while an earth bender walks by and casually tosses it aside as a joke. Instead it seemed like most benders tooks care of most public utilities: metal police, electricity bending power grids, water bending healers. Give the Equalists a good reason to fight, don’t just cop out with “there are gangsters who bend.”
benders made up the entire police force & the governing body. even in the text of the show unsympathetic to the equal-guys those conditions are textbook intolerable. fuckssake the avatar’s son whose tribe is all of 6 people got an equal say to the earth, water, and fire people
But we don’t see any affects of that. The Metal Bending police aren’t shown oppressing non-benders. The Council isn’t shown making decisions that favor benders. They aren’t shown doing anything really other than responding to the Equalists. It’s a purely liberal understanding of government where representation is all that matters, aesthetics.
For instance the victory for non-benders is shown to be having an (I think elected) non-bender president. But what actually changes from that? Metal Benders are still the police, benders are still the military. My complaint is that they only show the surface level, which is why the Equalist movement feels so hollow.
But given it’s not hereditary and powder guns and scifi shit was very lethal, it felt balanced. But yes, the Amon situation is never resolved, and highly hinted in the post-comics of AtLA
it is hereditary did you not notice that the people with magic always have at least one magic parent
and for example the fire nation royal family seemed very sure that their kids would have magic
Yes, but bending still pops among non benders and viceversa. But yes, royal families do eugenics
On the other hand, we saw some identical twins in Book 1 of ATLA where only one was a bender
I’m not gonna say incest but I get a feeling if the ATLA was written by a more serious writer the fire nation royal family would be like the Habsburg minus the jaw.
Idk how else to read Azula’s character
A victim of monarchist brainwashing also. After all, one is not born a noble but made one through the system they are emplaced in.
Damn which JRPG is this from? Just kidding, it’s all of them.
The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin is the only fantasy story I’ve read that handles this trope correctly.
(Being written by a woman of color probably helps a lot).
And the dumb Poo People persecute the Specials and resent how special they are! :so-true:
I feel like i see this mostly in fantasy aimed at children and teens, but typically magic-powers stories don’t treat the powers like a social class
Korra is the major exception, except that it takes place in a society with a real capitalist class that includes non-benders, and the critiques of “bender supremacy” as presented by the season’s villain (intentionally) don’t make any sense.
the legend of Korra is just ideologically incoherent like that.
Every time a writer does this it’s like the biggest tell - you can see the moment where they realized they were describing the antagonist trying to change the world to the way things should be but then had to catch themselves and say “shit! We can’t show that! make bad guy blow up a hospital or something!”
Another example being the…lol…“Flag Smashers” from Falcon and WS. They were trying to give medicine and food to starving people, but because that’s cool and good, they had the main character literally bomb a hospital and say “that’s how you get through to these people” like ok disney we get it you hate the poors
Strong Dark Knight rises vibes. Getting rid of rich people and police means also getting nuked. The ony thing keeping us from nuking ourselves is that it would destroy capital.
