Modest Medusa 799
(via demilypyro)
It used to puzzle me why it was such a common element in urban fantasy settings - particularly those of tabletop roleplaying games - that the reason magic stays hidden is because people don’t want to believe in it.
In the real world, people are desperate to believe in magic. You see it everywhere, from spirit mediums on TV to the horoscopes in the daily paper.
The idea that there’d be an institutional refusal to believe in magic is just so alien to the demonstrable facts of human psychology that it would seriously hurt my suspension of disbelief.
Talking cats and setting things on fire with your mind is one thing, but a human psychology that lacks an inclination toward magical thinking is simply bizarre.
Then it hit me.
The public’s refusal to believe in magic in urban fantasy settings is a stand-in for the perennial nerd fallacy that non-nerds are stupid, and only the special, nerdy elite have the objectivity to understand the world as it truly is.
Charming.
This kind of fucked me up.
This is a huge problem I have with any setting that has a Masquerade in place (see also basically any Santa Claus movie where Adults Not Believing In Santa is a plot point, but gifts not bought by those adults mysteriously appear in their houses every 25th of December). If magic is a force in your universe and a non-zero number of people can reliably use it to cause things to happen, then it’s not going to be this mystical thing that nobody believes in except the Chosen Few, especially not if people are kind of vaguely aware of the concept of magic as a thing and everyone just thinks it’s fictional. It’d be like the population of the world suddenly and collectively deciding somewhere around the Renaissance that electromagnetism didn’t exist, and the Chosen Ones making a highly-mobilised effort from then on to cover up lightning strikes. And then the protagonist of the novel zaps themselves on a doorhandle after they walk across a carpet in socks and suddenly they have to travel by bullet train to electrical engineering school and get in huge amounts of trouble if they ever use a battery-powered fan in a Muggle community.
It’s worse than that - often in these settings scientists are reluctant to believe in observable, repeatable magic. Have any of these people met scientists? We would go absolutely nuts for an entire aspect of the universe we hadn’t had a chance to study yet. You’d have to routinely assassinate people to stop magic being studied.
I always thought it was because of capitalisum that it had to be hidden
That humans had to be really passionate or earnest to understand magic
Like if magic was understood capitalists would mass produce it or kill people
this is why I love the Bartimaeus series of books: because magic is known and accepted by everyone but there’s a huge conspiracy in hiding HOW magic works (spoiler: humans have no natural magic, they absolutely need the help of djinni to do anything at all)
there’s it’s actually part of plot that humans, especially wizards who refuse to see this truth, it’s hubris
in FMA the power behind whats essentially magic treated like a science is a major conspiracy to the point where briefly the disconnect the power source and so the only one who can do the magic is someone from fantasy china who uses it like actual magic.
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Hey, this post may contain sexually explicit content, so we’ve hidden it from public view.
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🔥Fantroll Commission🔥
(via homeluck-deactivated20171205)
1) Put four pills on each side. The heavier side has the pill. Take the four pills from the heavier side.
2) Put two of the potential pills on each side of the scale. The heavier side has the poison pill.
3) Take the two potential pills. Swallow one. If you survive, you are holding the poison pill. If you die, you have eaten the poisoned pill. Either way you will find out which one it is for sure
1) Weigh 6 of them, 3 on each side
2a) If both sides are equal, weigh the 2 you didn’t use before.
2b) If one side was heavier, pick 2 of the 3 and weigh them. Heavier one is poisoned. If they’re even, it’s the 3rd.Well, all I can say is that we all have our methods and some of us are more willing to take a risk in the name of science
And here we see natural selection at work.
1) eat them all
2) wait for death1) reclaim the right to use the scale as many times as you want, on the basis that the right not to die is more important than some arbitrary limit, probably artificially created by a committee of rich fucks to further the grasp of their greed
2) seize the means of measurement
3) weigh as many pills as you want, as many times as you want, until you have identified the poisonous one
4) open an investigation on why there was a poisonous pill in the first place
5) arrest those responsible
(via mbulteau)
