Tag: essay

Classifying Mages

It’s been mentioned that trying to classify mages is difficult or impossible. But it’s also been mentioned that people have tried and they have created various systems for doing this. The reason is pretty straightforward. Even if these systems are intrinsically imperfect, they’re informative, and having language for easily describing someone is useful. The motivation for systems both informal and rigorous is easy to see. Theories about why they work the way they do are often very complex, and are largely beyond the scope of this note, a phrase you should get ready to see a lot.
Despite ignoring the underlying theory and the reason things take some of these forms, this is going to be a long note. It’s not important to fully understand the back-end reasoning in order to understand the story. In case you want to know the categories that are mentioned throughout the narrative but not to read the full essay, I’ll go ahead and list those up front. The main categorization system, aside from just going “that mage works with this specialty”, has five categories: Wizard, sorcerer, druid, shaman, witch. Wizards and sorcerers both work with physical forces; wizards do so using rational logic, while sorcerers work with emotion and intuition. Druids interact with the physical world, and shamans interact with the spirit world. Witches interact with living things.

Knowing this set of terms is enough to get by in the narrative itself without losing anything. The rest of this essay is just for people who are interested in the back-end reasoning I use for this, which (as usual) is much more elaborate and abstract than it first seems.…

Teleportation

Teleportation is almost impossible. For the vast majority of people, human and otherwise, it is completely out of reach, impossible; it is among the most complex and difficult types of working there is, in this setting. The reason for this goes back to something that was mentioned in the Magical Mechanics note: Location is among the most fundamental and difficult-to-change parts of the world. Any time you want to screw with spatial dimensions and the concept of position, things get difficult fast.

Now, to start, let’s define teleportation. What people in-setting mean by this is that someone is in one spatial location, and is then in a different spatial location, without having moved and without having engaged with the space in between.…

Sword Design

The bronze sword that Thorn is being compared to is called a kopis and is a traditional form of ancient Greek sword. It’s curved forward and shaped somewhat like a larger version of a kukri. It’s more sharply curved than Thorn and has a convex tip, for a number of reasons; this makes it less suitable for thrusting. Thorn is more similar in profile to some of the thinner forms of the Illyrian sica, which has a longer, thinner, and less sharply curved blade. Unlike a normal sica (or a kopis, or a khopesh, or a falcata, or a kukri, or…you get the point), Thorn is sharpened on both edges. There are a number of reasons for this, mostly related to how much more you can get away with as a swordsmith when the material you’re working with will be made supernaturally durable. Mundane blacksmiths have to manage an inherent property of steel, which is that harder (i.e., able to take and retain a sharper edge) alloys will also be less tough (i.e., they will be brittle and prone to shatter).…

Enthrallment

Thralls are a complex concept in this setting, and one which varies widely in execution. The basic concept of enthrallment is that a person is subjected to intense enough mental magic that their actions are effectively under the control of someone else. There are a ton of ways to do this, and pretty much all of them are pretty fucked up. Enthrallment is not at all the same thing as subtle mental influence, or even the kinds of high-intensity emotional manipulation which Capinera is capable of. There are qualitative differences that are somewhat hard to define but extremely significant.

To start with, enthrallment is a sustained state. It is not a spell you cast on someone once and move on. Capinera makes you feel something while you’re hearing her sing, but when the song is over you get over it. That’s a big part of what produces the qualitative difference. When the CIA was doing extremely unethical large-scale experiments with LSD (yes, this is a thing that really happened, and Project MKUltra is fascinating to read about in a horrifying way), this would be the difference between the people they dosed once during an interrogation and the people who were on a bad acid trip for six months straight in a mental hospital. One of these things is going to do a hell of a lot more harm to someone than the other, even though both are using the same drug and the same basic methodology. A thrall is like the second one. The enchantments applied to them are not transient in nature, and that matters a lot.

There are a lot of ways someone can go about this kind of magic. By and large, they’re going to be sorted into categories in two distinct ways, depending on which part of the experience is being discussed.…

Unreliable Narrators

Every source of information you get about this story is unreliable. This includes the things I say, to a degree; I don’t lie about the contents of the story, but there are plenty of things I omit, particularly spoilers about future story events or the hidden significance of some of the elements in the story and characters. I’m not likely to point things like that out in the comments, because the story is written from Kyoko’s perspective and I tend to limit some kinds of information to things she knows.

So, I’m unreliable. The information within the story is even more so. Every character has their own biases and agendas. Everyone has blind spots. Many people are either actively misinformed, reaching wrong conclusions, or simply lying. Kyoko’s narration is not an exception, and that the story is purely conveyed in that narration impacts what shows up in numerous ways. One of the major things I hope to do with things like interludes, in-universe documents, and extended notes is provide other perspectives, other elements of the story, characters, and world.…

Interludes

Interlude chapters are shorter pieces that I place between books. Some actually take place during the books, but I set them aside because I feel that interrupting the flow of the narration is more disruptive than it’s worth, particularly when the intention is that the story is fully intelligible without them. There are two basic types: Interludes, which are narrative stories, and documents, which are in-universe documents of various kinds. Both are optional, but they provide potentially valuable context for the books.

The reason for interludes is pretty straightforward. This story is written entirely in first-person limited perspective. That is to say, all of the narration is from Kyoko’s perspective, written in first person, and written with no additional knowledge beyond what she knows in the moment being described. One of the greatest strengths of this style, and the reason I prefer it, is that it allows the voice of that character to show through very strongly. Everything is seen from her perspective, which also showcases how her perspective works—what she prioritizes and pays attention to, what she ignores, the cognitive links she’s making. But this is also probably the single biggest weakness of this perspective, because Kyoko’s perception is not complete. There are events she’s not present for, and even when she is present, she isn’t going to see everything. There are details she doesn’t notice or doesn’t pay attention to, contextual meaning she isn’t aware of, assessment and interpretation she might get wrong, bias she introduces. This makes it feel real, but it does mean the reader isn’t seeing everything. Hence, there are side chapters which are meant to provide context and other perspectives.…