Doing In the Wizard/Headscratchers
- Why is Doing In the Wizard popping up everywhere now? It's on its way to becoming a Dead Horse Trope with its use. I mean, what ever happened to good old fashioned magic? Why is it no longer acceptable in storytelling? Now it seems that everything mythical or magical has to go through a scientific explanation. Vampires, Werewolves, everything. On the rare cases actual magic is used people complain about it not being realistic enough! What's the deal?
- Because the understanding that pretext and explanations are hardly worth something ceases to be all that common? The theological exercises (including parascientifical ones), accordingly, slowly raise in an affected area.
- can someone translate this into simple English?
- A wizard did it.
- To translate: "People are getting sick of A Wizard Did It, because if effect does not follow cause,
WE'RE ALL SCREWED!!!!!science is all a big coincidence." (People used to think that science was mostly just a bunch of coincidences, but there's enough science now that Occam's Razor says coincidence is far less likely than actual rules.)
- can someone translate this into simple English?
- Also, science fiction's really popular right now.
- Because saying "A Wizard Did It", in a setting that otherwise resembles our world, tends to be interpreted as lazy writing more often than "nanomachines", even when it isn't.
- To expand on that, Magic A Is Magic A often seems arbitrary, and magic in series that don't use Magic A Is Magic A tends to result in Ass Pulls. Making something based on science means the rules that govern it feel more solid.
- Just because we make Technobabbles about how scientific it is, doesn't really make it so. To quote Terry Prachett, "A lot of science fiction is fantasy with nuts and bolts painted on the outside." A possible corollary to that quote should be "A lot of Applied Phlebotinum is magic with nuts and bolts painted on the outside." In actuality trying to base magic on
pseudoscience doesn't really make things more solid.- It may not make it more solid, but it does make it a good deal more relatable, given that most of the viewership can't tell the difference between real science and plausibly fake science anyway. Fantasy can be very, very relatable, but even the best-written stuff doesn't have that visceral hit that even bad science fiction can provide, of drawing connections to one's own daily life.
- Just because we make Technobabbles about how scientific it is, doesn't really make it so. To quote Terry Prachett, "A lot of science fiction is fantasy with nuts and bolts painted on the outside." A possible corollary to that quote should be "A lot of Applied Phlebotinum is magic with nuts and bolts painted on the outside." In actuality trying to base magic on
- There are several positive outgrowths of Doing In the Wizard. By assigning actual properties to something that was previously considered magical, you can create interesting interactions. Take the most well-known example: Midichlorines (which doesn't really fulfill all of the Doing In the Wizard trope). By having them as an anchoring point for The Force, you immediately create a number of story hooks and properties that would not otherwise have been available or would have had to been Hand Waved in. You can have an objective test for Force potential, as well as strength in the Force. At the same time, there is an explicit weakness: a Midichlorine virus or some such is now theoretically possible that could kill someone's connection to The Force. There is also the possibility of being able to give people Midichlorines, though this can be as easy or difficult as the story requires. This kind of thing fires the imagination.
- Might not be the best example...
- Maybe off topic, but midichlorines are an indicator of force sensitivity, not a cause. There is no doing in the wizard at all there.
- Also, it isn't "popping up everywhere now." It is certainly more popular than it used to be, but it's far from omnipresent. There are plenty of franchises that have retained "The Wizard".
- A Real Life example of this is best put forth; in Roman Theaters a secret science of pulleys, levers, and ropes were used to make men fly, float, and vanish into the stage. People once though of these tricks as mystical (often because some performances were about divine beings)until someone understood how they worked. Again same thing in the 1880's with the Age of Invention where uneducated local folks were treated to the site of a steam train commented on the devices as if they were marvelous mystical objects until they were told how it worked. In theory, magic is perhaps at best explained in a setting of Doing In the Wizard as 'something not yet understood by current science' but once understood could be duplicated over and over again and used to test theories. Hence why this trope is sometimes used (or misused) often.
- To paraphrase Martin Hannett in 24 Hour Party People: "People have been telling stories that way for 20,000 years and quite frankly, it's boring me arse off, y'know?" We've had countless stories over countless centuries where it's been "the man turned into a werewolf because of MAGIC!" or "the wizard saved the day because of MAGIC!", where 'MAGIC!' kind of stands in for "we don't know how this happened, shut up", and for certain readers and creators, it's been done a lot before and gotten boring. Getting under the skin of why the man turns into a werewolf or how the wizard's magic works to help him save the day allows the author and reader to look at things in a new way; granted it's probably only a veneer of science, but it just makes things a bit different, and thus a bit more interesting. I also think that, on the whole, people are a bit more savvy, educated and curious about how things work (to a point, anyway) and like someone said above, handwaving it because it was just magic that no one really understands is a bit unsatisfying, and can even be taken as an insult to the reader's intelligence (as if the author's going "oh, our audience is stupid, we don't have to worry their tiny little minds with a reason behind all this...". Like the man said, the 'explanation' might just be technobabble, and it might not work all the time, but it at least gives the sense that the author's thought about it and is trying to come up with an explanation; it suggests a bit more effort than simply relying on a lazy handwave.
- Because the understanding that pretext and explanations are hardly worth something ceases to be all that common? The theological exercises (including parascientifical ones), accordingly, slowly raise in an affected area.
- One thing that been overlooked is the occult implications with magic. if a story has a boy finding out he's a wizard, some idiot going to take it as promoting devil worship. Pseudoscience is 'safer'.
- "Magic...mysticism...it's all just another realm's science!" -Batman
- ...Until it becomes this realm's science.
- Indeed. One interesting thing is that the scale between magic and science may be a misnomer; science is basically just categorizing phenomena based on repeated experiments. Physics are the things that do in the wizard; even if Batman were to categorize magic, that doesn't mean it's not magic anymore. Sadly, this is lost on most people.
- ...Until it becomes this realm's science.
- I'm a huge sci-fi fan. If you want scientific explanations, why not write a sci-fi story from the beginning? Magic is pretty elemental on its own; it's not simply "science, but less thought-out."
- Some writers don't seem to think the audience will accept flat-out magic. Which is hogwash, of course, since the usual Techno Babble that results from this trope is usually worse than no explanation at all.
- See, I agree that there's an idea that audiences won't just accept straight-up magic, but I don't think it's necessarily because the producers think Viewers are Morons. Frankly, flat-out magic can be a lot more insulting to an audience's intelligence than this trope, depending on how it's done, since it can assume that the viewer's stupid enough to accept anything without questioning it if the author just throws in a handwave of 'it's magic'. This trope, for all that it can go badly wrong, tends to assume the opposite; that the viewer's a curious, intelligent thinker who wants to know how something works. Of course, if the explanation's a whole load of bullshit technobabble it can backfire badly, but usually because the explanation doesn't work or makes no sense, not because explaining how something works is automatically a bad thing.
- The oldschool fantasy tropes are far less respected because the modern generation has no idea what quality is anymore.It's going to be hard to prove this wrong.And no, Harry Potter, Fantasy Lite, isn't going to help the argument any.
- Some writers don't seem to think the audience will accept flat-out magic. Which is hogwash, of course, since the usual Techno Babble that results from this trope is usually worse than no explanation at all.
- Back to Doing In the Wizard