Automoderated users, Autopatrolled users, Bureaucrats, Comment administrators, Confirmed users, Moderators, Rollbackers, Administrators
213,530
edits
Young Wizards: Difference between revisions
no edit summary
(RoC) |
No edit summary |
||
| (One intermediate revision by one other user not shown) | |||
Line 24:
* ''Games Wizards Play'' (Coming Sometime): Nita, Kit and Dairine coach contestants in a wizardly contest to win a year-long apprenticeship with Earth's Planetary Wizard, but all does not go as planned.
{{
* [[Action Girl]]: Almost all the female characters classify as this. Yes, even girly Carmela. (Curling iron=laser gun.)
* [[Adults Are Useless]]: Mostly averted. The younger the wizard, the stronger their magic, to make up for the lack of experiences. They still sometimes have to consult Senior Wizards though. In one of the books, someone muses that young wizards are better able to sacrifice themselves. However, in ''Wizards at War'', {{spoiler|the older wizards lose their powers and forget about magic. Without the advice of the older wizards, the younger wizards are very confused about what to do next. The point of experience is shown here.}}
Line 42:
* [[Because Destiny Says So]]: An odd take. "There is no such thing as coincidence" is practically the wizard credo, yet their entire system is based around choice. It essentially boils down this: the ''big'' things that happen are up to the decisions of mortals. All the little things that ''lead'' to those big things, not so much.
** basically the [[Powers That Be]] will get the right person to the right place with the right tools to do what needs to be done, the hardest part is usually figuring out how to use the tools in question.
* [[Call on Me]]{{context}}
* [[Carnivore Confusion]]: Wizards can talk to any animal and even vegetables and the Wizards Oath is about preserving life, yet wizards still need to eat to survive and cats aren't about to give up the pleasure of hunting mice and rats. Most of the time it's better not to think of this but there are in-universe justifications:
** ''So You Want To Be A Wizard'' addresses this when Nita talks with the rowan tree about the war the trees fought (and won) against the Lone Power to make the world ready for humans, fully knowing that humans would not always be so nice in return.
Line 49:
** Nita acknowledges at one point that vegetables (on Earth at least) are less upset about being eaten than they are about being wasted. Waste contributes to entropy which is what the wizards work to counter. By that token, sport hunting is also discouraged (in ''A Wizard Abroad'', Nita warns a fox who's been pestering nearby farmers to make himself scarce before the locals' planned foxhunt).
** A better example is when Filif (a sentient tree-alien who's also a wizard) comes to visit. Dairine suggests "something vegetarian" for dinner, and then has to explain to Filif why they're not really murderous maniacs. Later, she decides to keep Filif (in a human disguise) away from the salad bar in the food court, because he'll think it's a massacre.
* [[Cast From Lifespan]]: An (unfortunately) somewhat common tactic. Often, the more impressive spells will require more energy than the wizard currently has to cast, so they have to find an alternate way. For instance, when Nita goes up against the Lone Power in ''High Wizardry'', she uses a shield that costs her a year of her life for each attack made against her it deflects.
* [[Chekhov's Gun]]: Carmela's {{spoiler|closet world gate}}.
* [[Comic Book Time]]: No more than four years' of story time pass from first book (published in 1983) to the ninth (published in 2010), yet each novel is ([[Technology Marches On|technologically]]) set in the year it was published. And only a few ''months'' pass between books seven, eight, and nine.
** However, the older books are being edited to avert [[Technology Marches On]]. The ebooks, first, but eventually the print copies will be changed, too.
* [[Contrived Coincidence]]: Used and lampshaded repeatedly in the story; the [[Powers That Be]] are so fond of using apparent happenstance and coincidences to get wizards to be in just the right place to do their jobs that they can often be heard repeating the phrase "There's no such thing as coincidence" to themselves and each other.
* [[Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?]] and [[Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu?]]: To be expected in a series where human teenagers fight [[Satan]]... and some of the instances are [[Crowning Moment of Awesome|pretty dang awesome]].
** There's also an in-character moment of this in book seven, when Nita and Kit visit an alien world and see a recording of that species'
*** "Seem" being the key word there.
** During the climactic scene of ''High Wizardry'', Nita uses one of the simplest spells she knows and
* [[Digital Bikini]]: {{spoiler|The [[Message in a Bottle]] on Mars communicates by creating holodeck-like simulations of fictional Marses. Kit gets dropped into [[Edgar Rice Burroughs]]' [[Barsoom]], complete with [[Green-Skinned Space Babe]]. Said [[Green-Skinned Space Babe|Babe]] is wearing a [[Chainmail Bikini]], rather than the [[Stripperiffic|jewelry-as-clothing]] featured in Burroughs' story. Kit wonders whether this is because of [[Censorship Tropes|something built into the magic]] or his own mind chickening out on him.}}
* [[Downer Ending]]: {{spoiler|''Wizard's Dilemma''}}
** Well, really, most of them are kind of bittersweet.
** Wizards At War. {{spoiler|Roshaun's deathlike disappearance, Ponch's deathlike [[Ascended to A Higher Plane of Existence]] status, and the fact that they barely succeeded, at the highest possible cost... Well, not the highest possible, but pretty close.}}
* [[Early Teen Hero]]: The heroes range between ten and fourteen, depending on the character and the book.
* [[Embarrassing Middle Name]]: Nita really hates her middle name "Louise". Why? Long story... that NOBODY KNOWS. Grrr.
** Also the incredibly weird story behind Carmela's middle name, Emeda. Though Carmela doesn't seem to mind.
Line 78:
*** They can do even cooler stuff if they get access to the kernel, and everything is right there in the man pages. The Young Wizards universe basically runs Linux. So I guess the Speech is bash? Or Perl?
**** [http://www.xkcd.com/224/ mandatory xkcd reference.]
* [[Gadgeteer Genius]]{{context}}
* [[Gambit Roulette]]: Later books reveal that everything that's ever happened in the universe is in many ways {{spoiler|a complex series of events planned out to turn the Lone Power good again and bring It back into the fold}}.
* [[Geometric Magic]]: Spell diagrams are constructs written much like mathematical equations and wizards come up with a slew of inventive ways to make them portable.
Line 88:
* [[Heroic Sacrifice]]: Used so much in the series, it's almost a joke. Don't get too attached to any character to whom Nita and Kit give a nickname!
* [[Humans Through Alien Eyes]]: the cats in the ''Feline Wizards'' series.
* [[Inconvenient Summons]]{{context}}
* [[In the Name of the Moon]]: The traditional greeting to the Lone Power, some variant of "Fairest and fallen... greetings and defiance!" Just because you're fighting [[Satan]] doesn't mean you have to be ''rude'' about it.
** There's also that no wizard in the universe expects the Lone Power's eventual permanent defeat to be brought about by killing it -- largely because that's ''impossible''. What they ''do'' expect is that eventually, in the fullness of time, {{spoiler|the Lone Power will finally surrender and redeem. And that's going to take long enough on its own, so no need to make the wait even longer by pissing it off with adding insult to injury. Even if/when does redeem, as an Eternal Power outside of time, it's not as bound by chronological causality as mortals are. Its evil self is/was/will be messing with Wizards in the future simultaneously.}}
* [[Journey to the Center of the Mind]]: In the sixth novel, ''A Wizard Alone'', Nita and Kit travel into the mind of an autistic wizard.
* [[The Joy of X]]: ''So You Want To Be A Wizard''.
* [[Killed Off for Real]]
* [[Language of Magic]]
* [[Little Miss Badass]]: Dairine and Nita both. Given how young wizards tend to be chosen, this trope is to be expected.
* [[Mage in Manhattan]]{{context}}▼
▲* [[Mage in Manhattan]]
* [[Magical Computer]]: Literally; though Nita and Kit have book-form Manuals and the animals tend to listen to the ocean or wind or whatever, some of the newer human wizards have their manual in laptop or iPod form (a [[Mac]] laptop, no less, coincidentally. Either Duane's been paid a lot by Apple Computers over the last 20 years or so, or she ''really'' likes Macs...)
** It can give the impression that the computers in question resembled Macs mainly because of the symbolism of having their logos be [[Rule of Symbolism|an apple without a bite out of it.]] (Think Adam and Eve.)
Line 112 ⟶ 111:
* [[Neural Implanting]]: Combined with [[Brain Uploading]] in the third book.
* {{spoiler|[[Official Couple]]: Nita and Kit, as of the end of ''A Wizard of Mars''.}}
* [[Place Beyond Time]]: Timeheart
* [[Portal Network]]: The worldgates. Carmela has one {{spoiler|in her closet!}}
Line 126 ⟶ 124:
* [[Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness]]: The wizard's manual describes plain old things like teleportation in insanely impossible-to-understand words. Justified in that magic is based on telling the universe what you want it to do in a very specific manner. You ''need'' to be able to split hairs and use precise diction. Especially when you want to do things like bring air with you on your jaunt to the moon. If you miswrite a name, the named changes to fit.
* [[She's All Grown Up]]: {{spoiler|Kit and Nita both realize this about each other in ''A Wizard of Mars''}}
* [[Some Call Me... Tim]]: Fred the sentient [[wikipedia:White hole|white hole]], Ed the Shark and Filif the tree-like alien.
* [[So You Want To]]: Be a Wizard?
Line 142 ⟶ 132:
* [[Sympathy for the Devil]]: A common theme in the books. Especially present in ''High Wizardry''.
* [[Talking Animal]]: though still they have their own dialects. Everything understands the Speech, but that doesn't mean that it has to be their main language system.
* [[Thoroughly Mistaken Identity]]: Happens to {{spoiler|Kit, sort of}} in ''A Wizard of Mars''. It's... complicated.
* [[There Are No Therapists]]: Subverted. {{spoiler|Nita receives counseling from her school's psychologist after her mom's death. At first she thinks of it as a waste of time because [[You Wouldn't Believe Me If I Told You|she can't talk about her real problems.]] However, when she takes the chance of greeting him in the traditional manner of wizards he responds in kind.}}
Line 155 ⟶ 144:
* [[Voluntary Shapeshifting]]
* [[Wake Up, Go to School, Save the World]]: Particularly memorable when Nita has to explain to the school guidance counselor in the eighth book as to why she's going to need a couple of weeks off from school. {{spoiler|It helps that he's one of the very, ''very'' few Muggles in on the whole wizardry thing.}}
* [[Will Not Tell a Lie]]: Even when not speaking in the [[Language of Truth]], wizards try to avoid lying, since when your job is [[Rewriting Reality]] using words, lying is a Bad Idea.
* [[The World Is Always Doomed]]: Not surprising, given that the [[Satan|Lone Power]] is the enemy of the protagonists.
** Amongst wizards, a "[[Busman's Holiday|wizard's holiday]]" is somewhat of an inside joke, being a "vacation or pleasure trip that rapidly turned into something else, usually involving [[Saving the World|work]], but that was still pleasant in a strange way, simply because of the change."
* [[World of Silence]]: In ''High Wizardry'', {{spoiler|Dairine's mobiles planned to do away with entropy on a universal scale, creating a Universe of Silence as a side-effect. In fitting with the trope, they are persuaded otherwise when she links her consciousness to theirs, allowing them to understand the importance of human experience.}}
* [[Words Can Break My Bones]]: The entire premise of magic is that wizards can learn to speak the language the universe understands and ask it to do things for them. Since they are wizards, the universe is obliged to do these things...for a price.
| |||