So, Your Protagonist Is In Danger Of Internal Magical Manipulation
(Spoilers for Jujutsu Kaisen / Avatar / Aurora / Shadow & Bone / A Darker Shade of Magic / Sousou No Frieren)
You're a valiant hero, sword in hand, standing in a vast meadow beneath a clear sky. Standing opposite from you is a combatant, an enemy, sinister and violent and hell-bent on your destruction.
You draw steel. You trade blows. You espouse ideologies. Day darkens to dusk, and the tides of the duel slowly but surely begin to turn in your favor.
You strike a decisive blow. Your foe falls to the grass, defeated, and you stand triumphant, sword raised, eyes hard, soon to end the struggle once and for all.
But before you can land that final blow, your foe does something unexpected--they thrust out their hands and squeeze, and suddenly, your body is no longer your own.
It's a terrifying sensation. Teeth chattering, muscles seizing, eyes bulging, you watch as the hands that hold your sword begin to lower from the death blow they were just a moment ago poised to strike–they are moving against your will.
Your enemy is controlling the blood in your body.
You watch in horror as those hands--your hands--take your sword and point it toward your chest. It's only then that you realize the danger that you are in. You have to do something, anything to stop whatever is being done to you. You don't understand the mechanisms by which you're being controlled, but you know that the danger to your life is immediate and real, and that if you don't act now, right now--
It's too late. Your foe's fingers close to fists, and you are skewered on your own steel. For a moment, just a moment, pain blossoms in your chest, but then lines of darkness dance in your vision and you are sinking down into nothing.
We just saw a character having their body controlled via internal manipulation. It’s a well-treaded trope in fantasy stories featuring element-oriented magic systems. When the different aspects of power exist not only in the world but also in the human body, it’s not necessarily a big leap for characters capable of controlling those elements to try and use their powers to tamper with the elements within their enemies. Water is a primary component in blood, and many of the same periodic table elements that constitute the earth and air around us can also be found in the human body. If the rain can be stopped, then why can’t a heartbeat? If a rogue lightning mage can siphon electricity from thunderbolts, then why can’t they tamper with the electrical signals inside a human body?
It’s a scary thought. It’s also a fascinating one. In a world where mages or alchemists or benders can control a person’s body without ever laying a hand on them, no one is ever really safe. Any conflict where one party can dominate the other by turning their body against them can be reduced to a non-issue. It’s an interesting conundrum for writers who implement this framework of abilities into their story.
When you have a ready supply of characters who can control blood or crush bone or hijack internal electral signals, then from an external perspective the audience starts to wonder why every conflict can’t be solved by those sorts of characters. If they’re in high enough supply, then what good are rogues or spellswords or rangers? For conflicts of increasing severity where players with wealth and influence are bound to become more and more involved, one would have to wonder why the most lethal operators aren’t appearing on the field in mass numbers to end any and all conflicts in the most brutal, efficient way possible.
Well, the easiest thing to do is to prevent that kind of elemental manipulation from ever being an in-world issue to begin with. Just because a water mage can control rain and tide, that doesn’t automatically translate to being able to control the hundreds of thousands of minute currents of liquid running through the human body. For many many characters, it’s simply a matter of skill and scale.
In Leigh Bardugo's Grishaverse, controlling the elements inside a person’s body is out of the ballpark of 90% of the Grisha population because of how insanely complicated a process it is. Even Corporalki, the order specifically capable of affecting the human body, can’t control complex organs like the brain because of how intricate it is. It’s technically possible, but it’s hardly a widespread problem.
Similarly, in Sousou No Frieren, in a world where magic is initiated and carried out solely by what mages are capable of visualizing, controlling the water inside a human body is impossible because such an act is legitimately infeasible to conceive. How would a person even go about that? What would those currents look like? How would they be controlled?
For stories like these, the magical characters in question are functionally incapable of affecting the human body because of how intricate, complex, and small its working systems are. Here, characters are safeguarded against being controlled because control is infeasible. It’s not necessarily a non-issue, but it’s as close as one could get.
Or, from another perspective, instead of making it difficult because of the complexity of the body, elemental manipulation could just be locked behind underlying mechanisms of the world.
In Aurora, all life forms are composed of a stable fusion of 6 elements. Mages can manipulate these elements in the atmosphere and environment, but they can’t manipulate them in living beings because of a construct called the soul barrier.
It’s an internal domain composed of omnipresent, unaffectable soul energy, and this energy prevents all but one kind of magic—Life–from affecting the internal elements of living things. It keeps people safe from having their internal Fire or Water or Lightning from being tampered with, and thus, most generally don’t have to live in fear of being controlled.
It’s a freer kind of world, where the natural horrors of internal elemental manipulation are generally locked behind existing worldbuilding mechanisms intentionally crafted to prevent important characters from having their bones crushed or their eyes burst in their sockets.
Other stories take a more head-on approach. Perhaps one of the most well-known cases of internal element manipulation, blood-bending, is only locked behind the insane level of personal skill, ingenuity, and insight necessary to master the bending ability. It’s a sub-type of water bending that focuses on a far more insidious application of the power. In this sense, blood-bending is locked behind a difference in psychology as well as the insane level of skill and inherent cruelty necessary to completely enforce one’s will on another living thing.
Blood-bending is a very real threat in the world of Avatar, but it’s not a widespread one because the population capable of performing it is largely unwilling and unable to bridge the psychological leap necessary to delve into what most consider a hideous abomination of a bending style. People within the world are saved from being manipulated by the inherent horror that water-benders of the world find in such a perverted distortion of their power.
But when morals fail, there’s always the law. In a world where internal elemental manipulation is a present threat that many people are capable of tapping into, then any rational government would step in to intervene. For powerful nation-states with competing agendas and ambitions, the widespread presence of individuals who can control others without being detected or exposed to dangers (AKA the perfect assassins) poses a distinct issue because that kind of power could be used against them.
Widespread persecution and violence is always a solid go-to. A water mage can’t assasinate the king if we purge the kingdom of all water mages. It doesn’t take much to get scared people angry and desperate enough to look for vulnerable groups to blame and attack for their misfortunes. If the ruling class fears the dangers posed by a small but superpowered population, then it can’t hurt to rally some peasants and set them on the smaller magical population to solve the issue without.
But in cases of more “just” nations, then peace-making de jure solutions might prove more humane than violent de facto ones. In V.E Schwab’s A Darker Shade of Magic, bone magic is literally prohibited and punishable by law. It’s not a crime to be a bone magician, no, but it’s most certainly a crime to use bone magic. No one wants to be puppeted. Therefore, bone magicians must not be allowed to puppet people. Those that do so regardless will have their magic sealed and will find themselves ostracized from society. Criminals. In this case, the use of internal manipulation is an illogical, immoral, and illegal action. Therefore, its practitioners are kept in check.
In some worlds, the best or the only way to defeat internal manipulation is through technique. Ordinary people are likely to be incapable of defending themselves, but those with similar powers might be able to repel or counter internal manipulation by attempting their own internal manipulation or through employing specific defensive measures.
This is a bit of a fringe story for an example of internal manipulation, but I’m gonna go a bit broader here and just talk about general internal manipulation for a second. Let’s look at Jujutsu Kaisen.
Here, internal manipulation is not meaningfully present on a widespread scale. It's extraordinarily rare, yet the mechanism by which it occurs is so deadly that nearly every Jujutsu sorcerer lives in fear of the technique that enables it. The Domain Expansion is a technique that allows an individual to trap their opponent within a set space where the caster's power is enhanced, and any and all attacks made by the caster are guaranteed to hit.
It’s the same sort of sure-fire press-to-win button as controlling blood or siphoning the electricity from someone’s body. In someone else’s domain, they’re already affecting you, manipulating you. It’s hardly the same as blood-bending, but the two shared the core trait of a loss of control. Sorcerers caught within a Domain Expansion only have one recourse–-relying on the refinement of their technique.
There are two routes that sorcerers can take to prevent themselves from being affected by an enemy domain. Each one is dependent on the internal skill of the sorcerer, or their technique. The sorcerer can create a simple domain to prevent the sure-hit aspect of the domain from taking place, giving themselves the possibility of dodging a previously sure-hit attack and suviving the domain.
It’s effective at staving off the immediate threat of the domain, but it’s an incomplete measure, as it doesn’t erase the unfavorable circumstances inherent to being on someone else’s home turf.
In dealing with a domain, the more effective maneuver is to overlay the enemy’s domain with one’s own—the two domains will clash, and whichever one is more refined will dominate the space. In this sense, preventing internal manipulation is predicated on having a technique more refined than the enemy’s.
So uhhhh yeah. Internal manipulation is a really fun and really scary concept that I like a lot. Personally, I feel like it should maybe usually be the case that characters who live in a world where there’s a non-zero possibility of getting their hearts exploded in their chests by hostile enemies account for that possibility as best they can in case of a fight but maybe that’s just me anyway okay bye thanks have a good night.
