Discover Top Posts Tagged with #featuring an

i thought of it today. this is it. this is the fantasy story that i want:

being a wizard is really freaking hard. it’s not enough just to have a natural inclination for magic, you have to spend years and years and years studying to be able to use magic with any confidence. and it’s notorious that the thing that trips everybody up is how incredibly difficult it is to produce the correct hand motions for a spell in exactly the way necessary for the spell to be successful. as a side effect over the centuries wizards have become known as this elite, fairly cold/ruthless bunch because you have to have the money and the time and the dedication to suffer through an absurdly long time at school learning really difficult stuff that requires a lot of sacrifice and concentration to be able to execute well.

enter our protagonist, who is of modest background but whose parents are immigrants who have been working really hard their whole life to support their child and try and elevate their social status a little bit so their child can have a better life. when routine testing reveals that the protagonist has the ability to use magic their family and friends and neighbors save up to be able to send them to wizarding school in the hopes that this is going to be their big break. the kid does fine at school - not at the top of the class, not at the bottom. doing well enough to justify the financial support from their community at home to continue their education, but hardly a prodigy or anything like that.

two or three years into their schooling (so enough that they have the basics of magic under their belt but still have a really long way to go), both of the protagonists’ parents pass away unexpectedly. they are overwhelmed with grief but manage to make it through the rest of the school year without failing any classes (wizarding school is a boarding school so the question of where they’re going to live is not immediately pressing). then when summer comes they’re sent to stay with an aunt and uncle who have also moved from their hometown since the protagonist’s childhood. however, since some members of the family are Deaf, they didn’t move to the same city the protagonist’s parents did, they moved to a town with a really high rate of congenital deafness where a village sign is used by everybody who lives there.

when the protagonist and their cousins were little they were really close so the protagonist used to be fluent in sign, but it’s been a really long time and they’re really rusty. so when they first move in with this family they’re still grieving for their parents and mostly just stay in the house, and their only communication is with their Deaf cousins, and so they also spend a lot of time trying to relearn the sign language that they lost.

as they start to get more comfortable staying in this house though weird stuff starts happening. magic happens even when the protagonist isn’t trying to cast a spell. which is really weird because magic is so notoriously difficult and the protagonist isn’t even particularly powerful and having extra magic happening is almost unheard of, vs. magic not happening when you want it to which is a pretty common thing to happen.

around the time these weird things start to happen the protagonist also is working through their grief about their parents’ deaths and also is getting more comfortable using sign language again so they start to venture out into the village more and more often. and as they spend more time around the villagers, they are absolutely mindblown to discover that most people in this town have some degree of magic. magic is just like a totally casual part of everyday life here. and as they start trying to figure out how the hell that’s possible when the most powerful wizards in the world had to spend decades perfecting their highly precise spellcasting techniques they finally realize: the handgestures that are required to cast a spell are literally just sign language. the parts that trip hearing wizards up - having to be careful about which direction your eye gaze is going and which way you’re leaning and where your spatial referents are and mirroring and all of these little details that are so hard to think about if you’re not used to paying attention to them - are as easy as breathing for people who communicate predominantly in sign language. and if you have even a tiny inclination towards magic, if you’re using sign language all the time, it’ll come out in some way, so it seems like everybody has magic. but it might not be a big deal if you don’t have strong innate abilities.

and what’s more, a lot of these people who are using magic all the time haven’t even received any training. they all receive some basic lessons on focusing and not letting anything disastrous happen as part of the normal elementary school curriculum and there are some people who choose to develop their magical abilities a little bit more but it’s pretty typical for people to never intentionally cast a spell, it’s just that sometimes when they’re talking about something magic just...happens and since it’s usually about whatever they’re talking about anyway it’s never really a problem. some people intentionally use magic to make household tasks a little bit easier but by and large magic is just a casual thing that happens and is not really remarkable in everyday life.

there are a lot of ways that the plot could go from there - the protagonist can’t afford to go back to school after their parents passed away so they stay in the village and get really good at a combination of educated wizard magic and casual Deaf magic; or they can afford to go back to school thanks to support from extended friends and family, and tell the wizards about what they learned, and either revolutionize magic or are scorned and have to work against the system; or something else entirely! there are so many directions the story could be taken depending on what narrative you want to tell.

but at the end of the day i think it would be amazing to celebrate Deaf people, and sign language, and the ordinary protagonist who has an interesting story not because of being special or chosen but just because of the experiences they have. plus imagine the amazing worldbuilding you could do about all of the cultural/societal impacts that magic would have and all of the ways magic would be incorporated into day-to-day life in this village.

i want this story to exist so badly now