I hate the IDEA of hard magic at this point
I have to admit, my tolerance for people bloviating on about magic systems and what makes one good versus another one bad, is wearing very thin these days.
Probably unfairly, I blame Timothy Hickson. He did his own thing which had its own issues but it was ok. It's just that his videos got popular enough that it seems like everybody just kinda took his take as gospel instead of actually doing the work he was doing of trying to extrapolate and learn what he could from Brandon Sanderson's work of developing thought around the. use of magic in fiction.
I haven't heard anyone deviate from Hickson's definitions of hard and soft magic in years. Hickson's definitions aren't actually what Sanderson said. The take is still attributed to Sanderson though. Which makes me strongly suspect that most people these days actually reads the essays Sanderson wrote about his thoughts and opinions that he had developed into his three laws of magic. Which is a shame, they're quite good. Much better than what has been done with them. Until the general popular definitions seem to have actually BECOME how Hickson defined it in his early Hello Future Me videos, while he was learning.
I've actually got four of Hickson's book sitting in my giant TBR pile of creative writing texts that I simply haven't gotten around to. At this point he's really DONE THE WORK. So I'm curious if he fits his own mold and has developed it better or switched his ideas around.
Sanderson's Laws of Magic essays are here by the way:
1st Law: An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic.
2nd Law: Limitations are greater than powers.
3rd Law: Expand what you already have before you add something new.
I should remember to add these to my rec list instead of just the link to the videos of his 318R creative writing classes at BYU, which are also very good and worth looking up.
One of the things I actually deeply admire about Sanderson is that he does take a moment of intellectual humility and specifies that he developed his laws out of a difference in taste from a panel he was on where he disagreed with other panelists who were also successful fantasy writers and that these are not hard and fast universal rules that cannot be bent or even broken but they are steeped as best he is able in his working experiential knowledge of being a successful fantasy author in order to try and accommodate both points of view, not merely elevate his own as best even as that is where he concentrates.
Everyone else I've run into makes the nod to that but I haven't yet dealt with anyone who really does much of any work there beyond the lip service to the idea that alternatives work.
The really deep problem is that most of us talking about magic are not actually accomplished authors of magic with lots of experience in the mass audience reaction to our work depending on the variables we tinker with. We usually have some inkling of how things are working for ourselves and our close associates but that is a quite limited base of critical response to work with. Sanderson CAN do what he did because he simply has significantly more to work with than most people do. Sanderson not only has the experience of professional practice with his own aesthetics, he has the experience of forcing himself into the aesthetic box of other authors. He's simply, significantly better qualified than most people who write on this subject than the extreme majority of people who do. That's just how it is.
We might have the chops, we might not. Generally, we don't really know. But to be completely fair, part of doing this sort of thing is doing it confidently, even if you aren't actually confident. Confidence is necessary. So I can't begrudge anyone their speaking authoritatively.
I do begrudge the fundamental flaws in the argument though. And they're everywhere. They're so commonplace that they betray the other really deep problem of the incestuous echo chamber that this sort of information and advice is developing inside of. It's a naturally self selecting audience, with limited experience in practical execution of the subject and breadth of source materials for examples of the subject, both primary and secondary.
I don't think the ideas have been around quite long enough for there to be any major tertiary sources.
I don't think there are enough secondary sources that can make any kind of conversation that could fuel tertiary material from the comparison.
Partly because most of the people doing this work don't have enough primary texts under their belt to realize this isn't covering it. And most of them share so many of their primary sources and a deep attachment to the same endeavors because of the self selection of the audience, that the argument for the primary line of thought to seem apparent.
IF everybody has read Brandon Sanderson's books as THE exemplar of "Hard Magic," Played a buttload D&D as their primary source of worldbuilding play experience, read Lord of the Rings under the impression that it is both the origin and magnum opus of Epic Fantasy, hangs around on r/magicbuilding because that's where you go, has uncritically digested the hero's journey as how genre fiction works, has gotten into LitRPG because it is really capturing that kind of fun which you don't really have time for anymore because of adulting, and - in spite of the quite different population statistics around all those previous data points - are mostly white protestant christian men from the United States in the first half of life THEN there's a real finger on that scale, the measure is highly biased in and of itself.
It's not universally true. I quite like the worldbuilder I watch who is a middle aged woman from northern Europe. So I know there are plenty more out there but there is a definite lean in who is thinking about these things and their backgrounds and what they are consuming as the basis for forming these opinions.
And it's not universally bad. The stuff they're saying absolutely can work as it is. It's just too small a pond to represent the sea that it is being presented as.
You can make a "hard magic system" as they describe it, if you want to. It will work. And that you want to will probably up its ability TO work. Because this IS a self selection issue. The people most likely to really hunt down rules of magic building are going to be the people most likely to enjoy playing with rule systems for fun. People who aren't as interested in that kind of interactional systems logic puzzle simply aren't going to look as hard for such things. Unfortunately, they're still going to get exposed to it by osmosis. So it is going to leak into them as the way things SHOULD be done as the default.
Once they get that message, even if they push back and try to go argue for the "soft magic" that they like, they'll find they're doing the work from scratch because so little has been developed for them, while the "hard magic" people have all this codified material ready to go. They can whip out 100+ videos on this on demand, pull up a quote from Sanderson, and conveniently ignore that all these ideas are descended from one point of initiation and we've pretty much just been in the process of iteration rather than debate and synthesis.
The equivalent level of critique work is not being done. There equivalent level of alternative systems work is not being done. And that's a lot of work for one person to do. I expect most would simply give up on sight. But that inherently means that the system that is iterating is flawed as a general basis of what a person should do. It is too limited, even within its own local cultural setting.
I suspect it is actually part of why LitRPG is taking off. No shade intended. I like LitRPG. But I think it is growing as much because of the author side of it, which conforms to this line of thought which has been going on long enough that it predates the LitRPG market, as it is growing from audience demand. Again, no shade intended. There's plenty of fun to write in it and there's a good lineage from other genres that it is drawing from when it is all ticking along smoothly. But it is fairly perfectly iterative of this idea of Hard Magic as it is experienced by the people who are thinking the most about it and have the least experience of challenges to it.
But trace it back to Sanderson instead of going with Hickson's work, that idea isn't there.
There isn't such a thing as a hard magic SYSTEM or a soft magic SYSTEM. It's a subgenre distinction of texts. It's not what the author CREATES as much as it is what the audience CONSUMES. What makes it hard or soft isn't the behind the scenes mechanics. It's the same differentiation between hard and soft science fiction. One shows you the clockwork of how the science works and one does not. The authors developing the story can use the exact same methodology of development behind the scenes but produce either kind of work depending on how much they SHOW to the audience.
Does the audience understand the magic well enough to correctly extrapolate what can be done with it before the text shows that that particular use can be done? That makes it hard magic. Not the rule set itself, how well the audience can work with it. To do that, the author does need to understand it at least that well themselves but that's it.
If the audience can't understand the magic well enough to correctly EXTRAPOLATE (not merely anticipate) what can be done with the magic before the text shows them it can do that, it's soft magic. This in no way compels the author not to develop rules or concepts. They can have an intense understanding or not. Their understanding is immaterial. It's the audience's ability to work with it that matters. Plenty of soft magic actually DOES rely on audience anticipation of the correct spell to solve its problems. Soft magic tends to make a habit of showing the basic idea of the ultimate spell solution by having a lesser version of the same spell cast early on in the text.
Note that this exactly conforms to all three of Sanderson's Laws. It fulfills them all eloquently. It uses what is already there, it (usually) does not overcome a fundamental ultimate limit because it has been shown to be possible in another form already, and because it has already been shown the reader already understands the magic in principle. They simply didn't see it in this precision application.
That's what I mean by accommodation. Sanderson's rules aren't about Hard Magic in specific, they're illustrating the debate between the two different sets of expectations. He's setting up the spectrum of what these things mean.
It's later iterators who have divvied things up and presented this internal definition of this is what hard magic is: a back end system developed by the author that explains how the magic works in an internally logical and consistent way, with strictly limited inputs and outputs determined by AT LEAST that internal logic, which can be demonstrated in a piece of art made according to that with relative ease to the audience by example so they can work out what that system and its internal logic is. And soft magic is NOT that.
Which is bullshit because it is tremendously ARTIFICIALLY constraining. Again, it can work well. But it describes far too little to govern how we think about these things.
It's the same problem of saying there was no Fantasy before Tolkien or no Fantasy that wasn't inspired by him. Yes you have to DEAL with him and his influence. In the same we all still have to deal with Harry Potter, it's simply too big and too influential to not consider how you're going to work in relation to it, whether you draw on any of it or not, because it is highly likely to be in your audience's brain. That doesn't mean you have to emulate it. That doesn't mean you have to contrast it. That doesn't mean you have to deconstruct it. It just means that you have to be aware where your audience might insert an idea from there that you don't want and head them off before they run with it.
That's literally why Zephyr has silk sheets in the Hidden and the Maiden. Because he sleeps in his closet and I describe the silk sheets before I describe the closet so the reader, who has probably read Harry Potter, possibly just before reading the hidden and maiden D:<, doesn't leap to any incorrect assumptions about my text because of associations with that other text.
And as we collapse what magic is "supposed" to look like, it doesn't only get incestuous in the discussions, it makes the breadth of what is most available collapse as well, forcing the mainstream of fantasy fiction along these lines when there are so many other possibilities to exploit and enjoy.
