#red wizard

[laowrart]

second attack!

[oh-moth]

humiliation ritual

[oh-moth]

🥩Mystery meat🥩

The source of the meat 🔞 Thank you @snekkinsnerpent for letting me steal your oc

[mask131]

I don't know if I posted about this before, but here is a good example of how the TV Tropes-derived vocabulary can lead to some pretty funny misunderstandings...

People on the internet, out of the website's Red Mage page, started talking very freely and commonly of the "red wizard" and "red sorcery". And they mean it in the sense the TV Tropes page brings it: as derived from the mechanics of Final Fantasy, with a very basic original trinity of magic users. White Wizards, whose "white magic" is about healing and strengthening people ; Black Wizards, whose "black magic" is about launching destructive attacks and wounding enemies ; and in-between the Red Wizard, who does not have any specific magic but rather uses both white and black magic to lesser degree than the other Wizards, but can still have both protective and offensive spell making him more versatile. This resulted in a lot of people speaking of "red magic" in game-mechanic terms, as meaning a "neutral magic between black and white magic", in the sense that it is actually a "jack of all trades" magic, the sorcery of someone who can wield various abilities in a world where said abilities usually are strictly split into very different (if not incompatible) functions/roles/specialization.

Problem is, when I first saw the term used online and saw people discuss it, I didn't know anything about Final Fantasy. Yet I was interested in esoterism, occultism, myths and legends, so forth and so forth... And I knew of a "red magic" explicitely referred to by this color and which was presented as the "third of the colored magic", and "in-between black and white magic"... But the red magic I knew about was a term used by occultists and esoteric practionitioners to refer to sex magic and love spells... I can let you imagine the deep confusion I was left into.

Yet the trinity also was there. The same way "green magic" can be used to refer to any type of herbal use in magic, "red magic" was used to designate a magic influencing emotions and desires, mainly attraction, in order to perform supernatural deeds related to love, romance and sexuality. And it was presented as "between black and white magic" in the sense that "black magic" was evil because it was always to harm others or do nefarious things, and "white magic" is good as it is to help, protect and guide, and "red magic" due to its... specific nature was an ambiguous magic standing at the edge, if not beyond, of the morality divide.

I doesn't help that the Red Wizard of Final Fantasy was actually inspired by D&D Bards (the same way their White Wizard is just a Cleric) and thus the seducing, erotic, sexual connotations can still be found somehow deep down...

Speaking of D&D, the only other time I saw such a specific trinity was in their Dragonlance setting, where the main "schools" of magic are again White, Black and Red meant to correspond to the alignments of classic D&D. White wizards being "Good" because they believe magic is to help other and make peoples' life better, Black wizards being "Evil" because they only see magic as power, are driven by ambition/desire to control, and are ready to have any type of cost or price if it means strengthening their spell ; and the Red wizards being "neutral" because all they seek about is to understand, explore, study and advance magic purely for the sake of research and knowledge and experiences, and nothing more. (There's also a divide between them of the various basic magic disciplines of the game - with the Red magic being more focused on Illusion and Transmutation).

It is quite interesting to see this trinity come back here and there, when you know of Pastoureau's color-history works and his presentation of black, white and red as the original, primary color palette of civilization.

EDIT: There's one avoiding or subversion of this trinity with "The Black Magician Trilogy", where you have a vaguely similar good-bad-neutral trinity with its colors, but it avoids the black and white coding. Here the "red wizards" are the Warriors practicing offensive arts, as opposed to the green-clad Healers here... well, to heal bodies and minds, and the "in-between" are the purple-dressed Alchemists. With here "Alchemy" being a catch-all term for "everything that is not fighting or healing" - chemist wizards, architect sorcerers, mathematician magicians, weather-predicting mages, etc...

[cleric-of-ilmater-and-sune]

Why do the evil people always gotta look so dang cool?

[legion-art]

He's half of my soul, as the poets say...

[legion-art]

based off that one picture you know the one

[dungeons-n-dragons-n-dumbasses]