#soft magic

[littlecakeclub]

[luxdollhouse]

Some days hope is not loud or brave or cinematic.

Some days hope is just getting out of bed. Making tea. Opening the laptop. Answering one email. Reading one page. Clicking two little bricks together and remembering that things can be built slowly.

I think that’s why I love collecting little Hogwarts pieces so much. They remind me that nothing beautiful has to appear all at once. Castles are built one wall at a time. Assignments are written one sentence at a time. A life can be rebuilt gently too.

Maybe today wasn’t perfect. Maybe it was messy. But I still added something small to the world, and for tonight, that counts.

https://throne.com/kimibunnii

[iphysalian]

Soft magic systems work best when, even if you or your characters don't have the answers to *why* something works, the if/then cause and effect still happens reliably enough that it is predicable and thus not at risk of a "because the author says so" plot hole.

Blorbo might not have the foggiest idea of why spamming their poison damage spell works on a lifeless object, but so long as that spamming poison works every time they use it, who gives a damn about the technical magical jargon behind the scenes?

So for anyone who doesn't want the intense hassle of a hard magic system, but worries about "because the author says so" deus ex machinas: It's all about consistency and predictability.

Like. Gandalf's whole bit is fire and light. All of his spells that he uses (at least in the films) are derived from creating fire, or creating light.

Lighting up the dark caves of Moria

Using enough powerful concentration of light to break that bridge in Moria

Burning that sigil into Bilbo's door in the Hobbit

Saving the fleeing cavalry from the Nazgul with a giant spotlight

All his cool fireworks

We have no idea how his magic works, but we know thereabouts what it can do, and it's never used to save the day over a main character's personal strength and purpose in the story. That gives it consistency and cues for when to step off the stage and let the non-magical hero do the work instead.

[whimsicalcharmbox]

[sayariastrology]

Pick-an-Image: Love & Relationships

Take a deep breath, tune into this moment, and use your intuition to choose an image. If you're drawn to more than one, that's okay too. Take what you need, leave the rest... (note that these are intended for an 18+ audience)

Pile 1

I see you alone. Someone is giving you the silent treatment or intentionally creating distance between you. In the silence, you are in reflection mode, feeling deeply and observing these emotions. Likely questions are coming up for you now that you hadn’t even considered before. Discovering the answers to these questions could lead you to an epiphany. There is a serious question here about settling. You’re asking yourself if this relationship could go all the way and become a source of joy again, or if you’re just resigning yourself to it because you’re tired, don’t feel like starting over, or fearing you won’t find another connection that’s as validating. When you view it objectively, the relationship looks good on paper. You may like how you feel receiving attention from this person, how you are viewed with this person, or the idea of completing milestones in life with them. But your intuition is saying something different. You’re losing faith in it. There is something that you are running from. It smells like the truth. 

The other person here was broken. They really didn’t want this relationship to fail. They felt shattered for some time, playing and replaying certain conversations and events in their mind. But recently, they’ve chosen to focus on letting go. They can see both the good in the bad in every situation and decided that protecting their peace is the priority at this time. They’ve been scorned but they also have practical matters to tend to. They can’t afford to drop the ball. They know they have deeper healing to do and that it will take time. If this is a marriage, it looks like they will be contacting an attorney soon. Either way, there is some legal matter they are moving forward with now

Pile 2

I see you taking control of your material world. The masculine energy within you is in charge and experiencing a glow up. There are new opportunities coming to you, perhaps because you’ve been on a health journey that has you feeling more confident and drawing more attention to yourself. I can also see you are putting more energy into your career goals, partially to distract from the failed realization of hopes around a relationship you are still clinging to. You are still secretly longing for connection here. It’s like this relationship had you frozen in time at one point, but I see you’ve tapped into that energy and transmuted it into fuel for self-improvement. I definitely see a health and fitness journey here, but it flows into all aspects of your physical reality. This shift is helping you to refocus, so you can finally move forward and heal into the best version of yourself.

This other person lacks trust around the relationship. They now see it as a bridge that’s been burned. They are not open to reconnection at this time; they feel it’s not possible and, overall, they are hopeless about the future of the relationship. Interesting that both parties’ responses are similar. This person was also focused on improving their material reality, but they seem to have hit a wall. It’s like they’ve plateaued. They may have suffered a major material loss on top of the loss of this connection; this sent them spiraling. They have to make up for lost time. This person is not in a position to put attention on this connection as they have to focus on their bounce back.

Pile 3

You’ve found happiness in a love affair with someone you are deeply attracted to. The chemistry between you is undeniable, and the connection, beyond s3x, is mutual, but you are keeping this on the hush. It’s a secret between you both for now. But, boy, is this secret burdensome. One or both of you may be married. If that’s the case you’re obviously very stressed that you will be caught. Otherwise, one or both of you want to avoid outside interference, opinions, and gossip around the connection either because they are high-profile or have a lot of people that are chasing them based on their appeal. This makes you feel a little insecure knowing they’ve got options. I can tell this is stressful because I see you wondering what they are doing when you’re not around. Are they sneaking around with other people? Is that why they want to keep it on the down low? Cooking up stories isn’t going to make anything better. Try to focus on enjoying their company. 

This person sees you as an escape from reality. They covet this connection, and they want to protect it. They view you as a flower that they are blessed with the privilege to stop and smell. Outside of your connection with them, they are stuck in an unfulfilling connection. I now have confirmation that this is a third-party situation. This person is entangled with an energy that is cold, bitter, angry, and petty. Though the future of this relationship is unknown, they are committed to enjoying the moments of sweet peace they have with you. They are dreaming about the day that they can capture you and hold onto you forever, to prolong this feeling. They see you as their person, their true match. Needless to say, it’s complicated.

[nyxshadowhawk]

A Retrospective on Harry Potter

Why did I like it in the first place? What about it worked? Where do I go from here?

I have decided to give up Harry Potter.

J.K. Rowling’s reputation now stinks to high heaven. At this point, she is quite indefensible. And even if that weren’t the case, she is not someone that I would want to associate with anyway. Meanwhile, the internet has not only turned against her, but against Harry Potter itself. An innocent question on Reddit, about which Hogwarts Houses the ATLA characters would be in, got downvoted to oblivion. Innumerable Tumblr threads insist that fantasy fans should get into literally anything else (suggestions include Discworld, Earthsea, The Wheel of Time, and Percy Jackson). And now that Harry Potter is no longer a sacred cow, there has been a recent slew of video essays that rip it to shreds, attacking it for its poor worldbuilding, unoriginality, and the problematic ideas baked into the original books (like the whole SPEW thing), etc. Those criticisms always existed, but now they’re getting thrown into the limelight.

It pains me to see such an ignoble downfall of Harry Potter’s reputation. If Rowling had just kept her damn mouth shut, Harry Potter would have aged gracefully, becoming a beloved children’s classic. I'd still plan to introduce it to my own kids one day (after Rowling dies and the dust settles). It’s not surprising that not all aspects of it have aged well, since it’s been more than twenty years since its original publishing date, and everything starts to show its age after that long. I acknowledge that most of the criticisms of the series that I’ve seen lately are valid, and I’ve read plenty of better books. And yet, when I return to the books themselves, even with the knowledge of who JKR really is inside my head, I still really enjoy reading them! There’s still a lot about them that I think works!

None of the other things I’ve read have had as collossal of an impact upon my identity, my values, and my own writing as Harry Potter. It’s hard to move on from it, not just because it’s something I enjoy, but because I have to literally extract my identity from it. I don’t know who I’d be without Harry Potter. I don’t know what my work would look like without Harry Potter. I don’t know how to carry it with me as just another piece of media that I like, as opposed to a filter for who I am as a person. So, with all that in mind, I have to ask myself why I liked Harry Potter so much in the first place. If I’m going to move on from it, then I have to be able to define and isolate the things about it that I want to keep with me. Something about it obviously worked, on a massive scale. So what was it?

It’s not the worldbuilding. The worldbuilding is objectively quite terrible, especially in comparison to that of other fantasy writers who knew what they were doing. At best, it’s inconsistent and poorly thought-out, and at worst it’s insensitive or even racist. Is it the characters? The characters are, in my opinion, one of the stronger parts of the story. But I felt very called-out by one of the many online commentators, who said that anyone who identifies with Harry is too cowardly to write self-insert fic. (I do not remember who said it or even which site it was on, but I distinctly remember the phrase, “Reject Harry Potter, embrace Y/N.”) The reason why people get so invested in Harry Potter’s characters is because they’re easy to project upon, and it’s possible that my love of Harry comes more from over a decade’s worth of projection than anything else. The incessant arguments over characters like Snape, Dumbledore, and James Potter ultimately stem from the fact that these characters do not always come across the way Rowling wanted them to. As for the writing itself, it’s decent, but not spectacular. Harry Potter is something of a sandbox world, with less substance than it appears to have and a crapton of missed opportunities, making it ripe for fanfic. For more than ten years, I’ve been doing precisely that — using Harry Potter as a jumping-off point to fill in the gaps and develop my own ideas, some of which became my original projects.

So what does Harry Potter actually have that sets it apart? Why are people so desperate to be part of Harry Potter’s world if the worldbuilding is bad? What, specifically, is so compelling about it? I think that there’s one answer, one thing that is at the center of Potter-mania, and that has been the underlying drive of my love of it for the past decade and a half: the vibe.

Harry Potter’s vibe is immaculate.

You know what I mean, right? It’s not actually a product of any specific trope, but rather a series of aesthetic elements: The wizarding school in a grand castle, with its pointed windows and torches and suits of armor, ghosts and talking portraits and moving staircases, its Great Hall with floating candles and a ceiling that looks like the night sky, its hundreds of magically-concealed secret doorways. Dumbledore’s Office, behind the gryphon statue, with armillary spheres in every single shot. Deliberate archaisms that evoke the Middle Ages without going as far as a Ren Faire: characters wearing heavy robes, writing with quills and ink on parchment instead of paper, drinking from goblets, decorating with tapestries. Owls, cats, toads. Cauldrons simmering in a dungeon laboratory. Shelves piled with dusty tomes, scrolls, glass vials, crystal balls, hourglasses. Magical candy shaped like insects and amphibians. A library with a restricted section. A forbidden forest full of unicorns and werewolves. That is the Vibe.

There are five armillary spheres just in this shot. They are unequivocally the most Wizard of tabletop decor.

There’s more to it than just the aesthetic, though. The vibe is present in something that writers call soft worldbuilding.

There’s a phrase that writers use to describe magic systems, coined by Brandon Sanderson: hard magic and soft magic. Sanderson’s first law of magic is, “An author’s ability to solve problems with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic.” A hard magic system has clearly-defined rules — you know where magic comes from, how it works and under which conditions, how the characters can use it, and what its limitations are. Examples of really good hard magic systems include Avatar: The Last Airbender and Fullmetal Alchemist. If the audience doesn’t understand the conditions under which magic can work, then using magic to get out of any kind of scrape risks feeling like the writer pulled something out of their ass. It begs the question, “Well, if they could do that, then why didn’t they do that before?”

You may come away from that thinking that having clearly-defined rules is always better worldbuilding than not having them, but this isn’t the case. Soft magic isn’t fully explained to the audience, but that doesn’t matter, because it isn’t trying to solve problems — its purpose is to be evocative. Soft magic enhances the atmosphere of a world by creating a sense of wonder. If your everyman protagonist is constantly running into cool magical shit that they don’t understand, then the world feels like it teems with magic, magic that is greater and more powerful than they know, leaving lots of secrets to uncover. Harry Potter, at least in the early books, excels at this. The soft magic in Harry Potter is what got me hooked, and I think it’s what a lot of other people liked about it, too.

The essence of soft magic is best summed up by this scene in the fourth film, in which Harry enters the Weasleys’ tiny tent at the Quidditch World Cup, only to find that it’s much bigger on the inside. His reaction is to smile and say, “I love magic.”

That’s it. That’s the essence of it. You don’t need to know the exact spell that makes the tent bigger on the inside. You don’t need to know how Dumbledore can make the food appear on the table with a flick of a wand, or how he can make a bunch of poofy sleeping bags appear with another flick. You don’t need to know how and why the portraits or wizard cards move. You don’t need to know how wizards can appear and disappear on a whim, or what the Deluminator is, or where the Sword of Gryffindor came from. You don’t need to know how the Room of Requirement works. Knowing these things defeats the purpose. It kills the vibe, that vibe being that there is a large and wondrous magical world around you that will always have more to discover.

One of the best “soft magic” moments in the books comes early in Philosopher’s Stone, when Harry is trying to navigate Hogwarts for the first time:

There were a hundred and forty-two staircases at Hogwarts: wide, sweeping ones; narrow, rickety ones; some that led somewhere different on a Friday; some with a vanishing step halfway up that you had to remember to jump. Then there were doors that wouldn't open unless you asked politely, or tickled them in exactly the right place, and doors that weren't really doors at all, but solid walls just pretending. It was also very hard to remember where anything was, because it all seemed to move around a lot. The people in the portraits kept going to visit each other, and Harry was sure the coats of armor could walk. —Philosopher’s Stone, Chapter 8

Many of these details don’t come back later in the series, which is a shame, because this one paragraph is super evocative! It establishes Hogwarts as an inherently magical place, in which the very architecture doesn’t conform to normal rules. Hogwarts seems like it would be exciting to explore (assuming you weren’t late for class), and it gets even better when you learn about all the secret rooms and passages. The games capitalized on this by building all the secret rooms behind bookcases, mirrors, illusory walls, etc. into the game world, and rewarding you for finding them. The utter fascination that produces is hard to overstate.

Another one of the most evocative moments in the first book is when Harry sees Diagon Alley for the first time, after passing through the magically sealed brick wall (the mechanics of which, again, are never explained). This is your first proper glimpse at the wizarding world and what it has to offer:

Harry wished he had about eight more eyes. He turned his head in every direction as they walked up the street, trying to look at everything at once: the shops, the things outside them, the people doing their shopping. A plump woman outside an Apothecary was shaking her head as they passed, saying, “Dragon liver, seventeen Sickles an ounce, they're mad....” A low, soft hooting came from a dark shop with a sign saying Eeylops Owl Emporium — Tawny, Screech, Barn, Brown, and Snowy. Several boys of about Harry's age had their noses pressed against a window with broomsticks in it. "Look," Harry heard one of them say, "the new Nimbus Two Thousand — fastest ever —" There were shops selling robes, shops selling telescopes and strange silver instruments Harry had never seen before, windows stacked with barrels of bat spleens and eels' eyes, tottering piles of spell books, quills, and rolls of parchment, potion bottles, globes of the moon.... —Philosopher’s Stone, Chapter 5

What works so well here is the magical weirdness of wizardishness juxtaposed against normalcy. Eeylops Owl Emporium is just a pet shop to wizards. A woman makes a very mundane complaint about the price of goods, but the goods happen to be dragon liver. Broomsticks are treated like cars. All of these small moments contribute to the feeling of the wizarding world being alive, inhabited, and also magical. It gets you to ask the question of what your life would be like if you were a wizard. What do wizards wear? What do they eat? What do they haggle over and complain about? What do they do for fun?

In Book 3, Harry enjoys Diagon Alley for a few weeks when he suddenly has free time, and we get to experience the wizarding world in a state of “normalcy,” when he isn’t trying to save the world. He gets free ice creams from Florean Fortescue, gazes longingly at the Firebolt, and engages with delightfully weird people. He’s a wizard, living a (briefly) normal wizard life among other wizards in wizard-land. And that is fun. It’s so fun, that people want that experience for themselves, enough for there to be several theme parks and other immersive experiences dedicated to recreating the world of Harry Potter.

One of the greatest things about Universal was its phenomenal attention to detail. You can hear Moaning Myrtle’s voice in the women’s bathroom, and only the women’s bathroom. The walls of the Three Broomsticks have shadows of a broom sweeping by itself and an owl flying projected against the wall, so convincingly that you’ll do a double take when you see it. Knockturn Alley is down a little secret tunnel off of the main street, and that’s where you have to go to buy Dark Arts-themed stuff. It’s really well done.

Another thing that contributes to the vibe, in my opinion, is that the wizarding world is slightly macabre. They eat candy shaped like frogs, flies, mice, and so forth, and they have gross-tasting jellybeans. In the film’s version of the Diagon Alley sequence above, there’s a random shot of a pet bat available for purchase. In the third film, when Harry is practicing the Patronus Charm with Lupin, the candles are shaped like human spines. In the first book, this is Petunia’s description of Lily’s behavior after she became a witch:

Oh, she got a letter just like that and disappeared off to that-that school, and came home every holiday with her pockets full of frog spawn, turning teacups into rats. I was the only one who saw her for what she was — a freak! —Philosopher’s Stone, Chapter 4

I remember reading this for the first time, and it just kind of made intuitive sense to me. I suppose it fits into the “eye of newt and toe of frog” association between magical people and gross things, but somehow it works. Unfortunately, this is retconned later with the knowledge that wizards can’t use magic outside school, but before that limitation gets imposed, the idea of Lily amusing herself by turning teacups into rats seems like an inherently witchy thing to do.

That association between magic and the macabre shows up elsewhere, as well. In The Owl House, Luz’s interest in gross things is one of the things that marks her as a “weirdo” in the real world. When she goes to the magical world of the Boiling Isles, weird and gross stuff is absolutely everywhere. That world’s vibe leans more towards the macabre than the whimsical, but it works because you sort of expect the gross stuff to exist alongside the concept of witches, and that they would be an intrinsic part of the world they inhabit. You don’t question it, because it’s part of the vibe.

(The Owl House is one of the few things I’ve encountered that has a similar vibe to Harry Potter, but it’s still not the same vibe. In fact, The Owl House outright mocks the expectation that magical worlds be whimsical, and directly mocks Harry Potter more than once. The overall vibe is much closer to Gravity Falls.)

The Harry Potter films utilize a lot of similar soft worldbuilding with the background details, especially in the early films that were still brightly-colored and whimsical. For example, the scene in Flourish and Blotts in the second film has impossibly-stacked piles of books and old-timey looking signs describing their subjects, which include things like “Celestial Studies” and “Unicorns.” When Harry arrives in the Burrow in the same film, one of the first things he sees is dishes washing themselves and knitting needles working by themselves, taking completely mundane things and instantly establishing them as magical. In that Patronus scene with Harry and Lupin, the spine-candles and a bunch of random orbs (and the obligatory giant armillary sphere) float around in the background. One small detail that I personally appreciate is the designs on the walls above the teacher’s table in the Great Hall, which are from an alchemical manuscript called the Ripley Scroll:

It’s all these little things that add up to produce The Vibe.

Obviously, much of the vibe is expressed very well in John Williams’ score for the first three Harry Potter films. The mystical minor key of the main theme, the tinkly glockenspiel, the strings, the rising and falling notes that mimic the fluttering of an owl, the flight of a broomstick, or the waving of a wand. That initial shot of the castle across the lake as the orchestra swells, as the children arrive at their wizarding school:

If you grew up with Harry Potter, just looking at this image gives you The Vibe. The nostalgia hit is definitely part of it, but The Vibe was already there, back when you were a child and you didn’t have nostalgia yet.

In my opinion, only Williams’ score captures this vibe — the later films, though their scores are very good, do not. But the soundtrack of the first two video games, by Jeremy Soule (the same person who did Skyrim) absolutely nails it. This, right here, is Harry Potter’s vibe, condensed and distilled:

This is why I feel invalidated by the common advice “just read another book.” I have read other books. I’ve read plenty of other books, many of which are wonderfully written and have left an impact on me. But there’s still only one Harry Potter. To date, there’s only other book that has filled me with a similarly intense longing for a fictional place, and that is The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. That book deliberately prioritized atmosphere over everything else in the story, and actually lampshades this in-universe. The Night Circus has a plot and it has characters, but it’s not about its plot or characters. It’s about the setting and its atmosphere. It swallows you up and transports you to a fictional place that is so evocative and so magical that you just have to be part of it or you’ll die. And even then, The Night Circus has a different kind of vibe from Harry Potter. In this particular capacity, there’s nothing else like Harry Potter.

The thing is, I don’t think Rowling was being as deliberate as Erin Morgenstern. (In fact, given many of Rowling’s recent statements, I question how many of her creative choices were deliberated at all.) She was throwing random magical stuff into the background without thinking too hard about it, which works when you’re writing a kids’ story, but stops working when you try to age it up. Actually, scratch that — soft worldbuilding is definitely not just for kids! The Lord of the Rings has a soft magic system, for crying out loud, and Tolkien is the original archmage of worldbuilding. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you that prioritizing atmosphere over meticulousness is bad worldbuilding. That is a valid way to worldbuild! Not everything needs to be clearly explained, not everything needs to make sense. The problem is that Harry Potter doesn’t balance it well. Certain things do have to be explained in order for the magic to play an active role in the story (and the setting of a magic school lends itself to that kind of explanation), but no rules are ever established for the kinds of magic that need rules. When you begin thinking about the rules, you’re no longer just enjoying the magic for what it is. At worst, you begin running up against the Willing Suspension of Disbelief.

It wasn’t actually the “aging up” of the story that did it in, per se, but rather, the introduction of realism. The early books were heavily stylized, and the later books were less so. A heavily stylized story can more easily maintain the Willing Suspension of Disbelief. That’s why, for example, you don’t ask why the characters are singing in a musical — you just sort of accept the story’s outlandish internal logic, and the inherent melodrama of it doesn’t take you out of the story. Stylized stories are more concerned with being emotionally consistent over being logically consistent. The later Harry Potter books changed their emotional tone, but without changing the worldbuilding style to compensate.

In addition to the more mature themes and darker tone, Harry Potter introduced more realism as it went, but Rowling did not have the worldbuilding chops to pull this off. There’s the basic magic system stuff: When you begin thinking about it too hard, something like a Time-Turner stops being a fun magical device, and starts threatening to break the entire story. Then there’s the characters: Dumbledore leaving Harry on the Dursleys’ doorstep in the first book is an age-old fairy tale trope that goes unquestioned, but with the introduction of realism in the later books, it suddenly becomes abandonment of a child to an abusive family. The exaggerated stereotypes of characters like the Dursleys become tone-deaf. The fun school rivalry of the House system is suddenly lacking in nuance. And then there’s the shift in tone: The wizarding world that we were introduced to as a marvellous place is revealed to be dystopian. You start thinking about how impractical things like owl messengers are, you start wondering if Slytherin is being unjustly punished, the bad history appears glaringly obvious, the quaint archaisms become dangerously regressive. Oh, and the grand feasts are made through slave labor! The wizarding world suddenly feels small and backward instead of grand and marvellous. J.K. Rowling’s bigotry throws it all into an even harsher light.

This is why I’ve always preferred the early books and films to the later ones. There’s a lot of things I like about the later ones, but they’re not as stylized — they don’t have The Vibe. Thinking about things too hard is just a necessary condition of adulthood, but it’s still possible to tell a dark, mature story that is highly stylized. I really think JKR could have better pulled off that shift if she was a more competent worldbuilder. But it is painfully obvious that she did not think things through, and probably didn’t understand why she had to. In her defense, she did not know that her story would end up being one of the most scrutinized of all time. As it stands, her strength in worldbuilding was in the softer, smaller, deliberately unexplained moments of magic that were there just to provide atmosphere. And there were less and less of those as the books went along.

Pretty much all the Harry Potter-related content released since the last film — including Cursed Child, Fantastic Beasts, Hogwarts Mystery, Hogwarts Legacy, Magic Awakened, and that short-lived Pokemon Go thing — have been unsuccessful attempts at recreating The Vibe. In fact, the only piece of supplemental Potter content that I think had that Vibe down pat was the original Pottermore, back when it was more of an interactive game. And of course that got axed. That was right around the time things started going downhill.

Some of the art from Pottermore’s original Sorting quiz.

So what now? Well, that’s the question.

I think I can safely say that The Vibe was the reason I liked Harry Potter. It’s the thing I still like the most about it. I’ve spent years chasing it, like an elusive Patronus through a dark wood. If I can capture and distill that Vibe, and use drops of it in my own work, then perhaps I won’t need Harry Potter anymore.

I'm gonna write the story that I wish Harry Potter was, and when I'm a famous author, I won't become a bigot. I'll see you on the other side.

[columba1234]

Hey Ben and Holly fandom, I need some help describing the show's Fairy Magic System please? I'm in the process of doing my Future AU and I need to properly understand it. I know it has:

An introduction post about the magic system in Ben and Holly's Little Kingdom

- Soft magic: It doesn't have much rules, but fairies need wands to cast spells, the wands can be sick and not waterproof, and no magic in No Magic Day. Moreover, the only magical limit I've seen is the number of spells the caster knows (which can be improved by further learning and practice).

- Appearance: Magic in Ben and Holly appear as white sparkles of light (can be compared to white glitter). In the winter or space, fairy magic would change into neon colours to stand out (which is a design choice that I love:

- Transformative: The characters use magic to transform something into the other. Eg: frogs, cats, other animals, etc.

- Unpredictable: How many times the magic went wrong in the series? I've lost count of it.

- Effects on the caster: Fairy toddlers have trouble controlling their magic, which makes it go haywire. Fairy kids and inexperienced casters have to use cast spells verbally, whereas experienced and adult fairies can cast them non-verbally.

- Spells and how to cast them: Rhyming and hand control are the most important aspects of a spell. A spell needs the right rhyming, clearcut meaning, and right hand gesture, or else it would go wrong. And all incantations is temporary, their effects will be worn off at some point.

- Wands: Strangely, the elves are the one who make the wands, and the general structure consist of a 6-pointed star head with faces, and a stick made from the fairies namesake plant, like this:

The internal structure of the wand consist of cogs and springs, truly a master of elven engineering to accommodate something as opposite and unpredictable as fairy magic. Inside the head has the structure that resembles that of a watch, with the faces eyes and mouth controlled by clockwork and magic (presumably from the wooden stick, since it needs to be specially grown). A spring in the stick's centre probably channels the wood's magic to the head, where it is used to control the cogs, then the wand's emotions, and being dispersed outside, in the form of fairy dust. (This is me attempt to explain wand mechanics, and for anyone who studies actual mechanics, please correct me for anything wrong). The internal structure looks like this:

Each fairy has a specific theme colour and has their clothes and wands in that palette and it does not have to be the same colour as the flower/fruit/plant, as shown by Holly (who should be red/green) and Rosie (anything but turquoise). In the reign of Vlad and Sharon, Millicent and Victor, (aka Granny and Grandpapa), the wands used to looked much bigger and crazier (with the exception of Mrs. Fig, whose wand looks normal). From King Thistle's reign to the present, all wands look like the model above, but with different colours and sizes depends on the fairy and their age.

- Healing properties: Fairy magic can cure anything but the common cold.

- Related to plants and life: the fairies' wands' handle is made from specially grown plants, which the fairies are named after). I think this is related to the transformative and healing properties of fairy magic, since plants grow and transform their appearances, and many of them are used medically. Plus, plants are life, and magical objects are sentient (Nanny's cookbook, the wands, etc) so it connects the plant/ life theme I guess 🤷‍♀️. Other observations from canon such as why the wands has faces, etc is in this ask by the blog @ben-and-holly-headcannon-blog (now deleted ;((()

This is the most I that I convey into words (my observational skills are not that good yet) . If you can describe it in more detail, please reblog me!

(Edit: I've accidentally made an introduction post about the magic system in Ben and Holly's Little Kingdom 😅)