The Wizard Competition
I don’t know why I’m suddenly remembering a TV show from my childhood except for the fact that I’ve been watching Only Murders in the Building.
Does anybody else feel like the wizard competition should have been an essential law of magic? Like once they reach a certain age, the magic in a family starts naturally coalescing together and unless all of the siblings but one give it up, they they all lose it regardless. (If I were writing a darker more adult version of that story though, it would be horrible terrible agonizing death for all but hey this is a kid’s show).
I mean, it would have been better than the very clearly arbitrary and nonsensical rules of the canon series. Like instead of “we’re making this happen and destroying individual rights and families for reasons that are never apparent,” it instead becomes “yeah, this sucks ass and we’d love it if you could all keep your powers, but that’s not the world we live in so we devised the competition to make it fair-ish.” Like you could even make it so the Wizard Competition is an imperfect attempt at making it so the parents can’t just pick their favorite or that it doesn’t become just a long list of the eldest sons getting magic over and over again.
Like there was once a full on revolution led by Alex’s new best friend Stevie and they never explained why she was evil and wrong because apparently enough wizards working together could overturn this unjust system? She was a heroic revolutionary imo. Whereas in my version of the story, you could make it so that, Stevie loses to her brother but runs away. The magic begins to coalesce and it is hurting both her and her brother so maybe she starts trying to steal other wizard’s magic. So this version is demonstrably selfish (rather than being so because the writers said so), unwilling to surrender herself and her magic even though she lost (you can even add a speech or scene where it reveals that Stevie always assumed she would win and supported the system up until the moment she lost). Whereas in canon, it just comes off as the Russo’s being the boots who crush the righteous wizard revolution (that was clearly well-peopled) on behalf of the Wizard Elite.
Yeah, the universe would still be cruel and capricious but that’s just the universe.
