Magicians in Society

[marycatelli]

The panel on magicians in society went off topic early.

Prolonged discussion whether it's a gift or a skill.  (Skill, please, for my sake.  Unless you make it somehow not a way to make your character a special little snowflake.  No, persecuting your special little snowflake doesn't administer a cure, it worsens things.)

Two basic structures for a magician in society.  They can form an elite and highly regarded layer of soceity.  Or they can be the poor perscuted pariahs.  The thing is, if you make them just part of society, you have either a comic story, or the background for a thriller like The Dresden Files.  The other two forms generate more story ideas that are inherent to them.

Of course, there's also the alternate America with magic -- Robert A. Heinlein's "Magic, Incorporated" or Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos.  Both of which feature invasions from other worlds, so to speak.  Eruptions, maybe?  But you need some conflict, and the setting didn't hold it inherently.

There's also the possibility of having a priest caste with magic, but that was late, with no time to get into it.

Also, this was the panel where a panelist tried, severally times, to stay up in the library allegedly haunted by Archbishop -- Law, I think.  They have his heart and his journal.  He's supposed to be bad-tempered, and frightens all the servants -- then, he was executed on trumped-up charges.

Comments

[izuko.livejournal.com]

In the anime series Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic, they go both ways with that. The magicians of Magnostadt were, first persecuted, and then the upper crust. Of course, things never quite work as hoped.

[marycatelli]

heck, you can be both simultaneously by attaining power by means that others don't approve us. Like trade.

[persephone-kore.livejournal.com]

Since "SCIENCE!" is at least semi-magic, the Sparks of Girl Genius kind of wind up as examples of both (separately or together), and that with it as a gift.

[marycatelli]

How very true. Though it's the ones out of the powerful families that tend to suffer the most.

[persephone-kore.livejournal.com]

I liked Payne's point about the vulnerability of Sparks with just enough to be identified and limited education/resources; there's only so much they can do, but it's enough to make new and exciting forms of trouble. Presumably some of them still turn it to advantage at home, but then Payne spends all his time with the ones who survived and ran away....

Tangentially, a friend of mine suggested that in that universe, some fairytale stuff might reflect what Sparks were doing at past levels of technology. A coverlet of bells that could be heard across nine kingdoms is totally something a Spark would come up with.

[marycatelli]

Oh, yeah, that sounds like a Spark coverlet.