motivating the masquerade

[marycatelli]

thought up a new in-universe motive for the masquerade where the mundanes are unaware they are surrounded by magic.

The mundanes dun it.

Now, that's a real easy one to motivate.  Leaving aside the perils that such powers put them in, they could also easily do it out of spite.  Or hopes that no longer trusting on magic would allow them to find their own way.

The bear, of course, would be their having a way to do it.

It could blur into the magicals being the ones to create a magical barrier -- especially if it has to be guarded and protected from breakage.  Once a long, long, long time ago, a mundane did the magical king a great favor -- or tricked him into a boon -- and the price was that the magical beings had to erect and maintain a magical force that would separate them.

For the mundanes to have done it themselves would require their -- hmm -- learning the magical weakness.  Perhaps they put significant items -- rowan or iron -- in significant magical locations to bind the magical beings.  Or perhaps they just popularized something to keep them off.  Say, iron. (Which means no urban fantasy. Magic would have to live in the country, or the wild, to avoid the iron.)

Comments

[ext-1641287.livejournal.com (from livejournal.com)]

Here's a simple one: One fairy-tale hero gets a wish. He wishes for the masquerade. The exact terms of the wish (always important) determine the forms of leakage in the masquerade.

For example, if he wishes, "I wish magic would never have anything to do with ordinary people again," a masquerade comes into effect, but you aren't covered by it if you aren't "ordinary." After a while, the truly ordinary people who never see any magic begin to feel there's something uncanny about people with six fingers or mis-matched eyes or who are seventh sons of seventh sons, or whatnot -- beyond the surface peculiarity -- because one sees some of the low-SFX side-effects of the things that happen to them, and sometimes they tell very strange stories (often while crying into their beer).

Or perhaps the wish isn't enforced by mere power of magic but by the superintendence of some magical being(s), so the leakage changes with whatever the current wish-enforcers consider "ordinary." ("There's nothing weird about having red hair!" "_I've_ never seen it before.")

Or the wish could be "I wish magic would never bother people who have no magic." Again, construal is everything. "Never bother" might mean that magical beings can't make the first move. But if you go looking for a soothsayer, witch, wizard, or leprechaun, on your own head be it.

Earl Wajenberg

[marycatelli]

The precise boundary does much for possible plots.

[marycatelli]

Oh, I have it. The subjective perception of the person.

Hence, the self-esteem movement, masterminded by a human collaborator, to make more and more people vulnerable by inflating their egos until they, delusionally, think they are not ordinary.

[ext-1641287.livejournal.com (from livejournal.com)]

...so that the dupe has no more chance than a special little snowflake in hell.

[marycatelli]

There are a number of possibilities. They might just want to break the boundary.