Journal Time!

Magic is Real and I'm a Wizard | September 17, 2023

I'm writing this while actively moving into college. Well, not exactly, but I'm traveling on my way to traveling to the college that I will be actively moving into. But none of that is important and you don't care. What I want... no, have to talk about it Magic.

Specifically, the gathering thereof. The Magic of Gathering. No wait, it's some other preposition? The... Magic above Gathering. Oh whatever. You know what I'm talking about.

Feigned stupidity aside, I've finally learned a little bit from my boyfriend. And I have to say, as a card game it stands up. Yes yes, save your applause. I'm breaking new ground with my fiery new ideas here. I know. What I really want to talk about is the setting.

The setting, to my limited understanding, at its most rudimentary, is really boring. You play as a wizard. The creatures that fight for you are all summoned through spells. There are orks and goblins and elves and dwarves and paladins and knights. It is about as white and basic as it gets. Now of course they've added onto that extremely tired premise over time, but I don't know about it and subsequently don't really care.

It really is tiresome to see yet another big piece of media play on tired motifs of western folklore. In a vacuum, the whole mythos is cool. Very cool, in fact. I have seen it a million times before, though. And nobody is beating Lord of the Rings. I'm sorry, but nobody can. So why are we all still on this?

I think a lot of it is simply familiarity. It's really hard to get into another culture like that. Everything is built on top of one another; after all, mythology was all about delving into the very rudiments of our world. Having to consciously learn the ins and outs of all these new types of creatures is quite tricky. It is figuratively and more than a little bit literally learning a whole new language. Even great projects like Warhammer40k, itself built on goblins and shining (white) knights, sees limited appeal just by how dense it all is. It really is difficult to penetrate without having all of those ideas naturally flow into you through the cultural miasma all around you when you were a child.

It's challenging, but in the end rewarding. Playing with new characters is literally playing with new ideas. There are simply some metaphors and allegories that work better for some ideas rather than others. It fosters a wider lens than just the Western one. I don't wish to sound like I'm knocking the predominate Western mythological tradition, because in my heart of hearts I don't. I think it's really cool. I just think the rest is just as interesting, and worth grasping.

tl;dr Magic needs more than just pretty elf ladies for me to feel like it's got anything interesting going on.

Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible, and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer.

― J.R.R. Tolkien