Wealth Is Magic
Apr. 11th, 2025 04:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tresfoyleA thing I've observed in my time reading entirely too many light novels for non-recreational purposes is that the contemporary fantasy slice of the milieu tends to all embrace essentially the same formalized "magic system." The relative uniformity and popularity of the idea seems, to me, indicative of Some Things.
If you're not familiar, your average shelf-filler isekai plot will eventually lay out how magic is done in it in more or less the following terms:
1. you form a mental image of what you want to have happen. This may or may not be forcibly narrowed around an elemental or functional theme.
2. you circulate and gather your internal reserves of make-shit-happen juice—mana, aether, od, whatever you want to call it. if the setting gets particularly technical you might have to sculpt it into particular patterns or do shit with "formulae" or recite incantations.
3. you expend your gathered make-shit-happen juice in the volume appropriate to the desired effect, and it takes place. Not uncommonly, your mojo comes in actual honest to god individual units of MP like in a video game (because often it literally works on video game rules).
In practice, most narratives that use this approach inevitably produce characters whose vast magical power is essentially an idealized version of a fat bank account. Whims are outlined, numbers are rattled off, budgets might nominally impinge on the matter, and lo, the problem is solved with a little flashy magic circle and a sentence fragment in italics.
A character's mana reserves almost never bottom out in a terribly significant way, and in nearly every one of these settings every magical person (if not every person period) has a comfortable passive mana income (tho the have-nots will have less aptitude and a lower natural ceiling for mana accumulation, due to a deficiency of genetic birthright or personal cultivation), and the expended mana is inevitably cycled right back into the order of things via ill-explored principles of diffusion (though lots of very intense magic happening for bad reasons might coalesce into "miasma," which just hangs around making things shitty and waking the occasional skeleton). This is all, plainly, a fantasy of idle self-replenishing wealth—the joys of being a self-made one-man owner class.
It overlaps rather neatly with how many of these books' protagonists are, more than heroes or schemers or explorers or any other enticing pulp role, entrepreneurs. An isekai hero is more likely than any other kind of fantasy protagonist to own a business and employ a workforce (if not several), vertically integrate their business to establish a monopoly, employ child labor (or just buy slaves. sometimes both!), and spend significant volumes of page space in what are, for all intents and purposes, board meetings.
Obviously this is hardly new. If magic has any coherent thematic role in the Harry Potter books—a surprisingly relevant body of fiction in the development of the contemporary light novel boom—it's as a vehicle for class mobility in a distinctly British mold: magic is at once a body of knowledge hoarded by ancient, moneyed, secretive institutions with elaborate internal hierarchies and ritual signifiers of one's place therein and an inherent personal capacity passed down from generation to generation like a recessive gene, surfacing once in a while in surprising places or not turning up in disappointing specimens of established germlines. Critically, the ins and outs of having magic (that is to say, being born right) and learning more magic (translation: being the right kind of student) matter a hell of a lot more than any sort of system behind what magic actually does; it can do anything, but first you have to be shown how if you don't already know how it's done.
It's interesting, then, that the fantasy worlds of contemporary Japanese pulp fiction tend to fully enshrine their magic systems as the justification behind their consistently occidentalist-Medieval trappings (or, in certain other stripes like romantic fantasy, a sort of pre-WW1 Krautcore sensibility) while they bask in modern-equivalent luxuries like sophisticated indoor plumbing, air conditioning, and healthcare, while also leaving the society of magicians themselves an anarcho-capitalist playground where it's not enclosed by the ultraparanoid rigidity of aristocratic life. Taken as a whole the phenomenon says the quiet parts of Rowling's imagined world very, very loud, sans its faint affectations towards Blairite passive necropolitics.
When Potter was in its pop-cultural ascendancy I held much more affection for Ted Naifeh's Courtney Crumrin comics, which were just as invested in magic as a vehicle for talking about status and wealth, but naturally took a decidedly New England approach to the whole idea. Courtney is, like the Potter child, from gormless lower-middle class stock, and, similarly, swept up into a hidden society of occult mystery and ruthlessly enforced secrecy by obscure family ties.
The difference is that in these books everything but the magic is bullshit. Magic, as usual, does whatever it has to to move the plot, but there isn't really any Special Potential any one person has. There is deep personal magic, but it practically has to be cored out of you after already tampering a fair bit with the magic that's already out in the world before you can use it intentionally. Magic is mostly just powerful secrets—hidden levers feeding into the dark machinery of the world. Anyone could do it, so naturally the people who already can keep a tight lid on it, not least because it'll mangle the unprepared, but mostly because they like their power where it is. Courtney's mentor, her uncle Aloysius, is heavily implied to not actually have any relation to her or her family whatsoever; he just picked a couple of easily manipulable and financially desperate stooges whose kid had the right configuration of intellectual curiosity, low tolerance for bullshit, and deep capacity for vicious, bloody vengeance to aim like a missile at an old boys' club he no longer wanted a part in.
I find myself wondering what a solid thematic counterpoint to the new model will resemble. Surely something is already taking shape.
If you're not familiar, your average shelf-filler isekai plot will eventually lay out how magic is done in it in more or less the following terms:
1. you form a mental image of what you want to have happen. This may or may not be forcibly narrowed around an elemental or functional theme.
2. you circulate and gather your internal reserves of make-shit-happen juice—mana, aether, od, whatever you want to call it. if the setting gets particularly technical you might have to sculpt it into particular patterns or do shit with "formulae" or recite incantations.
3. you expend your gathered make-shit-happen juice in the volume appropriate to the desired effect, and it takes place. Not uncommonly, your mojo comes in actual honest to god individual units of MP like in a video game (because often it literally works on video game rules).
In practice, most narratives that use this approach inevitably produce characters whose vast magical power is essentially an idealized version of a fat bank account. Whims are outlined, numbers are rattled off, budgets might nominally impinge on the matter, and lo, the problem is solved with a little flashy magic circle and a sentence fragment in italics.
A character's mana reserves almost never bottom out in a terribly significant way, and in nearly every one of these settings every magical person (if not every person period) has a comfortable passive mana income (tho the have-nots will have less aptitude and a lower natural ceiling for mana accumulation, due to a deficiency of genetic birthright or personal cultivation), and the expended mana is inevitably cycled right back into the order of things via ill-explored principles of diffusion (though lots of very intense magic happening for bad reasons might coalesce into "miasma," which just hangs around making things shitty and waking the occasional skeleton). This is all, plainly, a fantasy of idle self-replenishing wealth—the joys of being a self-made one-man owner class.
It overlaps rather neatly with how many of these books' protagonists are, more than heroes or schemers or explorers or any other enticing pulp role, entrepreneurs. An isekai hero is more likely than any other kind of fantasy protagonist to own a business and employ a workforce (if not several), vertically integrate their business to establish a monopoly, employ child labor (or just buy slaves. sometimes both!), and spend significant volumes of page space in what are, for all intents and purposes, board meetings.
Obviously this is hardly new. If magic has any coherent thematic role in the Harry Potter books—a surprisingly relevant body of fiction in the development of the contemporary light novel boom—it's as a vehicle for class mobility in a distinctly British mold: magic is at once a body of knowledge hoarded by ancient, moneyed, secretive institutions with elaborate internal hierarchies and ritual signifiers of one's place therein and an inherent personal capacity passed down from generation to generation like a recessive gene, surfacing once in a while in surprising places or not turning up in disappointing specimens of established germlines. Critically, the ins and outs of having magic (that is to say, being born right) and learning more magic (translation: being the right kind of student) matter a hell of a lot more than any sort of system behind what magic actually does; it can do anything, but first you have to be shown how if you don't already know how it's done.
It's interesting, then, that the fantasy worlds of contemporary Japanese pulp fiction tend to fully enshrine their magic systems as the justification behind their consistently occidentalist-Medieval trappings (or, in certain other stripes like romantic fantasy, a sort of pre-WW1 Krautcore sensibility) while they bask in modern-equivalent luxuries like sophisticated indoor plumbing, air conditioning, and healthcare, while also leaving the society of magicians themselves an anarcho-capitalist playground where it's not enclosed by the ultraparanoid rigidity of aristocratic life. Taken as a whole the phenomenon says the quiet parts of Rowling's imagined world very, very loud, sans its faint affectations towards Blairite passive necropolitics.
When Potter was in its pop-cultural ascendancy I held much more affection for Ted Naifeh's Courtney Crumrin comics, which were just as invested in magic as a vehicle for talking about status and wealth, but naturally took a decidedly New England approach to the whole idea. Courtney is, like the Potter child, from gormless lower-middle class stock, and, similarly, swept up into a hidden society of occult mystery and ruthlessly enforced secrecy by obscure family ties.
The difference is that in these books everything but the magic is bullshit. Magic, as usual, does whatever it has to to move the plot, but there isn't really any Special Potential any one person has. There is deep personal magic, but it practically has to be cored out of you after already tampering a fair bit with the magic that's already out in the world before you can use it intentionally. Magic is mostly just powerful secrets—hidden levers feeding into the dark machinery of the world. Anyone could do it, so naturally the people who already can keep a tight lid on it, not least because it'll mangle the unprepared, but mostly because they like their power where it is. Courtney's mentor, her uncle Aloysius, is heavily implied to not actually have any relation to her or her family whatsoever; he just picked a couple of easily manipulable and financially desperate stooges whose kid had the right configuration of intellectual curiosity, low tolerance for bullshit, and deep capacity for vicious, bloody vengeance to aim like a missile at an old boys' club he no longer wanted a part in.
I find myself wondering what a solid thematic counterpoint to the new model will resemble. Surely something is already taking shape.
