this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2025
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All these stories about zoomers not knowing how to do computer stuff is making me want to write a fantasy world where magic is prevalent but most people do not bother to know how it works or question it beyond its surface applications, despite it being the basis for all military and economic might.
Well I wanted to write that, but then I realized I was talking about FMA: Brotherhood.
Or Eragon, lol
Or Mad Max.
I mean Mad Max has a reason for that, because of the harsh setting and difficult lifestyle where everything is trying to kill you. You know... Australia.
I feel like the Empire in warhammer 40k operates on a similar premise, all there machune rituals and what not are just maintanance, but nobody understands the machines, so they'll just reenact what was shown to someone eons ago or what have seemed to cause some effect.
just like me blowing into NES Cartridges when a game would not start :D.
Smearing computers with weird oils and burning sage in a server room sounds crazy now, but rather that than try your luck with a customer service LLM.
You mean an Abominable Intelligence
Lmaoo thank you for this.
This is why all my stuff is painted red. It goes faster!
Don't forget to add some Speed Holes!
onward kinda has this, but practically everyone forgot magic
I wanted to like that movie more, just for the novelty. I got a strong impression that the story wanted to be a book, but it was forced into movie script shapes that didn't quite work?
That could be the least comprehensible critique I've ever written, but I did just wake up. If it doesn't make sense I'll try again when my eyes have stopped trying to close.
i got the impression it was meant to be made about 10-15 years earlier with jack black and michael cera instead of chris pratt and tom holland
Haha! That's already a way better movie tbh.
In sci-fi proper that is also a plot point of Isaac Asimov's The Foundation. The giant galactic empire collapses and all the scholars are holed up on a planet to preserve knowledge. They then go out to other planets and give technology, but everyone is so ignorant that it seems like magic and the scholars kind of roll with it.
In a similar vein is A Canticle for Liebowitz which is about an order of Monks whose goal is to preserve all technology and information after an apocalypse scenario. I think it may have been the inspiration for the Brotherhood of Steel.
It moves through time and shows how ignorance of technology can mix too easily with religious power.
What I really loved about Foundation was the sheer timescale of it. Too much Science Fiction is only on a scale of an individual doing something, and maybe it will follow a few individuals over the course of a few decades or even a couple of centuries and you're left to fill in the blanks, meanwhile Foundation is on a timescale of tens of thousands of years
It's also basically how the Adeptus Mechanicus operates in 40k. Lots of worshipping the old tech, preserving it, and there's some limited giant machines that they could never fathom rebuilding or even fixing so they're very protective of them
Also, basically my codebase at work.
To this day, I don't understand how wired telephones worked.
I mean, I kinda do, since I watched a bunch of YouTube videos explaining it. But then I kinda don't.
"So, like, you can just conjure up a gun out of a brick?"
"It's more complicated than that! You have to do a bunch of math and science and draw a circle and stuff"
"Okay, sure... but then you can just create a gun. Or you can science water into wine. Or any dirty liquid into clean water. Or medicine? You can turn dust into medicine. Using nothing but your brain and a stick of chalk."
"Well, yes! Isn't it cool!"
"And what did you say your title was, again?"
"The big fucking gun alchemist, why?"
Discworld's magic system is like this. The wizards often don't know why certain parts of a ritual or spell are in place, but it works so they don't touch it
Half of the plots of the Wizard books are about what happens when someone ignores that advice and does start poking at things better left alone. Wizards are only human after all, and the magical equivalent of a "don't touch; wet paint" sign leaves them so very tempted.
Ridcully would see a wet paint sign, take it down, touch the paint, then demand the Bursar to do something about "all the messes they keep leaving around here."
Basically every day I look at weird code as a programmer
Hello, can I suggest the package code for LXML? I once wondered why the fuck etree.tostring() returned a bytes object instead of a fucking string and made the mistake of diving into the function. Never again. That library is cursed script condensed from the haunted cries of forgotten pharaohs and inscribed in the blood of a newborn foal onto an ancient ash tree under Venus' vexatious gaze.
I got the impression that most Discworld wizards actually avoid doing magic altogether, because the way things work traditionally is way too risky.
Meanwhile a research such as Miss Level asks, and keeps a log of, what subspecies of henbane works best and does it work better if collected at midnight under the full moon?
While Esmé Weatherwax eschews most magic mostly, preferring Hard Work and Headology, even against Death. Unless magic is really required, when she digs deep into the strongest magic imaginable.
Ive seen at least one other anime that was like that, cant remember the title but the magic system was surprisingly fleshed out for a 12 episode anime
Edit: Akashic Records of Bastard Magic Instructor
This was one of my biggest gripes with the JK Rowling Wizarding World before Rowling herself gave me other reasons to dislike it
As a worldbuilding enthusiast who cares a lot about making it all hang together as a rich tapestry and all (come check us out at https://lemmy.world/c/worldbuilding btw) it really does chafe to see someone become a billionaire by literally only making their worldbuilding serve the plot and the tone, with no effort to make it internally consistent or even coherent outside of the main narrative.
What fantasy world can you think of where most people bother to learn how magic works?
Harry potter, they all go to wizarding school (not that HP should be used as a reference for world building...).
That's a series where people learn how to use magic, not a thing about "how it works". The series is very careful to never explain anything about the mechanics of magic, other than "incantations are a thing unless they aren't, willpower maybe matters, and quality of the magic wand is relevant except when it isn't".
This is something I think about a lot, and has been done well in fiction plenty already. My adhd wouldn’t just go away in a fantasy world. Sure I might have a burst of motivation for a while, but I probably wouldn’t magically be interested in studying and research just because I might be able to do some basic magic.
Disability in fiction is always going to be fertile soil imo because it's such a genuine aspect of the human experience. Even when fictional devices have answers for some things (a focus spell would be nice), there are still always personal struggles that are worth exploring.