Date: 2015-03-19 07:40 am (UTC)
simont: A picture of me in 2016 (Default)
From: [personal profile] simont
But it's particularly evident in magic because the author has to invent a whole system from scratch, make it seem natural, and usually, have something dramatic happen in it later on without it seeming contrived...

Yes. In fact some of my favourite cases of books that achieve this are done with a well explained magic system – and the dramatic extra bit is basically a puzzle, in that there turns out to be a loophole in the presented rules that you can get some really good effects through, so the implicit challenge to a reader that way inclined is the puzzle game 'Can you spot the way to beat this system before I reveal it 3/4 of the way through the book?'. Not that you always have all the facts, but you usually feel as if you could at least have spotted the possibility of a loophole in this area. (Or better still, you actually did spot it, and then get to feel smug.)

With a not-explained system, if you want a magician character to go beyond some previous apparent limit without it looking like blatant plot-bodging, you tend to have to fall back on some other way of making the reader expect that they've got more power. For example, they just had a close encounter with a very powerful entity and absorbed some extra magicalnessness, or they've spent the last year on another planet getting extra tuition from super-elves, or they died and an archangel resurrected them with more welly, or whatever. You don't just get to say 'and then they had a really neat idea, aha!', because unlike the puzzly case above, if the author doesn't have to explain the idea then that's clearly a plot device they can whip out any time it happens to be needed, so it's unsportingly easy.
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