Maybe it's just cause I'm growing up. Maybe everyone thinks the world is ageing with them, that the prospect of something once so well loved is now looked upon as babyish or immature. It causes some to panic - and why shouldn't it? The idea you can never get back to when life was simple, when you took it day by day and never worried about the future. Never worried about war, politics, the environment, illness, death, the terrible things humans can do to each other.
Never worried.
These people have good reason to panic.
I don't know how I've lasted this long.
Perhaps I haven't, and I'm mad already.
Magic - pure, simple wand waving - is never used anymore. JK Rowling got it right in most aspects, and I think the reason she's so popular is that the initial idea of a school for kids with wands, broomsticks, cats and potions, is that is so darn simple nobody thought they'd get away with it. But she did. And how.
But now it's all shady, diluted magic, even those books and programmes about magic itself. Tithe and Ironside, gritty, 18-rated Faerie books, show magic as hazy and uncontrollable, best left alone.
Merlin, of all things, uses long Latin phrases the boy wizard hardly ever gets right first time.
Betwixt, by Tara Bray Smith, doesn't even bother describing the odd, instinctive magic it's characters use. A guy turns into a human Moth. What? How, why?!
Hell if I know.
Then there's the fact most things are entirely disowning magic altogether, and replacing it with it's greatest foe. Science.
Heroes is about a group of people who have certain strands of DNA that generated unique abilities.
Gone, by Michael Grant, features an unanswerable Lost-like conundrum that we know is linked to nuclear fallout.
Even one of the shows I'm the most faithful to, the fantastic Doctor Who, dismisses magic as nonexistent.
Martha: Is it real, though? I mean, witches, black magic, and all that? It’s real?
The Doctor: Course it isn’t!
Dudes. What's wrong with a couple of choruses of Abracadabra?
Regarding J.K. Rowling:
ReplyDeleteOne of my longest-held pet peeves in traditional fantasy is that, in most books prior to Harry Potter, magic was something you had no choice but to grow out of: Christopher Robin wandered away from the Hundred Acre Wood when he entered school, Little Jackie Paper grew up and simply forgot about Puff, and let's not even contemplate the horrible Problem of Susan in the Chronicles of Narnia. And, since magic represents the power to control your own destiny, and to bring your imagination into reality, having it die as soon as you reach adolescence is pretty lousy.
J. K. Rowling, however, created a world where magic is something you can grow into, rather than out of. Which makes it a good metaphor for wisdom.
Oh, I hated the last Narnia book and it ruined my perception of Susan completely.
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