Magic is the tool, not the theme, in Magicians

I’m getting into the Magicians quite a bit, but for while it was hard to pin down why.

First off, maybe I’m reading into it too much, but let’s see. While the literanazies usually comment that much of genre fiction is “adolescent” especially for it's love of the Chosen One trope, the Magicians is more of the collegiate version.

I'll skip over the two obvious spins of that angle, the post-Harry Potter commentary and the addiction allegory, though the undertone I was having trouble articulating about seemed akin to both.

It seemed more like the addition to being a "Chosen One" ... among thousands of other “Chosen Ones” and the sacrifices you make only validate your alleged uniqueness.

Harvard? Yale? Being in the 10% of special people in country? Bah. That pales in comparison to magic school. Suck on that valedictorians!

And yet the show is already hinting that every one of these special snow flakes are all headed towards a crash of realism out in the adult magic world. Just as every wizard graduate from Brakebills will learn that  high scores only puts more expectations to deliver in a world they are outclassed for, so goes it for mundane lawyers, doctors and academia.

You see that some are already finding justifications to avoid dealing with that realization. I.E. at least they are not hedge witches, or worse yet not one of the little people who have no magic. And the hope that if they are willing to keep pushing and sacrificing, they can prove they at least belong if not stand out among peers who are already standing above everyone else. And how those older and more cunning than them are manipulating their insecurity and ambition.

So I knew it's definitely a hubris of some sort,  sometimes, but then some characters use the magic as facade to remake themselves into what they want to be. "I am own greatest creation." Just as others had used magic as something to bury themselves into to hide from their personal pains

Then I realized where I had gone wrong. 

I had assumed the writing room had only picked one theme or one trope. A lot of shows and stories do that. In the past, that was a pretty solid way to go, but I think audiences are more savvy to that now. A show has to keep moving forward now a days.

 Example? Twenty years ago, the old "Hero is stuck in a fake insanity ward" episode would have been in season four of a genre film. 

The Magicians did it as their fourth episode, season one. 

And I think that this show has taken that a step further with magic. Instead of sticking to one metaphor and running it into the ground, on fumes, with a shovel, they've embraced that magic can be many things to many people. It can be a way to power, a place to hide and even a salvation of sorts. 

It could also be a one-way ticket to a personal hell. 

So I tip my hat off to the crew of show. Keep making magic. 

Space Opera Tropes: the Precursor race. Here to stay?

It's a literary tradition in science fiction that when Hollywood and video games start regularly using a trope that's been around for ages, then it might be time to move on from that trope.

Thanks to Prometheus and Halo, a lot more of the mainstream public is now familiar with the Precursor race trope. For those who watch what's left of the History Channel, it also known as "God is an Astronaut."  The trope evolved to explain (in a retcon fashion) why so many alien races on the screen -- and in books -- have two arms, two legs, communicate with their mouths, and are basically humanoid except for the addition of fur, scales or other bits of Hollywood makeup.

And it's much less cynical to explain that aliens seeded the universe than to admit to convenient writing and tiny budgets.

But as audiences get more savvy, there's been an uptick in  this trope is a nod to the hard science fiction. It helps explain why we can interact with the aliens  — and that we all advanced our technologies at the same rate. And just to further clarify, when I say the same level of tech I mean that the gulf in technologies and sciences are close enough that one can eventually reverse engineer from the other.

Without a precursor race, pure science says the odds of us meeting a race that both resembles us AND shares the same level of tech is near nil. It's much more likely our neighbors will be vastly different, incomprehensible. Their technology will also be on a completely different level than ours. There will be no contest for the side with the better tech. On the other hand, it's much easier to live in peace with a species that shares no common resources or even knows that you exist. ... Until they accidentally wipe you out or vice versa.

The tropes of Space Opera have popped up to help tell a certain style of story to a certain audience. Over time, those tropes have evolved to keep the genre going.

For example, Old Man's War explained that FTL was actually dimensional jumping and terraforming in Firefly explained one climate planets.

You can do Space Opera without FTL (synchronized cryosleep) as in the Lockstep novel. But then again, Altered Carbon tried to have Space Opera without starships (broadcasting downloaded personalities) and that came off more as cyberpunk.

So at this point, the PC trope might be here to stay just like Starships, FTL and big laser guns.