Behind the Curtain: Why The Hard vs. Soft Magic Debate is Pointless and a Little Bit Offensive

Most people associate fantasy with magic; some consider it the definition of the genre, although trying to pin down fantasy exactly gets complicated. Alternate worlds without magic but with different races often straddle the line between fantasy and its twin sister science fiction; and magic sometimes pervades literary fiction in its own ways. In recent years, however, a growing – and strangely loud – subset of people have been voicing their distaste, if not hatred, for the concept of the magic system. To me, this seems a bit of a contradiction in terms, but it's important to define our terms in how they're being used. The Magic System, in these arguments, refers to hard magic – magic with hard rules, equations, definitions. The contrasting form is 'soft magic', albeit magic that works in a much more free-form, folkloric kind of fashion. Hard magic involves wands and spells, ancient words and meanings, battles of words and potions and runes – soft magic involves wishes and prayers, intent and sense. The line isn't always completely clear between the two, but generally, you know the difference when you see it. Nor is it (supposed to be) a binary with any implications of quality or maturity; Lord of the Rings is a classic example of soft magic, as is Star Wars, while Harry Potter, The Stormlight Archive and The Belgariad all depict varying levels and complexity of hard magic. The complaints about hard magic vary – but I've seen them range from 'I shouldn't have to have a PhD to understand fantasy' (this seems like an exaggeration, but nevertheless) to 'hard magic is a colonizer invention' (still puzzled about this one!) to the really kind of unforgivable 'hard magic is a plague upon fantasy, shouldn't exist, and the world is worse off for it existing'. All the worse as a take, by the way, given that it still used the term 'magic systems' instead of 'hard magic'. There's usually a lot of fingers pointed at Brandon Sanderson – which, look, maybe I'm the odd one out here, but not only have I read exactly one Sanderson novel, I've also managed to avoid any osmosis on his books. For an author that's supposedly shoved down people's throats. I don't think I could name a single plot point, character, or even an element of the magic systems that are so terrible other than the fact that they're detailed and what I remember from reading Mistborn ten years ago. (That's slightly a lie. I also know Brandon Sanderson doesn't put sex in his books because he's Mormon. So I know one thing. Two if you count the Mormonism.)

In fact, one of the main arguments behind this take – that hard magic is forced down writers' or readers' throats, or even heavily encouraged – doesn't seem to hold much weight when looked at with too much detail. As with everything, there's a disclaimer here that I am a single person who occupies a single corner of the universe. Not only that, but I don't doubt that hard-magic purists exist. I've met tabletop NerdBros:tm:. I'd actually be deeply shocked if they didn't. In fact, the concept of the hard magic elitist is reminiscent of the “min-maxxer” in tabletop and card games – the player who's more focused on getting their stats as 'good' as possible rather than roleplaying and building a story, or likes building turn-one win-condition gimmick decks in Magic worth several hundred dollars, promptly turning it into a single-player game. (And then wonders why nobody wants to play.) But are they actually that widespread? Or successful? The best-selling fantasy books of the last decade include The Stormlight Archive (Sanderson) and The Fifth Season (Jemisin), which are two extremely different flavours of hard magic, but hard magic nonetheless; but it also includes the works of Sarah J. Maas and Rick Riordan. On top of that, the systems that are around don't seem to fulfill the stereotype depicted of almost-mathematically-devised gaming-stat systems. Babel by R.F. Kuang isn't mathematical in the slightest, being oriented around language, and it as well as many others – Children of Blood and Bone (Adeyemi), Fifth Season, and Shadow and Bone (Bardugo)– are using their magic systems as much as metaphor as anything else. Add to that the popularity of A Song of Ice and Fire, which is not just a soft-magic franchise but one that uses very little magic to begin with, and the complaint starts feeling directed to the point of being a thinly-veiled personal grudge.

A corollary point to this is that the conversations are all occurring in literary circles; but the nature of media and creative work especially in the modern age is that conversations about one medium usually end up in another. To be a 'fantasy fan' inevitably puts you in community – like it or not – with lovers of fantasy film (a neglected arena beyond its few big standouts, unfortunately), fantasy television (a field that has blossomed tremendously in the last decade), fantasy tabletop gamers (Warhammer and Wizards of the Coast comprising a shocking amount of reference points), fantasy videogame enthusiasts (Final Fantasy, League of Legends, World of Warcraft and Dark Souls as distinct and identifiable axes, if not the only ones) and fantasy comics – both webcomics and traditionally published ones (Gunnerkrigg Court and Girl Genius don't directly compete with things like Sandman, but they live in very different worlds). I doubt I'm the only person to look at this particular conversation and wonder if the complaints are about the lore of games rather than that of books; or at least about the writing attempts of gamers who refuse to read books, but since those books are unlikely to get finished, let alone published, there's not much point in discoursing about the shadow they aren't casting on the wall. Someone sharing a work-in-progress novel with a magic system designed for a tabletop isn't affecting the world of publishing, no matter how much they're personally pissing you off.

The other interesting thing about some of the very, very strong objections raised to 'hard magic systems' is their determination to carve out a granite wall between science fiction and fantasy – and by extension, science and magic. Magic is, by their definition, unknowable; trying to make magic comprehensible is not just verboten but tantamount to blasphemy, an attempted transformation into (the dreaded) Science Fiction. Not all of them even have particularly negative views on science fiction, but a thread of disdain shows up regardless in the sense that science is, no matter what you do to it, inherently boring. If it's not boring, it's masculine-coded; it's colonialist, or stuffy, or tainted by condescension and gatekeeping. I can't fault people for these associations entirely. I'm thoroughly a humanities scholar, and I've been treated with disrespect by STEM students more times than I can count. But to dismiss science – what a remarkably dim view of the world. To consider magic and science as enemies is, first of all, completely ahistorical. Magic is, after all, not something originating from fiction but a tool from the past used to explain everything from divine miracles to forbidden knowledge. While not all witchcraft involved science (many accusations were in service to political machinations and land grabs) many 'witches' were herbalists, midwives, apothecaries, and even astronomers. Perhaps that doesn't suit the modern definition of science enough for some tastes, but the basic principles were and are there; observation, the formulation of a hypothesis, testing, and results. I've mentioned the critiques of hard magic as colonialist a few times, too, and it's worth mentioning here that I'm not opposed to decolonial critiques; quite the opposite. Instead, I think framing Indigenous “magic” as purer, less rigorous, and based on faith alone as opposed to formalized colonizer “science” is actively harmful. It's true that magic works in different ways in certain narratives. But take, for example, the famous example of the Easter Island heads; upon questioning about how they got there, the Rapa Nui explained that 'they walked'. It was a perfectly good answer, and perfectly scientific; just wrapped in language that the listeners weren't willing to understand. But to claim that it's somehow opposed to science – despite being, again, perfectly accurate! – feels like an insult to indigenous histories. On top of that, how positively medieval (or Southern Baptist, if you will!) to act like understanding something takes away from the wonder of it! Understanding how photosynthesis works – how a plant converts light into food through chemicals that absorb the wavelengths of red and blue, and that's why plants are green – doesn't make it any less amazing, or cool, or beyond our real comprehension; because it's not like we can do it. (Also, we know significantly less about plants and plant processes than you probably assume.) We might know that the sun is just a very distant ball of thundering chemical reactions, and that it doesn't have anything to do with gods, or chariots in the sky; but stand outside and feel the strength of its fire on your skin and the difference between a god and a sun feels like semantics, not scholarship. Doctor Who, in my opinion, has always trod the line excellently between fantasy and science fiction very much on the basis of this – I'll give a particular shoutout to the Series 7 episode “The Rings of Akhaten” for weaving the two together with rather stunning grace, although others like “The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit” (Series 2) and “The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang” (Series 5) also play quite cleverly in the space between.

I'm standing here defending the right of hard magic systems to exist and why people should like them or at least tolerate them, of course, and there's a pretty obvious, glaring pitfall in all of this: why? As in, why is it anybody's business what the person next to them enjoys? It's already a patently ludicrous claim that magic systems are “making fantasy worse” – and, apparently, one that's been made for at least a decade – and it's exactly the same as every other over-the-top complaint about how the latest trope is absolute cancer and ruining everything. I don't like romance tropes. I don't like insta-love, or jealousy, or forced monogamy; I certainly can't stand endings that treat death of one as the end, forever, for the other. I'm aromantic and frequently romance-repulsed. I am not the audience. And I know I'm not! While I'll make my complaints here and there, largely speaking, I know that my criticisms of romance and Romance are personal. But this is part of a larger trend; the need to make personal dislikes justifiable in some way, perhaps in order to have a socially-conscious take in the first place. God forbid you don't have something new to contribute to the Discourse – so you might as well engineer something. In this case, as in many others, it just makes people who like magic systems feel put on the spot and targeted; and of course the retorts start getting into the same territory in response, attacking 'soft magic' on equally silly grounds, and we have a whole fight that doesn't need to happen.

The idea of a 'hard magic system' versus 'soft magic as vibes only' isn't real, anyway. A narrative with magic is always, no matter how 'loose' or 'vibes-based' the magic is, making trade-offs about how it works. That isn't me trying to make some argument that 'all magic is science' or that 'all magic is REALLY hard magic'; it's that all magic has some structure by dint of being part of a narrative. The difference between hard and soft magic is just how much you're showing to the reader – but our quintessential example of soft magic, the works of Tolkien, are also a perfect example of how much unspoken work usually goes into that effect. Gandalf's nature as one of the Maia is rarely directly relevant to Frodo's perspective, and movie-only watchers don't really need to know that about him, just that he's someone very skilled with magic; nor do movie-only or casual fans have any real need to know the lore involved in the Silmarillion. Yet all of that worldbuilding and lore, the work that Tolkien put into the magic, the races of Middle-Earth, and the rings of Sauron, is what makes the world feel so lived in. The same is true of even single novels, on a more abstracted level; a novel like 100 Years of Solitude (Marquez) is making very deliberate choices about how much magic, how much unreality, is pervading into the 'real world'. That in and of itself is careful, painstaking work. The wizard isn't zapping everybody where they need to go – why? What is stopping the magic of this world from breaking the narrative? In The Witcher and Fullmetal Alchemist it's rules around energy and balance – in others, it's explained through politics, personality or even just narrative convenience.

All of which brings me to my final point, which is that while I don't think any element of a fantasy novel needs to justify its existence – that's how we get Serious Business Fantasy Writers declaring themselves to be beyond the petty world of 'escapist' writers, and so on and so forth – magic systems are more than just twiddly little Rube Goldberg machines. You may personally dislike more complex ones, and that's fine; but magic systems are usually deeply thematically entwined with the narrative they're there to tell. It's very easy to say that fantasy would be “better off without” them, but Fullmetal Alchemist's story is fundamentally about its own magic system – equivalent exchange, or the conservation of mass, repurposed into a fable about what you feel you deserve, what you put into the world, and the entire principle of a fair universe. Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar series is preoccupied from the very start with companionship in difference and using gifts for the good of the people – not a rare theme by any chance, but one that's strengthened by both the nature of Companions and the idea of a Herald's calling. And how can I leave out R.F. Kuang's Babel and Seanan McGuire's Middlegame – two books so thoroughly about being used and abused by higher powers, the corruption of language (and in Middlegame's case, mathematics as well) in the service of greed, and the pawns turning their powers against those who created them? I'd also like to point out just how many of the examples I've chosen, not just in this particular paragraph but throughout, have been by women (and not just white women either) – which is a pretty firm rebuttal to the idea of the magic system as the cishet white man's playground, or even particularly 'masculine-coded'. (Although that entire concept is just a little gross. Is the flip-side that unicorns are a Girls-Only club? Because I thought we were moving past that kind of thing.)

Ultimately people can feel any way they want to about tropes in fantasy, or the mechanics of fantasy, or even the line between fantasy and science fiction. The subgenres of speculative fiction are a messy, ill-defined affair – note I haven't touched on my own genre of horror here, for good reason. I'd add another five pages on horror's complex relationship with magic and explaining the unexplainable, and two of them would be on Fall of the House of Usher – But. Regardless. Having the opinions is fine. When it boils over into broad, pointless or flatly offensive statements that you then put out into the world, you have to expect one of two things. One, people are going to be offended, because you said something that targets them and the things they like in a rather tasteless way. And two, you're going to have people arguing with you. Magic systems are an integral part of fantasy – they're everywhere and come in every complexity, from pointing a wand at something and barking out mangled Babelfish Latin or Ancient Greek (Harry Potter) to eating and digesting metal (Mistborn) to spells carved on any and every kind of object you can find (Septimus Heap). That's part of what makes them fun – and if you don't like one, that's the good news. There's a wealth of fantasy out there to read; I'm sure there'll be one more to your liking.

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CITED WORKS:

Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion - J.R.R. Tolkien Star Wars (film series) - George Lucas The Stormlight Archive, Mistborn - Brandon Sanderson The Belgariad - David Eddings The Fifth Season (Broken Earth series) - N.K. Jemisin Works of Sarah J. Maas (general) Works of Rick Riordan (general) Babel - R.F. Kuang Children of Blood and Bone - Tomi Adeyemi Shadow and Bone - Leigh Bardugo A Song of Ice and Fire - George R.R. Martin Dark Souls (video game series) - NamCo Bandai, Hidetaka Miyazaki Final Fantasy (video game series) - Square Enix, creator Hironobu Sakaguchi League of Legends (online game) - Riot Games, several writers World of Warcraft (online game)- Blizzard Entertainment, several writers Gunnerkrigg Court (webcomic) - Tom Siddell Girl Genius (webcomic)- Phil and Kaja Folio Sandman (comic) - Neil Gaiman Doctor Who (tv series) - created by Verity Lambert and Sydney Newman "The Rings of Akhaten" - Series 7 (Modern), Episode 8: W - Neil Cross, D - Farren Blackburn "The Impossible Planet" + "The Satan Pit" - Series 2 (Modern), Episode 8/9: W - Matt Jones, D - James Strong "The Pandorica Opens" + "The Big Bang" - Series 5 (Modern), Episode 12/13: W - Steven Moffat, D - Toby Haynes 100 Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Márquez The Witcher (novel series) - Andrzej Sapkowski Fullmetal Alchemist (manga) - Hiromu Arakawa Valdemar (novel series) - Mercedes Lackey Middlegame - Seanan McGuire Fall of the House of Usher (miniseries) - Mike Flanagan Septimus Heap (novel series) - Angie Sage

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