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DF Reference Collection / Making magic stick against Outsiders [series spoilers]
« on: September 10, 2013, 04:44:56 PM »
So I’ve made a couple posts touching on this material in other people’s topics lately, but I thought I might try to tie it all together in a dedicated topic with my patent pending formatting. (don’t worry the license is open for all to use if you want to duplicate the formatting 
)-Serack
This is my take on why it's hard to get magic to stick on Outsiders unless you have a couple few centuries of experience with magic, and where the story is going to allow Harry to do it (or should that be “how the story allows Harry to do it”).
Jim has made several comments about how the upper bounds of magic are about rewriting reality.WoJ#1 This combined with the frequent in text comments about a wizard not being able to work a particular piece of magic unless he truly believes that the world should be that way make me think of all wizardly magic being about the wizard wielding his will to rewrite reality to conform to his idea of what it should be.
Now one of the significant things about Outsiders, is that according to the books, they aren’t part of our reality!XRT#1 It is my opinion that the whole objective for their assault of our reality is to subsume it and invoke their own upon it. Possibly as “Empty Night.” So when a mortal wizard tries to hurl magic at an Outsider, they are hurling their own revision of reality against another being whose very existence is its own assertion of a new foreign reality into our own. To accomplish this, you must either have centuries of practice at asserting your reality through magic, or have some undefined “Starborn” property apparently.
Now I'm not quite sure how being "starborn" makes you better at asserting your reality (edit: Although I do try to examine this more closely in reply #5), but it has been my hypothesis that Harry's experiences in GS certainly do. Excerpt #2 below seems to me to be a very key part of what Harry experienced in GS that IMO will be significant in shaping how he identifies with his magic in the future. In fact, Excerpt #4 is a passage from the next book CD where he seems to utilize this very lesson to an extreme that allows him to rewrite reality to his will vs the will of a primal force on par with “Let there be light!”XRT#3
Sounds to me like Harry is getting pretty dang effective at using his will to shape reality to what he wants it to be. Which will be KEY to his fighting the outsiders. In fact in Excerpt #5 we see how Harry countered the major Outsider psychic attack near the end of CD and yet again, Harry hurls his experiences and life into a foundation for a spell of his will that asserts his reality over the one the Outsider is imposing upon him.
Word of Jim quotes (hidden in spoiler code to condense the massive block of text)
Book Excerpt quotes
Edit: OH NOES, I accidentaly deleted this post attempting to edit one of the replies. I managed to save the text, but not much of the formatting. I'll have to fix it later You rock TCF and Elegast!-Serack
)-SerackThis is my take on why it's hard to get magic to stick on Outsiders unless you have a couple few centuries of experience with magic, and where the story is going to allow Harry to do it (or should that be “how the story allows Harry to do it”).
Jim has made several comments about how the upper bounds of magic are about rewriting reality.WoJ#1 This combined with the frequent in text comments about a wizard not being able to work a particular piece of magic unless he truly believes that the world should be that way make me think of all wizardly magic being about the wizard wielding his will to rewrite reality to conform to his idea of what it should be.
Now one of the significant things about Outsiders, is that according to the books, they aren’t part of our reality!XRT#1 It is my opinion that the whole objective for their assault of our reality is to subsume it and invoke their own upon it. Possibly as “Empty Night.” So when a mortal wizard tries to hurl magic at an Outsider, they are hurling their own revision of reality against another being whose very existence is its own assertion of a new foreign reality into our own. To accomplish this, you must either have centuries of practice at asserting your reality through magic, or have some undefined “Starborn” property apparently.
Now I'm not quite sure how being "starborn" makes you better at asserting your reality (edit: Although I do try to examine this more closely in reply #5), but it has been my hypothesis that Harry's experiences in GS certainly do. Excerpt #2 below seems to me to be a very key part of what Harry experienced in GS that IMO will be significant in shaping how he identifies with his magic in the future. In fact, Excerpt #4 is a passage from the next book CD where he seems to utilize this very lesson to an extreme that allows him to rewrite reality to his will vs the will of a primal force on par with “Let there be light!”XRT#3
Sounds to me like Harry is getting pretty dang effective at using his will to shape reality to what he wants it to be. Which will be KEY to his fighting the outsiders. In fact in Excerpt #5 we see how Harry countered the major Outsider psychic attack near the end of CD and yet again, Harry hurls his experiences and life into a foundation for a spell of his will that asserts his reality over the one the Outsider is imposing upon him.
Word of Jim quotes (hidden in spoiler code to condense the massive block of text)
(click to show/hide)
Book Excerpt quotes
(click to show/hide)