As a consumer of a lot of geeky media, I love it when a book or TV show has excellent worldbuilding that involves different cultures with different magics of their own. However, a lot of times I find that those magics and cultures are pretty rigid. One does this. The other does that. It makes for an easy understanding of how magical battles in that world might work, but it’s an unrealistic and rather simplistic view of how cultures and cultural immigration works.
Category Archives: Magical Mondays
Magical Mondays: Time Loops and Cheating Death in the Miss Peregrine Trilogy
When I first saw the trailer for the Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children movie coming out later this year, I wasn’t super interested until Miss Peregrine literally turned into a peregrine falcon. Falcons are one of my favorite birds! So I decided to seek out the books to find out what this series is all about before the movie comes out.
All in all, I was quite impressed with the books. If you’re trying to tell a story about British kids with magic powers that’s wildly different from Harry Potter, then this is the way to do it. Author Ransom Riggs not only found ingenious ways to incorporate the “peculiar” old photographs he found into the story (e.g., the photo of the floating girl on the cover inspired a character whose peculiar ability is to float), but he also used them to inspire a quite original take on how “magical” (called “peculiar” in this trilogy) folks can hide within plain sight in the world of “normals”: time loops. But while I loved the time loops, they allowed characters to essentially live forever, which could be a huge problem.
While I’m pleased with how things panned out for the main characters at the end of the trilogy with regards to time loops, I don’t think Riggs fully explored the insidious implications of the time loop mechanism he set up. Immortality is a dangerous thing, and while there are rules governing it in the series and those who try to get around the rules are punished, the system itself is never adequately questioned. This ends up undermining the trilogy’s otherwise brilliant worldbuilding.
Spoilers for the Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children trilogy below!
Magical Mondays: Rayearth and (Possibly) Zapping Tropes in Shoujo
Magical girl anime and manga have been around for what seems like forever and have meshed with several other genres outside of their shoujo roots. Recently—for seemingly no reason—I was reminded of Magic Knight Rayearth, a magical girl series that combines the transformations and magic we all know and love with the sort of impending doom one might get from a Final Fantasy game, with a dose of giant robot anime on the side. The three protagonists—Hikaru, Umi, and Fuu—journey to a land called Cephiro to become the Magic Knights to save its Pillar (aka: Princess/Priestess) and learn how to harness their magic and mechas along the way, but the functionality of Cephiro’s magic is more explored through the series’s side characters (which makes sense, since the three heroes are from Earth and not Cephiro). While for the most part the magic is your typical elemental/summoning fare and the series utilizes several genre and character tropes, Rayearth does manage to surpass the limitations of some of these tropes. In the case of the character Presea, an older woman in a series focused on younger women, I found this to be especially true. Through both her character and her personal magics, Presea manages to become her own person rather than a character defined by her presumed role in patriarchal tropes.
Magical Mondays: Sephiroth is an Aeon
Whether you love it or hate it, Final Fantasy X is a prequel to Final Fantasy VII. Thankfully, for everyone who dislikes this connection, the two games don’t actually impact each other in terms of plot or characterization. However, for the rest of us, it’s always fun speculating about all the different ways the two games are alike and figuring out the history of both their worlds. This connection is something the game creators have been adding to for some time, and considering that Auron shows up in the new FFVII remake trailer, I imagine that we’re going to have a few more hints and Easter eggs in our future. And yet, somehow, I found myself surprised when Kingdom Hearts turned Sephiroth into an Aeon.
Magical Mondays: Beauty and the Beast & Magic and Morality
In fairy tales, magic is often used as if it’s a force of nature’s divine justice. Even if no god figure is connected to a magical world, magic tends to act as the deus ex machina, doling out punishments and blessings where needed. But sometimes I question the morality of this mysterious magical force and the judgements it gives out.
The new Beauty and the Beast live action movie has everyone hyped, and so I decided to rewatch the original animated movie. In doing so, I noticed something disturbing: the Enchantress that punishes the Beast seems like a judgmental dick!
Magical Mondays: Themes, Magic, and Hustle Cat
Over the past month, I’ve seen Hustle Cat gaining some traction among the Let’s Player circuit—well deserved traction. Even people who haven’t really played dating sims before, or ones for whom the genre isn’t their bread and butter, seem to enjoy the game, and when I reviewed it, I mentioned several of the potential reasons that this could be the case. However, one aspect of the game I didn’t really delve into was its interpretation of magic, and as far as I’m concerned, this is one of the most important, thematically-driven parts of the game.
Huge spoilers under the cut.
Magical Mondays: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood and the Consequences of Alchemy
A while back I talked about Dragon Ball Z and how it handles death and raising the dead in a previous Magical Mondays post. To recap, I found the way Dragon Ball Z went about this to be lacking. DBZ didn’t offer nearly enough consequences or limitations on its magic, and as a result, the narrative suffered. Raising the dead—or rather, attempting to—is a big part of Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, and unlike DBZ, the story sets hard limits on its magic that are never broken. This means that the characters are never able to pull a deus ex machina and instead they have to operate within the story’s rules in order to learn about themselves and develop as characters.
Trigger warning for body mutilation up ahead.
Magical Mondays: Ella Enchanted Breaks the Curse of Subpar Worldbuilding
I’ve been pretty stressed out recently, so whenever I get a chance, I like to just conk out in front of the TV and relax a little. However, on one of these mindless couch potato outings, my cat decided to curl up on my lap and go to sleep at about the same time the movie on TV ended. This is generally a more than welcome occurrence, but the next movie that came on was… the movie version of Ella Enchanted. I looked around. The remote was out of reach.
“No,” I said to myself.
Since I obviously couldn’t push my cat off my lap, I ended up, to my immense regret, sitting through most of the movie. Gail Carson Levine’s Ella Enchanted was one of my favorite books as a kid (and still is today, if we’re being honest). To get the bad taste of the movie out of my mouth, I immediately went to reread my old copy, and I started thinking about why I loved it so much. It’s obviously a revisionist fairy tale, like the many other takes on Cinderella there have been throughout the ages, and what I really admired about this particular take on Cinderella was its worldbuilding. Unlike Maleficient, which didn’t exactly succeed in adding magic to its story, Ella Enchanted added magic to its story in a way that subverted tropes and enhanced its plot and characters.
Magical Mondays: The Little Mermaid & Magic
The Little Mermaid isn’t exactly one of my favorite movies. It has great music, but the story and characters are really lacking in a lot of places. It was only during a recent rewatch of the movie that I realized that the magic in the movie is really unclear and ultimately ends up making the whole movie confusing.
Magical Mondays: The Magicians Versus Fun
I am a busy woman, and as such, I have very little free time to devote to activities that are purely leisurely. Therefore, when I sit down to consume some piece of media for enjoyment’s sake, I want to enjoy it. More to the point, I don’t want my media to be grimdark or jaded or humorlessly cynical. I want to have fun with it, because I am consuming it for fun’s sake.
So having said that, I wish someone had warned me about The Magicians before I started reading it.
Lady Geek Girl and Friends 