LW and related blogs are basically spoiling fantasy fiction to me. DAE have an experience like this? How to overcome it?
Interesting. I haven’t had this experience much at all, primarily because the entire genre is occurring specifically in universes where all these lessons we know don’t apply, where there somehow really is no clear line between the map and the territory, or where the basics of the default versions of the map match the territory so closely that it doesn’t make a difference.
I’m not sure the potion of healing example is actually a good one though: a healing potion could “heal” in specific changes that we simply label healing as such. I’ve read at least one fantasy series where cancer was specifically called out as something that regular healing magic couldn’t help with and the implication was that (although the characters didn’t understand it) that healing magic accelerated cell growth of cells similar to the human cells already present, and the magic couldn’t differentiate between healthy human cells and the very small changes that make cells cancerous.
There seems to be a sliding scale of fantasy in how much the universe resembles our own or how much careful thinking goes into the nature of magic in that context. Dragonlance seems to be somewhat on one end while maybe some of Brandon Sanderson’s novels might be closer to the careful thinking end.
Interesting. I haven’t had this experience much at all, primarily because the entire genre is occurring specifically in universes where all these lessons we know don’t apply, where there somehow really is no clear line between the map and the territory, or where the basics of the default versions of the map match the territory so closely that it doesn’t make a difference.
I’m not sure the potion of healing example is actually a good one though: a healing potion could “heal” in specific changes that we simply label healing as such. I’ve read at least one fantasy series where cancer was specifically called out as something that regular healing magic couldn’t help with and the implication was that (although the characters didn’t understand it) that healing magic accelerated cell growth of cells similar to the human cells already present, and the magic couldn’t differentiate between healthy human cells and the very small changes that make cells cancerous.
There seems to be a sliding scale of fantasy in how much the universe resembles our own or how much careful thinking goes into the nature of magic in that context. Dragonlance seems to be somewhat on one end while maybe some of Brandon Sanderson’s novels might be closer to the careful thinking end.