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Date Posted: 18:20:33 10/26/05 Wed
Author: Celebaelin
Subject: Re: I was making a somewhat different point
In reply to: Sophist 's message, "I was making a somewhat different point" on 16:20:27 10/26/05 Wed

Well, yes, I have an inherent bias because I believe that magic is often best shown as having negative consequences in a kind of Newtonian 'equal and opposite' way and I believe that the writers on Buffy follow this principle to a large degree. I was conscious of not mentioning the 'co-incidental' spells, Willow teleporting Glory and only getting dizziness and a nose-bleed for example, but I thought there were a fair few more 'points on the line' in my post: even if you would not concede all the 18 episode-central instances of magical karma.

There is a sense in which the episodic nature of the program dictates that the Monster/Villain of the Week/Series/Episode Group must be defeated, so if they use magic then inevitably something will be seen to go wrong; but it goes wrong for the good guys too.

The point about the spell not always working properly is surely part of the magical price to be paid? There are FRP systems where entire rule sets have been written for things going wrong with magic, the take home message being if you want to mess around with this stuff be prepared for much uncontrolable wierdness of an unexpected nature, breaking the laws of causality does not come cheap.

If the consequences of the spell are not immediately apparent then perhaps we don't associate them with the casting and instead put it down to 'bad luck' or 'the inexplicably doomed nature of the SGs love lives' or 'the joys of life on the hellmouth' so I commented only when I saw a direct correlation between a spell and a subsequent misfortune.

As I say I AM approaching this from the position of already believing in the kickback from magic however, Terry Pratchett came up with one of my favourites; in the early studies of telekinesis mages were known to force their own brains out of their ears as they did not realise that Newton's actual laws of motion applied in full when trying to move, say, a boulder, by the power of the mind alone.

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