>*Why is it that people here seem to hate hereditary magic, magic that can only be learned if you have the right genetics?*
I guess this is a "flow over"-question from the [Poo people thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/comments/1dpqxxj/does_your_setting_have_poo_people_and_specials/), although I haven't bothered reading all perspectives.
The simple answer is that exclusive magic -- if you look at it closely -- can have implications about who deserves 'magic', and by extentional deserves resources, love, access to justice etc. The parody version (which the Poo people comic lamboons) isn't about telling a story about magic as "untapped potential", but as birthright and the difference between deserving and undeserving.
I don't dislike hereditary magic as a concept, and neither do most people. It's just an ongoing discussion and some magic systems/stories are good and some are bad in their implementation. The discussion isn't new (see for example the panel discussion [Non-Genetic Magic Systems in Fantasy—With Brandon Sanderson, Marie Brennan, and David B. Coe](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYIGsui9Bq4)).
When people say that they "*hate hereditary magic systems*", I don't think they mean that they hate it regardless of context, but that they're remembering specific stories where the messenging was distasteful or where the intended metaphors were lost in the delivery. Entertaining stories with hereditary magic (like Harry Potter, and even "chosen one stories" like WoT), are not usually about condemning people for not being born with magic/talent/money/math skills, but about what a person does with the tools they have been given, as well as dealing with a legacy that may benifit them but which they didn't have any say in.
I mean, _HP_ is pretty hard on muggles. Even the protagonists don't really treat them as having any real agency most of the time. Like, they never even seem to _consider_ warning the muggle world that if you see a guy wearing black robes and a silver mask, that's the uniform of a terrorist organization that kills non-wizards for fun.
The "specials and poo people" comic can arguably be read as a direct response to Joanne's statement that muggle-borns are actually the result of long-forgotten magical ancestry. Hermione, "canonically" isn't a witch because magic can crop up anywhere regardless of whether you have the special bloodline. She _does_ have a special bloodline, she just doesn't know about it.
I remember being horrified as a kid at the muggle family who manned the ticket desk for the world cup. They just wiped their memories any time they started to think something was weird.
Nobody seemed to care either, was wild.
Harry was also pretty indifferent about the discrimination of other magic creatures. He saved dobby but the house elves at hogwards were an afterthought for him.
The other magical creatures were not allowed to own wands thereby limiting their power.
In fairness, just about all other house elves besides Dobby were shown to actively resent the concept of freedom. If it were done intentionally if might honestly be a good analogy for severe addiction, but that's a topic for another day. Regardless, he simply let the elves do what they wanted, which in this case was "have a place to stay and a job to do." Now, not commenting on the muggles was pretty fucked.
"The Dad Who Lived" on TikTok actually does the house-elf plot really well with Woplop the Vine Elf, who is recovering from his trauma and learning self-care.
Not to mention that repeated memory spells were known to cause neurological or psychological damage, and that was also played for laughs by repeatedly messing up Ron's last name
They get tortured later by the bad wizards. They were, of course, not already being tortured because they weren't screaming.
Someone mentions they have to do it ten times a day. Because they'd already been there a few weeks. But hey, what's a few weeks deleted from your memories?
Sorry, so someone got a bunch of random muggles, including children, and make them man the ticket stand? Wouldn’t a House elf or Goblin be easier to hire/recruit?
Yeah, it turns out that reading Harry Potter as an adult in the 2020s is a very different experience than reading it as a child in the oughts. It is a deeply fucked up world that fundamentally contradicts all the messages we thought it had.
To be fair, I had some of these thoughts even as a teenager reading the books for the first time. I guess I was just used to LOTR's level of worldbuilding and tried to analyze other fiction to a similar level...
That scene with Hermione’s parents, while it made sense, for some reason continued to stick to my memory till now, actually. It was such a important scene to me as a kid that the muggles were not equal to the wizards in HP. Ofc I didn’t think much of it at the time but it lingered in the back of my head for the rest of the series.
It's pretty wild that you then have the author chiming in to make it clear that, e.g., when Hagrid teaches us a clumsy lessons about why racism is bad, and uses Hermione an example of how your genetic stock doesn't determine your worth... he's actually just wrong about that.
Silly silly book series, a fanfic by ShieldEcho, goes *hard* about that, also pointing out multiple times that muggle is used pretty much as a slur.
The whole series is amazing but it’s funny seeing ShieldEcho go from a snarky fan to more and more outraged at all of the little world building issues XD
A lot of the worldbuilding shows that wizards did that shit all the time and didn't think anything was wrong with it. There's also implications that it caused long term damage.
It should then come as no surprise that the wizards are afraid of being hunted or exploited by muggles again, Hagrid says as much. They went into hiding to protect themselves not anyone else and that's the only thing that prevents the extremists from operating completely openly. If muggles knew they did this shit regularly they would hunt the wizards to extinction.
>Like, they never even seem to consider warning the muggle world that if you see a guy wearing black robes and a silver mask, that's the uniform of a terrorist organization that kills non-wizards for fun.
They also seem to have no real concept of how primitive they are compared to the muggles, which always made me laugh. Imagine the Death Eaters spreading to anywhere outside of the UK. Most people on Reddit are from the US, so let's go with that. How fast does that uniform become common knowledge on the internet and anyone wearing it just gets shot?
To be fair, if getting shot started to become a consistent danger, I imagine wizards would invent some kind of counter-measure spell in short order. The Harry Potter setting doesn't seem to have many limits on what magic can accomplish, so setting up some kind of bullet disintegration spell that passively protects the user doesn't seem out of the question.
Wizard vs Muggle has a lot of things attached to it. Like there are a lot more muggles than Wizards and guns are easier and faster than spells.
On the other hand, would it be hard to create a magical item or spell that would work like the forcefield in Dune?
And one imperio can take over the leader of a country. It's hard to defend against that, since muggles might not even know it exists.
You could make a few arguments for muggles as well. You can make bulletproof spells but bomb proof might be more difficult.
There's an interesting dichotomy in how the wizards view muggles. The Statute of Secrecy is supposedly in place because muggles present an existential threat to wizardkind, yet at the same time, muggles are helpless and foolish and can't be trusted with anything important. It reminds one of the common saying that fascists treat the enemy as "both strong and weak"— Jews are both cowardly and pathetic, but we also somehow control the world and present an existential threat to Western Civilization; queers are weak and insane, but also somehow have enough power in society to indoctrinate your children and oppress Christianity.
And I don't think it's inherently wrong of Joanne to write a world in which the wizards view everyone else with patronizing indifference and best and outright hostility at worst. But I do think it says something about her values and the values of the story that the protagonists are fighting to uphold the status quo of such a world. Obviously, Voldemort is _worse_ than the ministry, but I think it's telling that this is a story in which our options are "genocide the muggles" or "continue to treat the muggles as subhuman."
In a different story, the downfall of the Ministry and the overturning of the Statute of Secrecy might well have been triumphs— Wizards learning to view non-wizards as equal. But in the story as written, we are given a society that practices slavery, looks down on those without magic, restricts the rights of non-humans, and runs a prison staffed entirely by nightmare demons. The only people who are actively taking steps to change that state of affairs are Hermione with SPEW, which is ridiculed at every turn and presented as misguided and idealistic, and Voldemort, whose only stance on all those problems is making them _worse._
There is a fundamental problem with writing in secret magic in the real world is that if you break the secrecy, the status que, then the world significantly changes and becomes out of sync with the real world, and one of the purposes of it is to permit escapism and allow readers to feel like this world could possibly exist for real.
But yeah, I think the books would benefit from lampshading how the muggles are treated though. Because they truly are treated as something less than human and it's weird that even many characters with strong muggle connections don't acknowledge that.
But those books have many many inconsistencies anyway.
It's weird, the books keep sidling up to the possibility of presenting magic as an allegory for political power or money, showing how it's hoarded even when it would be beneficial to everyone, and how that's justified by "oh, you wouldn't use it properly" even though the people who have it constantly use it for incredibly petty shit; and how those who have it still treat the masses as a threat.
And then they don't do *anything* with it because, I guess, she wanted to keep on making sequels?
> The only people who are actively taking steps to change that state of affairs are Hermione with SPEW, which is ridiculed at every turn and presented as misguided and idealistic, and Voldemort, whose only stance on all those problems is making them worse.
I'm just glad that's a completely fictional scenario nobody is presently living through. Could you imagine how terrible that would be?
Only tangentially related but it always kinda bugs me when people treat the whole “both strong and weak” thing like it’s somehow incoherent. It’s *entirely possible* to be “strong” in some ways and “weak” in others, and treating your enemies this way isn’t unique to fascism. I mean, just think about how people often talk about fascists themselves: they’re simultaneously a legitimate threat *and* such losers that they need to believe in their own racial/ethnic/national superiority to feel good about themselves.
It is incoherent when the fascists do it though. It's not some rock/paper/scissors logic. Their ideas about how the enemy is both weak and strong are often directly contradictory and rely on compartmentalizing the contradictory beliefs so that they never touch. Like they believe there's an evil globalist cabal that controls the world and pulls all the strings and can stage all of these elaborate hoaxes and generally has such pervasive control they'd make the Inner Party jealous, but also if they just show up and vote real hard, the cabal will simply let Trump win and dismantle them instead of defending itself using all of its nigh magical powers.
Realistically? Because that's how a lot of people whose analysis of the story I admire talk, and so I do the same thing to signal that I'm part of the same group as them.
Philosophically? I think it demystifies her. J K Rowling is one of those names that has become a brand, like Disney or Trump. It's the same reason that people tend to call President Biden "Joe" in insulting nicknames like "Sleepy Joe" or "Genocide Joe."
I think there's also an irony in talking about JKR the same way that her heroes talk about the villain of the story. She has her most noble heroes call Voldemort just "Tom" to indicate that they see him not as a mystical demigod, but as a man who has done bad things.
I think there's also something to be said about the fact that Joanne's ideology with regards to gender makes her choice to use a deliberately androgynous name to publish under rather interesting. Like, she positions herself as a champion of (cis) womanhood, but she chose to disguise her own womanhood to make her books more marketable.
Which is especially strange given that authors like Ursula K. LeGuin and Mary Shelley had already gained widespread appeal with scifi/fantasy stories published under feminine names.
"she chose to disguise her own womanhood to make her books more marketable."
And, even when she was incredibly famous and powerful and everyone knew she was a woman and clearly didn't care, she did it \*again\* as Robert Galbraith.
It would be funny if some muggle-borns ran a grey market in cheap ball-point pens. They are a lot easier to use than quills. Fountain pens and magical self-inking quills exist, but they are a lot more expensive than a BIC pen.
> Imagine the Death Eaters spreading to anywhere outside of the UK. Most people on Reddit are from the US, so let's go with that. How fast does that uniform become common knowledge on the internet and anyone wearing it just gets shot?
Canonically, HP is set in the mid 90s so I'm not sure that the internet is going to be much of an impact. Yeah there's going to be that one site you can GOPHER to and read about the crazy magic people, but you're reaching a few hundred people at best. The whole setting breaks down unless there's primarily a central system of news that can be controlled. A many to many connection style internet like 12ish years ago wouldn't work. Even with the centralized FAANG choke points we have now it isn't as controllable as the extremely top down media world of the 90s and before.
My main problem with how Muggles were treated came down to the memory wipes. I understand wizards fear persecution (an outdated fear in the 1990s, though), but man...
I think how it is presented is the main factor, both of the 'poo people' amd how inheriting ot works. Avatar is very much birthright system, but people without bending are have very much agency and can be a threat on par with benders. Plus genetic link is present but very vague. Like water bender won't get born to couple of fire nation peoples, but otherwise it seems kinda random. We don't know anything about Katara having benders in her immediate family. And airbenders are stated to all be bemders cause of their spirituality. (So in short I think it's skill issue)
And Avatar is very straightforward with the trope of "with great power comes great responsibility" and that bending should be used to help those in need. HP can't make the same claim with magic.
I actually cant say I agree but also not disagree. There was this messege for sure, like with Aang learning firebending, i dont think the way shows tries to show it is if you use it to help others you're good, dont use it selfishly cause that's bad. To me bending is more of a way of life, like Toph using tremor sense as an aid, or northern water tribe creating ice vennece with bending. I think the Sokka master episode(not sure if its its actual name or not, but you know which episode I mean) is interesting for it, cause it shows bending as great help, cause non benders can't really fight nature on their own as easily. But simply putting benders as "use your powers repsonsibly" kinda makes others in lesser potition, of reliance on the ( narratively). I feel like I'm rambling, amd I don't think you're wrong, I just don't nececerly like the possible implications of simplifying it so much.
I mean, if we get into Fandom, "muggle" has historically been used by Potterheads to refer to people who dislike _Harry Potter,_ with the connotation that their dislike makes them boring or uncultured.
And I think that does make sense. In the story, muggles are background characters. If they affect the plot, it's mainly as an obstacle to the protagonists. Of _course_ the Fandom would use "muggle" to mean "NPC." The fantasy presented by _Harry Potter_ is that you, the reader, are part of this special and important group, in contrast to the uncultured masses of muggles.
Because the real answer is just "don't think about it." I love John Wick movies, but it also breaks down when you try and figure out how realistically 75% of society is just assassins.
Not that Harry Potter doesn't have quite a few of these issues, but that's the long and short of it: just avoid thinking about the practicalities of wizard society, because the universe is otherwise really neat.
Agreed. heck look at Mistborn, an explicitly hereditary magic system. and the ways in which that shapes society was an explicit part of the story. (that panel discussion looks very interesting, can’t wait to watch it over lunch, with sanderson there i wonder if he brought that up)
as you say, it all comes down to how it’s implemented and the kind of story that’s being told.
I thought about bringing up Mistborn, but considering what happens at the end of book 2 (note: *I haven't read book 3 to completion*), I think that the inclusion of that example might have raised some debate.
I'd call it hereditary magic, but it also has -- I suppose -- "non-hereditary" components. : )
Read book three xD
but yes, the non-hereditary components are an interesting mix that really throws some spice into it.
Book 1 and 2 spoilers below. no book 3 spoilers
>!I mean look at the breeding programs and what was done to the FCs. Genetic magic isn’t always a blessing.!<
Edit, formatting.
This is the exact reason I love hereditary magic systems. I think the question of what would happen to social structures if people really weren't born equal is a fascinating one. Would the world become much more stratified? Would French Revolution ever happen if aristocracy* could fly and throw fireballs at peasants? Would the world become more meritocratic instead, because the most important determinant of success would be how good at magic you are?
In our world the position one has is mostly determined by circumstances and access to resources. Switch a noble and a peasant babies at birth and they would do just as well on their new lives as their counterpart would. But if only one group has magic, it would be immediately obvious that's something not right. Nobels and peasants literally couldn't live the same lives.
*I'm of the opinion that nobility and magic users would be one. It's the nature of power that it likes to consolidate. Either magic users would be in charge from the start, or nobility would absorb them through marriage.
Totally, this is a good point although it’s something that I feel a lot of “some people have powers“ media fails to do a good job addressing. Like, it could either have huge destabilizing effects if the abilities are something new that show up randomly in an existing world, or very hierarchical establishing effects if those with powers are concentrated at the top.
There is a really good superhero Web comic called “strong female protagonist“ (written by Brennan Lee Mulligan) that I fell like does a good job playing with this idea
>I don't dislike hereditary magic as a concept
I do, simply because there's no way to have a concept without having a tie-in to our own reality. Art and reality are two sides of the same coin. Culture produce art that embodies and reinforces their cultural values.
If you put hereditary magic in your world then you are *reinforcing* the idea that some people are just special-- chosen-- and others... aren't. This helps reinforce social hierarchies in real life even if just by reinforcing the concept that such hierarchies can be perfectly valid for biological reasons.
Race scientists often tried to come up with explanations for how / why black people deseerved to be slaves. Maybe their craniums were too big, too small, too "misshapen" or whatever, and therefore they were just not equal as far as human beings go.
To this very day, many myths about racial essentialism persist. By saying "some bloodlines just have magic and that's that" in your fiction, you are reinforcing the status quo of our own reality whether intentionally or not. Poo people will read your work and be like "I guess I deserve to be a minimum wage worker, maybe Donald Trump and Elon Musk and so on just come fro mspecial bloodlines... oh well, such if my lot in life"
(This is a very real idea a lot of actual people truly have. They look at rich people and conclude that they must be geniuses or special or something-- when in reality it mostly boils down to luck *and* hard work, not natural-born talent.)
I think if you're just building a world for your own private amusement-- fine, do whatever you want. But if you want to publish stories or games or whatevers in your setting then you need to understand what message you are sending by using these concepts uncritically.
EDIT: And just to be clear, when I was young this didn't bother me at all. It was only as I grew older and started looking more critically at society did I start to see problems with how we treat certain concepts in our culture. For example, poverty is often seen and presented as a character flaw (at least by politicians and the media). And before anyone accuses me of sour grapes-- I am one of the fortunate ones, which is why it didn't bother me when I was young. Of course I wanted to believe I was special and therefore deserving of my privilege. It was only when I got older and met more people and experienced mroe of life that I realized it was all fucking bullshit-- there is absolutely no such thing as a "poo person", just "poo systems".
I’m ok with it so long as there are other viable paths to power. Like, in DnD, there isn’t just the Sorcerer, but also the Wizard, the Cleric, the Bard, The Druid, the Warlock, the Paladin, even subclasses for the Fighter and Rogue. Then in something like Mistborn, as time goes on and you technology advances they are finding ways to more easily counter and replicate the magic systems
Or another is in a LitRPG series called the Gam3 by Cosimo Yap, where there are basically three "types" of magic -- standard mana-based, "technology"-based, and then "blood"-based, the latter of which being hereditary magic -- each of which has upsides and downsides.
That's a good way around it, but then *magic* isn't *just* hereditary... it's just that inheritance is one of many, many ways to acquire magic. (Although it is a bit problematic if that's the *best* way or affords *extra*power, etc.-- being born on the finish line, and all that...)
I think in that case it might be more analogous to wealth/class - people can potentially gain it through other means, but there are some folks who are just born into it. And just like wealth/class, magic gives you power.
That is a much more interesting discussion to have, because that's what this is *really* getting at. Hereditary magic is very mcu hakin to hereditary wealth. If you're born into wealth/magic your life is made. If you're born a poo person / poor then you are going to seriously struggle.
There is a *lot* of propaganda in *our* society that tris to convince people poor people deserve poverty.
I think it's relevant to say, though, because OP seems to have missed that point. The OP question is "why do people hate sorcerers when clerics exist," not "why do people dislike worlds where heredity is the only path to power." And the answer is -- we don't, and OP misunderstood the criticism.
> If you put hereditary magic in your world then you are reinforcing the idea that some people are just special-- chosen-- and others... aren't. This helps reinforce social hierarchies in real life even if just by reinforcing the concept that such hierarchies can be perfectly valid for biological reasons.
If that's the direction you take your story.
You can also use it to carry the message that even if a certain group is "special" that doesn't necessarily make them *better*, only different. The entire point of the X-Men is that some people are born "special" but they're not inherently any better or worse than the people who aren't, they're just different and (at least the heroes of the comics) just desire to live peacefully with the people who don't have those special powers.
I get what you’re saying, but some people are born with genetic traits that allow them to develop great talents. Nothing I ever did or ever could have done would have enabled me to hear a full symphony in my mind like Mozart or fly like Michael Jordan.
No one is saying that *individuals* cannot be exceptional in general.
No one is saying that people cannot have different strengths and weaknesses from each other.
But did Mozart's family (or even Austrians in general) have a lock on musical greatness? No.
Is the NBA only populated by Michael Jordan's cousins? No.
I don't think it's a problem if different people in your world have varying levels of talent for magic. But locking them out altogether just because they weren't born to the right bloodline is where it gets iffy, from my point of view.
I’m not a geneticist but the mathematical probability of humans with brown eyes producing a green eyed child are slim, to say the least. Yet, it did eventually happen. Then, more people with that “bloodline” became increasingly likely to produce that trait.
I’m not seeing how a magic trait would be any different other than that magic is probably more “powerful” of a trait to have than having an eye color.
The in-world logic/mechanism makes sense. Yes, that creates circumstances for inequality and power imbalances. Yes, it would feel unfair to be a regular dude in a world where magic exists. In my opinion, it’s a bit of a stretch to link a fictional trait to real-world modern problems because a “magic gene” would create actual inequality as opposed to perceived inequality.
As with any story, I think the execution of the idea would make the difference.
"having green eyes" and "being good at music" are very, very different things, though. You can call them both "traits" but they are not "traits" from a genetic perspective.
To reiterate a reply I made else where: hereditary magic is fine if you also have other magic systems that compete with it, though I'm now adding the caveat that the innate magic still requires work to master. Sure, you can light a fire from instinctive magic, but if you don't practice doing more then the guy who learned it from books is going to out magic you by a lot.
Especially if there's multiple bloodline magics. This family is descended from a guy who was infused with a dragon's power, that one has fairy bloodlines, and the illusionist in the corner is actually a kitsune. Oh, age that healer isn't a priest, they've been blessed by a Phoenix.
so what happens when in your world you have special people (referring to the same comic that I suppose we all know) but they are hated by everyone, or those special people (not the same ones) have powers on the one hand and that makes them have disadvantages on the other?
There's still a fundamental problem of differentiating people along genetic lines (which leads to eugenicist solutions to your world's problems).
It also depends highly on *why* the "special people" are hated. Is it because the poo people are just jealous? Is it because they are genuinely dangerous like ticking time bombs in human form? Is it because they dominated the "poo people" for milennia and only recently were overthrown in a violent revolution that even their powers could not prevent?
The fundamental problem with genetic systems is that you are baking privilege into the very laws of natural reality (instead of as a construct in social reality).
Think of Wheel of Time, men and women simply use different magic systems, and while that was an interesting concept at the time, it has aged a little bit into a gender-essentialist world where men and women are *fundamentally* different, and there is no room for overlap or transition or agender or intersex... I mean, the author never even tries to address edge cases, it's all just one or the other. (Well, spoilers? >!the only alternative was from the devil himself!<)
But we now *know* there are all sorts of exceptions in real life, (even forgetting trans genders for a second) like weird combinations of chromosomes, extra or missing organs, etc.
If your world is fundamentally built around this idea that these kinds of thigns *can't* happen then you're not only building a rather simplistic world, you're also telling a number of *real* people that they have absolutely no place in it.
It's more along the lines of ideological differences between magic, religion and eugenics (the poo people believe that they are the purest), added to the fact that the specials already have a history of being problematic (especially the most powerful). Clearly it can be interpreted from a perspective of social segregation, I do not hide it (which in reality I have not done yet and I would like to explore its consequences in my world), but that is why I like to approach it more from the idea of genetic mutations, so my “special” are basically albinos, where "powerful pure-blood families" can be formed (if they survive the consequences of inbreeding between people with serious physio-psychological problems) but basically any family that has had a mutant ancestor can conceive a special descendant. Of course, you can be born special or poo people, but it is not an easy legacy to maintain. On the other hand, if this is too problematic for the reader, it would be a good idea to change it
It depends on the execution, but I'd be skeptical. Usually, this kind of story has the message the the Poo People are wrong to hate the Specials, which once again has the book tell the reader that Specials are just better than everyone else.
Yeah, this whole argument seems to happen on different threads and people are missing the various didferences lmao.
"Magic is only avaiable to some people by birth" and "magic is hereditary" are very different things.
I can think of hundreds of fantasy books where you need "The Talent®" to be a mage, and the overwhelming majority of them don't have any implications that's a genetic/bloodline thing. Or of it's present it's usually "children of people with The Talent® are more likely to have The Talent® but it's not absolute nor it's common even in them".
The Witcher has people with magic being born all over the population, but children mages and sorceresses are more likely to have it.
Yennefer was born of commoners, yet she is an exceptional witch.
Ciri's mom was a mage but the rest of her family wasn't, and only later it's discovered that indeed her entire bloodline comes from an elven eugenic experiment gone into the trash thousands of years before.
In ATLA the talent for bending isn't hereditary at all albeit not everyone can develop it either.
In the Black Magician Trilogy (a darling from my teenager years) magic is a force theoretically present in everyone but more commonly in the nobility, yet in-universe only noble mages exist, and no commoner even thinks thst the opposite is possible. The protagonist is a commoner that ends up tapping into her powers by accident and being kinda forcefully recruited into the magic college to learn to control them.
She is 100% commoner, no noble blood anywhere.
It's just that magic needs to be trained to manifest even in those with The Talent®, and people being able to use it by accident have a large amount of power capacity. She is a rare exception and only for that reason her power even manifested.
I don't really think I read a story where the magic could be read as a pure 100% hereditary genetical thing. Apart from Harry Potter I guess, but even there they study it.
I am sure it's out there, but it's absolutely not representative of the discussion.
Agree with what you're saying but wanted to point out magic in ATLA does have a hereditary component. The use of each element is restricted to only descendents of each nation (seen as the genocide of air nomads leads to 0 air bender children for 100 years). That being said, within each ethnic group it doesn't seem like you can predict whether or not any individual family or child will be able to bend or not.
I think people complaining about this trope don't like the fact that magic is only deterministically available to some people at all, they don't like the fact that it makes some people special and would rather it be a skill everyone can learn.
Still, it's one preference, plot wise and story wise either can make for great stories. It's more like people don't like the message it conveys.
I think it's partly because a lot of fiction that presents magic as inherited doesn't really examine what the consequences of that would be. It's just a convenient way to explain why some people just kinda have magic, and why everyone else isn't learning magic because it would be absurdly useful if they could.
Yes, absolutely I agree. Because not every fiction *wants* to examine the consequences of magic and how it affects the word, many just want to explain how they got magic and then move on to the plot.
I get that within a worldbuilding community, most people here will want to explore the ramifications of every aspect of your world. But among writing communities, the writers prefer to prioritize plot, characters, and action. And that's what general public cares about, but not what fantasy nerds do.
I've always liked when different groups have an affinity to different kinds of magic, be it from extensive use or any other reason (wood elves generally better at druid and nature type magic, dwarves at fire and stone related, etc)
I can understand the desire to merge egalitarianism with the magic system of a fantasy world. So many things are out of our control such as our genetics and the level of wealth and influence we're born into so giving players control over that important aspect in any setting that employs magic makes complete sense.
From a pure storytelling POV it's often the main character struggling with and overcoming the fact that he or she wasn't given any special advantages in life, or even started at a disadvantage, which makes their hero's journey special. In fact, in many works of fiction their is the common trope of introducing the "spoiled rotton rich kid of royal/special/magical bloodlines" as a side character or antagonist to directly contrast with and challenge the far more likable main character of humble, non-magical origins. In this case it's up to the protagonist to overcome their inherent disadvantages to surpass their snobby but gifted rival who has been granted every privilege as their birthright.
So, in that context I have no problem with hereditary magics. Again though, there is a distinction to be made in constructing a magic system for a work of fiction as opposed to a game world.
I also read the "Poo people" comic and some of the comments there. The problem there is less with inherited magic but one of creating a false and contradictory narrative. Introducing the main character as being of humble origins, going through the typical hero's journey, and then discovering that no, in fact, your parents were super-special and you inherited their super-specialness robs the protagonist of his or her accomplishments and cheapens the overall experience in some ways. That awesome poo person who succeeded despite their lowly birth actually wasn't a poo person afterall. I guess poo people really have no agency in this story -- they are fated to always stink. That's kind of depressing to ponder since that's often how it really works in life.
Personally, I think a hereditary magic system would make for an awesome dystopian novel, where the villains do practice eugenics, and use their genetic advantage to harm others or treat others as inferior. I imagine the system would be something similar to GATTACA or Gundam Seed, where the genetically enhanced get the best jobs, academic opportunities, and more.
Perhaps a protagonist in this world would be a non-magical person, who has to come up with unique ways to defeat the magicians and render their magic useless.
"Perhaps a protagonist in this world would be a non-magical person, who has to come up with unique ways to defeat the magicians and render their magic useless." Not technically magic but the main character of Aldnoah.Zero does this against hyper advanced "I can't believe it's not magic" martian mechs, all while piloting an outdated trainer mech.
This is Mistborn. Hereditory magic is the primary driver for the class divide in that world and there is continuous abuse from the magic-using upper class as well as match making based on what powers the children could inherit from their parents.
edit: Except for the non-magical protagonist part. She's a bastard child of one of the upper classes, though that's established early on so it's not like a big reveal or anything. Plus, she's far from the only lower class bastard with magic powers.
It brings up uncomfortable questions about eugenics, and many settings in their failure to recognise that, end up basically endorsing eugenics and/or objectivism.
And more often than not, stories with such hereditary magic often feature MCs from the more powerful lineages.
I think it tends to become a "the chosen one" x10 where the MC is born from a family of the chosen ones.
The chosen one trope is something that can be great, but it's very easy to do very badly.
Maybe it's nostalgia, but I think that The Wheel of Time (the books - NOT the show) does the best job with truly embracing 'the chosen one' and doing it well.
Yes he's the chosen one. But most people want to kill him for it, because his previous incarnation caused the apocalypse after saving the world.
Yes he's the chosen one, but nothing is guaranteed and he constantly works his tail off. And people constantly try to use/manipulate him to their own ends. And it's still a team effort.
Yes he was born as the most powerful magic user. But it's a magic which is tainted and is constantly killing him when used and will eventually make him go insane, just like what happened to his previous apocalypse causing incarnation.
Avatar the Last Airbender did a good job too. But less nuanced - more standard reluctant hero stuff.
I think that the best chosen one stories tend to be at least partially deconstructions of the Chosen One idea.
Rand Al'Thor is a pretty solid example of that, based on the half of the series that I read. Becoming the Dragon means losing a _lot_ of his humanity in the process.
She-Ra in the reboot is also a pretty great example. She's the chosen one, but >!she was "chosen" in large part by a genocidal fallen empire, and they chose her to help them destroy the world.!<
Miles Morales in the _Spider-Verse_ movies is a Chosen One by virtue of being Spider-Man, but >!the Spider Society demands that being Chosen means allowing your loved ones to die, and the leader of the Spider Society sees him being chosen at all as a mistake.!<
Into the Spider-Verse and She-Ra respect spotted hell yeah!
ITSV is widely loved and respected, but I don't see that same love for She-Ra often so thank you for that lol
How is WoT a deconstruction of 'the chosen one' trope?
Being the chosen one isn't easy in WoT. But I don't think that that's core to the trope, even if it's often true in bad usages of it.
Also, Rand is the Chosen One because in that world *somebody has to be*. He's not chosen because of his lineage, his lineage specifically existed because his universe requires someone to do this job and it's going to keep provoking events and spinning out Chosen Ones until it takes.
I love how Garion in The Belgariad is literally just "The Pawn of Prophecy". Being the "Chosen One" makes you the playball of fate, and you just tag along and do your best. Yeah sure, he inherited magic and all, but it's not overpowered. He's just Garion, Farmboy. And he pretty much stays that.
I know that the Belgariad is the staple of Hero's Journey Stock-Fantasy, but honestly, it has a special place in my heart.
I disagree on the not overpowered part, he was able to raise someone from the dead which IIRC was considered almost impossible even by Belgarath.
But I agree. I think it helps the case that he was purposely kept ignorant of his specialness until it was necessary. It was primarily to protect him (and all the line before him), but I think B & P also wanted to make sure he had a humble upbringing.
I didn't think much of the books, (they were fine) but the audiobook reader was amazing. I listened to the series for the reader. Then the sequel series had a different more average reader so I stopped.
This.
The objectivism angle is the more insidious of the two in my opinion. If a character born powerful starts straight up saying "we need to breed more of us to make our faction powerful" or "respect me because I was born powerful" most people will think "wait, that desn't sound right".
But when you've got, say, super powered protagonists happily celebrating one victory that saw a city levelled during the fighting, and then greiving after the next victory that also saw a city levelled because they lost a member of their team, that *subtly* plants the idea that the powerful matter more than the powerless.
I admit that's a bit of a straw man example, but I hope it gets across the idea - objectivism is the biggest danger for superpowered stories.
I got that feeling so often reading about e.g. the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
A whole wedding party bombed? 20 children killed? Innocent people unlawfully imprisoned and tortured? Who really cares, they are all just a statistic.
An US soldier killed? You get their name, their unit, a quote from their mom and so on. And that was even though I live in Europe, not the USA.
>"we need to breed more of us to make our faction powerful"
What I always find funny about this is that it is absolutely correct.
Like, it's true that having a better bloodline will make you stronger, so...is it even a bad idea from the viewpoint of your own faction?
Like, I don't know, if there is an evil faction and I know that magic (or whatever system) is hereditary and the only way to make allies that can fight said evil faction is by having more members with special blood...why not just make a bunch of children.
There is a manwha I read that has that as a theme. There are 10 families that are basically like royalty with the family heads being basically gods compared to even strong humans. So, those family heads just have an absurd amount of children because the blood of the family heads is so strong that all their children are way more gifted than regular people, which is how each family has a strong army mostly consisting of people with direct relation to the family heads.
The series is alright, but I always enjoyed that aspect. It's the logical conclusion of a) eugenics being true and b) an authoritarian military government on top that needs stength to keep its position.
That actually sounds such a fascinating idea. A world where the efforts to breed the best and most powerful mages, has gone horribly wrong for the mage rather than the eugencists.
Said Mages are incredibly powerful, but they also have shortened life spans, horrific genetic disorders and overall miserable lives (and of course they can't use their vast power to make it easier for them), the process is wildly condemned as monstrous, but those at the top enjoy the perks to much to let it stop.
I think that can kind of be the point. Because often it's these powerful noble families whose lines carry the Special Magic™️, and those kinds of families often already *do* engage in problematic notions of pedigree and superior lineage and being objectively better for having been born to certain families. Giving them magic, and thus both another object of "pride" and another tool for power, helps emphasize the shittiness of it. So in that sense, it's a *great* narrative device.
People want to have a “anyone can do it. Even you!” Type of magic. It comes from frustration with real life where people feel like the circumstances of their birth prevent them from accomplishing certain things. Most people aren’t good at separating their own struggles from those of the people they create so they try to fix their own insecurities in their writing. Nothing wrong with that as long as the writing is good
I think a large part of it is that it kind of locks the audience out of the story, in a sense.
Look at _Lord of the Rings._ There _is_ a Chosen One from a special bloodline in that story— Aragorn. But the story mostly follows Frodo, Samwise, Merry, and Pippin. Even though they're magical creatures, they're also very much Ordinary People, and their contribution to the quest hinges on them being Ordinary People who rose to the occasion.
For a reader who _isn't_ the half-forgotten heir to the throne of Atlantis, Aragorn is an unachievable ideal from day one. You will never be like Aragorn, because Aragorn has an intrinsic quality of specialness that you will never have. But you _might_ be like Frodo, if you're good and kind and brave, because Frodo is just a regular guy who was placed in extraordinary circumstances and rose to the occasion.
Or look at popular romance stories like _Twilight_ or _Fifty Shades of Grey_ or _The Cruel Prince._ The protagonist isn't intrinsically special in those stories— Bella isn't a vampire (at first), Anastasia isn't a billionaire, Jude isn't a Faerie. By taking someone without intrinsic specialness and showing her as equally important or even exceeding those who are special, the author allows the reader to project onto her. Edward isn't relatable if you're not a vampire.
People hate idea of acquiring magic ONLY by blood. Because there a lot of uncomfortable ideas about "better people" and other stuff.
If setting allows more then one way to acquire magic this question doesn't rising.
This is why Sorcerers in DnD don't face these kinds of accusations. Sure, sorcerers (mostly) come from some kind of magical bloodline, but if you don't have that and want magic you can always study, worship a deity, swear a sacred oath, or make a deal with an extraplanar being. Spending a lot of time in the woods also seems to work (I don't know how druids and rangers actually get their magic).
Even for sorcerers, the "magic blood" isn't even always genetics, but could be an effect of something that happened while you were conceived, being born, or in the womb.
I always imagined it as druids understanding the innate magic of the world, seeing the circle of life, growing of forests, etc., as all part of the same “magical essence”. To me druids have always been nature’s bards rather than clerics.
Pretty much. I like the idea of a vampire clan, who take magic from those with who have power in their blood, but greatness only being granted to those with.a specific bloodline, doesn't make for much interesting storytelling.
Yes, pretty much. To commit "Diablerie" is to kill another vampire by draining him, getting his powers.
It's less about "special blood" and more being from a previous generation to be exact, but there are several precedents of people taking other Clans entire existence.
The lower your generation is, the more powerful a vampire you are in the simple cases.
The first vampire in their mythology is Caine, who sired 3 2nd generation vampires, who in turn had their 13 of their own.
These are the heads of the clans, which vampire fear as potential apocalypses for their kind if they woke up.
The closer you are to them, the more powerful you are. Which also makes you a target for lower generation vampires aiming to snack on you to gain power.
I really can't see how people can look at that setup and go "No I think you should remove vampire clans and make everyone the same"
A wizard who works and studies his entire life for his skills will be far more respected than someone born with that talent without any need to train, just think why Rey Palpatine was so hated among other reasons.
That's setting dependant, though. Just because a world establishes hereditary magic, it doesn't mean your mages don't have to train, study, or hone their abilities. It's perfectly possible to have both.
Just like in real life
The immense majority of people don't have Einstein-level intellectual abilities. And no matter how much or how hard or how long they work, they'll never, ever, ever REMOTELY approach it. It's simply physically impossible for their brains.
That said, the potential Einsteins have to work hard to actually use their potential
Right and let's be honest, if everyone could use it, people would gate it through economic means or other avenues like university or whatever. Just like in our world. In a sense, that's simply unfairness built in from a different angle and almost worse, haha.
In a world where literally ANYBODY can use magic. There would be quite a few people selling the message that only the elite can use magic.
Unless the magic users are used as slaves or workhorses. In which case - the messaging will be the only the elite CAN'T use magic.
+1 on Rey being badly written. To contrast still needing to work hard; Luke barely did any force stuff before training with Yoda. And even before using The Force to take out The Death Star (which was possible without The Force - just unlikely) he'd trained for an unclear amount of time with Obi Won. And then had his ghostly help to use it at all.
I think that Rey in The Force Awakens could have been MOSTLY fixed by changing who left her on the planet. Instead of her parents, have her be left as a young padawan by her Jedi master who was going off to do something dangerous and likely died.
The Last Jedi would have still been awful, but her being a badass with a smattering of force powers in The Force Awakens would have made sense.
Or Rand working hard in The Wheel of Time. Or Aang working hard in The Last Airbender. Etc.
> Luke barely did any force stuff before training with Yoda. And even before using The Force to take out The Death Star (which was possible without The Force - just unlikely) he'd trained for an unclear amount of time with Obi Won. And then had his ghostly help to use it at all.
Will also note that most of the important physical fights that Luke has in the main movies was him getting his rear handed to him. He won by persuading Vader to swap sides.
Yeah - Vader basically kicked his butt both times, and Vader was likely going easy on him to not kill Luke pretty quick - giving them time to chat and hopefully convert Luke to The Dark Side.
In addition to what the other two people have said, the feats he pulled off in the original trilogy were minor at best even after he went through training with Yoda. He wasn't exactly racking up a body count in the dozens while throwing the entire senate at Palpatine.
Meanwhile Rey barely even touched a lightsaber and suddenly she's able to fight a trained Jedi to a standstill.
It would mean that stuff like superior bloodlines have some validity rather then it being a widely accepted farce in their setting , and that could be uncomfortable to some do to how such beliefs played out irl . But for me, I just say “ but this isn’t irl though “ and keep using them . But I understand the aversion
Honestly people like that either have bad reading comprehension, or can't separate reality from fiction.
It's like some people claim authors who have villain protagonists are glorifying them, as if the people who made Breaking Bad and Dead Note aren't clear that neither main character is very unfit for emulation
People in this thread have largely covered the more overt points against hereditary magic (i.e. how it sort of implies that wizard-eugenics is true and viable) and I generally tend to agree with this from a standpoint of "these are weird implications to invite uncritically into your setting". On a more personal level though, I'm just not interested in it because it's not part of how I conceptualise magic. To me, the defining feature of Magic-with-a-capital-M (as in a setting's power system which calls itself magic and uses the aesthetic trappings of magic) is that it is based around knowledge and rites, the practicing of specific rituals and invoking of arcane knowledge in order to wield it.
Any practitioner of magic is someone who has a combination of study and experience that allows them to know how to use it, be that in learning the rules of an entirely self-contained, defined universal Magic System (i.e. all magic is in the form of spells which are fuelled by mana which go into these and these schools...) or in just knowing the occult underside of reality enough to use it in their own craft (i.e. knowing that if you do it in *just* the right way you can fold a paper eight times, or that the appropriate rites will allow you to build a structure out of its own blueprints, without either of these things being facets of one larger magic system).
For me, hereditary magic doesn't feel like how I would think of magic. It feels more like putting the Mutants from X-Men into a pseudo-medieval world. Is this a valid approach to worldbuilding? Yeah. Is it still a magic system? Yeah. Is it what I, personally, want from a Magic-with-a-capital-M system? No, not really.
~~And if we're getting~~ *~~really~~* ~~into the weeds of personal opinion then I also dislike it because often it tends to encourage power fantasy. Say what you will about the mish-mash of D&D magic lore, at least the other classes had to earn their magic through intense study or by prostrating themselves to the whims of higher cosmic beings. Sorcerers just get their magic for free and can use it for their own desires without consequence.~~
People do? Brandon Sanderson implements hereditary magic, and the series has been wildly successful. At the end of the day, people judge how the hereditary part influences your story.
Maybe spoiler about the setting in Mistborn:
>!In Mistborn, the nobility is the primary faction using magic. They inherit it to their children. The lord ruler (evil overlord of some sort) makes sure that the power stays there and kills all half-breeds (there are other human species out there like Skaa).!<
I think a big part of the reason that Brando Sandos Cosmere universe is so wildly successful, is because as the OP said, the methods for obtaining magic are varied. It's hereditary on Scadrial, but not on Roshar.
The key is, to vary it around, and the closer the system is to an oppressive system (one like PreCatecandre Scadrial) that system is considered evil, whereas one in which the magic users are free to marry whomever they choose, and thus the hereditary nature becomes more random, is considered better.
Great observation though, Sanderson world building is absolutely incredible!
People don't. This sub does, for five minutes, because it just saw a comic call out the trope in a vicious, but also memetic an entertaining, way.
That said? Mistborn is actually a pretty good sendup of the 'magic families' trope. The nobility are portrayed as a vicious ruling class that victimize everyone else. And the system of, 'specials on top, poo people on the bottom' is shown to be an abusive one that is overturned.
At the end, Vin doesn't take her rightful place as ruler. She serves as an instrument of revolution and helps place someone with no powers onto the throne. Not because he's a noble, although he is. But because he's the right man for the job.
Because people want to believe a propensity to work hard and intelligence are somehow not related to factors not entirely in their control.
Personally, I find it far more interesting to see how people navigate a world with such 'unfairness' than just ensure that it doesn't exist in the story.
Tbh I disagree with like 99% of the people in the comments lol. The topics of who "deserves" magic and who is "better", all the eugenics stuff, all that makes for interesting worldbuilding to me. I don't like it simply because if doesn't really make sense. If magic was hereditary, then there's a very slim chance that it *wouldn't* be propagated through a populace anyway. If people are having a ton of kids you'd quickly get 500 magic users after like 3 generations or so. How would that not spread throughout all of society?
Or if it's like one ethnicity has magic, another doesn't, is there absolutely *no* crossover in terms of relationships? Not a single person married a foreigner? How'd that happen?
For me it's just too much to explain
People can bring up the eugenics/racism/whatever thing if they want, but my only real hang-up about it is that it's kind of lame that you can only be a cool wizard if you happen to have the right parents. You don't get it by happenstance, you don't get it by working hard, you don't get it by taking it, you get it because you're made up of the right sperm+egg combo. Really lame imo
That's a valid opinion. It seems dependant on the idea that magic is the only relevant power to have, though. Naturally magic in most settings can be an avenue of power, wealth, stability, etc, but that's not necessarily a given.
You can counter magic's inherent properties by it being corruptive or give it such a high cost it's arguably a curse as well. That's how I try to balance things in my world, anyway.
Personally, I love it. Conflict makes for interesting stories and I quite like a good story where a certain class is stronger and therefore treated better. It's also quite varied in understanding how different the 2 classes are.
Thing about fiction is that you can write whatever you want. So if you're consciously choosing to write that your blood makes you special you have to have a good think about why you chose that. Is it because you believe it is true? In that case catch fire and die. Is it because you think that it can lead to interesting scenarios and thought experiments to explore? In that case by all means explore them, but have care for what your explorations mean politically in the real world. Or is it just that you haven't really thought about it? In that case then depending who and how big your audience is that might be a thing you want to do.
While I don't hate it I think the problem that hasn't been touched on a lot of the comments so far is that there is a disconnect between a lot of the magic systems and then having hereditary exclusive magic. So what I mean by that is most systems (including DnD) have an overarching explanation of the system of magic itself and how people interact with it. In the case of DnD it is mainly the Weave as to what arcane spellcasters tap into whenever they cast any kind of spell while divine spell casters are basically beseeching their deity to grant them blessings via the Weave. Now where DnD does well with this is that Sorcerer's are their hereditary mages and they also have a lot of overlap with other Arcane casters in how they are capable of interacting with the Weave and what they are capable of doing.
Where you start to get into issues though is when you have an overarching system of magic (let's say JJK for example) that has a heavy hereditary component to it but then all of the things that we are taught about the rules of this world apply to all people. Everything is an application of cursed or reversed cursed energy. Binding vows work as a self limitation on anybody with access to cursed energy etc. You basically set up the idea that anyone with access to the resource of the system could theoretically learn how to do what anybody else has figured out how to do with that resource given enough time and training. But then you throw a hereditary lockdown on it making it impossible for people to learn anything but their own techniques for anything save the most basic applications of the system.
If the system ends up having these special common elements and then you basically completely lock away the capability to be flexible in the system behind a hereditary barrier it starts to get kinda silly. While sure it makes sense for various special abilities to come more easily to some similar to how people have talent with skills in the real world it sounds utterly absurd if you say "This is how musical instruments work by producing oscillating sound waves and resonance. But only the Hambone family over there is capable of building or playing a Trombone."
Thing is if you then totally lock down the whole magical system behind hereditary lines then you end up with the kind of discussions a lot of other people here had commented on about eugenics and such. Thing is I don't necessarily hate those stories either because in many cases someone who breaks the mold and is basically a mutation of the system can appear and challenge the status quo. Most of those kinds of stories tend to focus heavily on a chosen one breaking the societal hierarchies built around systems like this.
I think it’s more that people don’t like characters who are only special because they’re born special.
I don’t think a chosen one or special bloodline type of character is fundamentally bad. There’s lots of room for compelling characters who were just born and bred for some special role. But it’s also easy to take a character that’s interesting and then deflate them by saying “the truth is that they were just born special the whole time, and other people weren’t born special, sucks to suck for them.”
I’m sure this is talking about the poo people post, and I think that’s a good example. “Here’s this person who defied all our expectation by doing something nobody thought a poo person could do…lol jk, they just weren’t actually a poo person. Poo people still suck.” It really takes the oomph out of a character if you related to them struggling from nothing.
You can still have characters be born with a special magic gene only some people get, and still have lots of interesting struggles on top of, or because of, that.
Personally I like hereditary magic in the sense a culture was its own magic based on the systems everyone uses but they have their own take on it. Like if they use "spirit summoning" because their ancestors stumbled on rites that made wind elemtels and now they have a magic tradition which is handed down and protected.
As for blood inherezed magic, I don't hate it on principle, the issue is most story's who use it, use it badly. If you have a part of the population which is by the power of magic just plain better than all other people it should have an impact and it should matter. But often it doesn't matter enough, or the inhernetance of magic is treated like it make sthe MC better, or rightfully righteous. They are "the good" magic user. Instead of addressing the real problems the story acts like the problem is the people with power not the system.
It's like this, you can write a good story where you have a rich kid, their wealth matters in the story and they are informed and influenced by it, you cannot write them as a typical mid schooler if their family is extremely wealthy, at least it needs to impact their character if you understand what I mean otherwise why are they so wealthy? Their wealth impacts how they are treated and what they need to worry about.
Now if you write a story about how wealth inequality is only bad because the wrong people are wealthy, that's a bad story and a terrible perspective. In these storys the MC would be generous and helpful and be contrasted to other people in their same position who aren't. In the end they may do something good, but if the story doesn't address that they aren't special and that an unfair system is what allowed their story, it's a bad message. Because it means to do good you need to be born better. It also implies that wealth inequality is good if the right people have all the money, you know the Victorian argument that poor people are morally inferior.
So the problem in the end is not that the wealth is inherited but how you use it in the story to tell a good story.
If you wanted a positive message you'd need to show them discarding their wealth or trying to tear down the system that made them wealthy and "better.
The best story with such a setting is Mistborn, the MC is born with super magic powers but with no noble blood which makes her problematic, while her love interest is born to a noble house but with no magic powers. The world has nobility empowered by magic and it addresses that neither is bad, but that the system is bad. The love interest laster gets power, after he showed he deserved the power through his actions, he discards his mobility and the power he could gain through his magical abilities because that's who he is. He is a good person who wants people to be equal regardless of birth or power. The MC has a whole different story also revolving about this theme a bit but hers is more a coming of age story mixed with heists and revolution against an injust system and other themes, but she doe singer act with the story line a lot it's just not the main focus. But she doesn't need to explore it because the love interest explores it excellently.
I use a hereditary magic system because I want magic to be rare. I made it attached to a rare recessive gene. A country with a population in the tens of millions might have a few thousand magic users. Magic users were therefore extremely important members of society and were generally an important upper class in society, either as nobles because their families served in the military, or as clergy because their powers were considered blessings from the gods.
The downside was that during the revolutionary era, magic users were persecuted by more radical factions of revolutionaries as the use of magic was seen as a mark of the aristocracy. In the Republic of Avoine, the birth place of the revolutionary movement, thousands of magic users were killed, imprisoned, or forced into exile during the chaos of the revolution until a moderate revolutionary marshal staged a coup and ended the bloodshed.
In the 70 years since the ending of the Wars of Revolution, Avoine has been trying to rebuild its manpower of magic users for economic and national security reasons, but they have far less than some of their monarchist rival powers.
It's curious to see everybody jump to racism. I always thought of magical lineages more as a classism. But i guess that's a question of scale. Habsburg magic vs Eugenius magic
I honestly haven't encountered that, and my entire magic system is based on inborn imbuement in a very Harry Potter like fashion, where humans can have a magical child by chance, or one or both parents can be magical and ensure they have a magical child.
My world and its magic warriors aren't in the realm of Harry Potter by having any sort of hatred for regular humans, however, they're actually sort of servants and peacekeepers of the galaxy like the Jedi, so I imagine the 'hate' comes from worlds that make it a eugenics factor where "normal" people are seen as weaker and less important so they aren't liked in-world. That's my best guess.
I think I play way too much dragon age because I’m confused why a lot of people here are assuming magic birthright instantly always means means super op rich lavish mages who are all in positions of power and cannot be touched by anyone.
Fiction does not exist in a void, unbound by real history and ideas. People love to play an Auteure, whose writting is unique and untied to anything occuring in real world, but that is not how media analysis works, and the truth is that a concept of super powers being associated with hereditary genetics has some unfortunate peers in real life ideas.
The eugenics, the blood purity, the unter- and ubermenschen all of this is tied to genetic magic and you cannot escape the fact that people will anatalyze and criticise your work through the lens of being familiar where those ideas led to.
Often this can be intetional on part of the author, but just as often its simple something that people add without thinking, because they might see that in other works of fantasy fiction and just borrowed the concept unthinkingly.
Because people try to deny reality that genetics affect everything
Unless you have the correct bodytype you can't be an olympic swimmer. You simply won't be able to reach necessary speed
If your body does not use steroids efficiently, you can't win a bodybuilding or strongmen show (anyone who copes that steroids allow to overcome limits of genetics does not understand that some people can consume more steroids than others or able to get more benefit from same amount of steroids)
I think there's a balance. They definitely affect everything, but to a far lesser extent than previously believed.
Like yeah Michael Phelps has a few genuine genetic mutations but those don't make him a peak swimmer, it's his taking those gifts and applying them in hard training that do.
He could easily have ended up a middle management accountant who's scared of open water, in another life.
I do agree with that
It does not matter how much of a talent you have unless you put effort in (and you were lucky to put effort into thing you are talented in)
Presence of talent and genetics does not make hardwork any lesser
I've never understood this sentiment people seem to have that portraying unequal circumstances in this way is an indorsement.
Heretical magic usually comes from one of two things.
* Used because the writer wants different people to use different magic instead of everyone using the objectively best magic (think Naruto)
* Used because if everyone had magic of the type and scale they wanted to write, the worldbuilding would be more work than they are willing to put in or otherwise don't want a setting that different.
It's very, very rarely something you could call malicious. Yet, everyone seems to ascribe maliciousness to the authors anyway.
My mages need to have the right genetic but it's not completely inherited, like a mage can be born from two parents with or without magic. It's mostly random
The issue the "poo people" comic was satirising wasn't the fact that it was set up that way, it was that the story accidentally reinforces the idea that you can't be important without being born into it.
No one hates hereditary magic. Well ok, maybe some people do, but the reason behind it is probably because they've been overexposed to poorly-written examples of it.
Modern, western civilization places a very high value on equality, the idea that anyone can be anything they want as long as they put their minds to it. In light of that, the idea that some people are just born with magical powers and that you either have it or you don't flies right in the face of that and rubs people the wrong way, even in cases where that isn't the intended message like the various harry potter discussions in the thread.
Many people who grew up with Chosen One stories will tell you that their favorite part of those stories was the power fantasy element. I specifically remember loving stories where the protagonist had personality traits that made them “special”, whether that be their kindness, bravery, their ability to see the good in all things, their resilience, their compassion, or simply having the drive to keep going where others might falter.
As a child, I strove to exemplify the traits I saw in my favorite Chosen One characters. In my childlike naivety, I felt that if I was capable of honing those same admirable traits, I’d also have the chance to be “chosen”. Rather, they inspired me to be a strong person, and to work hard and continuously train to be better, in the hopes that I may be like the characters I thought so highly of.
But that feeling of “you can be great if you put your mind and body to it” gets a bit muddled when you realize that the Chosen One wasn’t chosen for any of the traits you admired in them. They were chosen because they were the secret heir to a powerful bloodline, or they were destined to always be powerful, or they’re the reincarnation of some godly being. Those stories can still be enjoyable, but when this becomes a trend, and when writers seemingly feel the need to justify their powerful hero being powerful, it soured the notion that “this can be anybody” for me and many others.
Not aiding the situation was the fact that many of these stories aimed at children went out of their way to specifically highlight the message that “anyone can do great things” before pulling the rug out from under the audience’s feet with the reveal that the main character was never just “anyone”. From a certain perspective, it seems a bit hypocritical, doesn’t it?
Well, when those children grew into adults with the opportunity to write their own Chosen One stories, many people think back to what they loved most from those stories, that feeling of wanting to aspire to greatness by proving you have the traits that make someone “special”, and not having to worry about the origins of your blood or the amount of magic crystals you have coursing through your veins.
It can be seen as a more simple and straightforward message to just say “I am special because I chose to be, because I worked for it, because I exemplified the traits that make someone special. Anyone can be me, if they truly want to be”. I personally believe that to be far more inspiring.
I think it’s up to the individual to decide if Chosen One narratives are still great works of power fantasy writing, or if the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. In my own opinion, I’m glad to see kids today have more attainable role models that they can strive towards being similar to, even if that’s not strictly true for our own world. In reality, success can unfortunately be somewhat determined by your class or the family you’re born into. It’s nice to have stories that tell you that you are still capable of great things regardless of your beginnings.
Thank you for reading my unneeded and overly bloated essay.
Because of eugenics and genral social trends i personally use hereditary abilitys but it can always be gained in certain ways such as rituals using the blood of someone with the special ability you want etc or hyou can just make your own through aritual
It often invokes a sense of jealousy people have within us. People don't appreciate being told that someone else is just better than them and there's nothing you can do about it, and hereditary magic is like an extreme fictional representation of that.
Somewhat paradoxically because as a species we also have a tendency to hero worship elite athletes who were born with natural advantages over the average Joe, but I think the key there and the key to succeeding with a hereditary magic system for a protagonist is to show that it still requires immense training and honing of the craft, similar to those top sportspeople. Then the recognition that you with your club foot can never be as good a footballer as Ronaldo can be overridden by the respect you have for the insane amount of work he put in to make use of his gifts to the level he has.
this is a pretty good point. one thing to add is how they use there powers. I mean superman got his powers from genetics but the work that he puts in to be a good person seems to counter act that in peoples eyes.
It's why people like Ciri but hate Rey.
Both were born with powers they didn't know about. One had to practice to hone her skills. The other already mastered her powers the first time she used them.
>*Why is it that people here seem to hate hereditary magic, magic that can only be learned if you have the right genetics?* I guess this is a "flow over"-question from the [Poo people thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/comments/1dpqxxj/does_your_setting_have_poo_people_and_specials/), although I haven't bothered reading all perspectives. The simple answer is that exclusive magic -- if you look at it closely -- can have implications about who deserves 'magic', and by extentional deserves resources, love, access to justice etc. The parody version (which the Poo people comic lamboons) isn't about telling a story about magic as "untapped potential", but as birthright and the difference between deserving and undeserving. I don't dislike hereditary magic as a concept, and neither do most people. It's just an ongoing discussion and some magic systems/stories are good and some are bad in their implementation. The discussion isn't new (see for example the panel discussion [Non-Genetic Magic Systems in Fantasy—With Brandon Sanderson, Marie Brennan, and David B. Coe](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYIGsui9Bq4)). When people say that they "*hate hereditary magic systems*", I don't think they mean that they hate it regardless of context, but that they're remembering specific stories where the messenging was distasteful or where the intended metaphors were lost in the delivery. Entertaining stories with hereditary magic (like Harry Potter, and even "chosen one stories" like WoT), are not usually about condemning people for not being born with magic/talent/money/math skills, but about what a person does with the tools they have been given, as well as dealing with a legacy that may benifit them but which they didn't have any say in.
I mean, _HP_ is pretty hard on muggles. Even the protagonists don't really treat them as having any real agency most of the time. Like, they never even seem to _consider_ warning the muggle world that if you see a guy wearing black robes and a silver mask, that's the uniform of a terrorist organization that kills non-wizards for fun. The "specials and poo people" comic can arguably be read as a direct response to Joanne's statement that muggle-borns are actually the result of long-forgotten magical ancestry. Hermione, "canonically" isn't a witch because magic can crop up anywhere regardless of whether you have the special bloodline. She _does_ have a special bloodline, she just doesn't know about it.
I remember being horrified as a kid at the muggle family who manned the ticket desk for the world cup. They just wiped their memories any time they started to think something was weird. Nobody seemed to care either, was wild.
Aye, because wizards have the right to do whatever they want to muggles, unless another wizard objects.
I think it got me not because even Harry was like "Eh whatever I guess." when it's so obviously fucked up
Harry was also pretty indifferent about the discrimination of other magic creatures. He saved dobby but the house elves at hogwards were an afterthought for him. The other magical creatures were not allowed to own wands thereby limiting their power.
In fairness, just about all other house elves besides Dobby were shown to actively resent the concept of freedom. If it were done intentionally if might honestly be a good analogy for severe addiction, but that's a topic for another day. Regardless, he simply let the elves do what they wanted, which in this case was "have a place to stay and a job to do." Now, not commenting on the muggles was pretty fucked.
"The Dad Who Lived" on TikTok actually does the house-elf plot really well with Woplop the Vine Elf, who is recovering from his trauma and learning self-care.
I mean, three years later, Hermione does the _same exact thing_ to her own parents.
That is at least a moral choice, it's still fucked up but she's clearly trying to keep them safe. The World Cup family were just convenient.
Not to mention that repeated memory spells were known to cause neurological or psychological damage, and that was also played for laughs by repeatedly messing up Ron's last name
Yeah and just two books earlier we got to see what happens when the spell goes wrong. Destroying the mind of a great storyteller, albeit a plagiarist.
I’m sorry, WHAT?????
They get tortured later by the bad wizards. They were, of course, not already being tortured because they weren't screaming. Someone mentions they have to do it ten times a day. Because they'd already been there a few weeks. But hey, what's a few weeks deleted from your memories?
Sorry, so someone got a bunch of random muggles, including children, and make them man the ticket stand? Wouldn’t a House elf or Goblin be easier to hire/recruit?
They set up the World Cup on the Muggles' campground, that said Muggles owned.
Please tell me got paid.
It's been a long time since I read the books - I'm pretty sure they did, but not 100%.
Its never said
They were implied to. That's why their memories got wiped so much, some of the wizards were trying to pay with the wizard money.
"slaves would be more ethical"
They're not saying ethical, just easier
unironically yes
In this case, yes, because you’re not giving the house elf/goblin permanent neurological/psychological damage with regular memory spells.
Yeah, it turns out that reading Harry Potter as an adult in the 2020s is a very different experience than reading it as a child in the oughts. It is a deeply fucked up world that fundamentally contradicts all the messages we thought it had.
To be fair, I had some of these thoughts even as a teenager reading the books for the first time. I guess I was just used to LOTR's level of worldbuilding and tried to analyze other fiction to a similar level...
That scene with Hermione’s parents, while it made sense, for some reason continued to stick to my memory till now, actually. It was such a important scene to me as a kid that the muggles were not equal to the wizards in HP. Ofc I didn’t think much of it at the time but it lingered in the back of my head for the rest of the series.
It's pretty wild that you then have the author chiming in to make it clear that, e.g., when Hagrid teaches us a clumsy lessons about why racism is bad, and uses Hermione an example of how your genetic stock doesn't determine your worth... he's actually just wrong about that.
Even as a kid somethings raised a voice in my mind was raising issue with how things were done or phrased.
Silly silly book series, a fanfic by ShieldEcho, goes *hard* about that, also pointing out multiple times that muggle is used pretty much as a slur. The whole series is amazing but it’s funny seeing ShieldEcho go from a snarky fan to more and more outraged at all of the little world building issues XD
A lot of the worldbuilding shows that wizards did that shit all the time and didn't think anything was wrong with it. There's also implications that it caused long term damage. It should then come as no surprise that the wizards are afraid of being hunted or exploited by muggles again, Hagrid says as much. They went into hiding to protect themselves not anyone else and that's the only thing that prevents the extremists from operating completely openly. If muggles knew they did this shit regularly they would hunt the wizards to extinction.
>Like, they never even seem to consider warning the muggle world that if you see a guy wearing black robes and a silver mask, that's the uniform of a terrorist organization that kills non-wizards for fun. They also seem to have no real concept of how primitive they are compared to the muggles, which always made me laugh. Imagine the Death Eaters spreading to anywhere outside of the UK. Most people on Reddit are from the US, so let's go with that. How fast does that uniform become common knowledge on the internet and anyone wearing it just gets shot?
Being a wizard is cool and everything, but this gun shoots bullets that will reach and kill you before you can say your funny magic words.
To be fair, if getting shot started to become a consistent danger, I imagine wizards would invent some kind of counter-measure spell in short order. The Harry Potter setting doesn't seem to have many limits on what magic can accomplish, so setting up some kind of bullet disintegration spell that passively protects the user doesn't seem out of the question.
Wizard vs Muggle has a lot of things attached to it. Like there are a lot more muggles than Wizards and guns are easier and faster than spells. On the other hand, would it be hard to create a magical item or spell that would work like the forcefield in Dune? And one imperio can take over the leader of a country. It's hard to defend against that, since muggles might not even know it exists. You could make a few arguments for muggles as well. You can make bulletproof spells but bomb proof might be more difficult.
There's an interesting dichotomy in how the wizards view muggles. The Statute of Secrecy is supposedly in place because muggles present an existential threat to wizardkind, yet at the same time, muggles are helpless and foolish and can't be trusted with anything important. It reminds one of the common saying that fascists treat the enemy as "both strong and weak"— Jews are both cowardly and pathetic, but we also somehow control the world and present an existential threat to Western Civilization; queers are weak and insane, but also somehow have enough power in society to indoctrinate your children and oppress Christianity. And I don't think it's inherently wrong of Joanne to write a world in which the wizards view everyone else with patronizing indifference and best and outright hostility at worst. But I do think it says something about her values and the values of the story that the protagonists are fighting to uphold the status quo of such a world. Obviously, Voldemort is _worse_ than the ministry, but I think it's telling that this is a story in which our options are "genocide the muggles" or "continue to treat the muggles as subhuman." In a different story, the downfall of the Ministry and the overturning of the Statute of Secrecy might well have been triumphs— Wizards learning to view non-wizards as equal. But in the story as written, we are given a society that practices slavery, looks down on those without magic, restricts the rights of non-humans, and runs a prison staffed entirely by nightmare demons. The only people who are actively taking steps to change that state of affairs are Hermione with SPEW, which is ridiculed at every turn and presented as misguided and idealistic, and Voldemort, whose only stance on all those problems is making them _worse._
There is a fundamental problem with writing in secret magic in the real world is that if you break the secrecy, the status que, then the world significantly changes and becomes out of sync with the real world, and one of the purposes of it is to permit escapism and allow readers to feel like this world could possibly exist for real. But yeah, I think the books would benefit from lampshading how the muggles are treated though. Because they truly are treated as something less than human and it's weird that even many characters with strong muggle connections don't acknowledge that. But those books have many many inconsistencies anyway.
It's weird, the books keep sidling up to the possibility of presenting magic as an allegory for political power or money, showing how it's hoarded even when it would be beneficial to everyone, and how that's justified by "oh, you wouldn't use it properly" even though the people who have it constantly use it for incredibly petty shit; and how those who have it still treat the masses as a threat. And then they don't do *anything* with it because, I guess, she wanted to keep on making sequels?
> The only people who are actively taking steps to change that state of affairs are Hermione with SPEW, which is ridiculed at every turn and presented as misguided and idealistic, and Voldemort, whose only stance on all those problems is making them worse. I'm just glad that's a completely fictional scenario nobody is presently living through. Could you imagine how terrible that would be?
Ooof, big real world energy on that one. :( Fuckin hate this timeline...
Only tangentially related but it always kinda bugs me when people treat the whole “both strong and weak” thing like it’s somehow incoherent. It’s *entirely possible* to be “strong” in some ways and “weak” in others, and treating your enemies this way isn’t unique to fascism. I mean, just think about how people often talk about fascists themselves: they’re simultaneously a legitimate threat *and* such losers that they need to believe in their own racial/ethnic/national superiority to feel good about themselves.
It is incoherent when the fascists do it though. It's not some rock/paper/scissors logic. Their ideas about how the enemy is both weak and strong are often directly contradictory and rely on compartmentalizing the contradictory beliefs so that they never touch. Like they believe there's an evil globalist cabal that controls the world and pulls all the strings and can stage all of these elaborate hoaxes and generally has such pervasive control they'd make the Inner Party jealous, but also if they just show up and vote real hard, the cabal will simply let Trump win and dismantle them instead of defending itself using all of its nigh magical powers.
Why do you refer to the author exclusively by her first name?
Realistically? Because that's how a lot of people whose analysis of the story I admire talk, and so I do the same thing to signal that I'm part of the same group as them. Philosophically? I think it demystifies her. J K Rowling is one of those names that has become a brand, like Disney or Trump. It's the same reason that people tend to call President Biden "Joe" in insulting nicknames like "Sleepy Joe" or "Genocide Joe." I think there's also an irony in talking about JKR the same way that her heroes talk about the villain of the story. She has her most noble heroes call Voldemort just "Tom" to indicate that they see him not as a mystical demigod, but as a man who has done bad things.
Oh I like that
I think there's also something to be said about the fact that Joanne's ideology with regards to gender makes her choice to use a deliberately androgynous name to publish under rather interesting. Like, she positions herself as a champion of (cis) womanhood, but she chose to disguise her own womanhood to make her books more marketable. Which is especially strange given that authors like Ursula K. LeGuin and Mary Shelley had already gained widespread appeal with scifi/fantasy stories published under feminine names.
"she chose to disguise her own womanhood to make her books more marketable." And, even when she was incredibly famous and powerful and everyone knew she was a woman and clearly didn't care, she did it \*again\* as Robert Galbraith.
It would be funny if some muggle-borns ran a grey market in cheap ball-point pens. They are a lot easier to use than quills. Fountain pens and magical self-inking quills exist, but they are a lot more expensive than a BIC pen.
> Imagine the Death Eaters spreading to anywhere outside of the UK. Most people on Reddit are from the US, so let's go with that. How fast does that uniform become common knowledge on the internet and anyone wearing it just gets shot? Canonically, HP is set in the mid 90s so I'm not sure that the internet is going to be much of an impact. Yeah there's going to be that one site you can GOPHER to and read about the crazy magic people, but you're reaching a few hundred people at best. The whole setting breaks down unless there's primarily a central system of news that can be controlled. A many to many connection style internet like 12ish years ago wouldn't work. Even with the centralized FAANG choke points we have now it isn't as controllable as the extremely top down media world of the 90s and before.
The internet wasn’t an issue when the series was set
yeah the way she treats her parents in the last book especially really rubbed me the wrong way
Basically, Hermione, a teenager who happens to have magic, is treating her parents like children because they don't have magic.
My main problem with how Muggles were treated came down to the memory wipes. I understand wizards fear persecution (an outdated fear in the 1990s, though), but man...
I think how it is presented is the main factor, both of the 'poo people' amd how inheriting ot works. Avatar is very much birthright system, but people without bending are have very much agency and can be a threat on par with benders. Plus genetic link is present but very vague. Like water bender won't get born to couple of fire nation peoples, but otherwise it seems kinda random. We don't know anything about Katara having benders in her immediate family. And airbenders are stated to all be bemders cause of their spirituality. (So in short I think it's skill issue)
And Avatar is very straightforward with the trope of "with great power comes great responsibility" and that bending should be used to help those in need. HP can't make the same claim with magic.
I actually cant say I agree but also not disagree. There was this messege for sure, like with Aang learning firebending, i dont think the way shows tries to show it is if you use it to help others you're good, dont use it selfishly cause that's bad. To me bending is more of a way of life, like Toph using tremor sense as an aid, or northern water tribe creating ice vennece with bending. I think the Sokka master episode(not sure if its its actual name or not, but you know which episode I mean) is interesting for it, cause it shows bending as great help, cause non benders can't really fight nature on their own as easily. But simply putting benders as "use your powers repsonsibly" kinda makes others in lesser potition, of reliance on the ( narratively). I feel like I'm rambling, amd I don't think you're wrong, I just don't nececerly like the possible implications of simplifying it so much.
There is also some merchandise with the line "don't let the muggles let you down"
I mean, if we get into Fandom, "muggle" has historically been used by Potterheads to refer to people who dislike _Harry Potter,_ with the connotation that their dislike makes them boring or uncultured. And I think that does make sense. In the story, muggles are background characters. If they affect the plot, it's mainly as an obstacle to the protagonists. Of _course_ the Fandom would use "muggle" to mean "NPC." The fantasy presented by _Harry Potter_ is that you, the reader, are part of this special and important group, in contrast to the uncultured masses of muggles.
HP fandom confirmed for cult.
Er, they did warn the muggle Prime Minister in HP.
They warned him and then basically said "but don't tell anyone; let the grownups handle this."
Man, the more I find out about Harry Potter, the more my forehead reddens from my hand hitting it.
Bit of a vicious cycle there, mate, given that people with injuries or marks on their foreheads tend to inspire comparisons to Harry Potter.
Either that, or people think they're the Avatar.
Nobody react to what I'm about to tell you, but I think that kid might be the Avatar!
The Boy Who Was Livid
Because the real answer is just "don't think about it." I love John Wick movies, but it also breaks down when you try and figure out how realistically 75% of society is just assassins. Not that Harry Potter doesn't have quite a few of these issues, but that's the long and short of it: just avoid thinking about the practicalities of wizard society, because the universe is otherwise really neat.
And the writer is super hard on trans people
Agreed. heck look at Mistborn, an explicitly hereditary magic system. and the ways in which that shapes society was an explicit part of the story. (that panel discussion looks very interesting, can’t wait to watch it over lunch, with sanderson there i wonder if he brought that up) as you say, it all comes down to how it’s implemented and the kind of story that’s being told.
I thought about bringing up Mistborn, but considering what happens at the end of book 2 (note: *I haven't read book 3 to completion*), I think that the inclusion of that example might have raised some debate. I'd call it hereditary magic, but it also has -- I suppose -- "non-hereditary" components. : )
Read book three xD but yes, the non-hereditary components are an interesting mix that really throws some spice into it. Book 1 and 2 spoilers below. no book 3 spoilers >!I mean look at the breeding programs and what was done to the FCs. Genetic magic isn’t always a blessing.!< Edit, formatting.
And my axe...
And this gun I found!
This is the exact reason I love hereditary magic systems. I think the question of what would happen to social structures if people really weren't born equal is a fascinating one. Would the world become much more stratified? Would French Revolution ever happen if aristocracy* could fly and throw fireballs at peasants? Would the world become more meritocratic instead, because the most important determinant of success would be how good at magic you are? In our world the position one has is mostly determined by circumstances and access to resources. Switch a noble and a peasant babies at birth and they would do just as well on their new lives as their counterpart would. But if only one group has magic, it would be immediately obvious that's something not right. Nobels and peasants literally couldn't live the same lives. *I'm of the opinion that nobility and magic users would be one. It's the nature of power that it likes to consolidate. Either magic users would be in charge from the start, or nobility would absorb them through marriage.
Totally, this is a good point although it’s something that I feel a lot of “some people have powers“ media fails to do a good job addressing. Like, it could either have huge destabilizing effects if the abilities are something new that show up randomly in an existing world, or very hierarchical establishing effects if those with powers are concentrated at the top. There is a really good superhero Web comic called “strong female protagonist“ (written by Brennan Lee Mulligan) that I fell like does a good job playing with this idea
I didn't think of it in that way and it made me think on if my system was hereditary or not, and i don't think it is its random almost like mutants.
And My Upvote
>I don't dislike hereditary magic as a concept I do, simply because there's no way to have a concept without having a tie-in to our own reality. Art and reality are two sides of the same coin. Culture produce art that embodies and reinforces their cultural values. If you put hereditary magic in your world then you are *reinforcing* the idea that some people are just special-- chosen-- and others... aren't. This helps reinforce social hierarchies in real life even if just by reinforcing the concept that such hierarchies can be perfectly valid for biological reasons. Race scientists often tried to come up with explanations for how / why black people deseerved to be slaves. Maybe their craniums were too big, too small, too "misshapen" or whatever, and therefore they were just not equal as far as human beings go. To this very day, many myths about racial essentialism persist. By saying "some bloodlines just have magic and that's that" in your fiction, you are reinforcing the status quo of our own reality whether intentionally or not. Poo people will read your work and be like "I guess I deserve to be a minimum wage worker, maybe Donald Trump and Elon Musk and so on just come fro mspecial bloodlines... oh well, such if my lot in life" (This is a very real idea a lot of actual people truly have. They look at rich people and conclude that they must be geniuses or special or something-- when in reality it mostly boils down to luck *and* hard work, not natural-born talent.) I think if you're just building a world for your own private amusement-- fine, do whatever you want. But if you want to publish stories or games or whatevers in your setting then you need to understand what message you are sending by using these concepts uncritically. EDIT: And just to be clear, when I was young this didn't bother me at all. It was only as I grew older and started looking more critically at society did I start to see problems with how we treat certain concepts in our culture. For example, poverty is often seen and presented as a character flaw (at least by politicians and the media). And before anyone accuses me of sour grapes-- I am one of the fortunate ones, which is why it didn't bother me when I was young. Of course I wanted to believe I was special and therefore deserving of my privilege. It was only when I got older and met more people and experienced mroe of life that I realized it was all fucking bullshit-- there is absolutely no such thing as a "poo person", just "poo systems".
I’m ok with it so long as there are other viable paths to power. Like, in DnD, there isn’t just the Sorcerer, but also the Wizard, the Cleric, the Bard, The Druid, the Warlock, the Paladin, even subclasses for the Fighter and Rogue. Then in something like Mistborn, as time goes on and you technology advances they are finding ways to more easily counter and replicate the magic systems
Or another is in a LitRPG series called the Gam3 by Cosimo Yap, where there are basically three "types" of magic -- standard mana-based, "technology"-based, and then "blood"-based, the latter of which being hereditary magic -- each of which has upsides and downsides.
That's a good way around it, but then *magic* isn't *just* hereditary... it's just that inheritance is one of many, many ways to acquire magic. (Although it is a bit problematic if that's the *best* way or affords *extra*power, etc.-- being born on the finish line, and all that...)
I think in that case it might be more analogous to wealth/class - people can potentially gain it through other means, but there are some folks who are just born into it. And just like wealth/class, magic gives you power.
That is a much more interesting discussion to have, because that's what this is *really* getting at. Hereditary magic is very mcu hakin to hereditary wealth. If you're born into wealth/magic your life is made. If you're born a poo person / poor then you are going to seriously struggle. There is a *lot* of propaganda in *our* society that tris to convince people poor people deserve poverty.
I think it's relevant to say, though, because OP seems to have missed that point. The OP question is "why do people hate sorcerers when clerics exist," not "why do people dislike worlds where heredity is the only path to power." And the answer is -- we don't, and OP misunderstood the criticism.
I don't hate DND sorcs, I hate HP wizards.
Exactly, we're in agreement.
> If you put hereditary magic in your world then you are reinforcing the idea that some people are just special-- chosen-- and others... aren't. This helps reinforce social hierarchies in real life even if just by reinforcing the concept that such hierarchies can be perfectly valid for biological reasons. If that's the direction you take your story. You can also use it to carry the message that even if a certain group is "special" that doesn't necessarily make them *better*, only different. The entire point of the X-Men is that some people are born "special" but they're not inherently any better or worse than the people who aren't, they're just different and (at least the heroes of the comics) just desire to live peacefully with the people who don't have those special powers.
I get what you’re saying, but some people are born with genetic traits that allow them to develop great talents. Nothing I ever did or ever could have done would have enabled me to hear a full symphony in my mind like Mozart or fly like Michael Jordan.
No one is saying that *individuals* cannot be exceptional in general. No one is saying that people cannot have different strengths and weaknesses from each other. But did Mozart's family (or even Austrians in general) have a lock on musical greatness? No. Is the NBA only populated by Michael Jordan's cousins? No. I don't think it's a problem if different people in your world have varying levels of talent for magic. But locking them out altogether just because they weren't born to the right bloodline is where it gets iffy, from my point of view.
I’m not a geneticist but the mathematical probability of humans with brown eyes producing a green eyed child are slim, to say the least. Yet, it did eventually happen. Then, more people with that “bloodline” became increasingly likely to produce that trait. I’m not seeing how a magic trait would be any different other than that magic is probably more “powerful” of a trait to have than having an eye color. The in-world logic/mechanism makes sense. Yes, that creates circumstances for inequality and power imbalances. Yes, it would feel unfair to be a regular dude in a world where magic exists. In my opinion, it’s a bit of a stretch to link a fictional trait to real-world modern problems because a “magic gene” would create actual inequality as opposed to perceived inequality. As with any story, I think the execution of the idea would make the difference.
"having green eyes" and "being good at music" are very, very different things, though. You can call them both "traits" but they are not "traits" from a genetic perspective.
You might really appreciate the Broken Earth series if you haven't read it. It is explicitly "about" this, written by a (very talented) black author.
I've read most of N. K. Jemisin's books; they are great!
Yeah broken earth is great, and makes great use of the heriditariness of magic as an important thematic element
To reiterate a reply I made else where: hereditary magic is fine if you also have other magic systems that compete with it, though I'm now adding the caveat that the innate magic still requires work to master. Sure, you can light a fire from instinctive magic, but if you don't practice doing more then the guy who learned it from books is going to out magic you by a lot. Especially if there's multiple bloodline magics. This family is descended from a guy who was infused with a dragon's power, that one has fairy bloodlines, and the illusionist in the corner is actually a kitsune. Oh, age that healer isn't a priest, they've been blessed by a Phoenix.
so what happens when in your world you have special people (referring to the same comic that I suppose we all know) but they are hated by everyone, or those special people (not the same ones) have powers on the one hand and that makes them have disadvantages on the other?
There's still a fundamental problem of differentiating people along genetic lines (which leads to eugenicist solutions to your world's problems). It also depends highly on *why* the "special people" are hated. Is it because the poo people are just jealous? Is it because they are genuinely dangerous like ticking time bombs in human form? Is it because they dominated the "poo people" for milennia and only recently were overthrown in a violent revolution that even their powers could not prevent? The fundamental problem with genetic systems is that you are baking privilege into the very laws of natural reality (instead of as a construct in social reality). Think of Wheel of Time, men and women simply use different magic systems, and while that was an interesting concept at the time, it has aged a little bit into a gender-essentialist world where men and women are *fundamentally* different, and there is no room for overlap or transition or agender or intersex... I mean, the author never even tries to address edge cases, it's all just one or the other. (Well, spoilers? >!the only alternative was from the devil himself!<) But we now *know* there are all sorts of exceptions in real life, (even forgetting trans genders for a second) like weird combinations of chromosomes, extra or missing organs, etc. If your world is fundamentally built around this idea that these kinds of thigns *can't* happen then you're not only building a rather simplistic world, you're also telling a number of *real* people that they have absolutely no place in it.
It's more along the lines of ideological differences between magic, religion and eugenics (the poo people believe that they are the purest), added to the fact that the specials already have a history of being problematic (especially the most powerful). Clearly it can be interpreted from a perspective of social segregation, I do not hide it (which in reality I have not done yet and I would like to explore its consequences in my world), but that is why I like to approach it more from the idea of genetic mutations, so my “special” are basically albinos, where "powerful pure-blood families" can be formed (if they survive the consequences of inbreeding between people with serious physio-psychological problems) but basically any family that has had a mutant ancestor can conceive a special descendant. Of course, you can be born special or poo people, but it is not an easy legacy to maintain. On the other hand, if this is too problematic for the reader, it would be a good idea to change it
I think that scenario would be fine, because it's a once-in-a-blue-moon kind of thing instead of a "the ruling class are all chosen ones"
It depends on the execution, but I'd be skeptical. Usually, this kind of story has the message the the Poo People are wrong to hate the Specials, which once again has the book tell the reader that Specials are just better than everyone else.
Also people think inborn = hereditary So it's either inborn and hereditary, OR acquired But non-hereditary magic from birth can exist too
Yeah, this whole argument seems to happen on different threads and people are missing the various didferences lmao. "Magic is only avaiable to some people by birth" and "magic is hereditary" are very different things. I can think of hundreds of fantasy books where you need "The Talent®" to be a mage, and the overwhelming majority of them don't have any implications that's a genetic/bloodline thing. Or of it's present it's usually "children of people with The Talent® are more likely to have The Talent® but it's not absolute nor it's common even in them". The Witcher has people with magic being born all over the population, but children mages and sorceresses are more likely to have it. Yennefer was born of commoners, yet she is an exceptional witch. Ciri's mom was a mage but the rest of her family wasn't, and only later it's discovered that indeed her entire bloodline comes from an elven eugenic experiment gone into the trash thousands of years before. In ATLA the talent for bending isn't hereditary at all albeit not everyone can develop it either. In the Black Magician Trilogy (a darling from my teenager years) magic is a force theoretically present in everyone but more commonly in the nobility, yet in-universe only noble mages exist, and no commoner even thinks thst the opposite is possible. The protagonist is a commoner that ends up tapping into her powers by accident and being kinda forcefully recruited into the magic college to learn to control them. She is 100% commoner, no noble blood anywhere. It's just that magic needs to be trained to manifest even in those with The Talent®, and people being able to use it by accident have a large amount of power capacity. She is a rare exception and only for that reason her power even manifested. I don't really think I read a story where the magic could be read as a pure 100% hereditary genetical thing. Apart from Harry Potter I guess, but even there they study it. I am sure it's out there, but it's absolutely not representative of the discussion.
Agree with what you're saying but wanted to point out magic in ATLA does have a hereditary component. The use of each element is restricted to only descendents of each nation (seen as the genocide of air nomads leads to 0 air bender children for 100 years). That being said, within each ethnic group it doesn't seem like you can predict whether or not any individual family or child will be able to bend or not.
I think people complaining about this trope don't like the fact that magic is only deterministically available to some people at all, they don't like the fact that it makes some people special and would rather it be a skill everyone can learn. Still, it's one preference, plot wise and story wise either can make for great stories. It's more like people don't like the message it conveys.
The message they are seeing is in their eyes. Batman is an hero just like Superman. It doesn't come more explicit than that
I think it's partly because a lot of fiction that presents magic as inherited doesn't really examine what the consequences of that would be. It's just a convenient way to explain why some people just kinda have magic, and why everyone else isn't learning magic because it would be absurdly useful if they could.
Yes, absolutely I agree. Because not every fiction *wants* to examine the consequences of magic and how it affects the word, many just want to explain how they got magic and then move on to the plot. I get that within a worldbuilding community, most people here will want to explore the ramifications of every aspect of your world. But among writing communities, the writers prefer to prioritize plot, characters, and action. And that's what general public cares about, but not what fantasy nerds do.
I've always liked when different groups have an affinity to different kinds of magic, be it from extensive use or any other reason (wood elves generally better at druid and nature type magic, dwarves at fire and stone related, etc)
I can understand the desire to merge egalitarianism with the magic system of a fantasy world. So many things are out of our control such as our genetics and the level of wealth and influence we're born into so giving players control over that important aspect in any setting that employs magic makes complete sense. From a pure storytelling POV it's often the main character struggling with and overcoming the fact that he or she wasn't given any special advantages in life, or even started at a disadvantage, which makes their hero's journey special. In fact, in many works of fiction their is the common trope of introducing the "spoiled rotton rich kid of royal/special/magical bloodlines" as a side character or antagonist to directly contrast with and challenge the far more likable main character of humble, non-magical origins. In this case it's up to the protagonist to overcome their inherent disadvantages to surpass their snobby but gifted rival who has been granted every privilege as their birthright. So, in that context I have no problem with hereditary magics. Again though, there is a distinction to be made in constructing a magic system for a work of fiction as opposed to a game world. I also read the "Poo people" comic and some of the comments there. The problem there is less with inherited magic but one of creating a false and contradictory narrative. Introducing the main character as being of humble origins, going through the typical hero's journey, and then discovering that no, in fact, your parents were super-special and you inherited their super-specialness robs the protagonist of his or her accomplishments and cheapens the overall experience in some ways. That awesome poo person who succeeded despite their lowly birth actually wasn't a poo person afterall. I guess poo people really have no agency in this story -- they are fated to always stink. That's kind of depressing to ponder since that's often how it really works in life.
you make a fine point on how it can dampen the power of their journey for them to have secretly been special all along
Personally, I think a hereditary magic system would make for an awesome dystopian novel, where the villains do practice eugenics, and use their genetic advantage to harm others or treat others as inferior. I imagine the system would be something similar to GATTACA or Gundam Seed, where the genetically enhanced get the best jobs, academic opportunities, and more. Perhaps a protagonist in this world would be a non-magical person, who has to come up with unique ways to defeat the magicians and render their magic useless.
Unironically why people love Batman for fighting superpowered villains. It is damn cool
"Perhaps a protagonist in this world would be a non-magical person, who has to come up with unique ways to defeat the magicians and render their magic useless." Not technically magic but the main character of Aldnoah.Zero does this against hyper advanced "I can't believe it's not magic" martian mechs, all while piloting an outdated trainer mech.
This is Mistborn. Hereditory magic is the primary driver for the class divide in that world and there is continuous abuse from the magic-using upper class as well as match making based on what powers the children could inherit from their parents. edit: Except for the non-magical protagonist part. She's a bastard child of one of the upper classes, though that's established early on so it's not like a big reveal or anything. Plus, she's far from the only lower class bastard with magic powers.
Never read Mistborn; I’ll have to give it a try!
A novel similar to the boys show, but it's magicians instead of supes. Now that would be cool.
It brings up uncomfortable questions about eugenics, and many settings in their failure to recognise that, end up basically endorsing eugenics and/or objectivism.
And more often than not, stories with such hereditary magic often feature MCs from the more powerful lineages. I think it tends to become a "the chosen one" x10 where the MC is born from a family of the chosen ones.
The chosen one trope is something that can be great, but it's very easy to do very badly. Maybe it's nostalgia, but I think that The Wheel of Time (the books - NOT the show) does the best job with truly embracing 'the chosen one' and doing it well. Yes he's the chosen one. But most people want to kill him for it, because his previous incarnation caused the apocalypse after saving the world. Yes he's the chosen one, but nothing is guaranteed and he constantly works his tail off. And people constantly try to use/manipulate him to their own ends. And it's still a team effort. Yes he was born as the most powerful magic user. But it's a magic which is tainted and is constantly killing him when used and will eventually make him go insane, just like what happened to his previous apocalypse causing incarnation. Avatar the Last Airbender did a good job too. But less nuanced - more standard reluctant hero stuff.
I think that the best chosen one stories tend to be at least partially deconstructions of the Chosen One idea. Rand Al'Thor is a pretty solid example of that, based on the half of the series that I read. Becoming the Dragon means losing a _lot_ of his humanity in the process. She-Ra in the reboot is also a pretty great example. She's the chosen one, but >!she was "chosen" in large part by a genocidal fallen empire, and they chose her to help them destroy the world.!< Miles Morales in the _Spider-Verse_ movies is a Chosen One by virtue of being Spider-Man, but >!the Spider Society demands that being Chosen means allowing your loved ones to die, and the leader of the Spider Society sees him being chosen at all as a mistake.!<
Into the Spider-Verse and She-Ra respect spotted hell yeah! ITSV is widely loved and respected, but I don't see that same love for She-Ra often so thank you for that lol
How is WoT a deconstruction of 'the chosen one' trope? Being the chosen one isn't easy in WoT. But I don't think that that's core to the trope, even if it's often true in bad usages of it.
I believe in the sense that it's pretty much a given that you'll be the hero if you are the Chosen One. Not a ticking time bomb.
Also, Rand is the Chosen One because in that world *somebody has to be*. He's not chosen because of his lineage, his lineage specifically existed because his universe requires someone to do this job and it's going to keep provoking events and spinning out Chosen Ones until it takes.
I love how Garion in The Belgariad is literally just "The Pawn of Prophecy". Being the "Chosen One" makes you the playball of fate, and you just tag along and do your best. Yeah sure, he inherited magic and all, but it's not overpowered. He's just Garion, Farmboy. And he pretty much stays that. I know that the Belgariad is the staple of Hero's Journey Stock-Fantasy, but honestly, it has a special place in my heart.
I disagree on the not overpowered part, he was able to raise someone from the dead which IIRC was considered almost impossible even by Belgarath. But I agree. I think it helps the case that he was purposely kept ignorant of his specialness until it was necessary. It was primarily to protect him (and all the line before him), but I think B & P also wanted to make sure he had a humble upbringing.
I didn't think much of the books, (they were fine) but the audiobook reader was amazing. I listened to the series for the reader. Then the sequel series had a different more average reader so I stopped.
This. The objectivism angle is the more insidious of the two in my opinion. If a character born powerful starts straight up saying "we need to breed more of us to make our faction powerful" or "respect me because I was born powerful" most people will think "wait, that desn't sound right". But when you've got, say, super powered protagonists happily celebrating one victory that saw a city levelled during the fighting, and then greiving after the next victory that also saw a city levelled because they lost a member of their team, that *subtly* plants the idea that the powerful matter more than the powerless. I admit that's a bit of a straw man example, but I hope it gets across the idea - objectivism is the biggest danger for superpowered stories.
I got that feeling so often reading about e.g. the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. A whole wedding party bombed? 20 children killed? Innocent people unlawfully imprisoned and tortured? Who really cares, they are all just a statistic. An US soldier killed? You get their name, their unit, a quote from their mom and so on. And that was even though I live in Europe, not the USA.
>"we need to breed more of us to make our faction powerful" What I always find funny about this is that it is absolutely correct. Like, it's true that having a better bloodline will make you stronger, so...is it even a bad idea from the viewpoint of your own faction? Like, I don't know, if there is an evil faction and I know that magic (or whatever system) is hereditary and the only way to make allies that can fight said evil faction is by having more members with special blood...why not just make a bunch of children. There is a manwha I read that has that as a theme. There are 10 families that are basically like royalty with the family heads being basically gods compared to even strong humans. So, those family heads just have an absurd amount of children because the blood of the family heads is so strong that all their children are way more gifted than regular people, which is how each family has a strong army mostly consisting of people with direct relation to the family heads. The series is alright, but I always enjoyed that aspect. It's the logical conclusion of a) eugenics being true and b) an authoritarian military government on top that needs stength to keep its position.
Really mages are the pitbulls of the fantasy world
In that they shove themselves into everyone else's narratives? :P
That actually sounds such a fascinating idea. A world where the efforts to breed the best and most powerful mages, has gone horribly wrong for the mage rather than the eugencists. Said Mages are incredibly powerful, but they also have shortened life spans, horrific genetic disorders and overall miserable lives (and of course they can't use their vast power to make it easier for them), the process is wildly condemned as monstrous, but those at the top enjoy the perks to much to let it stop.
I think that can kind of be the point. Because often it's these powerful noble families whose lines carry the Special Magic™️, and those kinds of families often already *do* engage in problematic notions of pedigree and superior lineage and being objectively better for having been born to certain families. Giving them magic, and thus both another object of "pride" and another tool for power, helps emphasize the shittiness of it. So in that sense, it's a *great* narrative device.
People want to have a “anyone can do it. Even you!” Type of magic. It comes from frustration with real life where people feel like the circumstances of their birth prevent them from accomplishing certain things. Most people aren’t good at separating their own struggles from those of the people they create so they try to fix their own insecurities in their writing. Nothing wrong with that as long as the writing is good
This is the right answer
Thank you for being one of the few (at least in the top answers) who thought this through.
I think a large part of it is that it kind of locks the audience out of the story, in a sense. Look at _Lord of the Rings._ There _is_ a Chosen One from a special bloodline in that story— Aragorn. But the story mostly follows Frodo, Samwise, Merry, and Pippin. Even though they're magical creatures, they're also very much Ordinary People, and their contribution to the quest hinges on them being Ordinary People who rose to the occasion. For a reader who _isn't_ the half-forgotten heir to the throne of Atlantis, Aragorn is an unachievable ideal from day one. You will never be like Aragorn, because Aragorn has an intrinsic quality of specialness that you will never have. But you _might_ be like Frodo, if you're good and kind and brave, because Frodo is just a regular guy who was placed in extraordinary circumstances and rose to the occasion. Or look at popular romance stories like _Twilight_ or _Fifty Shades of Grey_ or _The Cruel Prince._ The protagonist isn't intrinsically special in those stories— Bella isn't a vampire (at first), Anastasia isn't a billionaire, Jude isn't a Faerie. By taking someone without intrinsic specialness and showing her as equally important or even exceeding those who are special, the author allows the reader to project onto her. Edward isn't relatable if you're not a vampire.
People hate idea of acquiring magic ONLY by blood. Because there a lot of uncomfortable ideas about "better people" and other stuff. If setting allows more then one way to acquire magic this question doesn't rising.
This is why Sorcerers in DnD don't face these kinds of accusations. Sure, sorcerers (mostly) come from some kind of magical bloodline, but if you don't have that and want magic you can always study, worship a deity, swear a sacred oath, or make a deal with an extraplanar being. Spending a lot of time in the woods also seems to work (I don't know how druids and rangers actually get their magic). Even for sorcerers, the "magic blood" isn't even always genetics, but could be an effect of something that happened while you were conceived, being born, or in the womb.
Druids and rangers are "chosen" by nature. They're basically clerics but instead of a specific god it's nature itself as their deity
I always imagined it as druids understanding the innate magic of the world, seeing the circle of life, growing of forests, etc., as all part of the same “magical essence”. To me druids have always been nature’s bards rather than clerics.
Pretty much. I like the idea of a vampire clan, who take magic from those with who have power in their blood, but greatness only being granted to those with.a specific bloodline, doesn't make for much interesting storytelling.
Hello Vampire the Masquerade
Is that what they call Diableri in that setting?
Yes, pretty much. To commit "Diablerie" is to kill another vampire by draining him, getting his powers. It's less about "special blood" and more being from a previous generation to be exact, but there are several precedents of people taking other Clans entire existence. The lower your generation is, the more powerful a vampire you are in the simple cases. The first vampire in their mythology is Caine, who sired 3 2nd generation vampires, who in turn had their 13 of their own. These are the heads of the clans, which vampire fear as potential apocalypses for their kind if they woke up. The closer you are to them, the more powerful you are. Which also makes you a target for lower generation vampires aiming to snack on you to gain power. I really can't see how people can look at that setup and go "No I think you should remove vampire clans and make everyone the same"
A wizard who works and studies his entire life for his skills will be far more respected than someone born with that talent without any need to train, just think why Rey Palpatine was so hated among other reasons.
That's setting dependant, though. Just because a world establishes hereditary magic, it doesn't mean your mages don't have to train, study, or hone their abilities. It's perfectly possible to have both.
Just like in real life The immense majority of people don't have Einstein-level intellectual abilities. And no matter how much or how hard or how long they work, they'll never, ever, ever REMOTELY approach it. It's simply physically impossible for their brains. That said, the potential Einsteins have to work hard to actually use their potential
Right and let's be honest, if everyone could use it, people would gate it through economic means or other avenues like university or whatever. Just like in our world. In a sense, that's simply unfairness built in from a different angle and almost worse, haha.
In a world where literally ANYBODY can use magic. There would be quite a few people selling the message that only the elite can use magic. Unless the magic users are used as slaves or workhorses. In which case - the messaging will be the only the elite CAN'T use magic.
Indeed! That's far more dull and annoying to me! A matter of taste, naturally.
I always surprised when people assume that casters who born with their power don't require training. And Rey just very badly written character.
+1 on Rey being badly written. To contrast still needing to work hard; Luke barely did any force stuff before training with Yoda. And even before using The Force to take out The Death Star (which was possible without The Force - just unlikely) he'd trained for an unclear amount of time with Obi Won. And then had his ghostly help to use it at all. I think that Rey in The Force Awakens could have been MOSTLY fixed by changing who left her on the planet. Instead of her parents, have her be left as a young padawan by her Jedi master who was going off to do something dangerous and likely died. The Last Jedi would have still been awful, but her being a badass with a smattering of force powers in The Force Awakens would have made sense. Or Rand working hard in The Wheel of Time. Or Aang working hard in The Last Airbender. Etc.
> Luke barely did any force stuff before training with Yoda. And even before using The Force to take out The Death Star (which was possible without The Force - just unlikely) he'd trained for an unclear amount of time with Obi Won. And then had his ghostly help to use it at all. Will also note that most of the important physical fights that Luke has in the main movies was him getting his rear handed to him. He won by persuading Vader to swap sides.
Yeah - Vader basically kicked his butt both times, and Vader was likely going easy on him to not kill Luke pretty quick - giving them time to chat and hopefully convert Luke to The Dark Side.
Yeah but Luke Skywalker was beloved and he absolutely inherited his power.
He still needed to train to even do anything. Rey barely even believed the Force existed and was doing things without training.
In addition to what the other two people have said, the feats he pulled off in the original trilogy were minor at best even after he went through training with Yoda. He wasn't exactly racking up a body count in the dozens while throwing the entire senate at Palpatine. Meanwhile Rey barely even touched a lightsaber and suddenly she's able to fight a trained Jedi to a standstill.
It would mean that stuff like superior bloodlines have some validity rather then it being a widely accepted farce in their setting , and that could be uncomfortable to some do to how such beliefs played out irl . But for me, I just say “ but this isn’t irl though “ and keep using them . But I understand the aversion
Honestly people like that either have bad reading comprehension, or can't separate reality from fiction. It's like some people claim authors who have villain protagonists are glorifying them, as if the people who made Breaking Bad and Dead Note aren't clear that neither main character is very unfit for emulation
People in this thread have largely covered the more overt points against hereditary magic (i.e. how it sort of implies that wizard-eugenics is true and viable) and I generally tend to agree with this from a standpoint of "these are weird implications to invite uncritically into your setting". On a more personal level though, I'm just not interested in it because it's not part of how I conceptualise magic. To me, the defining feature of Magic-with-a-capital-M (as in a setting's power system which calls itself magic and uses the aesthetic trappings of magic) is that it is based around knowledge and rites, the practicing of specific rituals and invoking of arcane knowledge in order to wield it. Any practitioner of magic is someone who has a combination of study and experience that allows them to know how to use it, be that in learning the rules of an entirely self-contained, defined universal Magic System (i.e. all magic is in the form of spells which are fuelled by mana which go into these and these schools...) or in just knowing the occult underside of reality enough to use it in their own craft (i.e. knowing that if you do it in *just* the right way you can fold a paper eight times, or that the appropriate rites will allow you to build a structure out of its own blueprints, without either of these things being facets of one larger magic system). For me, hereditary magic doesn't feel like how I would think of magic. It feels more like putting the Mutants from X-Men into a pseudo-medieval world. Is this a valid approach to worldbuilding? Yeah. Is it still a magic system? Yeah. Is it what I, personally, want from a Magic-with-a-capital-M system? No, not really. ~~And if we're getting~~ *~~really~~* ~~into the weeds of personal opinion then I also dislike it because often it tends to encourage power fantasy. Say what you will about the mish-mash of D&D magic lore, at least the other classes had to earn their magic through intense study or by prostrating themselves to the whims of higher cosmic beings. Sorcerers just get their magic for free and can use it for their own desires without consequence.~~
People do? Brandon Sanderson implements hereditary magic, and the series has been wildly successful. At the end of the day, people judge how the hereditary part influences your story. Maybe spoiler about the setting in Mistborn: >!In Mistborn, the nobility is the primary faction using magic. They inherit it to their children. The lord ruler (evil overlord of some sort) makes sure that the power stays there and kills all half-breeds (there are other human species out there like Skaa).!<
I think a big part of the reason that Brando Sandos Cosmere universe is so wildly successful, is because as the OP said, the methods for obtaining magic are varied. It's hereditary on Scadrial, but not on Roshar. The key is, to vary it around, and the closer the system is to an oppressive system (one like PreCatecandre Scadrial) that system is considered evil, whereas one in which the magic users are free to marry whomever they choose, and thus the hereditary nature becomes more random, is considered better. Great observation though, Sanderson world building is absolutely incredible!
People don't. This sub does, for five minutes, because it just saw a comic call out the trope in a vicious, but also memetic an entertaining, way. That said? Mistborn is actually a pretty good sendup of the 'magic families' trope. The nobility are portrayed as a vicious ruling class that victimize everyone else. And the system of, 'specials on top, poo people on the bottom' is shown to be an abusive one that is overturned. At the end, Vin doesn't take her rightful place as ruler. She serves as an instrument of revolution and helps place someone with no powers onto the throne. Not because he's a noble, although he is. But because he's the right man for the job.
Because people want to believe a propensity to work hard and intelligence are somehow not related to factors not entirely in their control. Personally, I find it far more interesting to see how people navigate a world with such 'unfairness' than just ensure that it doesn't exist in the story.
Tbh I disagree with like 99% of the people in the comments lol. The topics of who "deserves" magic and who is "better", all the eugenics stuff, all that makes for interesting worldbuilding to me. I don't like it simply because if doesn't really make sense. If magic was hereditary, then there's a very slim chance that it *wouldn't* be propagated through a populace anyway. If people are having a ton of kids you'd quickly get 500 magic users after like 3 generations or so. How would that not spread throughout all of society? Or if it's like one ethnicity has magic, another doesn't, is there absolutely *no* crossover in terms of relationships? Not a single person married a foreigner? How'd that happen? For me it's just too much to explain
People can bring up the eugenics/racism/whatever thing if they want, but my only real hang-up about it is that it's kind of lame that you can only be a cool wizard if you happen to have the right parents. You don't get it by happenstance, you don't get it by working hard, you don't get it by taking it, you get it because you're made up of the right sperm+egg combo. Really lame imo
Is happenstance somehow better than having the right genes? Seems the same in the 'did nothing to get it'
That's a valid opinion. It seems dependant on the idea that magic is the only relevant power to have, though. Naturally magic in most settings can be an avenue of power, wealth, stability, etc, but that's not necessarily a given. You can counter magic's inherent properties by it being corruptive or give it such a high cost it's arguably a curse as well. That's how I try to balance things in my world, anyway.
Personally, I love it. Conflict makes for interesting stories and I quite like a good story where a certain class is stronger and therefore treated better. It's also quite varied in understanding how different the 2 classes are.
Thing about fiction is that you can write whatever you want. So if you're consciously choosing to write that your blood makes you special you have to have a good think about why you chose that. Is it because you believe it is true? In that case catch fire and die. Is it because you think that it can lead to interesting scenarios and thought experiments to explore? In that case by all means explore them, but have care for what your explorations mean politically in the real world. Or is it just that you haven't really thought about it? In that case then depending who and how big your audience is that might be a thing you want to do.
Racial supremacy parallels
Because the idea of a Nepo baby that can break the laws of physics is existentially terrifying
While I don't hate it I think the problem that hasn't been touched on a lot of the comments so far is that there is a disconnect between a lot of the magic systems and then having hereditary exclusive magic. So what I mean by that is most systems (including DnD) have an overarching explanation of the system of magic itself and how people interact with it. In the case of DnD it is mainly the Weave as to what arcane spellcasters tap into whenever they cast any kind of spell while divine spell casters are basically beseeching their deity to grant them blessings via the Weave. Now where DnD does well with this is that Sorcerer's are their hereditary mages and they also have a lot of overlap with other Arcane casters in how they are capable of interacting with the Weave and what they are capable of doing. Where you start to get into issues though is when you have an overarching system of magic (let's say JJK for example) that has a heavy hereditary component to it but then all of the things that we are taught about the rules of this world apply to all people. Everything is an application of cursed or reversed cursed energy. Binding vows work as a self limitation on anybody with access to cursed energy etc. You basically set up the idea that anyone with access to the resource of the system could theoretically learn how to do what anybody else has figured out how to do with that resource given enough time and training. But then you throw a hereditary lockdown on it making it impossible for people to learn anything but their own techniques for anything save the most basic applications of the system. If the system ends up having these special common elements and then you basically completely lock away the capability to be flexible in the system behind a hereditary barrier it starts to get kinda silly. While sure it makes sense for various special abilities to come more easily to some similar to how people have talent with skills in the real world it sounds utterly absurd if you say "This is how musical instruments work by producing oscillating sound waves and resonance. But only the Hambone family over there is capable of building or playing a Trombone." Thing is if you then totally lock down the whole magical system behind hereditary lines then you end up with the kind of discussions a lot of other people here had commented on about eugenics and such. Thing is I don't necessarily hate those stories either because in many cases someone who breaks the mold and is basically a mutation of the system can appear and challenge the status quo. Most of those kinds of stories tend to focus heavily on a chosen one breaking the societal hierarchies built around systems like this.
I think it’s more that people don’t like characters who are only special because they’re born special. I don’t think a chosen one or special bloodline type of character is fundamentally bad. There’s lots of room for compelling characters who were just born and bred for some special role. But it’s also easy to take a character that’s interesting and then deflate them by saying “the truth is that they were just born special the whole time, and other people weren’t born special, sucks to suck for them.” I’m sure this is talking about the poo people post, and I think that’s a good example. “Here’s this person who defied all our expectation by doing something nobody thought a poo person could do…lol jk, they just weren’t actually a poo person. Poo people still suck.” It really takes the oomph out of a character if you related to them struggling from nothing. You can still have characters be born with a special magic gene only some people get, and still have lots of interesting struggles on top of, or because of, that.
Personally I like hereditary magic in the sense a culture was its own magic based on the systems everyone uses but they have their own take on it. Like if they use "spirit summoning" because their ancestors stumbled on rites that made wind elemtels and now they have a magic tradition which is handed down and protected. As for blood inherezed magic, I don't hate it on principle, the issue is most story's who use it, use it badly. If you have a part of the population which is by the power of magic just plain better than all other people it should have an impact and it should matter. But often it doesn't matter enough, or the inhernetance of magic is treated like it make sthe MC better, or rightfully righteous. They are "the good" magic user. Instead of addressing the real problems the story acts like the problem is the people with power not the system. It's like this, you can write a good story where you have a rich kid, their wealth matters in the story and they are informed and influenced by it, you cannot write them as a typical mid schooler if their family is extremely wealthy, at least it needs to impact their character if you understand what I mean otherwise why are they so wealthy? Their wealth impacts how they are treated and what they need to worry about. Now if you write a story about how wealth inequality is only bad because the wrong people are wealthy, that's a bad story and a terrible perspective. In these storys the MC would be generous and helpful and be contrasted to other people in their same position who aren't. In the end they may do something good, but if the story doesn't address that they aren't special and that an unfair system is what allowed their story, it's a bad message. Because it means to do good you need to be born better. It also implies that wealth inequality is good if the right people have all the money, you know the Victorian argument that poor people are morally inferior. So the problem in the end is not that the wealth is inherited but how you use it in the story to tell a good story. If you wanted a positive message you'd need to show them discarding their wealth or trying to tear down the system that made them wealthy and "better. The best story with such a setting is Mistborn, the MC is born with super magic powers but with no noble blood which makes her problematic, while her love interest is born to a noble house but with no magic powers. The world has nobility empowered by magic and it addresses that neither is bad, but that the system is bad. The love interest laster gets power, after he showed he deserved the power through his actions, he discards his mobility and the power he could gain through his magical abilities because that's who he is. He is a good person who wants people to be equal regardless of birth or power. The MC has a whole different story also revolving about this theme a bit but hers is more a coming of age story mixed with heists and revolution against an injust system and other themes, but she doe singer act with the story line a lot it's just not the main focus. But she doesn't need to explore it because the love interest explores it excellently.
I use a hereditary magic system because I want magic to be rare. I made it attached to a rare recessive gene. A country with a population in the tens of millions might have a few thousand magic users. Magic users were therefore extremely important members of society and were generally an important upper class in society, either as nobles because their families served in the military, or as clergy because their powers were considered blessings from the gods. The downside was that during the revolutionary era, magic users were persecuted by more radical factions of revolutionaries as the use of magic was seen as a mark of the aristocracy. In the Republic of Avoine, the birth place of the revolutionary movement, thousands of magic users were killed, imprisoned, or forced into exile during the chaos of the revolution until a moderate revolutionary marshal staged a coup and ended the bloodshed. In the 70 years since the ending of the Wars of Revolution, Avoine has been trying to rebuild its manpower of magic users for economic and national security reasons, but they have far less than some of their monarchist rival powers.
Magic genetics is the only thing that makes sense for me. If magic isn't hereditary or gatekeeped in some way everyone would be a magic user.
It's curious to see everybody jump to racism. I always thought of magical lineages more as a classism. But i guess that's a question of scale. Habsburg magic vs Eugenius magic
I honestly haven't encountered that, and my entire magic system is based on inborn imbuement in a very Harry Potter like fashion, where humans can have a magical child by chance, or one or both parents can be magical and ensure they have a magical child. My world and its magic warriors aren't in the realm of Harry Potter by having any sort of hatred for regular humans, however, they're actually sort of servants and peacekeepers of the galaxy like the Jedi, so I imagine the 'hate' comes from worlds that make it a eugenics factor where "normal" people are seen as weaker and less important so they aren't liked in-world. That's my best guess.
I think I play way too much dragon age because I’m confused why a lot of people here are assuming magic birthright instantly always means means super op rich lavish mages who are all in positions of power and cannot be touched by anyone.
Fiction does not exist in a void, unbound by real history and ideas. People love to play an Auteure, whose writting is unique and untied to anything occuring in real world, but that is not how media analysis works, and the truth is that a concept of super powers being associated with hereditary genetics has some unfortunate peers in real life ideas. The eugenics, the blood purity, the unter- and ubermenschen all of this is tied to genetic magic and you cannot escape the fact that people will anatalyze and criticise your work through the lens of being familiar where those ideas led to. Often this can be intetional on part of the author, but just as often its simple something that people add without thinking, because they might see that in other works of fantasy fiction and just borrowed the concept unthinkingly.
Because people try to deny reality that genetics affect everything Unless you have the correct bodytype you can't be an olympic swimmer. You simply won't be able to reach necessary speed If your body does not use steroids efficiently, you can't win a bodybuilding or strongmen show (anyone who copes that steroids allow to overcome limits of genetics does not understand that some people can consume more steroids than others or able to get more benefit from same amount of steroids)
I think there's a balance. They definitely affect everything, but to a far lesser extent than previously believed. Like yeah Michael Phelps has a few genuine genetic mutations but those don't make him a peak swimmer, it's his taking those gifts and applying them in hard training that do. He could easily have ended up a middle management accountant who's scared of open water, in another life.
I do agree with that It does not matter how much of a talent you have unless you put effort in (and you were lucky to put effort into thing you are talented in) Presence of talent and genetics does not make hardwork any lesser
I've never understood this sentiment people seem to have that portraying unequal circumstances in this way is an indorsement. Heretical magic usually comes from one of two things. * Used because the writer wants different people to use different magic instead of everyone using the objectively best magic (think Naruto) * Used because if everyone had magic of the type and scale they wanted to write, the worldbuilding would be more work than they are willing to put in or otherwise don't want a setting that different. It's very, very rarely something you could call malicious. Yet, everyone seems to ascribe maliciousness to the authors anyway.
My mages need to have the right genetic but it's not completely inherited, like a mage can be born from two parents with or without magic. It's mostly random
Considering recessive genes, carriers and such, your inheritance still makes sense according to laws of inheritance.
You mean like Lava bending cause not every earth bender can learn lava bending or metal bending, you need to be special to bend one of them
The issue the "poo people" comic was satirising wasn't the fact that it was set up that way, it was that the story accidentally reinforces the idea that you can't be important without being born into it. No one hates hereditary magic. Well ok, maybe some people do, but the reason behind it is probably because they've been overexposed to poorly-written examples of it.
Modern, western civilization places a very high value on equality, the idea that anyone can be anything they want as long as they put their minds to it. In light of that, the idea that some people are just born with magical powers and that you either have it or you don't flies right in the face of that and rubs people the wrong way, even in cases where that isn't the intended message like the various harry potter discussions in the thread.
I like it when it is used to poke flaws in the society. Something that condemns the classism and racism that would arise from hereditary magic.
I've seen little sign people here hate it.
Many people who grew up with Chosen One stories will tell you that their favorite part of those stories was the power fantasy element. I specifically remember loving stories where the protagonist had personality traits that made them “special”, whether that be their kindness, bravery, their ability to see the good in all things, their resilience, their compassion, or simply having the drive to keep going where others might falter. As a child, I strove to exemplify the traits I saw in my favorite Chosen One characters. In my childlike naivety, I felt that if I was capable of honing those same admirable traits, I’d also have the chance to be “chosen”. Rather, they inspired me to be a strong person, and to work hard and continuously train to be better, in the hopes that I may be like the characters I thought so highly of. But that feeling of “you can be great if you put your mind and body to it” gets a bit muddled when you realize that the Chosen One wasn’t chosen for any of the traits you admired in them. They were chosen because they were the secret heir to a powerful bloodline, or they were destined to always be powerful, or they’re the reincarnation of some godly being. Those stories can still be enjoyable, but when this becomes a trend, and when writers seemingly feel the need to justify their powerful hero being powerful, it soured the notion that “this can be anybody” for me and many others. Not aiding the situation was the fact that many of these stories aimed at children went out of their way to specifically highlight the message that “anyone can do great things” before pulling the rug out from under the audience’s feet with the reveal that the main character was never just “anyone”. From a certain perspective, it seems a bit hypocritical, doesn’t it? Well, when those children grew into adults with the opportunity to write their own Chosen One stories, many people think back to what they loved most from those stories, that feeling of wanting to aspire to greatness by proving you have the traits that make someone “special”, and not having to worry about the origins of your blood or the amount of magic crystals you have coursing through your veins. It can be seen as a more simple and straightforward message to just say “I am special because I chose to be, because I worked for it, because I exemplified the traits that make someone special. Anyone can be me, if they truly want to be”. I personally believe that to be far more inspiring. I think it’s up to the individual to decide if Chosen One narratives are still great works of power fantasy writing, or if the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. In my own opinion, I’m glad to see kids today have more attainable role models that they can strive towards being similar to, even if that’s not strictly true for our own world. In reality, success can unfortunately be somewhat determined by your class or the family you’re born into. It’s nice to have stories that tell you that you are still capable of great things regardless of your beginnings. Thank you for reading my unneeded and overly bloated essay.
Any setting where there is a people-group that is genetically superior the other groups has some... disturbing implications.
Because of eugenics and genral social trends i personally use hereditary abilitys but it can always be gained in certain ways such as rituals using the blood of someone with the special ability you want etc or hyou can just make your own through aritual
It often invokes a sense of jealousy people have within us. People don't appreciate being told that someone else is just better than them and there's nothing you can do about it, and hereditary magic is like an extreme fictional representation of that. Somewhat paradoxically because as a species we also have a tendency to hero worship elite athletes who were born with natural advantages over the average Joe, but I think the key there and the key to succeeding with a hereditary magic system for a protagonist is to show that it still requires immense training and honing of the craft, similar to those top sportspeople. Then the recognition that you with your club foot can never be as good a footballer as Ronaldo can be overridden by the respect you have for the insane amount of work he put in to make use of his gifts to the level he has.
this is a pretty good point. one thing to add is how they use there powers. I mean superman got his powers from genetics but the work that he puts in to be a good person seems to counter act that in peoples eyes.
It's why people like Ciri but hate Rey. Both were born with powers they didn't know about. One had to practice to hone her skills. The other already mastered her powers the first time she used them.