Magic and incompetence
Feb. 5th, 2008 11:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nancylebovI just linked to a piece about common, highly trained misconceptions about knife-fighting, and my mind drifted to it being used for writers, then to that ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
yhlee, who posted it, is a fantasy writer....
Has there been any fantasy about people generally being stupid about magic? Not some institutional error or restriction which could be changed at its source, but a fairly intractable "what fools these mortals be, and the immortals aren't any better" sort of situation.
From the real world, or at least the edge of it: I've heard a claim that a disaster was partly caused by occultists who were trying to fend it off but didn't know what they were doing. Sorry, no further details available, but it does seem to me that's the sort of thing which should happen more often in fiction.
rachelcaine's Weather Warden series has some institutionally wrong-headed magic.
yhlee, who posted it, is a fantasy writer....Has there been any fantasy about people generally being stupid about magic? Not some institutional error or restriction which could be changed at its source, but a fairly intractable "what fools these mortals be, and the immortals aren't any better" sort of situation.
From the real world, or at least the edge of it: I've heard a claim that a disaster was partly caused by occultists who were trying to fend it off but didn't know what they were doing. Sorry, no further details available, but it does seem to me that's the sort of thing which should happen more often in fiction.
rachelcaine's Weather Warden series has some institutionally wrong-headed magic.
