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  • Regarding your last paragraph, I think there's a lot that can be done there. You can get a lot of mileage out of different degrees of skill at the "exciting" aspects of magic, whatever those might be for a given person. Basically the same reason that someone might engage with a story about elite secret agents, or brilliant detectives, or top athletes: while their skills are something that anyone could do, doing them very well requires a high degree of training and perhaps, sometimes, natural talent (being 8 feet tall helps a lot with professional basketball, for instance).
    – Obie 2.0
    Commented yesterday
  • And that's just why people in-universe might like such stories. It's even easier with actual, real-world audiences, because even if you tell me that anyone whose is the magical equivalent of 8 feet tall and practices 16 hours a day can lift a tank, it still will be incredible to me, because not only can I not do it, but I am not being fatigued with it in the story, either. But there are lots of other ways to make it interesting. One of the things that I found intriguing about the superhero comedy Extraordinary is that basically none of the interesting elements come from people who...
    – Obie 2.0
    Commented yesterday
  • ...are "elite" with their superpowers, even though the potential is there with some of the utterly broken abilities that some people have. Instead, it's all about how their different powers (including, in one prominent case, seemingly not having one at all) affect their lives in unique ways. Less about whether having the power to reverse time will let you stop malefactors, and more about how it could ruin your relationships if it starting glitching, or how someone might use shapeshifting to escape from an abusive relationship, or how super-strength could lead to embarassing incidents.
    – Obie 2.0
    Commented yesterday
  • To be clear, the people with useful powers and a high level of control who are acting as international spies or whatever are surely there! The plot is just utterly uninterested in them.
    – Obie 2.0
    Commented yesterday
  • TBH, fantasy where this stuff is commonplace is the most interesting, because it forces some actual worldbuilding to happen. Many years ago, Dragon had an article about what castle design should look like in a world with flying creatures, where walls and courtyards are very much not the way to do it; that's just one example of a test of whether you're writing in your world, or writing in our world and parachuting in details. For a good example of it done right, alchemy in Scott Lynch's Lies of Locke Lamora is everywhere.
    – Graham
    Commented 21 hours ago