One Trope Plagues The Fantasy Genre | My Brew

Imagine fire magic being labeled as dark magic in a setting. "What? Fire Magic is banned in your homeland? What's wrong with fire magic?! Lighting campfires easily, powering forges, channeling it to heat homes with the power of steam." "Some wizard a long time ago shot magic napalm out of his hand and set an everlasting fire in the northern mountains that is still polluting the atmosphere to this day." "Oh."

There was a comic I saw that was parodying a famous fantasy school series and the teacher was explaining why the curse that kills people instantly is bad...so he pulls out a mouse, and uses a levitation spell to drop a rock on it. "See? I can kill things just fine with magic everyone uses all the time! No Unitaskers! It's a bad spell."

The example in the thumbnail is a frat dissection of this. In Dungeon Meshi, “dark magic” is explicitly just really old and powerful. The danger is less in the magic itself (all magic can be dangerous when used wrong) but in the political powers which ban its use

To be fair, you can absolutely make tangible arguments questioning the ethics of necromancy based on the effects on the living rather than respect for the dead. Disease and public health would be an issue, and even if we assume that can be solved with magic (or some kind of sterilization processing), having a labor market comprised of corpses would probably create a sales market for corpses which would in turn create a business in shady disappearances - essentially a new form of human trafficking.

Having a diverse set of cultures with differing opinions on different topics is always great for fantasy settings.

In Naruto, the shadow clone technique is considered forbidden because most people can't use it effectively without risking killing themselves. This is a pretty common theme in the series, that techniques become forbidden because the cost of using it outweighs the benefits of using it. It also leads to a lot of characters using forbidden techniques because they have ways of offsetting the usual costs that other people don't have.

Yeah, I hate this trope but for the exactly opposite reason. I WANT some kinds to magic to be stigmatized, but as you said, there should be reasons for it. Authors seem to lack the balls to create something truly evil, like shadow magic being banned because accessing it involves committing mass atrocities, instead writing that "it is too cool for the general populace and the protagonist needs more edgy powers" or "look at those poor, misunderstood shadow magic users, they are prosecuted because of their own choices in what spells they learn, it's just like real world racism". Even something like a type of magic being banned because it's the main force of a nation we've been at war for centuries is more reasonable, since the magic transformed into a symbol and anyone using it expresses their sympathies with the enemy. I would also be fine with simple tradition, if it was actually based on something, like a catastrophic event long ago that caused the magic to be stigmatized and was eventually forgotten, leaving behind only the negative connotations. This gives both the opportunity for challenging the common preconceptions, as there is nothing inherently evil in that kind of magic, but also a lesson about pushing things too far, as it has already been proven to be extremely dangerous. Still, I want to see magic of capital E Evil. Necromancy not as something "disrespectful", but as a malevolent force that twists and corrupts all it touches, actively resisting any attempt to put it to good use, or a terrible art that puts the departed souls through unimaginable torment to bind their will to a corpse, with the only reason skeletons plowing the fields staying silent, is that they literally have no voice to cry suffering. I don't want despair, nor gore but for the word dark to MEAN something.

The Dragon Prince went about it pretty alright. Black magic is an imitation of actual magic, which humans can't generally do. It can do the same things as regular magic and more, but it always, without exception, requires killing a living being. Small spells may require something like a butterfly or a beetle, but the bigger the spell, the bigger the sacrifice. I've only watched to season 3, but I'm pretty sure people are not out of the question.

I always figured it as ‘magic whose prerequisites are unethical’ For instance, to become a lich in DnD, you have to kill at least one innocent. And the idea that ethics are unique to particular cultures is vastly exaggerated. Ancient Celtics and Chinese would both oppose disturbing the dead. People take an exception like the Aztecs and blow it up to say “look, ethics are subjective, the one culture whom is despised by its neighbors thinks even sacrificing people is ethically acceptable!” Like a bunch of doofuses.

I agree it is important to ask who is calling it evil and why, and think the answer is different depending on the context. In Tolkien's LOTR, evil has a tangible impact on the world, destroying nature and subjugating entire peoples to tyranny and enslavement. Evil magic corrupts those in power with fear and greed, like Wormtongue. Leading to death and suffering everywhere around them. In stark contrast, the Wuxia series Mo Dao Zu Shi (Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation) presents demonic cultivation as the "evil" counterpart to cultivating a golden core in the traditional style. The logic is that by drawing on latent negative energy of ghosts and other spirits, demonic cultivation is a corrupting fast track to power. Meanwhile, divinely powered golden cores must be carefully developed through meditation and under elite tutelage. In the long run, however, golden cores are used to wage bloody fascist wars, twice. While the protagonist uses talismans and other focuses of demonic energy to protect the people he loves. I think both of these works have very specific themes, shaped by their philosophies and the cultures of their authors. And how they construct their magic systems, including their morality, reflects their worldviews. Magic isn't any one way. How it's used is what gives it meaning.

My favorite version can be summed up as doing magic drugs: Feels really powerful, but has some dangerous side effects, potentially addictive to use, or straight up uses some pretty messed up sources to execute.

Why does the darkside fling lightning bolts, but the good guys use MIND CONTROL?

mtg players will tell you abjuration magic is evil

The idea of totally relative evil is a very modern concept. Back in the day a thing wasn't just evil because it didn't benefit people, but because it went against the natural order of things.

Witch Hat Atelier is by far the best example i know of that treats "dark" margic this way, i really recomend the manga

I would consider it a rather dirty move to mess with someone's afterlife (which exists in most settings, and messing with people's corpses often disturbs the afterlife in many settings). Even worse if you are dragging some innocent souls from their respective afterlifes in order to fight. Even more despicable if because of your magic the soul gets "used up" and truly destroyed -- even most enemies wouldn't deserve to just skip divine judgement and be obliterated (besides the fact that you're stealing souls from whoever that 'divine judge' is, you might want to use that magic on yourself before you die, lol). Depending on what a soul is, how conscious it is etc, you are either stealing someone's essence to use in your spells or literally enslaving people who were chilling in the afterlife to fight for you. I'm okay with such magic being considered evil. And in the majority of settings it is usually well explained why it's 'evil and dark', too. When it's just animating corpses with no beliefs about disturbed afterlife attached to them it is usually portrayed as just "nasty but okay, whatever".

I don't know but I have the impression that if we take my neighbor and a person from a city on the other side of the world they will both think that forcing a person's soul back into their rotting body to use as a slave is not a thing very kind thing to do.

Wizard: "that's dark magic!" Me: "Yeah? Well, you know, that's just like uh, your opinion, man."

A form of magic can be inherently "evil" if the use of it requires a henious act or two. What really plagues the trope of "evil magic" is that in most media,the writers themselves have barely an idea about why it is evil in the first place and/or don't dare to show it in the show,since they deem it inappropriate/too bold/etc. I would argue that often that often there is a general lack of idea regarding how that magic works. Seriously,when was the last time you saw someone deliberately crushing a child's dreams to make the closest adult act as a comforting/guardian figure,only to torture them to death after making sure they bonded? All for a spell?

So something that I feel should be mentioned is that things have absolutely been banned because they were perceived as bad or taboo by ruling powers. The prohibition, in particular, comes to mind for this. The issue as I see it isn't that a society banning a sort of magic, or viewing a sort of magic as wrong is poor storytelling, It's that we as the audience need to feel comfortable with this fact in the story. Having a person get discriminated against because they were born with weird magic is realistic, because we have historically discriminated against people for far less. But if it sort of just feels like people are discriminating against them because "dark magic evil, but really its not," then it doesn't feel right. Or if there is a spell to kill and it's forbidden and unforgivable, but other murderous spells exist that are acceptable, then it feels wrong. Even necromancy, there is nothing inheritly immoral about raising a corpse and having it do stuff or in contacting the spirit of a dead loved one. If a group shows up and says, "necromancy bad," it doesn't feel right because, outside of disrespecting a corpse, there is nothing inheritly wrong with raising the dead. Context can change that, but we often aren't provided with that context, which makes it feel odd when someone is ademently against necromancy (or other forbidden magics) If magic is dark, it needs to have a strong and clear reason why society has decided to ban it. Otherwise, it doesn't feel right, whether or not its something that might happen in real life, and especially if its useful for those in power to utilize for their own benefit.