Fuck magic systems.
There. I said it.
Sanderson’s First Law (please don’t tell me there’s going to be a second) admonishes us that “An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic.”
Which encapsulates quite neatly my problems with Sanderson’s work; an author shouldn’t be solving her conflict with magic! She should solve it with character choices, sacrifices, determination to win, anything other than a magic system.
When Luke blows up the Death Star, he does it by using the Force but we don’t need a twenty minute explanation on how the Force works, we just need to see that he’s making a choice to trust Ben, to trust in the Force, to have faith that the Light Side has his back. The plot resolution informs his character, not some arbitrary set of rules that define what the Force is and isn’t capable of.
Why does the One Ring need to be destroyed in the fires of Mount Doom? Because that’s where it was forged. Why can it only be destroyed there? Fuck if I know, and I don’t really care. What matters is that Gandalf knows his shit, and he says that this is the only way to do it, and any more complicated reason is basically a middlebrow thought experiment.
Rules for magic are better thought as rules for the narrative. They don’t have to fit into some larger system, and perhaps shouldn’t since then the story ends up becoming bound by the rules rather than the other way around and that can get dull very fast. All narratives have their rules, either implicit or explicit.
In Catch 22, Capt. Yossarian wants a Section 8 so that he can be excused from flying further combat missions. Failing that, he will use every trick in the book to avoid going into combat. This is structurally no different from seeking a magic talisman to cure a disease or bargaining with the gods to earn a favor. The important thing is that there is a clear and consistent narrative constraint keeping the hero from achieving his goal. The nature of the constraint can vary from story to story, and some of those variations have structural implications, but a lot of it is just flavor.
Another example:
Alice can’t go home until daylight because her brother is a vampire.
Alice can’t go home until daylight because her brother is an abusive asshole and she needs to wait until he’s out at work.
These are both narrative constraints that Alice has to work around. They work in mainly the same way, but for different in-universe reasons. They both suggest the possibility of the narrative forcing Alice to do what she knows is dangerous to do for the sake of telling a good yarn. There is in fact no structural difference between them. All stories have rules, and just because a rule involves the supernatural is no reason to over design it. Establish your rules when they become relevant. Make them clear. Do not waver from or contradict them. Do not pretend that the nature of narrative rules changes just because you’re calling some of them magic. If you put too much effort into developing the rules of magic, you lose sight of the drama that the story is supposed to be about. You get the fantasy equivalent of technobabble: magibberish.
A lot of times, authors will get so enamored of their magic system they’ll spend ages and ages explaining and reexplaining it (*cough* Mistborn *cough*), and then contort the story into all sorts of knots as a means to justify going through ever more convoluted permutations of the system. Watching an author get too cute with their magic system is like watching a stage magician do card tricks with a deck she drew herself. “Look! I pulled the Ace of Roses out of my hat! Remember, the Ace of Roses from Chapter 2 that I explained at tedious length? Yeah! It was right here! In my hat!”
On top of that, the most complicated magic systems seem to only be used for fighting. Come on, guys, even the RPGs you’re obviously taking your cues from were more creative than that.
In contrast, Chuck Wendig’s Unclean Spirits, the gods and goddesses roam the earth, tormenting any mortals unlucky enough to cross their path. Most of what we see the gods use their power for is to make some mortal’s life miserable, but it’s at least implied that they can do a lot of other things, too. They all have the ability to manipulate reality according to their basic portfolio. Death gods do death, time gods do time, etc. That’s about as detailed as the “system” gets, and it works wonderfully. (Also, Chuck’s version of Aphrodite is screamingly hot, which makes everything a whole lot more fun.)
In The Black Company, Glenn Cook has large parts of his supporting cast made up of horrifyingly powerful sorcerers, and yet never really needs to explain how they do the magic that they do. They seem all the more wondrous and terrifying because of that omission, yes, but more importantly the focus stays on the characters and the plot, and thus the book is actually interesting.
Hell, let’s go all the way to The Lord of the Rings and notice that Tolkien basically never explains his magic. In fact, Tolkien explicitly did not want magic to feel mechanical. He did not want it to be a gun that anybody could pick up and use to whack people. Yet that’s exactly what a lot of magic in modern fantasy has become.
We have people recommending books to each other based almost solely on the strength of their magic systems and it makes me really question what the hell this genre is for these days. Are we just giving up on telling stories about people now? Are we settling for narrative form RPG supplements?
Ditch your fucking magic system. Your book will be better for it.
I’ll open by admitting I quite like Sanderson (though I’ve not read Mistborn, so can’t comment there. The Emperor’s Soul had a _lovely_ system, imo), and I think I see your point. But, for counterpoint, as much as I love Robin McKinley’s stories, her endings always devolve into hand-wavey vague magical yaya, and it always, always loses me.
I agree ‘magic system’ cannot be the motivation nor the direct solution – character decisions and motivations should be doing the story heavy lifting – but I don’t know that I agree throwing out one’s magic system is the answer. Though perhaps McKinley’s issue is also that her magic solves things _and_ she doesn’t have a system, which just gets back to ‘don’t have magic solve everything.’
Handwavium is a risk that all authors face, of course, but I find that magic system heavy work isn’t any better about this than “softer” magic stories. The difference is that magic system heavy stories tend to rely on more magibberish to cover up the cracks.