I was thinking about it, and I really hate when writers make up stupid, stupid do-anything magic in their stories. I mean something like a magic wand that can do anything is a horribly lame plot device at best. OK it’s time for an example now. Recently, I was reading a great-selling novel in a great-selling series that had the hero confront an evil sorcerer who could draw anyone with magic chalk on his magic wall in a magic cave or some other crap and then hurt people that way. He drew a figure with a sword (the hero) and some lines around the figure closing in and that somehow indicated he was getting crushed by invisible magic barriers over time. The hero escaped this trap by finding the cave with the drawings and hurrying over to erase part of the drawing so that it resembled a figure with a piece of chalk instead of a sword so that the sorcerer was caught in his own magic.
REALLY???
Did the author honestly not think this thing through at all??? There is no way the stupid drawing would be able to tell which guy with a sword it was. Not to mention that several guys with swords showed up right after this scene, so why didn’t they get crushed, too? And why couldn’t the hero just put his sword on the ground to avoid the magic? “Whoops, no sword anymore! I’m clearly not the guy in this crude drawing that resembles no one and everyone all at once.”
This is a case of the writer being either stupid or lazy. There are either no rules to explain how this magical thing works, or the rules are stupid and easily broken without thinking hard at all. You can’t have people just sit back and think for less than a minute and say “Hey! That wouldn’t work in real life!” The whole idea behind immersing your reader/viewer/player in the world you create is to convince them that this is a place that could exist. Stupid systems like this one break the illusion, and pull you out of the created world.
The part that bothers me the most about this is how easily it could be fixed in most cases. For example, let’s say that the chalk-drawing-sorcerer requires a lock of hair of his victim and he uses that hair in the creation of the magic chalk. Aha! So easy! And then we can write a fun scene prior to this confrontation where he sneaks the hair away. It makes sense now, because the hair is from the actual affected person, so there can be no confusion. And to save himself, the hero can still just smear/destroy the drawing. Ta da!
Voodoo dolls are horrible offenders, too. Writers use them for anything! And it doesn’t really make sense! So you can stick a pin in the doll’s leg, and the victim feels a sharp pain there. OK, fair enough, but what if they don’t have a leg? Or if they do at the time of the doll’s creation, but then they lose the leg? Does the doll lose a leg, then? What if you make another leg and sew it on again? Would the person regain their leg? Would they just feel pain in the place where their leg might have been before? What if you sewed three extra legs on and put pins through all of them? Or just the extra ones?
NONE OF IT MAKES ANY SENSE ARRRGGHH
At first I thought you were going to talk about one of Brandon’s pet peeves in storytelling, which is the character that has too much power–like the Phoenix in X-Men–Brandon’s complaint being that superpowers and magic are much more fun/interesting when they have clear limitations.
But you’re pointing out a much more basic, glaring storytelling error. Though I suspect most readers of the series you’re critiquing never noticed the inconsistency …