In Defense of Soft Magic Systems

Why stories should not explain magic. [Magic Systems, Part 2 of 3]

Hi, I’m Eric. I write (and write about) epic fantasy. This week, Ian Dunmore and I are continuing our co-written exploration of so-called “hard” and “soft” magic systems.

Last week, we looked at hard magic systems and their advantages in resolving deus ex machinas, preempting uncomfortable questions, and enabling successful power scaling. This week, we’re exploring the counterpart, soft magic systems. Next week, we’ll finish up with unpacking some larger consequences of all of this for narrative storytelling in general.

If you’re totally new to this topic, we recommend starting with this introduction to the terms, and some of the storytelling principles that surround magic within narratives.

Now, let’s dive into Soft Magic Systems, their advantages and their disadvantages.

The Backstory

To get to the heart of soft magic, it’s worth going back to the origin of the term itself.

The terms “hard magic” and “soft magic” were first coined in Brandon Sanderson’s 2007 essay about his “first law of magic.” In particular, Sanderson tells the story of when he was invited to speak on a convention panel about magic. When the moderator asked him “How should magic work?” he replied with what at the time he believed to be the broadest, most innocuous statement: “Obviously, magic has to have rules.”

The rest of the panel, he says, “violently disagreed.” They argued against him, saying that fantasy was about wonder, mystery, and unbridled imagination. Not rules. Not limits. Not a “hardness” in something as otherworldly as magic.

Thus, the terms. Thus, the debate and endless #discourse about it all.

We are not here to weigh in on a debate—we are here to help you understand and leverage these concepts in your own writing.

But the story of Sanderson and the magic panel shows us, right out the gate, the most important advantage that soft magic has over hard magic…

A Sense of Wonder

Hard magic, if taken to its logical conclusion, is indistinguishable from an alternate form of science. Viewed through enough exposition and scrutiny, magic is just technology.

In these cases, the “speculation” of the fiction is less “what if magic existed?” and more “what if the laws of physics were different?” What if certain people could bend the four primal elements of fire, water, earth, and air? What if ingesting decoctions of certain metals allowed your body to “burn” them and execute new abilities? What if you could link two objects so they could sympathetically transfer kinetic energy between them across space?

These are interesting questions and can lead to interesting stories; these are the respective magic systems of Avatar: the Last Airbender, Mistborn, and The Name of the Wind, three much-beloved (and commercially successful) fantasy series.

But it’s worth noting that in all such cases, the magic-wielders very rapidly lose their own sense of wonder. They ask the exact questions of “What can we do with this? How far can we take this? Where are the limits?” Before long, benders and allomancers and arcanists begin to explain and react to the magic as if they’re explaining mathematics, or the weather, or how electricity works. The supernatural is reduced to something completely… natural. Something commonplace. Something mundane.

The more exhaustively understood a phenomenon, the more mundane it is rendered (ie no longer magical).¹

Magic’s hardness and magic’s mystery are inversely related; as hardness grows, mystery recedes. After all, the precise definition of “hard” magic is “magic that is understood”. Mystery is incompatible with that understanding.

Consider: once a magic system enables a secondary-world society to literally make a car or plane and drive it around exactly like a real-world car or plane, then what the author has for all intents and purposes created… is a car or plane. Once upon a time cars or planes might have been regarded as magical. But go spend two hours baking on LA’s 405 Freeway in one of these “magical” vehicles. The magic quickly bleeds away and you might even find yourself wishing for a non-magical world where you can walk to work. That is a system in tragic need of some mystery.

What if you want to tell a story of mystery and wonder? Or about the terrifying unknowns of the universe? Or the obscurity of reality itself? What if you want your wizards to be so knowledgeable that they seem unknowable?

What if you want the supernatural to remain… super?

If you want this effect, you’ll need to leave magic unexplained, or unknowable. You’ll need to leave it soft.

As noted, this function isn’t only for the positive—in the book Bird Box (maybe in the movie too?), the characters explicitly embark on a series of experiments to learn the limitations of the mysterious beings that have ravaged the world. They utterly fail at every turn. By adding this try-fail sequence, the author was making it known that his monsters are not to be understood, but feared.

Power Creep

The tension between maintaining a sense of wonder and explaining the use of magic can lead to another common problem for stories that rely on hard magic: power creep.

In our discussion of hard magic systems we talked about Power Scaling, and the error of “blowing the scale”. By making characters immediately very powerful, their power also immediately becomes trivial.

Power creep ends up at the same place, except more slowly. Power creep is what happens when the scale needs to keep expanding in order to continually deliver a sense of wonderment.

The power creep cycle goes like this: Bad Guy Appears → Bad Guy is too powerful for Heroes to defeat → Heroes must learn magic → Heroes become more powerful → Heroes defeat Bad Guy.

One “cycle” of power creep can make for a tidy story and, because using magic to defeat the Bad Guy is central to the story, the story relies on hard magic. We get to know how it works, and we get the Wow! moments and sense of wonder when we see how powerful the Bad Guy is or how much the Heroes have grown.

But if the story is to continue, we need a new bad guy. With newer, scarier powers. So the cycle repeats. And repeats. And eventually the magic is so big and the heroes so powerful that the story loses all sense of scale, and at worst can become ridiculous to itself. We’re back to “blowing the scale,” but on the back end rather than the front.

It’s a perennial problem in hard magic stories that linger on the page (or screen) for a long time. The storytellers have to either sacrifice the idea of “wonder” and stop introducing new magic elements, or else they have to keep upping the ante.

Avatar: The Last Airbender and its sequel, The Legend of Korra, are great examples of power creep. By the end of the first series, the main characters are pretty much all the best in the whole world at what they each do; Aang learns to bend spirit, which not only means he’s the most powerful being in the world, he’s more powerful than every Avatar that ever lived. That’s fine, because the story then concludes when he beats the Fire Lord. We don’t have to watch the “happily ever after.”

But to resurrect the story with Korra—who inherits Aang’s powers as the next Avatar—things that were remarkable in the first show became commonplace in the second; the world is almost unrecognizable. Now, to keep things remotely interesting, they had to take away Korra’s powers in the first season. She gets them back, and then by season 2 she’s breaking out giant kaiju “spirit titans” to slug it out with the End of the World Threat of the Week.

Soft Magic Is Quicker

Wordcount is a really important consideration for authors.

It takes fewer words to put soft magic in a story because you don’t have to explain it. That’s really good news for narratives like short stories—short is in the name.

Concision is so valuable, in fact, we won’t say anything else about this.

“Authorias Handwavium!”

The principal criticism of soft magic is that it remains too arbitrary, too easily identifiable as “the hand of the author.”

If done properly, however, this is a feature and not a bug.

Soft magic is useful precisely because it allows the author to create certain premises or narrative pillars without any more effort than a “handwave.” As Eric wrote in his initial post:

The Potion does The Thing because that’s how the Wizard made it. Gandalf came back from the dead because c’mon it’s Gandalf. The magic mirror works like FaceTime because of the ancient spell of Authorias Handwavium. None of these are explained. They don’t need to be explained.

Why does Harry Potter’s wizarding world use owls for mail? They’re manifestly worse than pigeons—harder to feed, expensive to keep, nocturnal, possibly dangerous, and obnoxious during mating season (ask us how we know). Why owls? Because of the vibes. It’s cooler. Don’t think about it. It’s magic! If you can’t get over the owls, you won’t like these stories.

Think of Studio Ghibli movies, like Spirited Away. How does the witch’s curse work? Why does Haku turn into a dragon? Why does the river spirit need a bath? Why does forgetting one’s name trap you in the spirit realm? Magic, magic, and more magic. Sure, there are parallels with Japanese folklore all over the place, but that doesn’t make it make sense. It doesn’t make these decisions less arbitrary.

This magic might be “arbitrary,” but that does not mean it is random, unreasonable, or inconsistent.

Soft “handwave” magic is especially strong when it is presented in ways that align with pre-existing audience expectations; said another way, soft magic works really well when it is intuitive.

If a story features Wood Elves, an intuitive magic system might include magic elf-powers over plants and trees. Exactly how or why those powers manifest could be unexplained (i.e. soft), but it still works because “Wood Elves do Forest Magic” is an intuitive leap. If those same Elves suddenly and unexpectedly start shooting lasers from their eyes, then that might seem arbitrary and “cheap,” even if it’s every bit as unexplained as the tree-magic. An author would need to exposit and justify that laser-vision for it to work—in other words: the author would need to harden the magic.

Used well, however, “authorias handwavium” is a very useful tool.

Especially for…

Exploring Narrative Theme

Soft magic is usually more useful than hard magic for exploring narrative themes and character growth. (Note that word “usually.” We’re going to explore this a lot more in Part 3).

Before we go further, it’s worth reminding ourselves:

1. These terms—hard and soft magic—are relative. Every system will be harder than some, softer than others.

2. The terms are also not a clear dichotomy: they are a spectrum. No system is fully hardened or entirely nebulous.

3. Lastly, any given magic system can have very hard, clear limits and simultaneously have soft, unexplained elements. If that sounds odd, go reread point 2.

Got it? Okay. So what do we mean by “soft magic is better at theme?”

Forgive our indulgence, but we want to give three examples:

Harry Potter’s Patronus

First, let’s look again at Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. It’s the only one of the seven books that doesn’t feature Voldemort as the main threat, but it instead focuses on Sirius Black, an escaped murderer who wants to kill Harry. We also see Harry directly trying to learn more about his parents as people: we learn of them through their friend, Lupin, and in order to learn the important Patronus Charm Harry has to rely on his faint memories of his mum and dad. There is a clear theme of family, specifically the longing that Harry has for a relationship with his late parents.

In the end, it’s revealed that Sirius is actually Harry’s godfather, a friend of Harry’s parents, and an all-around Good Guy. Harry then has to save Sirius to have any chance at a normal family. To do this, Harry has to cast the Patronus Charm—a difficult spell that he’s struggled to work out. But he does it, saving himself and his godfather in the process.

Now the spells in Harry Potter are fairly hard magic. Character does XYZ and there’s a predictable result. 2 + 2 = 4. That’s hard. We also explored in the last essay how the Patronus Charm’s hardness is useful for showing how Harry has to overcome an emotional problem.

However. The “edges” of magic are very soft. Is there any other spell like the Patronus Charm that gets its power from a person’s memories? Is there another spell that creates a corporeal ghost that “fights” for you? Why does Harry need to focus so much on his happiest, most powerful memory to cast the spell? The spell—like every spell in the series—is remarkably unique. Each spell is fit to the purpose of the narrative.

The Patronus Charm is an antidote to the Dementors, but how do they work? Are they born? Do they have bodies? Why do they exist and why do they try to literally suck the happiness and joy out of people? They aren’t so much creatures as they are a force of nature, but I can’t think of any other “force of nature” creatures in Harry Potter. Are there versions of Dementors for joy? For anxiety? For anger? All of these questions are unanswered and soft.

This version siphons your motivation to get your car’s Check Engine light looked at.

And the result of that softness is a powerful, physical representation between despair and hope. Furthermore, when Harry succeeds with the Patronus Charm, his Patronus—the ghostly apparition that staves off the evil Dementors—is in the form of a stag, a direct symbol of his father, James.

We get the theme full circle: Harry does have a family, and his parents’ love is still present in his life, and his parents’ legacy lives on in him. The theme lands home in part because of all the soft edges of the fantastical: the Dementors and their vague operations, the origins of the Patronus Spell, the rationale behind the patroni (patronuses?) being animals…

The hardness of the Patronus Charm is useful for the plot: Harry needs to do this and this to Save the Day. But the spell’s softness is useful for adding meaning and depth to that plot.

Dad of War

Another example: in the video game God of War 4, the demigod and notorious deicide Kratos tries to live a quiet life away from his past. To protect that quietude, Kratos does not tell his adolescent son, Atreus, of his own semi-divine status, attempting to raise Atreus as a mortal.

However, whenever he’s aggravated, Atreus begins to exhibit wrathful paroxysms followed by fainting spells: symptoms of his neglected godhood. Kratos is continuously warned by those around him that he must reveal to Atreus his true nature before it destroys his son from the inside out.

Here, a hard magic system would have presaged these events with concrete parameters. The player would have been able to foresee that Atreus’ suppression would have led to these negative symptoms, either through some precedent or exposition of magical mechanics.

But that’s not what we get. Instead we’re told that this is the consequence of Kratos’ actions as it’s happening before our eyes.

Rather than being a defect, this is alluding to the greater point of the story: Kratos is trying to avoid the sins of his past, but his suppression is figuratively and literally hurting those he loves the most. It’s a classic story of a father attempting to bury the faults of yesterday only to witness his own destructive tendencies manifesting in his son. Explaining the precise way in which Atreus’s malady works would not elevate the story in the least. In fact, it would cheapen it. “The teenager needs an honest father,” is a much better story than “the teenager needs medication.”

When Kratos does reveal Atreus’ heritage, the story is able to focus directly on the resulting character effects rather than fussing over what exactly is occurring at the level of magic. The “softness” of the magic allows the father-son dynamic to remain front and center.

The Narnian Children

In The Chronicles of Narnia, the Pevensie children find Narnia in a wardrobe while playing hide and seek because that’s a very childlike thing to find. Children look into the small and taken-for-granted, in-between places like a wardrobe, especially in an old house belonging to distant relatives! Grandma’s attic and grandpa’s workshop are great places to blend the ordinary and the fantastic—because that’s how it feels to a child. It’s the same reason that it tends to be children who can spy the fairies and goblins flitting through the backyard garden or disturbing the pantry cupboards.

It’s totally in keeping with the themes of childlike wonder to have the Pevensies find a portal to another world in a neglected item of furniture. It works better as a wardrobe than it would as some mystical artifact covered in runic symbols.

An early manuscript—ultimately rejected by consumer report lobbyists—was titled The Lion, the Witch, and the Lead Refrigerator.

So why is it a wardrobe? Well, we just told you. Because it works for the story.

No, but why—in the story—is it a wardrobe? Well, it’s sort of retconned in the later publication of The Magician’s Nephew (the Professor is shown to be able to create portals of some kind) but it’s not really explained. Nor should it be. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe works just fine with nothing more than “because magic, you dolt.”

To be clear, and to be fair: there are hard magic systems that explore themes quite wonderfully (to be discussed in our final post). However, the soft—and yes, arbitrary—nature of unexplained magic gives an author way more latitude for uniting the fantastical elements with narrative themes and a character’s internal growth.

Conclusion

As we said with hard magic systems, there’s a lot more that could be said about relative advantages and disadvantages, but we’re going to leave our exploration there.

But before we sign off, a word about next week’s post.

There’s a reason why we were a bit self-indulgent with providing three separate examples on the question of theme: because “theme” actually highlights some much deeper questions about why we as speculative fiction authors would even use magic in the first place.

The fact is, any discussion about hard or soft magic can rapidly (d)evolve into a conversation about the nature and purpose of fantasy itself.

Now, we’re not going to weigh in on that question exactly, but in our third and final post, we’ll look at why scratching at “magic systems” can very quickly suck you down a philosophical or diegetic rabbit hole. We’ll also explain why that’s not a bad thing, and show how you can either avoid that rabbit hole or safely explore its depths.

Till then. Thanks for reading.

If you like what you’ve read here and want us to keep making stuff like this, you can help us do that by liking, commenting, or sharing this post. You can also see the rest of my writing on this page.

And if you’re not subscribed to Ian’s publication, Dunmore Dispatch, I highly recommend you check it out. He’s a hell of a storyteller, and I owe him quite a lot when it comes to how I think about narrative.

There should be a link at the bottom of this email/post, but you can also check out Ian’s stuff here 👉 Navigation Guide to Dunmore Dispatch.

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1. There's also a lesson here for horror: once we see the monster, it is almost always less scary than what we had imagined. Once we know a thing, it loses some of its grip on us.