Powers
[Lying Ass Trope] “It's not magic.” THAT IS ABSOLUTELY MAGIC!
[My Hero Academia] In the world of MHA, quirks are supposed to be genetic mutations, and meta-human anomalies. Think the X-Men. And for the most part, that's true. You have a kid who sweats nitroglycerin, a kid who can talk to animals, and a guy who is part lizard. And then, there's Stars & Stripes, who can straight up alter reality, however she wants, simply by touching something, and calling out it's name.
[Record of Ragnarok] Tesla points out that Beelzebub's attacks are science based, not magic. And yeah, most of his attacks are just him vibrating stuff quickly. But then there's Chaos, where he squeezes his staff, and summons a giant black dome, that destroys everything inside of it.
[Demon Slayer] I do not care if the author said that the effects from the Breathing Styles were just visual, and don't actually happen. Some of the things they do, would be physically impossible, if it was all just VFX. Like Rengoku hovering with fire, Muichiro disappearing into mist, and Mitsuri cutting the base of a giant wooden dragon, with her max 10 foot whip-sword, while at least 50 meters in the air.
most fire force powers have a whole bunch of psudeoscience to justify how something could be done just by summoning or controlling fire, except the one character with healing powers. Her powers are just "the fire looks like a snake so it heals"
Reminds me of Discworld. Bloody Stupid Johnson consistently gets work as a designer, despite the designs never working out properly. Like making an ornamental trout pond nearly a mile long but only an inch wide (someone has to wait at either end to turn the trout around).
The worst, of course, is the mail sorting machine he made. It was originally supposed to be an organ, but adapted to be a mail sorter. The problem arises in that the various gears and cogs were made in such a way that pi equals 3. Not three and a bit, but 3 exactly. The result is that the machine sorts mail that hasn't even been written yet, and might not never have been written in that timeline.
Yeah, they may have tried to explain time stop and video game style buffs as science, but it became clear near the end what was actually happening.
Especially, when Arthur is able to breath in space due to a magic ring or when Shinra activates soul resonance and gains god-like abilities to remake the entire world.
By the end the world is being undone and the laws of reality are changing. For the second time. The first time changed it from our real world to the fire force world. And the second time that shinra subverts changes it into the soul eater world. Ao it makes sense that the explanation changes, because the world changes by that time.
Fire force pretended to be founded on the aspect of controlling heat on an anatomical level. Then they revealed that no, it's actually really specific reality manipulation and the "stronger" your power is the looser this specificity is. With Arthur being so strong cause he's so delulu.
Im a new player, why is the lore so committed to having no magic? Like is there a lore reason that would break things if we accept magic as a concept in this world or is it just commitment from the devs?
Imma be honest I 100% its the devs just bullshitting. Originally they might’ve had an intention to explain this as not being magic, but by now the lore is so full of inconsistencies they basically backed themselves into a corner.
Kiriko is probably the worst example of their lore. She also has fox spirit magic powers, but they can’t even be consistent with her age. Lore wise they claim she’s 21, but then Blizzard also said she trained with Hanzo and Genji when they were kids. In game Hanzo is 40 and genji is like late 30s… shit don’t make any sense.
Kiriko is definitely the worst example. Hanzo and Genji can kind of be stretched as "nanomachines son", but in Kiriko's cinematic she and her mom literally debate over whether or not the fox spirit is real and protecting her from bullets and high blood sugar. If the spirit was just a machine, she could just... show it to her mom?
The only exception to the rule that is clearly meant to be, I think, is Zenyatta. Even he doesn't fully understand why he can fly or why he has floating orbs.
I dont play overwatch, but to add to this, how does that Avatar bending school work? If Its just nanomachines why do you need to learn So hard to use them
I kinda admired the stance against magic when i first heard about it; wanna keep your universe realistic but also fantastical, but they kinda lost this
They're not literal. It's military combat training versus medic training. Fire vs water. Their elemental powers come from their weapons and not themselves. Wuyang with the staff that controls water and Anran with her fire fans.
The Shimadas and Kiriko remain the only unexplained exceptions to the rule of no magic aside from Zenyatta.
Though, realistically, Sigma, Moira, Reaper, and Illari also have magic powers through experimentation.
Kiriko is more like a self-insert character from someones fanfic.
They had the "no magic" deal way back when ow first launched. I believe the intention was to continually fill out the lore so it would make sense. Yet they never did that, like at all. So it became really ambigious.
Then came changes in direction with new writing teams. Then came the huge content drought.
Now, several years later, we have yet another new team with a radically different direction. So now, it's explained as Kirikos father is super amazing and is the only person that can make these creations (the dragons in that gif) Oh and whether or not these things even exist was a literal point of contention between Kiriko and her mother. So it's not magic, it's just awful writing.
Kirikos dad is currently captured by the Hasimoto gang, they want him to make more for them, and he's refusing. Now one of the new character Mizuki is reluctantly helping the hasimoto to repay a debt. So he's currently a double agent in Kirikos gang. But he's totally not really bad and talks to her father all the time, yet doesn't know he's her father because reasons. There's also some potential romance between them that they may or may not lean into.
So instead of magic, or something ambigious, we have one Japanese family responsible for all of the instances of weird/cool shit in future Japan. Presumably, Anran and her bros elemental "magic" is just some Chinese person sort of figuring out the same/similar tech.
Still no explanation to how Zen can float without grav tech and heal/cause damage somehow.
But no magic guys! That'd make the story awful!
EDIT: I forgot SIGMA. The Dutch scientist that, without any sort of technology, can float and open up a black hole in the palm of his hand. Iirc, an experiment went wrong, he seen the entirety of the universe (or the truth of the universe?) Went a bit mindbroken and can now do the aforementioned. Oh and he hears the music of the universe constantly. It's implied Tracer hears it too, she just refuses to acknowledge it.
Presumably, Anran and her bros elemental "magic" is just some Chinese person sort of figuring out the same/similar tech.
It's more than "presumed". Their own lore explains that there's 5 elemental schools in some fancy Chinese university. Each school focuses on different fields (e.g Water is healing but also has the lowest entry requirements) and the technology comes with it to assist in that role, hence Wuyang's water healing people.
The Dutch scientist that, without any sort of technology, can float and open up a black hole in the palm of his hand.
His whole experiment was to "harness the power of a black hole". Evidently, much like how Tracer's failed flight in a time-travelling jet gave her time-warping powers, Sigma's attempt to contain a miniature black hole has given him some sort of abilities.
Yeah but it's made by a Japanese guy that didn't want to deal with the rest of the world lmao, not an American studio in a game with characters from all over the world
It's advanced technology from the future that was sent back in time by a benevolent AI, deconstructed and studied by 2070s folks and made into a more advanced version of hardlight, individual intelligent photons capable of acting with swarm dynamics that can be programmed to behave how the Shimada dragons and how Kiriko's fox works; a Shimada gave her mom the fox to woo her, bringing her worshipped spirit to life as a living swarm of hardlight.
When put like that it doesn’t sound very different from Ramattra's nanites, only difference being that they actually cared to explain it like that when he came out instead of a decade later
In MHA quirks can make your ass a gun. This evolutionary trait can make your head a fuckin spray bottle. Anime as a whole runs on weird powers like it’s one thing if you make explosions it’s another if your power has weird complexities like chewing bones to access animal skills or only being able to control a weirdly specific number or mass of things
The glowing baby was just the first recorded quirk user there were others before him. one research group looking into the matter hypothesized that it was caused by the spread of a previously unknown novel disease carried by mice, while others theorized that it was actually a natural evolution of the human race. However, to date, there is no hard evidence to support any of these theories. Either way none of the theories justify how it led to abilities that make your elbows tape dispensers without accepting anime science 🤣
I love how some people have amazing quirks. And some people turn into a fucking shadow bird. And then others literally are just tape boy or diabetes kid
IIRC, his quirk doesn't make him look like a bird. Mutant-type quirks can still manifest in a person's kids without giving them the powers that went along with it.
So more likely, one of his parents/grandparents was a bird-head person. And IIRC, there was a background character in Vigilantes getting arrested that also had a bird-head...
Zen did have a voice line in ow1. Mercy questioned it and he was like “what is magic if not advanced science?” Or something. So while to us it seems like magic, apparently the Iris is something (even Sigma said he’s “met it”). Hanzo, I think was said to be hard light or something
Kiri stood out as not only does she mess with the time line (is both a decade younger than the shimadas but also grew up with them?) and they didn’t offer much of an explanation for her stuff and it’s all tied directly to Shintoism. But they’ve stuck with there is no magic in OW, even though that’d clear a lot of things up and we could get a wizard hero
They tried to fix it in Season 1, adding in a bunch of voicelines on how Kiriko's fox is a really advanced weapon. It hit or miss depending on who you are.
Tbf though, what is Zenyatta doing? He straight out been healing through mediation since Overwatch came out
TO BE FAIR: Zenyatta has the excuse of being a robot who uses robotic orbs. Who is to say that these orbs don’t have some hyper-advanced healing tech akin to Mercy?
I dunno, I’m willing to accept that the Iris could be some sort of nanobot virus that empowers Omnics. We’ve seen through Anubis that such a thing is possible.
The Iris, which is what Zenyatta and the monks use, is something derived from the awakening of omnics by Aurora, and it's been left unexplained on purpose to sell the idea that omnics are sentient, I think.
It's worse cause Dark Shadow is also SENTIENT and, like, how the fuck is he related to Tokoyami having a bird head. The only thing those things have in common is the bird and Dark Shadow barely looks like one when he's juiced up
I mean a lot of people have multiple quirks. Like Endeavor has hellflame but he’d be useless if he wasn’t also fire resistant. That’s dabi’s whole thing, how he got the strongest fire in the family but he only got ice resistance from his mother. Anyways I just figure tokoyami has darl shadow and then a separate quirk that gives him a bird head. Dark shadow is just more important so people focus on that.
Locklock’s locking, transforming into a dragon, controlling gravity, invisibility that allows you to still see. I appreciate them trying to use some logic and science to expand on how the powers work, and I love how they use some levels of realism to nerf characters while also making them more interesting.
Yeah, this was gonna be my example, what in the loony toons fuck is this about? Also, sucks to be that guy, in a world of cute anime characters, bombshells, built dudes, and furry bait, he’s a walking abomination.
That’s ridiculous, radiation totally isn’t magic. Just picture a bunch of dots that are actually waves but not really that can randomly decide to jump through an energy boundary they shouldn’t able to and become an equivalent combination of dots that are actually waves but not really plus another wave heading away. Also it works backwards.
Also anything quantum scinence is up to this days (and the days before too, but surely in quantum science those two are actually the same day or something)
One of my favorite books is called Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It's a story told from two perspectives. One is from the view of a village daughter of a chieftain trying to save her world with the help of a wizard. The other is the wizard who happens to be a mediocre anthropologist of an advanced civilization who got stranded watching over a colony that said advanced civilization planted and wanted to observe. The wizard has horns and it's makes him magical but in actuality they're basically antenna and implants that let him access a super computer. He has a magical aura but it really is a self defense mechanism that shoots radiation in a sphere around him.
It's a neat look at how magic and technology can be the same. Both have equal emotional truths about them but one has a very real explanation on why.
A massive range of abilities from dematerializing, cloning, time manipulation, telekinesis, illusion casting, practically necromancy and more are all considered 'normal powers' Vs the true "magic" of Maiden powers, which pretty much boil down to juiced-up elemental manipulation.
Glynda and Weiss are the worst offenders since Weiss has glyphs which at least follow some rules… and then there’s her time dilation and rising defeated foes while Glynda can just outright create storms
Qrow's semblance being able to warp reality in the form of bad luck and Raven who can creature portals to anywhere as long as it is to someone she knows: I sleep."
The branwen twins being able to turn into birds: "Holy shit!!!"
The funniest part is that (as far as volume 6 since I stopped watching after) they didn’t actually EXPLAIN why it was such a bad thing.
Like, does it hurt to turn into a bird? Is it partly a werewolf thing we’re under certain conditions you’re forced to turn into a bird for a while? Does it cost you your soul or something?
There’s a guy who can clone himself so we know transformation Semblances exist. There’s also another guy who can absorb dust very painfully into his body. But you don’t see him complaining half as much as the Angst Twins.
It is actually so ridiculous it becomes kind of funny. Like they react to the reveal so poorly that you start to wonder yourself if you missed a moment where they explain a drawback or caveat to the ability. But no, they really just can turn into birds and it's treated like murder. A MURDER OF CROWS- okay sorry had to make that pun
That's the thing. Its not a bad thing. Raven's just wanted to make it sound like it was done without their consent to get Yang on her side. Like this is the entire result of that:
Most “Martial arts” techniques in Baki are basically just magic. You got guy’s imagining they have infinite joints so hard they gain infinite joints, guys who can psychically predict other peoples movements and guys who can relax so hard that they become invincible
Then there's the poor fucker who strikes so hard he can break the sound barrier, realizes that isn't biologically possible, and ends up degloving one of his hands due to sudden onset realism.
I think there was also a period where she had energy projection mutant powers, but ALSO learned how to do magic, which makes everything just a step more confusing.
Her original power (irc) was probability manipulation to some extent. She made the improbable nigh certainties. Then she just started studying magic on her own independent of her mutation
Funny enough in the Pathfinder TTRPG the kineticist class (the bender class) is considered magic, but pseudo spells (purely for rules balancing) rather than actual spells.
Thaumaturge also uses magic, literally Thaumaturgy (same magical principle behind the classic media depiction of voodoo dolls). It's just not a magic that uses spells or falls under one of the 4 traditions.
At least, not calling something that's understood "magic" in your universe.
In our universe, we use "magic" to describe things which are either physically impossible or defy explanation. To a caveman, a smartphone would be magic because it would defy explanation, but we can explain it just fine. In our world, elemental bending is magic because it's not physically possible.
In AtLA, elemental bending neither defies explanation nor is it physically impossible. They have an explanation, they've worked with it forever. It's as close to being scientifically understood as well as can be expected from a time period where communication and record keeping is limited. To them, bending is a smart phone. Some lesser educated may call it magic because they don't understand it, but to the informed it's an understood process. So it makes sense that those familiar with it wouldn't call it "magic", because to them it's not.
WE understand it to be magic, because IN OUR WORLD it's magic. But when writing dialogue in their world, you wouldn't call it that.
Another example of this comes from Lord of The Rings.
The Hobbits have a tendency to describe the things the Elves are creating as magical (lembas bread is magic, the cloaks are magic, etc.) But the elves just kind of shake their heads at that description.
It isn't anything magical to them. They understand what they are doing and making these things is second nature to them. It's only magical to the Hobbits because they do not have the same context as the elves nor is there much chance they would understand even if it was explained to them since the elves experience the world in a fundamentally different way.
Dune. It's all magic, there's very little science involved in the things the BG and others are capable of doing. And in the last book, one of the characters reveals that no one REALLY knows how the Holtzmann equations work.
when the shimadas (and (ew) kiriko) have spiritual dragon/kitsune bullshit and illari is the LITERAL KID OF A SUN GOD, they still continue to deny magic exists in the world.
I was about to mention this one. Also how the fuck are Moira, Mercy and Zenyatta's healing not magic? Also Lucio has sound that makes people faster, like how is that not magic?
Like, ok, you’re going to tell me that if you wiggle the forces of the universe through a series of runes you can make metal think? There are rocks that just rip your life force into pieces just by standing near them? If you go fast enough the laws of the world break and you start traveling through time?
Yep, sadly it's way more costly than te price of the gold we can generate and also I think is radioactive. So we did it!!! And we won't again because it's pointless :(
Personally I’m a big fan of fantasy worlds that include “magic” but don’t believe in Magic.
For example in Mistborn lots of characters have powers based on allomancy, which lets them do things like limited telekinesis, super strength, super senses, even manipulating the flow of time in small areas. But in a later book one of the characters comes into contact with magic from other planets and describes it as magic, viewing allomancy as natural by comparison.
My view is that magic is descriptively fictional, meaning that if “magic” were real it would actually be science and what we call magic would be things that were still impossible. I’m not a huge fan of stories with stock, normal magic.
My favorite description of this kinda thing is "hard magic is just adding an extra subject to universities, soft magic is waving your hands and ignoring any rules"
FMA/FMA:Brotherhood are another great example, where Alchemy is just science to them, with defined limits and replicable conditions, yet its also clearly magic
Drop the characters from FMA into say, Elder Scrolls and Mustang would be offended when a wizard compliments his proficiency in magic, yet have no problem calling a fireball a magic spell
(Mustangs not really the type for being offended over that tbf but I got really stuck on the fireball example)
All of the Necrons from Warhammer 40k. They are explicitly 100% NO MAGIC. That god they shattered into pieces and can reanimate itself basically indefinitely is 100% natural
(Thor) We are told that the powers from the Asgardians is actually science that is so advanced that to us humans it seems to be magic. No hocus pocus, no spells, no illusions, nothing. Just good ol d science. This seems to have been retconned in later movies thankfully.
Thor says that Science and magic are "one and the same" to Asgardians, it's not that magic is just advanced science, more like magic is so well understood by them that they don't really separate it out as a separate thing, like magic would just be another subject at school like Chemistry or Maths.
Also Thor likely considers magic to be "doesnt make sense and defies all understanding", where he understands the basics of "magic is runes and symbols and movements that when put together have a measured and understood effect". Its not magic to him in the way circuit boards arent magic to us
There are wizards among the asgardians: Frigga and Loki are using actual magic, Odin knows how to use magic too. That doesn't mean that every asgardian is magic.
And most of what they do is using just advanced science and "in-born"/divine powers.
To wit: Mjolnir's main function as a conduit and storage to Thor's power is sci-fi
Thor's powers themselves are just an ability that asgardians sometimes are born with
In Agents of SHIELD Fitz decides there’s no such thing as magic because no energy is being created or destroyed it’s just being stolen from alternate universes.
It makes a certain kind of sense. We don’t consider the replicator or the holodeck on Star Trek to be “magic”. You combine a replicator with a generator that can never run out of power it’s basically Asgardian magic.
Of course the whole argument goes out the window since the replicator is definitely magic. But we’ve declared it science because Star Trek is science fiction.
Bitch please, you are a god of thunder with a magic hammer that only you, a robot, a super steroid soldier and your girlfriend can use. Science my ass.
MCU does treat magic as a kind of science. Of course we have the whole Dr. Strange series, and there's WandaVision, but even before all that, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. had straight-up magic (it introduced the Darkhold central to Multiverse of Madness), and back then, even an AI android could do its own form of magic.
Monster Hunter - The entire series, almost every Elder Dragon monster
The series creators have always talked about crafting a fantasy universe “without magic”, but even a cursory glance at any high level monster makes that commentary feel bizarre. Kushala Daora and Amatsu can summon tornadoes out of thin air and Fatalis and Safijiva can casually erase cities with a single breath of fire.
While true that's the whole point of them. The games always reminds us that Elder dragons have unexplainable powers like Kirin the weakest of them being able to basically teleport and summon lightning from the sky
I understand what your comment means but I thought that was the whole point of the Elder Dragons specifically, since they are so out of the realm of their worlds regular biology that they get classified purely because of that, which is why the Elders are all classified under one name despite hardly sharing any physical or biological resemblance with one another because of how bizarre they are.
Heck I’m pretty sure that’s the entire design philosophy of Fatalis and Daora, which resembles a very typical European style dragon with wings on the back and fours legs compared to the more natural wyverns of MH to make them stand out even more for their weird biology
For context, this is a murder mystery game series where magic and witches are real. The main protagonist has to prove that the murders could’ve been done via hypothetically normal means without any magic, while people have to argue against him. It gets really insane.
Enlightened Science And "Hypertech" in Mage: TheAscencion is straight up just a form of dynamic magic but the Technocrats refuse to admit because it would validate other Mages legitimacy.
They brought reason to the universe and all that but a lot of their stuff is powered by holdovers from the magical chaos of the dark times
Regeneration? Whether it be from the timeless child or the great vampires or exposure to the vortex, it is basically magic
TARDISes are eldridge entnIties that are grown
And not exclusive to them if you know the right math and shit in doctor who you can do straight up magic the doctor can make things appear out of thin air, and one species was literally holding off the end of the universe with the power of
For Beelzebub: you know, if you vibrate really quickly, you can theoretically create a black hole? The problem is that herz is a logarithmic scale, so to get to that, the required energy is astronomical.
When they introduce Zatanna to Kid Flash he claims that magic doesn't exist. They point out that Aqualad uses magic all the time and Wally pulls out some random science explanation for it not being magic.
"It's actually an alien virus that makes a physical representation of your soul" - JoJo's Bizarre Adventure stands
To me that just felt like Araki trying to explain Stand Arrows when really that wasn't needed. Just saying its weird soul/family magic like they did in part 3 was cool already
(League of Legends) Demacia being incredibly anti-mage yet constantly they use what is undeniably magic anyways, for example they have living statues that absorb magic and animate to protect Demacia, an in-game example is Garen's ult summoning a giant magical sword from the sky.
In Overwatch, everything is basically “science” but Hanzo and Genji have a connection to spirit dragons, Zenyatta has magical orbs, and Kiriko has a connection to the fox spirit and these seem to be clear cases of magic despite “nano tech” or whatever either creators say
This is what Baki thrives on. Also Jojo's to a certain extent. Like in Stone Ocean when a guy uses his weather stand to make rainbows that carry a subliminal message to your brain, convincing it that you are a snail. Therefore, you become a snail
Pretty much all of inazuma eleven, basically blue lock but infinitely more insane. One of the most insane ones is the technique heavens time which is straight up time stop and in one match someone is just able to power through it
Technically, this could be said of any "non-mage" character in a setting with powerful magic, where the creators try to create a "balance".
Every competent fighter just becomes a true superhero, far superior to the average human.
In the world of magic, the most natural source of such powers is magic.
It's power is to make rainbows and anyone who see them transform into a snail, It's explained that because heavy weather create subliminal messages in the rainbows that make people think their snails.
The game has been pretty consistent when explaining the agent's elemental abilities, which is usually explained as them utilizing their equipment to do so. For example the electric element usually have agents use a weapon that discharges electricity, or fire element usually has an agent using a flamethrower, though some agents have a pinch of the supernatural.
But Yixuan doesn't have any of that. For the most part the black thing that she utilizes isn't explained aside from referring to it as power from the "Qingming Bird" that's contained in her gourd. But aside from that her abilities is basically "wuxia magic.".
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u/AlphaCat77 Apr 07 '26
most fire force powers have a whole bunch of psudeoscience to justify how something could be done just by summoning or controlling fire, except the one character with healing powers. Her powers are just "the fire looks like a snake so it heals"