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Tiggum posted:How does this manifest though? What can a fully trained magician do that a hedge witch can't? So far I have no idea what practical use magic is to anyone, other than that trick for stealing cash from ATMs, and even less idea of what constitutes powerful or difficult magic to perform. Both Julia and Quentin have now learned that magic can't solve all your problems, but what problems can it solve? Nothing, basically. I thought that was always kind of the theme of the books. Magic is the result of a broken universe, which is why only broken people can use it, and broken people don't really solve problems. Usually the use of magic is either inconsequential or makes a bad situation worse somehow. The few people who mature enough to actually try to do something big and interesting just turn completely into monsters in a big ironic explosion (I guess this is supposed to be a form of transcending your hosed up human life and just becoming like a magic blue elf monster person forever) Johnny Joestar posted:they have some interesting ideas and it's very obvious why people could get really into them, but in general the books had this weird aftertaste to them like i'd just read someone's attempt at trying to make fun of YA fiction that managed to have just as much dumb poo poo of its own design layered in The third book is the best one, especially if you disliked the second book. The third book is Quentin realizing that he's not hot poo poo in a champagne glass, he's actually cold diarrhea in a Dixie cup. There's even an older magician who just straight up tells Quentin that he'll never amount to anything important and is basically like "I'm a badass so you can have some of this magic stuff I've made, you sure as gently caress need it you pathetic sack of poo poo" My favorite part was how his "mysterious" specialty that was built up over two books wound up being something completely lame, like I think it was "fixing small objects". Literally everything in the third book was about tearing down the legendary image that Quentin had built of himself
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Feb 23, 2016 10:34
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I read the first book years ago, but I don't think that the point of "magic is a lot of insanely hard work, now start memorizing all of this inane poo poo all day every day" was really made clear until Antarctica, which we haven't seen yet. I'm guessing that they'll have to make this come across in dialogue somehow. Up to this point in the story I think that the reader only knew that all magicians came from a group of top-performing obsessive students with a mix of mental issues. Quentin and many of the other characters actually seemed like slackers, only really working on stuff that they're really interested in, and this is coming across in the show really well.
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Feb 23, 2016 20:46
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Oasx posted:Quentin doesn't really do anything, things just happen to him while he stands around looking like a sad puppy, and it annoys me that he is attending magic school but never does any magic. I'm pretty certain that he's done magic in every single episode so far
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Feb 24, 2016 10:12
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WarLocke posted:This is part of the reason why I don't agree with the people who say the third book is all about tearing Quentin down. Yes he starts out as a little self-entitled poo poo, but by the end of the series he has literally held the power of a god, brought his love back from 'death', and created from whole cloth an entire 'land' which he and Alice proceed to gallop off into the sunset through, in search of adventure IIRC, none of that amazing poo poo could be accomplished by Quentin on his own. He had to borrow power and/or spells from others in order to do anything meaningful. "The Power of a God" was literally handed to him. I thought that the book made it clear that literally anyone could have done the same thing, if they had been at that time and place Quentin is basically a turd of a magician but he manages to do some really big things anyway because others lend him their abilities
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Feb 26, 2016 20:34
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Ersatz posted:Exactly. In my mind that's what the books are about. Quentin grows from an insecure, angry, and depressed teenager into a man who is comfortable with himself and with others, and who is far more interested in solving problems than in getting the benefits of having done so. Alright I agree with all of that, and I would add that Quentin also becomes comfortable with his mediocrity, relative to other magicians. The stark contrast between "I can accomplish anything" in the first book with "I guess I'm just not that awesome after all" in the third book and the steady progression toward that endpoint is why I enjoyed the books. I mean he is still a magician and has all of the talent that that represents, but coming to the realization that he's not "the chosen one" or whatever was really cool and refreshing, especially since people were warning him about that at the start of the first book
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Feb 27, 2016 04:56
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To be fair, SyFy's largest demographic is adult males who probably wish they could go to Adult Hogwarts
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Mar 2, 2016 04:39
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It kinds of makes me wonder why Hogwarts didn't have anything like a college or graduate program. Presumably there's a fuckton more magic poo poo that people would be interested in learning after getting the equivalent of a High School Diploma, but I guess having college students throwing keggers in the Room of Requirement and taking the magic equivalent of Adderall to get through finals wouldn't be suitable in a children's book. Now that she's writing additional books in the same universe maybe college-level and post-graduate education will get looked at Did The Magicians have a magic-adderall? I can't remember anything like that
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Mar 3, 2016 01:53
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Mouse Dresser posted:No, I meant that they'd probably have some sort of invented poo poo where The Beast fucks with Julia because The Beast is the ultimate baddy Presumably then the beast might wind up replacing that goat demon guy
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Mar 9, 2016 02:44
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or they're hoping to get the show cancelled before they have to shoot that scene
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Mar 9, 2016 06:18
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Johnny Joestar posted:from the beginning, it talking about a group of children disappearing into a magical fantasy world is pretty much 100% a tipoff to it being a huge narnia reference. from there it just keeps lumping more and more onto it to the point where it's unmistakable and lazy in every way. Are we talking about the tv show or the books now? The books have like a billion literary references beyond just the modern poo poo that people recognize easily (narnia, harry potter, D&D, etc.). When the first book came out some idiots on the internet bitched and moaned about how the Magicians rips off CS Lewis yet they didn't complain about the book ripping off The Once and Future King or Gulliver's Travels The tv show is lazy as gently caress but the books at least have a pretty significant amount of allusion effort put into them
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Mar 13, 2016 06:04
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child actors are all terrible so it's better to replace child characters with adult characters wherever it makes sense
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Mar 15, 2016 06:40
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I like that while everyone else has this enormous emotional breakdown Elliott just looks kind of hungover and badly needs a drink and a smoke
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Mar 30, 2016 09:29
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TV IV > The Magicians: Penny and Elliot are the hottest characters on the show, of either gender
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Jan 31, 2017 04:37
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Hedrigall posted:It annoys me how cheap some of the adaptation choices are in this show. I think these changes are actually really good. The costumes are fine and to be faithful to the books they'd have to basically create fully-CGI characters, which would be pointlessly expensive for characters that barely have any screen time
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Feb 2, 2017 11:45
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I hope the questing beast is some guy in a fursuit wearing a fedora with fake antlers taped to the sides of it It turns out that the magical world is full of weirdos and the author of the Fillory books had to take a lot of creative license in order to make the setting less weird
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Feb 3, 2017 04:08
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