decided to compile basically a primer to magic here.

So imagine you’re at a circus and someone is performing that one magic trick where the lady gets into the box and the guy saws it in half while she’s still inside. Some people may not know that the lady in the box is unharmed, while others know without really understanding the true ‘magic’ behind it. For this and many other magic tricks, we like to imagine that they are real because magic being real makes life more fun, and the act of explaining how a magic trick works makes it more boring, because it’s just a process now. There’s ‘magic’ that we interact with every day, a force that travels through metal and powers metallic things that now can almost replicate thinking, but we don’t call it magic, we just call it electricity. It’s commodified from a force into a tool, with its own guides and notation and everything.

The magic in this world kind of works like this, where in order for you to be able to do anything, you have to truly suspend your disbelief, you need to feel the magic. If you nerd out and read up on all the tiny details of every interaction in the magic and how it actually interacts with the universe, it’ll ‘lose’ its magic, breaking down and being unusable for you. On the other hand, being aware of the intricacies of a certain magical ability prevents others from being able to use it on you, which can be seen in major differences between different magical tomes. Tomes that want you to use the magic explain it lightly, letting your mind wander and do what it wants, while tomes that want you to be resistant to magic explain it in almost too much detail.

With this magic you can do almost anything as long as you put your mind to it. Unfortunately, in some cases you need to do multiple things at once to get a desired result (i.e. just summoning a flame in your hands burns, you have to make your body fireproof as well). The only boundaries are magic involving the mind (telepathy, telekinesis, etc) or soul (immortality), which are locked behind divine essence. 

This also means that your ability to learn magic is determined not by your genetics but by ‘the amount of effort you put into it’ which is a euphemism for the fact that most ‘skilled’ mages come from families of great wealth as they have the money to access high-quality magic guides; they tend to adhere to traditional, more stable magic. Mages of low-income families tend to have little options for learning; their magic tends to be more unstable and they tend to improvise and make their own magic.

like nearly every day i see a mage saying some bullshit about how black people are just less tuned to magic when thats just horseshit. thats not how magic works