thought

[permetaform]

I've seen many stories where the source of magic is tied to inner purity, ie. Healers have White Magic and thus are Pacifist and Good whereas Mages have Black Magic and Destory stuff and are Evil.

Well, see, that don't much make sense to me completely. It might be too much reading of the Devil's Fairytales (or some such title along those lines) where a painter was brilliant and nice and painted these eeeeeevil pictures. So Hell really really wanted the painter to go to hell so he could work for them; and they set about corrupting him. Well, what do you know? The painter became corrupt and wretched and mean but could only paint these highly religious pictures, so in the end the painter went to Hell and his latter paintings were admired in Heaven.

Along those lines, why aren't there more stories where, to be able to produce Good Magic you become mean-spirited? Like, by creating light, you become not-light to offset the balance? Conversely, by creating dark magic, you become more not-dark?

Comments

[ranalore.livejournal.com]

Well, what do you mean by Good Magic? Helping people? If so, then those who help people with their magic (i. e. Healers) are of course going to be seen as performing Good Magic. By the same token, those destroying people with their magic are going to be seen as performing Evil Magic. Whether those perceptions are absolute truths in the abstract is another question, but not necessarily a useful one (at least not to the characters involved in the books).

Some interesting things have been done along the lines of, doing this bit of magic here helps out this person or group of people, but it depletes another person or group of people, or the planet, or the gods. Most books I've read, even the bad ones, seem to push the idea that magic itself is neither good nor bad, it's what you do with it (one reason I find Mad King George's stated views on the Force migraine-inducing). I do suspect the good vs. evil divide that arises in the use has a lot to do with how many philosophies, religions, and civilizations of this world are based on this idea of two opposites. Naturally, that carries over into our art, of which literature is a part.

Your last paragraph would seem to indicate you separate people's natures from their actions. To a degree, I share that approach, in that a person's motivations for doing something may not be pure (pure good or pure evil), but who is deciding this person is good and this person evil? Who is perceiving their natures? Most of us only have other people's actions and words by which to judge them, in the real world. In literature, we get people filtered through the viewpoint character(s), or the uninvolved narrator. Sometimes we're left to draw our own conclusions, other times we're given very clear indications of what conclusions we are expected to draw, usually the same ones the viewpoint character is drawing. This doesn't mean there's no room for the character to be wrong, or for us to be wrong, but it's something to be considered when looking at "good" and "evil" in fiction.

Another thing is complexity in characterization. This character saves kittens and gives to charity and loves his family and volunteers at a hospital and goes home, reads names from the phonebook, and uses his magic to kill the people with those names. Is he evil? What's his reason for killing? What's his reason for saving kittens and giving to charity? This guy kicks puppies and gets into drunken fights every night and shoplifts regularly and can't open his mouth without insulting someone, and when he goes home, he reads names from the phonebook and casts protective circles so the other guy can't kill those people. Is he good? What's his reason for protecting people? Why is he kicking puppies and getting drunk and fighting? I've actually read a number of specfic stories and novels along these lines. So yeah, there's a fair bit of simplistic good vs. evil work out there, but the questions you're asking have been addressed, often at length.

[permetaform]

What I was thinking of specifically is that by, say, performing a healing act (or anything that "grows") the one using the magic gets an equivalent urge to destroy something. A small act of growth causes a small urge to destroy. A big act of healing causes a big urge to hurt.

So it's less a fact of debatable/questionable morality of good v. evil I'm looking for, than an actual *twisting* of one's personality due to one's magic use, as in magic use *directly* affecting mental state and/or spiritual state, to the opposite effect of one's using magic.

I would love book recs of stuff that explores this! ::bounces:: It's tricksy stuff but I'm not sure that I happened upon it in any appreciable form.

[ranalore.livejournal.com]

What you're talking about here sounds less like twisting to me and more like a certain kind of balance. You're not likely to find much of that in works based on the more popular Western mythologies, but I'm pretty sure I have read such things. More often, though, such a balance comes out as the energy needed to do the magic is actually drained from elsewhere, be it the caster or the caster's assistant or the land or spirit realm or what-have-you. Just as one example, the mages in Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry use "anchors," people who are bound to them magically and who act as their strength and source of power. Use of magic drains that person, much like physical labor wears you out.

[permetaform]

More often, though, such a balance comes out as the energy needed to do the magic is actually drained from elsewhere, be it the caster or the caster's assistant or the land or spirit realm or what-have-you. Just as one example, the mages in Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry use "anchors," people who are bound to them magically and who act as their strength and source of power. Use of magic drains that person, much like physical labor wears you out.

::nods:: yeah, I've read alot of stories like that, though I'm curious to see if there's actually more stories where, say, healing causes the equal and opposite reaction of wishing for destruction in the healer themselves.