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Nanase and Her Fox - 62 - HD
🕑 Added 2024-02-17 04:00:04 +0000 UTCTheory! Er, Hypothesis!
Commentary
- "People are perceived through magic," The Will of Magic
I didn't set out to write a "Tedd is rambling" comic. The "magic seems geared towards selfish spells" was simply a point I couldn't fit in the previous comic, and panel two is close to what naturally followed.
I say "close to" because that's the abridged version.
Uncertainty
I intentionally want to leave some things with magic unconfirmed. This isn't just to give myself wiggle room in case something Tedd hypothesizes turns out to be a bad idea narratively (THAT is a BONUS).
It's because leaving things unconfirmed makes sense. There are so many things that would be difficult in-universe to truly confirm.
Tedd would need statistically significant sample sizes for testing, controls, and years of research. Unless I want to pretend Tedd DOESN'T care about the scientific method, a lot of what Tedd hypothesizes needs to remain in "educated guess" territory.
On top of that, it's magic, and if they've got it all figured out, it's boring (and limiting).
(Of course, if tossing these rules into house rules for a Roleplaying Game, any hypothesis you want can be correct.)
ALL OF THAT SAID, what Tedd's saying here is pretty consistent with established canon. "Focusing on your desires while using magic is easier for magic to understand" probably adds up.
Probably.
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Comments
Kenneth A Graves
Can Tedd create a chibi-fication wand? Or would big-head/small-body cause too many circulation problems?
Rachel Greenham
or you could say: it's science all right, but given magic itself is sentient and the subjects' desires are relevant, it's more like social science and/or psychology than the heady empiricism of physics.
Some Ed
I think Tedd is close to recognizing a fundamental problem with science. Science assumes that science doesn't interfere with the results, that the very act of coming up with hypotheses and testing them doesn't alter how the universe works. Magic, on the other hand, relies on coming up with a desire to do a thing and then seeking out how to do a thing enabling that thing to happen. That is, almost the exact opposite of the assumption of science. When the thing you're making use of has its own will, science breaks down for the very reason that magic works. This is why we have a the will of magic in a lot of magic stories, but we almost never have the will of science in a science story, and in those rare times when we do, there's debate as to whether the book really belongs in SciFi or if it should be moved to Fantasy.
