#the worldbuilding was not very intuitive and there were no even implied explanations

[spoondrifts]

i finished the black tides of heaven by jy yang and i wish i could say i enjoyed it but i was skimming desperately by the end to just have it over with

[millicentthecat]

TROS FEELINGS

ASSORTED STAR WARS FEELINGS after the break.

Ok, I just sat down in front of my computer, and I haven't read any reviews or Hot Takes about the movie.  I went in completely unspoilered.  So these are all my instant thoughts after just seeing the film, and they are subject to change.

I was entertained but not impressed.

Palpatine is so incredibly cool.  Star Wars is a story about how cool Palpatine is.  How did he survive though?  And was it implied that Snoke was some kind of clone?  Made by Palpatine?  Why?  Why would you make a scarred, disfigured dude to go out and do your bidding?  And if you were going to make one, why not make a dozen and then never reveal yourself at all?

There were many "whys" in this movie.  Why did Kylo Ren---did he turn?  The Knights of Ren seemed to think so, but I don't know why.  And weren't they HIS followers?  Why were they suddenly defending Palpatine?  But back to--did Kylo really heel face turn because his mom said his name and then died?  And because Rey healed the hole that SHE stabbed in him, while gaslighting him with his deadname?  Was that all it took?  No thank you.  Rejected.

Also, Hux's death: rejected.  Kylo's death also rejected.  Palpatine's death also rejected.  I guess the spirits of the Jedi prevented him from inhabiting Rey's body and continuing the legacy of the Sith?  Unclear on how that worked.

In general, the movie was very complicated and dense, which is not a bad thing.  There was also some wonky pacing and a lot of expository dialogue.  These are things that I usually appreciate in a story, because my internal processing speed is different than most peoples', so wonky pacing and exposition help me keep a grasp on What's Going On more than action.  And ok, here's a thing that needs to be said.  If you watch the old movies from the 70s, the pacing--including simple things like the length of shots and frequency of cuts--they are MUCH slower paced than the prequels and MUCH MUCH slower paced than the sequel trilogy.  This is because movies have gotten FASTER and DENSER as each generation increases the speed with which they can process visual information, as we learn the language of film intuitively as children.  So I wasn't too put off by that, even though films that a lot of people younger than me like (like Grindlewald, for example) feel fast and dense and overwhelming to my old brain.

Some positives: so much good Sith worldbuilding.  Lots of cool aliens.  Good snek.  Complicated and fractious relationships amongst the heros.  Funny C3PO.  Solid first hour or so?  Though I may revisit that later.  I appreciated Leia training Rey, and the explicit nature of Rey's alliance to the Jedi, which I've remarked on before (to a lot of skepticism from the peanut gallery.)  Also, I thought introducing Force Healing was a bold move--though this was one of the things that knocked on the door of my brain and said "Your disbelief is still suspended, right?" and I said "yes of course please leave."

Neutrals: Rey Palpatine was a hoot.  I'm going to have to see it again before I have strong opinions about it, but I will.  The execution made it seem like a complete and utter retcon, even though I don't think it was?  IDK, mixed thoughts.

Some (of many) silly things.  Poe's romance and backstory.  Lack of Rose.  Too many walkbacks and "almosts"--Chewie almost dying, C3PO almost being erased, etc. etc.  No mention of the Rose/Finn kiss.  Random kiss between to Resistance fighters that the story tries to pretend is queer representation (GTFO).  Leia's death--I'm not upset that she died, I'm just kind of put off by how random and out of place it felt?  Like, the story halted for it to happen?  Continuing on.  Lack of Vader and/or Padme.  Rey on Tattooine for some reason?  Lando wasted.  It was AWESOME to see Lando but I felt like he was wasted, like there wasn't enough room for his character or explanation of why he was there and where he'd been.

Some more silly things.  The use of the Carrie footage was just janky.  I might not have noticed that if I wasn't looking for it, though.  I bet little kids won't notice.  Another thing little kids might not pick up on: it doesn't mean anything that the First Order has been defeated at the end.  Because they've been defeated like 6 times already.  They keep undefeating themselves, springing back up, same people, same conflicts.  It diminishes the meaning of the victories.  Even things like the Chosen One trope aren't meaningful if dozens of people are the Chosen One.

Another thing.  It didn't feel like anything that happened in this movie was planned when TFA was written.  I mean, we know that these movies were not written according to any kind of overarching plan--we know, for example, that Poe was supposed to die in TFA.  So I kind of wish that Rey Palpatine and Palpatine's rise in general has been hinted at more and built up more over the last two movies.  But TROS is not the end of a 3 movie arc, it's the end of a 9 movie arc, and so if nothing in the last two movies seems to build to this conclusion, it may still feel like a conclusion to all 9.  Or at least a spring board for fanfiction.

Ok I am going to go read what everyone else thought now.

[sol1056]

How do I define a magic system, so it doesn’t seem like a god in a machine type of thing?

Rules, limits, consequences – and don’t make the story’s resolution pivot on magic. (That last one is probably the most crucial, really.)

You don’t have to explain the rules in the story, but they must be somewhat intuitive by virtue of consistency. If a character can only do X magic when it’s night, make very clear it’s night, the stars are visible, and never, ever break that rule. Some readers will miss it, some will put the clues together, but you’ll write with an assurance that will make pretty much all of them roll with the system as internally logical, just on gut instinct. 

Limits are something that tends to get explained, because it’s useful for adding tension. Although you might not want to do a hard system (hard as in outlined and nailed down with very specific rules and limits; Sanderson’s novels are entirely hard magic vs Tolkien’s novels are soft magic), it’s still good to elucidate the limits so readers can get worried. 

A limit doesn’t always have to be explained, but like rules, it should be implied by context. It’s like… we know from the real world about how fast a given kind of horse can go, so if a horse is written going twice that fast, some readers will call foul. And even people who don’t know horses will give you the side-eye if you have the horse running for days on end without rest (unless you have some kind of worldbuilding detail to handwave that). 

So, a rule is what you can do, and a limit is how much you can do — and consequences are what happens if you do everything right, everything wrong, or something you shouldn’t, or do more than the limits say you’re allowed to do. Consequences will vary based on the situation and context, but they should always be present.  

Consequences are simply the cost of doing a thing (anything, regardless of value or intent), and the cost depends on the metaphor you’re using to conceptualize the magic. If you think of magic like technology, well, there’s a cost in the time to learn it, and a cost in terms of what it, well, actually costs to purchase. But you don’t feel physically exhausted after using your phone, I mean, you might, but that’s not inherent to the phone. 

If your metaphor is that magic is like running, then you’d have a physical cost like feeling drained or getting shin-splints, but you probably wouldn’t have a cost in terms of learning to put one foot in front of the other really fast. 

My favorite metaphor for magic is treating it like a complex area of study. It takes concentration, checking your work, and the ability to think logically and clearly. You might have eye strain, a headache, or just feel dull-minded after an hour or more hammering at an equation. You won’t necessarily have a cost in outright physical exhaustion, and the monetary cost might be little more than the effort of getting a library card. 

There are two reasons for consequences. One is that we’re dealing with a gaming-influenced genre, and a game gets boring if someone can power up to the point they can destroy worlds without breaking a sweat. Just like you’d expect a character to get exhausted if they push past their physical limit, consequences penalize them for pushing past a magical limit. 

The other reason is that consequences are the best way to introduce (or raise) stakes. Take the rules (ie, only magic at night) and the limits (ie, cannot do it for more than ten minutes): what happens if someone tries to do magic for twenty minutes? Lose their voice, or hallucinate? What if they do magic during the day? Maybe they have nightmares? What if they do magic for longer than ten minutes and it’s during the day? They get all of the above plus go bald?

And then you put the character in situations where magic — during the day, for ten-plus minutes — is their only option for getting themselves or someone else out alive. If you’ve done your groundwork, the reader will be on pins and needles, knowing the character is choosing a path that’s going to have severe consequences. 

Of course, then you do need to impose those consequences — or find some clever loophole in the rules and limits. Frex, a solar eclipse is one of the oldest ways around ‘only happens at night,’ but hey, it works, and it’s observing the letter of the law: the sun is gone, ergo, it’s not-day. 

The last one is the biggest, and it’s one of the reasons authors like Sanderson rely on hard magic. It’s a lot easier for the reader to visualize (and recognize) the validity of those loopholes if they have a fairly solid idea of how the magic system works. 

If, say, magic is like water, and the story consistently shows magic acting like water, the reader won’t see it as a deus ex machina but as a clever loophole to have the protagonist use magic that has the properties of ice. We know ice = water, so the final resolution to defeating the bad guy doesn’t violate our understanding of the metaphor.

If you look at older fantasy works (Tolkien being the biggest name, of course), the magic is usually soft. From start to finish, exactly what Gandalf can and can’t do, or how much he can do, isn’t explained (and I should note that he doesn’t do a great deal of it, either, which makes it harder because there’s no laundry list to derive rules or limits). 

However, the pinnacle of both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings isn’t magic at all. In one, it’s a man shooting an arrow at a dragon; the other, it’s three hobbits in a volcano, and one falls in. (Note: there is an extremely subtle magic going on there, that’s foreshadowed quietly and explained very clearly, and that final showdown is internally consistent with the explanation given.) For the most part, though, the resolution comes from reasonable actors and their believable actions, so it doesn’t require we know more about the magic than we’ve previously been told. 

If you feel the impulse when writing the resolution to have another character exclaim, “I didn’t know you could do that!” and the protagonist say in awe, “gee, I didn’t know, either,” you’ve just instinctively lampshaded your own deus ex machina. What you want is a surprise not for the unexpected but for the obvious, once the characters (and reader) have hindsight. Of course water has more than just its fluid state! The magic’s not been bent out of shape; we just hadn’t considered all the possible implications; now that we realize that, it’s obvious that was the best way to defeat the Big Bad. 

That said, one of the most satisfying resolutions (admittedly also harder, but that’s what makes it satisfying) is when you have magic throughout a story… and the resolution is entirely independent of magic. In other words, if the reader hadn’t been so focused on the world’s rules and limits around magic, they could’ve realized every ingredient was right there for an incendiary flash-device that would blind everyone and allow the good guys to get away. 

Granted, that’s a lot harder, because that means you have to come up with a way to get out of a (hopefully) really sticky and intense set of dire straits without being able to use Stuff You Made Up. Basically, you went through all the work of setting up this convenient system… and then setting it aside for the harder work of characters rolling up their sleeves and wading into the fight. 

As a good example of that kind of magic-is-everywhere except the resolution, get a copy of Rokka: Braves of the Six Flowers. There’s an anime version of the first light novel, from a few years ago, but the novels have been translated up through volume 6. Yamagata is an author who writes phenomenally tight stories; every single word and detail is a clue. 

It starts off with a very D&D-like premise: six heroes are mystically chosen via a tattoo that appears on them, and they must journey across the land to fight the oncoming evil. The six meet up at a temple, and from there they’ll set out to battle. Except there’s two problems: one, a barrier’s suddenly appeared, locking them all in, and two, there’s seven of them, not six. 

It’s basically a locked-room mystery, filled with magic and the usual tropes and a few totally unexpected twists that in hindsight were laid out perfectly. At least for the anime, rewatching meant catching a dozen or more clues in every episode, even in throwaway lines, and I’m told the light novels are all that times ten — and the resolution never lies in magic. It lies in something in the real world, some facet of geography or climate or physics. 

That takes a lot of work, and it’s really a story where you have to work backwards from the end, to make sure every clue is laid down but just enough obscured by various red herrings. When the story makes sense backwards – each clue leads to another – then you’re ready to tell it forward. Hard, but boy is it satisfying to get to that conclusion.