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Capital Letters Are Magic
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The door was the way to... to...
The Door was The Way.
Good.
Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn't have a good answer to.
One of the hardest parts of making a fantasy world can be names. Not just for people, but for metaphysical concepts, alien races or awe-inspiring devices/weapons. When writers don't want to make up a new word, they'll often take a short, evocative term and capitalize it. We get a lot of tropes this way as well, such as the The Load and The Chick.
Ideally, this will give the concept a simple, descriptive name that doesn't sound too dopey. Unfortunately, this can cause hiccups when they want to use the word in its usual sense, and often leads to eye-rolling from jaded fantasy fans.
Compare The Horror. Contrast Call A Rabbit A Smeerp, which is putting fantastical names to common things. A popular alternative is Phantasy Spelling, though such terms are often also capitalized.
Examples:
Metaphysical Concepts:
Races:
- The Flood from Halo
- Also the Grunts, Jackals, Drones, Hunters, Engineers, Brutes, Elites, and Prophets (which all have non-English names anyway (Unggoy, Kig-Yar, Yanme'e, Mgalekgolo (Lekgolo being colonies not integrated into suits or machines), Huragok, Jiralhanae, Sangheili, and San 'Shyuum if you're curious)).
- The Forsaken from Warcraft
- The Eternals from Marvel Comics
- The Neverborn and the Primordials from Exalted, as well as the titular Exalted. Lunar and Solar castes also get a rather negative form of this treatment from the Immaculate Order, with titles such as the Deceivers, the Blasphemous, the Frenzied, etc...
- The Fair Folk being from European folklore makes this Older Than Dirt.
- Gregory Maguire's Wicked makes an important distinction between animals and Animals.
- Likewise, capitalization serves to distinguish sentient hominids of Ringworld, such as Hanging People or Grass Giants, from non-sentient ones such as vampires. Subverted in that, while this convention is used in the (English) text of the last two novels, it's stated in-character that the trade-language of Ringworlders actually uses a prefix to tell them apart.
- The Forevers from Ayreon
- The Fallen
- The Thrones, the Dominions, the Powers, the Virtues
- The Powers That Be
- The Powers What Is
Other:
- White Wolf seems to be in love with this trope, and any RPG they publish will have multiple instances of this. Aside from the Exalted examples already listed above, we have the Beast and Vitae from Vampire, the Wyrm, the Weaver, and the Wyld from Werewolf, the Second Breath and the Wyld again from Exalted, Legend, Fate, Knacks, Birthrights, and Scions from Scion, and numerous other examples that I can't think of off the top of my head.
- From a Naruto Fan Fic: "Capital letters were very useful when dealing with Gaara. They helped to distinguish between sand, which got in your shorts, and Sand, which could kill you."
- Geneforge: the Shapers create and modify living organisms by Shaping.
- One may seem to encounter this Trope when reading Works written in the 17th and 18th Centuries, as it was then the Custom to write all Nouns with capital Letters. The Readers may be assured it's all in their Heads.
- This is still the custom in a number of languages.
- Also seen in works attempting to imitate their style.
- More 'official' than 'magic, but Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson, has a passage in which the main character navigated a small island. It is so small, in fact, that there is only one of most things-hence titles such as 'the Car', 'the Street', and 'the Squeegee'.
- The Sci Fi Channel's miniseries The Lost Room is based around a series of about one hundred items called Objects that possess strange properties. Objects featured include The Key, The Pen, The Glass Eye and The Bus Ticket.
- Wiki Words.
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