Magic by Any Other Name

"Let's just say 'polarity torsion does it,' translate that to 'it's very expensive magic,' and leave it at that."

— Liraz, Afterlife Blues

This is when a work has an intangible element that is obviously supposed to be magic, but is explicitly not called that. Maybe the word "magic" doesn't exist in their universe, maybe Agent Scully is using Insistent Terminology (as maybe their religion explicitly prohibits "magic") — yet whatever power they're using lets them levitate, throw fireballs and anything else that standard-issue Fantasy magic can do. This trope also applies to works where a practiced mystical art such as alchemy, tarot cards or ninjutsu has been broadened to the point where it functions as all-purpose magic. There can also be crossover with Unequal Rites when there are multiple sorts of mystic arts and Applied Phlebotinum in a work.

In a Science Fiction setting, Magic from Technology and "psionics" are favorite stand-bys along with Minovsky Physics, possibly with a "quantum" or "nano" tacked on for good measure. If Everything Is Online, Hollywood Hacking may be utilized as well.

Sufficiently Advanced Aliens that have evolved to the point where the physical laws of reality no longer apply to them (such as the Doctor or Q) generally do not count unless their powers are something Puny Humans can learn.

Sometimes, a more limited power may turn into this over time, due to abuse of New Powers as the Plot Demands.

See Also Sufficiently Analyzed Magic when Magic is treated as like a science, and Differently Powered Individuals for "Supers by Any Other Name". See also: Not Using the "Z" Word, A Mech by Any Other Name, Insistent Terminology, Magic Versus Science, Doing In the Wizard, Flat-Earth Atheist.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In A Certain Magical Index (and the spinoff, A Certain Scientific Railgun), esper powers are basically just Inherent Gift magic under a different name. Really, the only difference between the mages and the espers is that the mages use lots of crutches in the form of magic circles and magic items, while the espers develop Super-Intelligence to control their powers instead. And espers only get one power, while mages can learn multiple (though most don't use more than a few).
  • The lines between esper abilities and magic are further broken down when it turns out that that the training programme for unlocking esper potential was invented by a mage, based on a ritual intended to give the user traits of angels (and that the so-far theoretical Level 6 espers are essentially Deities of Human Origin). And while most esper powers are based on a clear scientific concept, such as control over electricity or friction, the Gemstones (espers who unlocked their powers at a young age without training) often have far more abstract powers or ones that seem to do multiple unrelated things.
  • Also played with by protagonist Touma's "Imagine Breaker" power. Academy City classifies Touma as a very weak esper for the sake of Plausible Deniability (which even he seems to be fooled by), but he's actually a Muggle with some kind of Cosmic Keystone inside his arm.
• Bleach: The "Kido" that the Soul Reapers use requires them to chant spells in order to summon blasts of energy among other attacks, but it's never explicitly called magic..
• Code Geass: Geass is a Magical Eye that grants the user some form of Mind Control, which varies by user, and more are introduced as the series progresses. While it's ambiguous if it's truely Magic or Psychic?, some abilities don't really fit into neuroscience (Bismarck's Combat Clairvoyance and Shamna's Mental Time Travel).
• Darker than Black: Contractors are able to do very specific things with their powers. These include generating massive amounts of electricity, using their blood as explosives, and draining people's life span. However, none if it is ever called "magic."
• Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba: The demonic abilities are called Blood Demon Arts. Subverted with Slayers' Breathing Styles, despite clearly being elemental they are said to be just physical abilities with visual flair.
• EDENS ZERO has Ether, which the series typically prefers to call magic, an "unscientific" word for despite there being no firm science behind it. It's both the Life Energy of the universe and a power source for machines, which can convert it into Hard Light objects, and people can tap into the Ether in their bodies by using a technique called Ether Gear. It's also present in the atmosphere of planets, with many Ether-abundant worlds having unique planetary phenomena depending on its type (Blue Garden's Water Ether creates a river that floats through the sky, Norma's Earth Ether creates huge pillars of crystal in its clouds that regularly bombard the surface, etc.).
• Fullmetal Alchemist: Alchemy is accompanied by flashes of light, requires mana, and can perform actions that look like Playing with Fire or Dishing Out Dirt, etc., but Edward is quick to point out that it is not magic but science. He's not entirely wrong, either, despite later revelations that certain fundamental assumptions about Amestrian alchemy, including Equivalent Exchange as they know it, are false.
• Hunter × Hunter: After passing the hunter exams, hunters are required to learn Nen, a magic-like power that is hardly known to the public and invisible to non Nen users. Nen lets the user cast various magical abilities depending on its type of Ki Manipulation. The strength of the abilities greatly increases if the user imposes difficult or dangerous conditions to them.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure has several examples throughout its history, using different excuses for different types of what boil down to magic, from martial arts to what originated as visualized psychic powers.
  • Hamon is a martial art that supposedly lets you channel the power of the sun. In practice, it's a touch-based magic that allows you to do everything from disintegrating undead, healing wounds, weaponizing liquids, and climbing sheer surfaces with your bare hands.
  • Stands start off similar to a sort of summoning magic, with users manifesting avatars that can fight for them with various combat powers. As the series progresses, Stands begin to cover any magic power imaginable, even if that means stretching or breaking some of the universal rules.
  • The Bow and Arrow are artifacts that grant people Stands. A scientific explanation is posited involving a virus, but ultimately the arrows are magic, most clearly in how even the deadliest wounds they inflict somehow leave the target unharmed if they are "worthy" of gaining a Stand. How the arrows interact with people who already have Stands gets even more complicated, often involving some level of Reality Warping, and has led to much Wild Mass Guessing.
  • The second timeline has things like the Spin and the Wall Eyes, which serve similar purposes as the above.
• Jujutsu Kaisen: Jujutsu Sorcerers and Cursed Spirits utilize Cursed Energy coming from The Power of Hate, which allows using Supernatural Martial Arts, Pocket Dimensions and personalized magic spells.
• The Clans in K never refer to their powers as magic. The Slate is an "energy source". Their powers aren't from any standard, they don't all operate the same way, and they're quite easy to lose control of, but "magic" is never used. It's possible that they're trying to avoid the dreamy, inspiring connotations of "magic", since their powers are something frightening, with intense potential for disaster. The Green Clan's more versatile powers (incl. walking through walls) are frequently called a "manipulation ability", a particularly standout example of this.
• Naruto: Ninjutsu. Although Naruto's techniques are explicitly magical, they have no defined limits and allow New Powers as the Plot Demands, a lot of which aren't traditionally associated with ninjas.
• One Piece has Devil Fruit powers that allow for all sorts of effects. Beyond the standard fire/ice/lightning sort of elemental powers one might expect, the protagonist is a Rubber Man, an enemy can generate poison gas, and one of the Big Bads of the series is capable of Casting a Shadow and causing earthquakes with a swing of his hand. None of these powers are ever explicitly referred to as magical; the few times magic is brought up, the whole thing is brushed off as silly.
• Reborn! (2004): Dying Will Flames, split into multiple variations and applications.
• Saint Seiya: Cosmo is a space-themed Life Energy that allows Saints to perform unique Supernatural Martial Arts. Higher Cosmo levels let the user use seventh and even eigth sense, create illusions, bend space, send people to hell and move planets.
• Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann: The Spiral Energy is cosmic evolution forces in theory and Imagination-Based Superpower in practice, humans can spontaneously create new weapons or upgrade their mechs by strong will.
• Twin Princess of Wonder Planet: The Prominence and the Power of Darkness. Neither are explicitly called magic despite looking just like it. Altezza refers to the former as Fine and Rein's "weird power".

Comic Books

• In the Valiant Comics titles set in the 41st Century (Magnus: Robot Fighter, Rai and the Future Force and Psi-Lords), "ectotheric energy" is used by some people to achieve the effect of "magic", even though it is in reality a variation of Psychic Powers and is scientifically comprehensible. "Necromancy" occurs in many titles from the 20th Century, and is even more overtly expressed as a kind of "magic" (obviously, given the name), although it too is really psychic in nature.

Fan Works

• Deliberate in the Heroes of the Storm fanfic Heroes of the Desk—the Strategic Prevention, Extraction, and Ablation Regiment calls it "Functional Supernatural Phenomena". And even then, they tend to take the view of Sufficiently Analyzed Magic and/or invoke Clark's Third Law, though it's deliberately left unclear what counts as the former versus the latter.
• Parodied in Nullmetal Alchemist, where Ed insists on calling alchemy "magic", because his mother told him that "alchemy" sounds too pretentious. Played straight by everyone else, though.
• In Opening Dangerous Gates, Kisuke Urahara tells the Fairy Tail characters that magic and reiatsu are one and the same. Every one has a reserve of energy in their bodies, but only some people can access it, and it has different effects based on the individual and how they apply it.
• Escape from the Moon: Doa’s magic is referred to as “thaumatics”.
• In I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For, it's shown that the Force is just a weaker, dormant form of magic. Eventually, Harry uses so much at once that magic "wakes up" and force users all over the galaxy find themselves using new abilities they never dreamed of.
• Holo-Chronicles is a bit weird about this. Actual magical abilities, or "mystic arts", do exist and are recognized as mystical in nature (prime examples being Fubuki and Mio, who both use it extensively), but they are most often referred to as "mystic arts" specifically, only using "magic" in rare instances that may just be Kugeki messing up. Same with Rushia's necromancy. Not explicitly called magic even once. And then there are examples that should be seen as magic by the characters' canon lore from hololive proper, but aren't, such as Lamy's basically-ice-magic being attributed to a trait ability (the Elemental Trait of Ice and Snow, to be specific) instead. Only time will tell if Shion will become the only talent in the setting to be explicitly referred to as a mage.

Films — Live-Action

• In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Word of God says there is no magic, just new and strange kinds of science. Yeah, even with Doctor Strange (2016). This was eventually dropped and magic has become a staple of the setting. Even some cases that were previously examples of this trope, such as Wanda's powers, are now stated to be real magic.
• In The Matrix, bending the rules of physics while jacked into the computer world is ostensibly just hacking a program, but tends to be accorded mystical significance. Then Neo starts controlling machines in the real world with his mind alone...
• Star Wars: The Force, right down to being split between Light and Dark magic. Slightly different in that Obi-Wan initially presents it as "an energy field" generated by living beings, the prequels gave it a physical component in the form of micro-organisms in the bloodstream, and it leans more towards the science fiction-y "telepathy, telekinesis, precognition, illusions" rather than fireballs or summoning or turning into frogs. Unusually, it's more inspired by Daoist magic than anything Western.

Literature

• The Broken Earth Trilogy: What they usually call "orogeny" is basically magic (although "magic" still exists in-universe as a nigh-forgotten separate but related force from orogeny). Lampshaded in this scene:
  Essun: What did they call it?
  Alabaster: Hn?
  Essun: The obelisk-builders. You said they had a word for the stuff in the obelisks. The stuff of orogeny. What was their word, since we don't have one anymore?
  Alabaster: Oh. The word doesn't matter, Essun. Make one up if you like. You just need to know the stuff exists.
  Essun: I want to know what they called it.
  Alabaster: They called it magic.
• The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant has Earthpower, an ambient quasi-mystical energy of The Land, which some humans can channel to devastating effect. Though the series also has magic (via the Wild Magic of white gold). Comparably, Earthpower is fire, wild magic is an atom bomb.
• Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere multiverse in general uses this; individual systems of Functional Magic are referred to by their names, and the term "magic" hardly ever comes up. The exception is in The Stormlight Archive, where one magic system is called "the Old Magic". In The Alloy of Law, allomancy is referred to as magic a few times. By contrast, the multiverse's resident Meta Guy, in the appendix of the same book, seems to refer to all forms of magic as "investiture", but exactly what this means is not yet explained.
• Cradle Series: The magic system in general is referred to as "the sacred arts," in rather the same tone you might say "the arts and sciences." No part of it is ever referred to as magic, just being the standard physics and technology of the world. The Abidan, extraplanar entities that enforce universal law, refer to these things as "energy systems," and using one world's energy system in another is one of the first and most obvious law violations.
• Dragonriders of Pern is officially classified as science fiction, because the dragons in question are actually alien creatures who have had genetic engineering added to them by human scientists. But how were the original alien creatures able to teleport or engage in mind-to-mind communication? That's attributed to an innate psychic power, which is different from having an innate magical power for... reasons.
• Hallow Mass No one uses "magic" or casts "spells". Instead, the cultists and the antiquities staff enact various "formulas".
• The Kingkiller Chronicle: Sympathy, not to be confused with "Naming". If you know the true name of something you can command it, but if you don't then you can find something to represent it and use your willpower to force what happens to this to happen to that. Sympathy is seen as magic by many people in-universe, but people who actually use it insist that it isn't.
• The Looking-Glass Wars: Imagination. Complete with divisions into White and Black imagination. And since it is, as the name suggests, an Imagination-Based Superpower, it's very flexible, so there's no need to cast specific spells.
• Played With in Lord of the Rings: when Sam asks Galadriel if she's about to use magic, she admits that she's not sure what he means by that term—hobbits use it to describe things that elves do naturally, but also the sort of things that Sauron does, though in her mind they are completely different.
• The Machineries of Empire has "consensus mechanics" where a combination of social norms, ritual observances, and technological amplifiers create a zone of "calendrical terrain" where "exotic technology" and "calendrical effects" become possible. The former include Living Ships with Faster-Than-Light Travel and internal Alien Geometries; the latter let State Sec agents Mind Probe people or transform them into paper with a touch.
• Played with in the Mediochre Q Seth Series. Some people occasionally do call it magic, but most get quite uppity about the fact that it's properly called "mancy".
• Runemarks uses "glam". The Gospel of Loki makes it clear that this is exactly the same as the thing we call magic.
• Strength & Justice firmly assures that everyone's powers in the books are called "dynas" (short for "dynamism"), but at several points magic circles are said to appear when a dyna is in use, and the history of the city very clearly states that the users are all with an innate magical capability. It's a bit unclear as to what it is exactly.
• Viceroy's Pride: Averted; as Dan is setting up his experiment to prove that the alien "technology" is actually magic, he notes that some people might insist on calling it "dimensional energy" or something like that. But he's a nerd who's had too little sleep and too many energy drinks, so he's in no mood to split hairs. In later books this backfires a bit, as it turns out that the world governments were extremely uncomfortable with calling it "magic" and so either tried to ignore or downplay it everywhere they could. It's pretty low on the list of things that go wrong in the end, but it might have helped if Dan had given them a fake scientific-sounding word to use instead.
• The Wheel of Time: The One Power, which is segregated by sex, with males using saidin and females saidar. Using the Power is called channeling. The Big Bad has his own flavor, which its followers call the True Power. Then there are miscellaneous bits of less well understood Wrong Context Magic floating around, like dudes who can talk to wolves, Ogier Treesinging, Dreamwalking, and Min's aura vision. All of it is clearly magical, but the word "magic" is never used; the closest they come is when Aes Sedai (an influential organization of female users of the One Power) are occasionally called "witches" as a pejorative.

Live-Action TV

• Doctor Who tends to handwave what would otherwise blatantly be magic with Techno Babble, but it is established canon that magic did once exist, before it was banished by the Time Lords in favour of rationality, and bits of it are still floating around.
  • Block Transfer Computations — complex mathematical equations that were never openly compared to magic, but the most blatant use of them (at least until the novels decided that TARDISes were made out of them) involved a planet of monastic aliens chanting arcane formulae to reshape reality.
  • A funny lampshade (or is it a reference) is made in "The Girl in the Fireplace", where the Doctor says that the window they're looking through to XVIII century France is a "spatial-temporal hyperlink".
    Rose: What's that mean?
    The Doctor: No idea, I just made it up. Didn't want to say "magic door".
  • The Carrionites — witches who use what the Doctor insists is not magic, but physics based on words rather than numbers.
• On Haven, the supernatural powers that affect the residents are known as the "Troubles." They're never referred to as magic, despite being indistinguishable from it. This is lampshaded in season one by Jess Minion, a Haven transplant of Mi'kmaq descent who is accused of being a witch by townsfolk who don't like her animal welfare advocacy. She points out that the Troubles aren't any different from what she's being accused of, and tells Nathan (who is Troubled) that he has been "transformed by magic," and the only thing lacking is his perspective.
• Motherland: Fort Salem: Although the word "witches" is used, the word "witchcraft" isn't. Magic and spells are never referred to as "magic" and "spells" in the show, only as "work" and "workings". The adjective "magical" or "mystical" is never used.
• In Star Trek, humans are absolutely militant about this. No matter how scientifically-inexplicable something is, or if that something can outright change the laws of physics at will, it is still not "magic". Referring to it as such will provoke an immediate negative response and denial. Technobabble, even if it is completely unsupported by evidence, will invariably be accepted as an explanation before "magic" will. Things which would be considered "supernatural" in real life such as Psychic Powers or Reality Warpers are still regarded as scientific in nature, even though Federation science cannot explain them. Which is why talking about the limitless power of "thought" is acceptable, but using the m-word will get you an earful of Flat Earth Atheism.

Tabletop Games

• Warhammer 40,000: The Warp and psionics, but Chaotic practitioners don't shy from calling themselves wizards. As a comparison, in the Warhammer universe — as befitting fantasy — the Warp is unashamedly magic. Mechanically, the Psychic Phase in earlier editions of 40k is an identical clone to the Magic Phase in Warhammer Fantasy, especially notable when identical daemons shared between the two settings who are treated as wizards in one are psykers in the other.
• New World of Darkness: Downplayed, with elements of Unequal Rites. Each supernatural splat has its own, very distinct powers, but as a general rule, only mages call their abilities spells, even though they all (usually) recognize themselves as supernatural or magical.
  • Vampire: The Requiem: Disciplines, plus blood sorcery.
  • Werewolf: The Forsaken: Gifts
  • Promethean: The Created: Transmutations
  • Changeling: The Lost: Contracts
  • Geist: The Sin-Eaters: Keys, Manifestations, and Ceremonies
  • Mummy: The Curse: Affinities and Utterances
  • Demon: The Descent: Embeds and Exploits
  • Beast: The Primordial: Atavisms and Nightmares
  • Deviant: The Renegades: Variations and Scars
  • Princess: The Hopeful: Charms and Invocations
  • Leviathan: The Tempest: Vestiges
  • Siren: The Drowning: Verses
• In Nomine: Songs and Sorcery, one of the rulebooks notes that many of those in the know will get annoyed with anybody calling Songs "magic", and some will also get annoyed about using that term for Sorcery. Also you don't "cast" Songs, you perform them.
• Psionics in Dungeons & Dragons can fall somewhere in or near this trope depending on the edition and variant rules. The default in arguably the most popular incarnation is "magic/psionics transparency", where spells and psionic powers are identical (i.e. Dispel Magic works on psionics and vice versa) and in some settings psionics is outright referred to as a type of magic. The main difference between the two is that spellcasters work with external energy using predefined spells as templates (giving them larger numbers of techniques), while psions work with internal energy which they shape directly through willpower (making their individual techniques more flexible). Earlier editions and mentioned variant rules, however, make psionics fully or partly disconnected from magic (i.e. Dispel Magic does not work on psionics and vice versa), while still having the same magic-like techniques.
• Mage: The Ascension does use the term magic (or Magick) for its magic in most supplements, but this only represents the perspective of the default player faction, the Traditions. Their enemy, the Technocratic Union, considers magic merely a special case of advanced applied physics, with its practice often referred to as Enlightened Science.

Video Games

• Assassin's Creed: Pieces of Eden. The Apple of Eden, the most prominent of these artifacts, can give the user control others' minds and bodies—even making them kill themselves—or allow a Doppelgänger Attack or apparently bringing the dead back to life; when Ezio uses the Apple in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, it is Cast from Hit Points. The Shard of Eden deflects bullets, and the Shroud of Eden really does bring people back to life, but not in the best way possible. Despite all this, they're really just Sufficiently Advanced Technology.
• BioShock: Plasmids. Bioshock Infinite replaces them with "Vigors." You drink them instead of injecting with a syringe, but other than that they work the same. There's some Techno Babble in the manual about a species of sea slug that produces large quantities of stem cells that make genetic engineering much easier, but no amount of genetics explains where the fireballs or bees that fly out of your hand come from.
• Neo-Psionics in the outer space hack 'n' slash Crimson Sea. Sho and Feany have the extremely rare power to generate different nifty effects based on sound frequencies.
• Dead Space: The Kinesis and Stasis Modules.
• Magic in Destiny is described as "paracausal", in the noun form "paracausality", in reference to the fact that it defies physical law and causality as we know it. It's furthermore (and more commonly) divided into either Light or Darkness, two opposing paracausal forces which can be tapped into to do magic. Characters "use the Light to" do things another franchise might say a character would "use magic to". The word "magic" does get used, mostly in reference to the Hive, who channel the Darkness via things like runes and rituals (rather than the practical, intuitive means used by Guardians), but their patrons the Worm Gods dismiss the word as one used by small minds and taught them how to do it so they could "respond in kind" to enemy paracausal weapons.
• Golden Sun: Psynergy can be harnessed by special humans known as Adepts. These Adepts are further divided into Venus (Earth), Jupiter (Wind), Mercury (Water), and Mars (Fire) Adepts. Psynergy is used by means of mental will, and can only be seen by other Adepts. Psynergy can be used against non-Adepts and they will be damaged/affected by it. In addition to combat elemental damage, Psynergy can also bestow certain other abilities, like mind reading (Jupiter), (tele)kinesis (Venus), and waterbreathing for one's self and others (Mercury). There are also special Psynergy types used for travel or secret hunting bound to typically mundane items. These range from a simple string of beads to an everlasting icicle. Some of these Psynergy-granting items can only be used by Adepts with the same elemental affinity as the item itself.
• Half-Life: The Vortessence is a binding life force that allows the Vortigaunts to communicate with each other via telepathy.
• Inindo has ninjutsu as one of the three types of magic, consisting of Elemental Powers.
• In Loom, the Guild of Weavers utilizes its Reality Warper powers through a "distaff" (which is just a Magic Staff lacking the apparatus normally attached to a distaff), on which "drafts" are cast through sequences of musical notes, or through the Loom itself, which can effect the entire cosmos at once. Each guild has its own form of magic, each couched in the terms and tools associated with its normal occupation.
• The Lord of the Rings Online: Rune-Keepers and Lore-Masters, to get around the fact that there are canonically only five wizards in all of Middle-Earth.^note Gandalf, Saruman, Radagast, Alatar and Pallando.
• Mass Effect: Biotics. It's basically telekinesis and kinetic energy bolts by another name - extremely detailed justifications, but in the end, its still lift spells. All of the advanced technology in the setting works off the same principles.
• The Matrix Online: Hacking. Building on the Matrix films' exploration of Magic from Technology, the game introduces an entire character class built around casting spells by hacking into the Matrix's code from within. Every "spell" is accompanied by an explosion of green binary code, just to remind players that it's not really magic.
• Nasuverse: Magecraft seen throughout the franchise, especially the Fate Series, is what mages use to cast spells. While outsiders label it magic, mages are insistent that it's something entirely different. This is mostly a case of Unequal Rites; magecraft uses study and Mysteries to develop a way to use mana to produce an effect that a human being could perform normally; for example, repairing a broken object with a wave of the hand. This is often summarized as "performing possible actions using impossible means." However, True Magic, also called Sorcery, also exists, and produces otherwise impossible effects. For example, materializing the soul, or dimensional travel. Interestingly, "impossible" is based on the beliefs of humanity as a whole; flight used to be a True Magic, until humans invented various means of artificial flight. Entire branches of magecraft became useless because they were based on this True Magic, but at the same time it became far easier to replicate flight with other forms of magecraft.
• Onmyōji (2016): Onmyōdō, which is already considered Magic by Any Other Name in Real Life.
• Aya in Parasite Eve uses "parasite energy" (or PE as it's shown on the UI) as a source of her powers as well as Eve. Parasite energy lets Aya manipulate her mitochondria to use abilities like healing, giving her next gunshot a huge power boost, and so on. The sequel still uses the same system, but it's renamed MP since it's now called "mitochondrial points". Regardless, Aya's powers might as well be magic in the eyes of everyone she meets.
• Phantasy Star: It's an ostensibly Space Opera and Planetary Romance, but ESP and "techniques" are functionally magic, with true magic being generally considered to be a rare lost art which only a select few can wield.
  • This is a plot point in Episode 5 of Phantasy Star Online 2, where the swords-and-sorcery alternate dimension of Omega has what is referred to by the inhabitants as Mana, which is used to cast Magic. Your allies immediately recognize this to be what you and they know as Photons and Techniques, just by a different name.
• Sure there's an actual magic user in Psychic Force and its sequel, but the Psykers don't have traditional psionic abilities such as telepathy and telekinesis. Instead what they have Psy which acts more like the Elemental Powers over the earth, wind, fire and not so traditional ones like darkness, time and gravity.
• In Sanity: Aiken's Artifact, psionics were discovered by the scientist Joan Aiken during an artifact dig in the Middle-East. The psionics in the game doesn't conform to the usual Telepathy/Telekinesis, instead people who became psychic developed "totems" that granted a theme for their powers to develop around (Nathaniel Cain is the creator of the Fire totem, the closest thing to traditional psychic powers). These include the Totem of Science (science-themed powers like lasers or a binary number grid that generates energy), the Totem of Illusion (throw imaginary knives at people), Totem of Demonology (summon demons) and etc. - making psionics act more like magic.
• Secret of Evermore: Had alchemy, in what was essentially a VR simulation.
• In the Shinobi series, "ninjutsu" is the name generally used to describe special magical attacks based on fire, lightning, etc.
• Songs of Conquest: The Essence is one of five types of magical energy generated by units. Wielders can cast any spell as long as they have enough Essence collected, and aren't restricted to one spell by turn.
• Spore: Any of the archetypes' superpowers qualify.
• Sonic the Hedgehog: Chaos energy and any abilities powered by it generally work like magic, although said abilities are usually, but not always, limited to Super Modes, a variety of Hand Blasts, or space-time manipulation. While the word magic itself has been thrown around in the games once or twice, Word of God dictates that magic in the traditional sense doesn't exist in-universe.
• StarCraft: Psionics (Complete with glowing hands in the sequel even though it is supposed to be a mental power.)
• Star Ocean: Heraldry, Symbology, Runeology, Whateverology... Justified in-universe as being programming code—the universe is actually an MMORPG, and magic is really just the AI hacking the system, and the eponymous symbols and runes are the game's code.
• Tales Series in general calls every single combat technique an "Arte" (with an "e", like in Middle English), both spells and weapon attacks. While most of close combat artes are explicitly not magic, they still produce magic-like effects, such as Sword Beams. When it comes to spells, the series' standard approach is to name them "[X] Artes", or "[X]-jutsu" in Japanese, "X" being a game-specific concept.
  • Tales of Eternia: "Craymel Artes" are accessed by trapping Craymels into a special crystal, which then allows its holder to cast spells of trapped Craymels' element(s).
  • Tales of Symphonia: Magic is referred to as such, but there's also "Angel Artes", which can produce undeniably magical effects, but somehow differs from "normal" elven magic, a difference that is represented by glowing feathers that replace usual Instant Runes during casting.
  • Tales of Rebirth: "Force" is a rare and unique power, that grants its user access various abilities, ranging from creating pillars of ice, to conjuring illusory copies of oneself, to switching bodies with someone else. Exact powerset depends on the type of Force (listed powers belong to Forces of Ice, Rainbow, and Moon, respectively), some being more arcane than the others.
  • Tales of Legendia: "Eres" is a mysterious power, described as "the blessing of the will of the sea". It manifests in two forms - Iron and Crystal, with the latter allowing its user to cast Stock RPG Spells, and the former being a stand-in for the aforementioned close combat artes, Sword Beams and all.
  • Tales of the Abyss: Magic is known as "Fonic Artes", with "Fonic" here referring to Minovsky Particles known as "Fonons", which comprise the game's world.
  • Tales of Hearts: "Will Artes", which draw power from one's Spiria.
  • Tales of Xillia and Tales of Xillia 2:
    • "Spirit Artes" are used by Rieze Maxians. They have a special part in their brain known as "mana lobe", which houses mana. By reciting a spell, they offer some of this mana to spirits, so they can enact the spell.
    • Elympions lack mana lobes, so they use an artificial method, that basically fools the spirit into using its own mana for a spell. Spells used this way are called "Calculatrics".
  • Tales of Zestiria and Tales of Berseria: "Seraphic Artes" and "Malak Artes" (which is the same thing under different names) can be used by Seraphim/Malaks, or humans to whom they are bound, whether willingly or not.
  • Tales of Arise: "Astral Artes" run on Astral Energy, Life Energy that permeates all existence. That being said, there are people in the setting who are called "mages", but they still use Astral Artes instead of magic.
• Trails Series: "Orbal Arts" is the umbrella term for all spells that characters use in battles. They are explained to be more of Magic from Technology, drawing their power from special crystals, that characters insert into devices called "orbments". It's a sound explanation for simpler spells, but not so much for spells like "Albion Wolf", which summons a giant spectral wolf that fires a ball of energy, and may or may not be an apparition of the Holy Beast of Crossbell. Actual magic does exist, but tends to be more subtle, and is very rare.
• Xenogears, Xenosaga, and Xenoblade Chronicles: Ether. At least in the case of Xenosaga, a lot of this is explicitly stated to be nanobots in the environs being somehow influenced by the characters. The effects are still just like magic.

Web Animation

• RWBY: Every living thing possesses Aura, a soul-generated power. Huntsmen are trained to use Aura defensively, offensively and manifested as a Semblance, such as Super-Speed or Magnetism Manipulation. Combined with Dust, a mined crystal that produces elemental effects, magic-style acts like summoning storms or wielding ice or fire can be produced. However, none of this is magic, which is believed to not exist. True Magic is a secret that is independent of Aura, Semblance or Dust. Everyone could wield magic until stripped by the gods for an ancient wrong, leaving behind remnants in the form of Aura, Semblance and Dust. The two remaining humans from that era are immortals battling secretly for the fate of the world. The Big Good sacrificed most of his magic to create the Four Maidens, who — along with the Huntsmen Academies he invented — protect four divine Relics, which are needed by the Big Bad to destroy the world.

Webcomics

• Girl Genius:
  • The Spark. Semi-example. The machines are powered by science, but you have to have the mysterious "spark" to invent technology that runs on incomprehensibly eldritch principles. Against the basic concept of intuition, the further down you go into The Madness Place, the easier it is for others, especially other sparks, to pick up on the basics of what you're doing (if they aren't killed by then). At the deepest levels, you can become a Reality Warper simply by 'thinking' about the supposed true laws of physics. It's not clear to what extent, though, since the technology is never clearly explained.
  • The old stories and legends of the setting's current Steampunk era include magic-using figures (explicitly as ancestors to the "modern" scientists), hinting that the Spark may indeed be some kind of Reality Warper power which manifests through the individual's understanding of how the world works (i.e. people used to believe in magic, so Sparks did magic, science has replaced that worldview, so Sparks do science).
  • Before the main plot kicks off and keeps him busy, the Baron used his (very limited) free time working on a side project where he was actually experimenting on the brains of Sparks (namely those who were too dangerous to let live anyway) to try to determine the origin of the phenomenon.
• Gunnerkrigg Court: Ether; etheric science. A case of insistent terminology by the Court, as opposed to the creatures of the forest.
• The Story of Anima, Anima is a mysterious force emitted by all individuals. Its exact nature is unknown; in fact, it's only called Anima because the theory that it's Soul Power is the most popular one. While normally it can only be wielded through the aid of Catalysts, some people, known as Animus, are capable of harnessing their own Anima into unique super powers.
• Initally, Tales of the Questor used "Lux" and "magic" indiscriminately. Then they decided to ban the latter term and stop styling themselves “wizards” because it's only magic to other people, and those go by the principle most monotheistic religions have that Magic Is Evil.
• In Unsounded, the world's Functional Magic is called "pymary". Word of God justifies this, though, saying that the word "magic" implies something mystical and unknown. Pymary may look supernatural to us, but in the world of Unsounded, it's an ordinary fact of life.

Web Original

• At no point in Funny Business are Jeannette's Reality Warper powers called magic, even though that's what most people the characters' ages would think to call the ability to ignore the laws of physics at will. They're generically called her "abilities" or "powers" instead.
• The debate between magic-users and scientists in the Whateley Universe whether magic is just "psychic powers" or whether psychics in turn are just this trope keeps going. In the meantime, a new approach called "pattern theory" offers potential insight into where superpowers in the setting come from in general, but is still very much in its embryonic stage as well as apparently nigh incomprehensible to most people.
• Prolecto has the abilities of angels, demons, and members of certain sects of the Survivalist Project. Like Kayla.

Western Animation

• Avatar: The Last Airbender: Bending. Lampshaded in the very first episode:
  Sokka: Why is it that every time you play with magic water, I get soaked?
  Katara: It's not magic, it's waterbending.
  Sokka: Yeah, yeah, whatever.

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