Young Wizards - Television Tropes & Idioms

Eldest, fairest and fallen, greeting and defiance!

An ongoing series of novels by Diane Duane (the first of which was published in 1983), set in a fictional analogue of the modern world where wizards are champions of "The Powers That Be" and given the ability to rewrite the universe using the Speech — essentially reprogramming the universe and thus performing wizardry. Wizards can literally be anything (animals, robots, etc.) and can talk to anything. No, seriously, anything.

Their main duty is to travel through time and space to battle the Lone Power, the evil Power who created Entropy and Death, usually involving them heroically sacrificing their lives. (In fact, halfway through the first novel it is explicitly stated that someone usually has to die this way in order to defeat the Lone Power — although it doesn't have to be a wizard.)

It has a sister series, Feline Wizards, which takes place in the same universe, but concerns a team of cat wizards who maintain the teleportation wizardry for New York City.

Notable because magic is presented as an advanced scientific principle, rather similar to the way Fullmetal Alchemist presents its alchemy. The series also includes lots of extraterrestrials, trips to other planets and moons, and a tendency to explain all mythology as being representative or descriptive of the actions of wizards and the Powers and all language as having been evolved from a natural innate ability to "speak" the Speech. This has the effect of making the YW series feel a lot more like a hybrid of semi-hard Science Fiction and mystic fantasy than it does pure action-adventure fantasy.

The books in the main series are:

So You Want To Be A Wizard: Nita Callahan and Kit Rodriguez become wizards and must use their newfound abilities to defend New York City, Earth, and possibly even the Universe itself from a supernatural threat.
Deep Wizardry: Nita and Kit discover that non-humans can be wizards too, and must work with Cetacean (whale) wizards to defeat a scheme to devastate the Eastern Seaboard of the United States.
High Wizardry: Nita's precocious little sister Dairine becomes a wizard, and major fireworks ensue.
A Wizard Abroad: Nita travels to Ireland and finds out that wizardry is somewhat different there than in the United States.
The Wizard's Dilemma: Nita's mother develops a serious illness, and Nita enters dangerous wizardly waters in search of a cure.
A Wizard Alone: Nita and Kit must find a way to help a new Wizard, who is autistic, complete his wizardly "Ordeal" and gain full access to his abilities.
Wizard's Holiday: Nita and Kit go on "vacation" to an alien world which turns out to have a unique and knotty problem; meawhile, back on Earth, Dairine has to cope with three alien "exchange student" wizards who have come to visit.
Wizards At War: A new danger appears, threatening all of Wizardry itself. Nita and Kit and Dairine gather all the other young wizards they've met, as well as some new ones, to find a way to restore the power of Wizardry before it's too late. They are only partially successful, and even then only through the direct intervention of ~~dog~~ God.
A Wizard of Mars: There may be signs of life on Mars (but not Life On Mars), but while investigating, Kit begins to act strangely.

These books provide examples of:

Adults Are Useless: Mostly averted. The younger the wizard, the stronger their magic, to make up for the lack of experiences. They still sometimes have to consult Senior Wizards though. In one of the books, someone muses that young wizards are better able to sacrifice themselves. However, in Wizards at War, the older wizards lose their powers and forget about magic. Without the advice of the older wizards, the younger wizards are very confused about what to do next. The point of experience is shown here.
And I Must Scream: The living, planet-sized computer chip on which Dairene's ordeal takes place averts this after being stuck playing it straight for untold eons.
- Played straight for the aliens in A Wizard of Mars, who got a lot crazier after being stuck in suspended animation for thousands of years
Annoying Younger Sibling: Dairine starts as this to Nita, but grows into her role as a wizard after the third book.
Anyone Can Die: And they probably will, if they have a nickname
Apocalyptic Log: Nita, S'reee, and Carmela find one in A Wizard of Mars
Ascended Fangirl: A borderline example with Dairine, a Star Wars fan who wants to beat up Darth Vader. (Borderline because, while she doesn't become a Jedi, becoming a wizard is pretty damn close.)
Ascended To A Higher Plane Of Existence: Memeki and Ponch in Wizards at War, Saash in the first Feline Wizardry book
- Don't forget Peach in High Wizardry.
- In Wizard's Holiday, it's the entire planet of Alaalu
Bad Ass Normal: Carmela, Ed (if a giant shark can be called "normal"), and Nita's mom.
Barrier Maiden: Darryl is the Distaff Counterpart version. And if he realizes it, he'll die, so everyone is very careful about preserving the Masquerade.
Canon Sue: Arguably, Kit's older sister Carmela and/or Nita's younger sister Dairine.
- Dairine gets less Sueish after she has to deal with no longer having enough power to do anything she wants and not knowing enough to make up for that, especially since that happens when her mother is dying of cancer.
Carnivore Confusion: Wizards can talk to any animal and even vegetables and the Wizards Oath is about preserving life, yet wizards still need to eat to survive and cats aren't about to give up the pleasure of hunting mice and rats. Most of the time it's better not to think of this but there are in-universe justifications:
- So You Want To Be A Wizard addresses this when Nita talks with the rowan tree about the war the trees fought (and won) against the Lone Power to make the world ready for humans, fully knowing that humans would not always be so nice in return.
  Nita: "But...we make our houses out of you, we— (...) We kill you and we write on your bodies!"
  the Rowan: "Well, We are all in the Book together, after all. (...) We do what we have to, to live. Sometimes that means breaking a rock's heart, or pushing roots down into ground that screams against the intrusion. But we never forget what we're doing."
- Nita acknowledges at one point that vegetables (on Earth at least) are less upset about being eaten than they are about being wasted. Waste contributes to entropy which is what the wizards work to counter. By that token, sport hunting is also discouraged (in A Wizard Abroad, Nita warns a fox who's been pestering nearby farmers to make himself scarce before the locals' planned foxhunt).
- A better example is when Filif (a sentient tree-alien who's also a wizard) comes to visit. Dairine suggests "something vegetarian" for dinner, and then has to explain to Filif why they're not really murderous maniacs. Later, she decides to keep Filif (in a human disguise) away from the salad bar in the food court, because he'll think it's a massacre.
Chekov's Gun: Carmela's closet world gate.
Comic Book Time: Only several years worth of story pass from first book (published in 1983) to the ninth (published in 2010), yet each novel is (technologically) set in the year it was published. And only a few months pass between books seven, eight, and nine.
Crowning Moment Of Awesome: Most of the major characters get one at some point, but one standout is Dairine going head to head with the Lone Power and trapping it within the darkness of her soul, which she does by stopping the expansion of the universe, causing all of the photons trapped in the expanding space-time to suddenly get wherever it was they were going much faster
- Nita's mom in Wizard's Dilemma:
  "This is my universe, and I say what goes here, and she does not have my permission.... My daughter and I are fighting the same battle. Maybe I do it in more ordinary ways. But we're on the same side. And you, if I recognize you correctly, are no friend of mine. Get off my turf!"
- Nita turning back a flood and then kicking the ass of the person who tried to kill her in A Wizard of Mars
Crowning Moment Of Heartwarming: The end of Deep Wizardry. "What's loved, lives."
Cunning Linguist: Carmela is turning into this
Deal With The Devil
Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu and Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu: To be expected in a series where human teenagers fight Satan... and some of the instances are pretty dang awesome.
Digital Bikini: The Message In A Bottle on Mars communicates by creating holodeck-like simulations of fictional Marses. Kit gets dropped into Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom, complete with Green Skinned Space Babe. Said Babe is wearing a Chainmail Bikini, rather than the jewelry-as-clothing featured in Burroughs' story. Kit wonders whether this is because of something built into the magic or his own mind chickening out on him.
Downer Ending: Wizard's Dilemma
- Well, really, most of them are kind of bittersweet.
Embarrassing Middle Name: Nita really hates her middle name "Louise".
Everybody Lives: A Wizard Alone, and A Wizard of Mars, amazingly.
- Although both have the characters dealing with a death or disappearance that occurred in the last book.
Fantastic Voyage Plot: In the fifth novel, Wizard's Dilemma, Nita and Kit travel into a metaphysical representation of the body of Nita's mother.
Fantasy Pantheon: The Powers That Be. Contains elements of All Myths Are True in that the diferent gods and saints people have worshiped over the years are all different aspects of the same Powers. That includes the feline pantheon too.
Fighting A Shadow: The reason the Lone Power is still the primary enemy in every book even after he is redeemed in one of the books — It exists out of time, so defeating It in one place only defeats that part of It.
Foe Yay: Dairine and Roshaun, though they're on the same side.
Functional Magic: to the point where in all honesty, wizards seem more like the IT staff of the universe than anything else.
- They are — in W@W, Carl points out that "the Powers know what the universe acted like when it left the factory, but we're the ones who know the little noises it makes every day when it's running. And where to kick it to make them stop."
- The original simile seems to have been "programmers" of the universe, but yeah.
  - They can do even cooler stuff if they get access to the kernel, and everything is right there in the man pages. The Young Wizards universe basically runs Linux. So I guess the Speech is bash? Or Perl?
  - mandatory xkcd reference.
Gadgeteer Genius
Geometric Magic: Spell diagrams are constructs written much like mathematical equations and wizards come up with a slew of inventive ways to make them portable.
Going Out With An Am: Fred did this to give Nita the power to rewrite the name of the Lone Power while reading the Book of Night With Moon, opening the chance for Its redemption.
Good Is Not Nice: Used over and over again as regards the Powers That Be, especially the One's Champion.]
Great Big Book Of Everything: The Wizard's Manual. The ultimate example. You discover that a dragon is trying to eat Manhattan? Open your manual; the first page you turn to will be "Dragons: how to stop from eating large cities". The fact that they even custom-tailor themselves to the wizard who bears them is pointed out when Kit tries to list a page number for Nita, who finds something completely different in her book than Kit's on that same page.
Green Skinned Space Babe: Aurilelde in A Wizard of Mars.
Hammerspace: justified, in that wizards can use magic to create their own personal hammerspaces, called "claudications" in the novels.
Heroic Sacrifice: Used so much in the series, it's almost a joke. Don't get too attached to any character Nita and Kit give a nickname to!
Ho Yay / Hide Your Gays: Tom and Carl. See the Word Of Gay entry.
Humans Through Alien Eyes: the cats in the Feline Wizards series.
I Just Want To Be Normal: Ronan Nolan, a young Irish wizard with the potential to be an avatar of the One's Champion, but who resists out of fear of losing his self if he allows such an awesome Power to manifest through his physical form.
In The Name Of The Moon: The traditional greeting to the Lone Power, some variant of "Eldest, fairest and fallen... greetings and defiance!" Just because you're fighting Satan doesn't mean you have to be rude about it.
- There's also that no wizard in the universe expects the Lone Power's eventual permanent defeat to be brought about by killing it — largely because that's impossible. What they do expect is that eventually, in the fullness of time, the Lone Power will finally surrender and redeem. And that's going to take long enough on its own, so no need to make the wait even longer by pissing it off with adding insult to injury. Even if/when does redeem, as an Eternal Power outside of time, he's not as bound by chronological causality as mortals are. His evil self is/was/will be messing with Wizards in the future simultaneously.
Jerk With A Heart Of Gold: Ronan. He's been getting better.
- Ronan's more a very self-aware Troubled But Cute ... or at least he tries to be.
Journey To The Center Of The Mind: In the sixth novel, A Wizard Alone, Nita and Kit travel into the mind of an autistic wizard.
The Joy Of X: So You Want To Be A Wizard.
Killed Off For Real
Language Of Magic, Language Of Truth: the Speech. Even the Lone Power can't lie while using the Speech.
Late Arrival Spoiler: Dairine does end up becoming a wizard in the third book.
Little Miss Badass: Dairine and Nita both. Given how young wizards tend to be chosen, this trope is to be expected.
Mage In Manhattan
Magical Computer: Literally; though Nita and Kit have book-form Manuals and the animals tend to listen to the ocean or wind or whatever, some of the newer human wizards have their manual in laptop or iPod form (a Mac laptop, no less, coincidentally. Either Duane's been paid a lot by Apple Computers over the last 20 years or so, or she really likes Macs...)
- It can give the impression that the computers in question resembled Macs mainly because of the symbolism of having their logos be an apple without a bite out of it. (Think Adam and Eve.)
- Notably, Spot (that's Dairine's Manual) came into Dairine's possession as an Apple IIe with the unbitten apple logo. Though given that the first out-of-the-ordinary ability Spot displayed was a backup utility which duplicates hardware as well as files, it's perhaps not too far-fetched to suggest hardware upgrades can similarly be treated like software.
- The book-form manuals have Magical Computer functions as well, getting new info when needed, having search, calculator, atlas and spell-storage functions, etc.
  - ... instant messaging...
  - Darryl has a WizPod. Somebody really likes Macs.
Magic Feather: In the first book, So You Want To Be a Wizard, Nita believes that her special space pen helps her to pass tests at school.
Mama Bear: Dairine and her "buddies," a race of sentient silicon lifeforms she helped "birth" — since they came into existence, all the Bad Guy has to do is suggest a threat toward them and said Bad Guy will immediately suffer The Wrath of Dairine. (The "buddies" even refer to her as "Mother" in a few instances.) Also, Nita Callahan's mother in "The Wizard's Dilemma", when she beats the living crap out of the Lone Power. She manages to do this only because the fight is within her own body, but still.
Mental Fusion: Happens during group spellcasting.
Mind Link Mates: Wizards who are romantically intimate with each other experience the mental as well as the physical connection. This is how Nita finds out Ronan is the new host for the One's Champion.
The Multiverse: An infinity of alternate timelines, with (possibly) one central, "true" universe (Timeheart, where things are preserved in their true, good form) — but it most definitely is not ours. Think of a fractal onion.
Neural Implanting: Combined with Brain Uploading in the third book.
No Celebrities Were Harmed: Nita's aunt Annie shares several similarities (physical appearance, residence, family details) with Duane's fellow Irish resident author Anne McCaffrey.
Not So Weak: Nita. In the first book it's much more obvious, but she does keep many of the same character traits. It's also apparently a useful set of characteristics for wizards in general, who aren't really supposed to do things for their own benefit.
Official Couple: Nita and Kit, as of the end of A Wizard of Mars.
One Of Us: The author has been known to edit this wiki from time to time.
Place Beyond Time: Timeheart
Portal Network: The worldgates. Carmela has one in her closet!
Powers As Programs: see above notes under Functional Magic.
Powers That Be: literally.
Rewriting Reality: what the Speech does. Writing names requires especial care. Famously, Nita rewrote the name of the Lone Power while reading the Book of Night With Moon, opening the chance for Its redemption.
Royal Brat: Roshaun, a prince who arrives on the exchange program in Wizard's Holliday.
Satan: The Lone Power, though seeing as he has to trick species into accepting death and entropy, he also represents the Trickster gods of Native American legends.
Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: The wizard's manual describes plain old things like teleportation in insanely impossible-to-understand words.
- Justified in that magic is based on very very specifically telling the universe what you want it to do. You NEED to be able to split hairs and use precise diction. Especially when you want to do things like bring air with you on your jaunt to the moon. If you miswrite a name, the named changes to fit.
She's All Grown Up: Kit and Nita both realize this about each other in A Wizard of Mars
Shout Out: Sprinkled liberally throughout the series:
- There is a guest appearance by the Peter Davison Doctor in the third book as a good Samaritan who helps Dairine in a moment of need.
- The fifth book has a shout out to the fifth (and unreleased in English) season of Sailor Moon, in the form of a Fan Sub being watched by Kit's big sister. (This was confirmed by Word Of God.)
- A Wizard of Mars hangs many lampshades on classic science fiction involving the planet, including Edgar Rice Burroughs' works and War Of The Worlds. Nita even encounters Marvin the Martian.
- Also in A Wizard of Mars, Ronan mentions hiding behind the couch at the scary parts of the science fiction show he watched as a child.
- In A Wizard of Mars, Darryl mentions that he's eating Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs, Calvin's favorite breakfast cereal (and the only one he'll eat).
- Conversely, the series gets a shout-out in one of the author's Star Trek novels, where a cetacean scientist mentions the Song of the Twelve.
Some Call Me Tim: Fred the sentient white hole, Ed the Shark and Filif the tree-like alien.
So You Want To: Be a Wizard?
Someone Has To Die: It is an established rule in the books that, to defeat the Lone Power, someone or something must die.
- Usually.
Speak Of The Devil: Referring to the Lone Power, even in the most indirect manner, risks attracting Its attention. And ~~heaven~~ Timeheart help you if you speak, write, or even think Its true name...
Superpowerful Genetics: Wizardry runs in families, namely Nita's. Probably has more to do with inheritable traits that make a good wizard more than any "wizard gene", since it must still be offered by The Powers to whom they believe is appropriate.
Talking Animal: though still they have their own dialects.
Tear Jerker: "The Wizard's Dilemna."
- And Fred when the kids read from the Book of Night and Moon.
Technology Marches On: Though the books hold up well, it can be jarring to compare the tech in So You Want to Be A Wizard with A Wizard of Mars, or even High Wizardry, especially because despite there being nine books in the series, they've still only covered a comparatively short period of time in the characters' lives.
Thoroughly Mistaken Identity: Happens to Kit, sort of in A Wizard of Mars. It's... complicated.
There Are No Therapists: Subverted. Nita receives counseling from her school's psychologist after her mom's death. Although at first she thinks of it as a waste of time because she can't talk about her real problems. However, when she takes the chance of greeting him in the traditional manner of wizards he responds in kind.
Time Travel: Mostly in the Feline Wizards series, though it is used in the first book of the main series so that the two child protagonists can have an adventure yet still get back home in time for dinner, thus preventing their parents from interfering with their work.
- Delayed Ripple Effect
- Grays Sports Almanac
  - It is the solution to the problem in A Wizard of Mars.
Voluntary Shapeshifting
Wake Up Go To School Save The World: particularly memorable when Nita has to explain to the school guidance counselor in the eighth book as to why she's going to need a couple of weeks off from school. It helps that he's one of the very, very few Muggles in on the whole wizardry thing.
What Beautiful Eyes: Darryl, who has eyes so innocent that it hurts the first time you see them.
Will Not Tell A Lie: Even when not speaking in the Language Of Truth, wizards try to avoid lying, since when your job is Rewriting Reality using words, lying is a Bad Idea.
The World Is Always Doomed: Not surprising, given that the Lone Power is the enemy of the protagonists.
- "In the wizarding world, a "wizard's holiday" is somewhat of an inside joke, being a "vacation or pleasure trip that rapidly turned into something else, usually involving work, but that was still pleasant in a strange way, simply because of the change."
Translator Microbes: The Language Of Magic that wizards use lets them be understood by all living things (and all non-living things, too), and also lets them understand all languages.
Xanatos Roulette: Later books reveal that everything that's ever happened in the universe is in many ways a complex series of events planned out to turn the Lone Power good again and bring It back into the fold.
Word Of Gay: Tom and Carl. According to a troper on this site, he "was an acquaintance of Diane Duane's before she moved to Ireland, and was present when she confirmed to a small audience at a reading that Carl and Tom are indeed a gay couple — but added at the same time that she'd never say so explicitly in the books" (partly because they're books in the Young Adult section, partly because they're based off two straight friends of Duane's). Frankly, you could call them Heterosexual Life Partners and no one would be the wiser if all they read are the books.