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edited 11th Apr '18 6:31:51 PM by dRoy
No, I meant the elements that make witches witches. You know like every kaiju has ferocity, fortitude, agility, and power?
Magic and femaleness? Actually, the latter isn't even a requirement, per some portrayals.
The word has been used so diversely that it's hard to answer the question. I would intuitively say "female magic-user who has greater focus on prepared effects than spells cast by innate power", but all the parts of that definition have been violated somewhere. Pointy hats are also a plus.
edited 30th Sep '13 6:03:19 PM by alethiophile
Shinigan (Naruto fanfic)Indeed, usages seem to vary to a similar degree to usages of "wizard": a "witch" may be a spellcaster that specialises in curses, or a female magic-user that specialises in the services that a rural village is likely to want, or a practitioner of Wicca (I think), or a member of a specific non-human species, or simply be the feminine of "wizard", etc. As with "wizard", I'm not sure that there are many fundamental elements any more, save — perhaps — an association with magic.
My Games and Asset PacksWhat about good actions; like kindness, honesty, perseverance, etc . .
Feel free to visit my yokai blog.Honestly, when I hear the word 'witch', I think of evil women and pointy hat-black magic-Hansel And Gretel-type witches who exist solely to cause pain, or simply female magic-users.
In a worldbuilding context, it makes absolutely no sense to me to associate any group of people with specific personality traits or qualities. Sure, there's nothing wrong with having your witches value certain things, but they're not all going to exhibit them.
"Jack, you have debauched my sloth."Witches are (often female) (usually human) beings who can use (usually western/European-flavoured) magic and that's... it. It's not a very specific term. Witches can but don't have to be kind or honest or persevering. Witches can but don't have to be evil, exaggeratedly ugly, cackling caricatures. If this is still your LWA-notfanfic then you shouldn't be able to fit them all to a few characterisation tropes anyway, since with a school's worth of people you should have a diverse cast.
You will not go to space today.I get what you're saying, I do plan to have a diverse cast, I just trying to make a mythology to go with the story.
Feel free to visit my yokai blog.Aren't you making up your own magic system? Folklore related to witches is tied to the sorts of magic people believed they could use. The actual folklore related to them is going to be of limited use to you. Instead of the cultural view of witches you should look at the history of whatever magic systems you're ripping from for your magic system.
edited 30th Sep '13 7:12:26 PM by greedling
You will not go to space today.Well yes, I am trying to make my own magic system, it's a work in progress.
Feel free to visit my yokai blog....the point wasn't answer the question, that was directly related to what I said after. If you're not using historical folklore as your base for your magic system, it doesn't work to use tropes associated with witches from that source either. Rather than looking at witches you should look at the magic system you're inventing, because you're not using a witch as it exists, you're making practitioners of a made-up magic system and calling them witches.
You will not go to space today.
Okay, I'm making my own system of magic. I understand. I'm just doing a little research is all.
edited 30th Sep '13 7:48:40 PM by SPDUDE48
Feel free to visit my yokai blog.You know what's funny? I was actually doing research, and it turns out there is such a thing as a male witch..
edited 30th Sep '13 8:13:30 PM by SPDUDE48
Feel free to visit my yokai blog.I'm fully aware of that, and I think it's pretty interesting actually.
Feel free to visit my yokai blog.Well, during the Salem witch trials men were accused as "witches" and referred to as such. Of course, these were the same people who tried to bring back thee/thou/thy and did it wrong (admittedly, I think this all predated Johnson's English Dictionary or any other formal codification of the language so blah) so I wouldn't exactly trust their usage.
I always preferred "warlock" as the male counterpart to "witch," but that's because of the meanings I've heard attributed to the words- "witch" is "one who knows" while "warlock" is "liar," ...Or So I Heard. I thought it was a nice yin-yang contrasty thing going on there.
Yeah, modern day Wiccans use warlock to mean "oathbreaker," a pretty severe insult. The etymology of the word is actually a little unclear, so that might not technically be what it means, but it's hard to tell.
Writing a post-post apocalypse LitRPG on RR. Also fanfic stuff.witch being female-only really depends on the universe though, Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Buffy made it pretty gender neutral.
Read my stories!Various people deliberately subvert the trope, but the general norm is that the term "witch" is associated with women and symbolically represents the "feminine" aspect of human nature. If your work doesn't concern itself with gender issues at all, why use the term? Just call everyone a "magic user" regardless.
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.Anthropologists use it in a gender-neutral way (though the definition's a little more specific than "generic magic-user") and Wikipedia claims
so it's more like witchcraft is a thing and it tends to be women who practice it, hence female witches. That makes male witches rare but not impossible, or at least the term doesn't by default exclude males nor does the magic system. (So this was basically a book that helps select people to kill so they didn't exactly have an academic interest in folklore but they also codified a lot of other things so if you use any of that, then. Well. The main important thing is that the concept of male witches has existed in culture for a long enough time that you're not just making something up if you use one.) If you've got a specific magic system that follows witchcraft tropes it's not that weird to call practitioners witches. Most of the terms for magic-users (sorcerer, mage, witch, wizard, etc) are used in a generic enough way that you can just choose what sounds prettiest, with only vague connotations with whatever tropes.
edited 1st Oct '13 11:08:55 AM by greedling
You will not go to space today.Okay, strange question.
We have this group of kids (2 or 3 13-15-ish-year-old kids) who are kidnapping people.
So they successfully kidnap (and later murder) a grown man. Now he was no weakling, and he did have experience fighting but it was against things that were very animal-like and had no experience fighting people at all.
Their next victim is a teenage girl (17-ish). Pretty average stature, pretty strong, maybe a casual athlete? However any training or "programming" she has had was definitely against people and to be very suspicious of people.
Will my readers believe that the girl got away because she was more aware of her surroundings, more wary of children, and caught on to what was going on much earlier than the man?
Probably, so long as you write it right. I mean, if the group of kids under estimated her, that also makes sense.
Read my stories!If you're worried about whether the reader will get it, that's a matter of execution. If you want to make it explicit, then write the scene.
Shinigan (Naruto fanfic)

http://bit.ly/19dfgQW
Shinigan (Naruto fanfic)