Discussion Main / MagicAIsMagicA

The only thing I can think of where it might come into focus is on the ship spec sheets, where they talk about having a "Class x" hyperdrive, which represents a particular speed that they can achieve using the hyperdrive.

The speed of the calculations themselves appears to be a separate thing altogether, since the Millennium Falcon is notably unique in having multiple hypercomputers, which is why it can churn out those calculations much more quickly (if the computers aren't conflicting), with the implication that it could do a quick escape, but I don't recall it being much use in the actual films.

Star Wars doesn't seem like it would do any kind of hyperspeed chase, either, so it doesn't seem particularly relevant.

Under normal circumstances this would be true, but Orange used reverse-geass on her, thus cancelling the original order. Essentially it was like she was never geassed in the first place.

Here's a lot more natter for ya. The Harry Potter entry has been restructured a bit, so hopefully people will stop arguing and only list what's actually relevant.

• The rule says that death cannot be undone. However, it's clearly explained that if you have a Horcrux, then you don't fully die. It's also explained that Inferi do not come back to life, they work just like puppets, just that more scary and powerful.

• Another plus is she stayed well within Stable Time Loop, and averted Timey-Wimey Ball, something many time travel writers seem to have trouble with. Of course, it helps that she only used Time Travel once in the whole series.
• Interestingly, Rowling claimed that she did take time to figure out the limits of magic before writing the series. Among other things, she's stated that conjured objects don't last for long, immortality is impossible without a magical item (like the Philosopher's Stone or a Horcrux), and that there are five specific things that cannot be created by magic (food, love, life, information, and money). On the other hand, the Power of Love (referred to as the strangest magic) is least understood and explained, as well as the most commonly used force in the series.
  • Needless to say, a lot of these laws are problematic. If Ron can Transfigure a teacup into a rat, isn't he creating life? If he transfigured it into a chicken, cut its head off, plucked it, deboned it, cooked it, and ate it, would he have turned the teacup into food?
    • Perhaps transfiguration merely transforms objects into some kind of living simulacrum? After all, objects not in motion have a tendency to remain themselves. In the absence of magic, the rat!teacup would simply be a teacup. Transfiguring it would simply make it a teacup with the appearance, mobility, and behavior of a rat. One suspects that if biting into one didn't break the spell immediately, that the rat would be somewhat crunchy and taste strangely like porcelain. (Or that you'd open up the oven and find a broken teacup in there.)
  • Although it initially appears in The Philosopher's Stone as though Dumbledore routinely casts some sort of food a'plenty spell to conjure meals in the Great Hall, it later turns out that the meals are prepared by house elves, with Dumbledore merely teleporting the meals from the kitchen onto the banquet tables.
  • It's probably worth noticing that the rule only says you can't create food. Or as Hermione puts it in the last book, "You can't create food out of nowhere, but you can make more if you have some". Which does beg the question of why doesn't every mage always carry a candy or somesuch.
    • Dumbledore is quite fond of lemon drops.
  • If you can make more food if you have it already, then does the same aply to the other objects with this limitation? Can you duplicate money, or divine extra information, or clone people?
  • It's generally Fanon that transfigured objects are really just an illusion, and so one wouldn't be creating a rat so much as a teacup very well disguised as one. It's confirmed Canon that they don't last long, depending on the skill of the caster.
  • If that's true then how come in the 4th book, when Barty Croutch Sr. is transfigured into a bone, he doesn't revert back in oh, say, a week and start stinking up the place as a rotting corpse?
    • Maybe he did. We aren't sure exactly where he was buried.
• Is a spell a colored jet of light that must be aimed, or an invisible magical effect that can merely be gestured into existence? Several spells (Stupefy, Expelliarmus, Impedimenta among others) seem to switch between the two, depending on the circumstances. Avada Kedavra, though, plays this straight, being consistently described as a jet of green light that must be aimed and can be deflected/blocked with creative use of moving statues.
  • This puzzled me for a while. Is magic a supernatural spiritual force or just like a bullet from a gun? I figured it's probably closer to the latter - the students learn nothing about the origin of their magic, just that they can shoot beams from sticks by saying a few words. Probably best not to think about it.
  • It probably starts out as the former, with children using magic randomly in stressful situations, but are taught to aim their magic with wands in order to best control it. Wands are wizarding inventions, after all, and they are the main tool for aiming magic.
    • If magic is simply an omnipresent force that they simply tap into, how come they're able to block individual spells (a personally harnessed form of magic) without shutting down magic entirely?

Is it me, or are the examples for My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic oddly formatted?

I could see both here and a forum thread on the work.

For the record, the reason why I removed it is because the "seems to imply" makes it look like speculation.

They're really two separate things.

The "psychic bending" (Combustion Man and the psychic bloodbenders) are treated more a special ability unrelated to sheer power. The Avatar in the Avatar state, WAY stronger than Amon or Combustion Man, couldn't do that. Some people can simply do that, some people can't.

The other bit about Toph's stomps isn't so much an unwritten rule but more "stronger people can do things more easily" which is a basic tenet of superpowers in general. To a powerful earthbender like Toph, creating more force takes less effort. I don't think that part really needs to be mentioned.

The quote I found from the game was, "Make the invisible plain to see!". I would imagine one explanation for this would be that the walls weren't truly invisible. Instead it might have been really clear glass or mirrors, as you can't really tell from the top-down view we got.

"A" is a word in English but there's no difficulty parsing it. It's impossible to mistake for a defining article in this context.

The title is a reference to Aristotle's way of putting the law of identity, "A is A".